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Bill McKibben, environmental activist and founder of 350.org talks about the next steps in the climate change campaign


An address by Bill McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, upon receiving the annual Gandhi Peace Award from the New Haven-based group Promoting Enduring Peace on April 18 in Hamden, CT

Bill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with "The End of Nature" in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. The group he founded, 350.org, has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. The Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was "probably the country’s most important environmentalist."


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Alexis Tsipras, leader of Greece's Left Party Coalition, on "Anti-Austerity Politics in Greece, Europe and Beyond"


A talk recorded on Jan. 25, 2013 at The City University of New York, in a program sponsored by CUNY's Center for the Study of Culture, Technology, and Work.

Alexis Tsipras, a member of the Hellenic parliament, president of the Synaspismos political party since 2008, head of the SYRIZA parliamentary group since 2009, and leader of the Opposition since June 2012. SYRIZA currently leads in Greek opinion polls. Listen to the audio here.


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"Rand Paul: Making a Point," by Reginald Johnson, March 8, 2013

"The Bipartisan Gift: Budget Cuts," by Reginald Johnson, March 2, 2013

"Fighting for Gun Control," by Reginald Johnson, Feb. 18, 2013

"Tyranny of the Minority," by Reginald Johnson, Jan. 28, 2013

"Is President Obama About to Betray Those Who Re-elected Him Less than 2 Months Ago?" by Scott Harris, Dec. 21, 2012

"Will the Slaughter of the Innocents in Newtown Lead to Gun Law Reform in U.S.?" by Scott Harris and Anna Manzo, Dec. 16, 2012

"My Friend in Sandy Hook," by Doug Moss, posted by Scott Harris, Dec. 16, 2012

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MP3: Glenn Greenwald delivers a keynote address at "A Conference in Defense of Civil Liberties and to End Indefinite Detention" at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain on Dec. 8, 2012.

Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian newspaper. He's a former constitutional lawyer, and until 2012 was a contributing writer at Salon.com. Greenwald is the author of "With Liberty and Justice For Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful."

Read his column at The Guardian (UK)
Between The Lines' executive producer Scott Harris conducted an interview with Glenn Greenwald at the conference, which will be featured in a BTL program to be released Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012.

Noam Chomsky is linguistics and philosophy professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Author of nearly 100 books, Chomsky is one of the world's most widely read progressive dissident intellectuals. He talks about his new book, "Occupy," about the Occupy Wall Street movement and the wider issues of class warfare in the America today.
Listen to this interview (June 6, 2011)
MP3: Nathan Schneider (www.wagingnonviolence.org) has been reporting on the OWS movement from its first days in August, 2011. In this April 3, 2012 interview, Richard Hill asks him to assess the on-going debate in the movement between those espousing a strict adherence to non-violence principles and practices and those advocating a 'diversity of tactics', Interview conducted by Richard Hill, WPKN

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Complaint Alleges Army Psychologist Advised Interrogators in Torture Techniques

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Posted April 20, 2011

Interview with Steven Reisner, psychologist, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

waterboard

Psychologist Steven Reisner is an outspoken critic of those in his profession who participated in coercive interrogations, or torture, which he says is defined as treatment that injures a prisoner for the purpose of extracting information. Reisner maintains that torture takes many forms, but that emotional and psychological torture techniques -- such as sleep deprivation, isolation and humiliation -- leave more serious, though invisible scars, than the physical tactics usually thought of as torture, such as applying electric shocks or waterboarding.

In early April, Reisner appeared in New York District Court to press his complaint against fellow psychologist Army Maj. John Leso, who Reisner accused of unethical conduct for his role in the torture of prisoners at the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba. The complaint accused Leso of recommending the interrogation methods employed against Mohammed al-Qahtani, an alleged 9-11 conspirator, that Reisner says included forced hydration, induced hypothermia, 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity and religious "disgrace."

The complaint which charges Leso of violating New York state professional standards, was supported by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Justice and Accountability. The Pentagon didn't respond to a request for comment on Reisner's complaint against Leso. Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Steven Reisner about torture and what he believes to be the major ethical position a psychologist should hold regarding the issue.

STEVEN REISNER: Then there's the question of what is torturous, in terms of people's experience of torture, and I can tell you from having treated torture survivors that the non-physical forms of torture have a much more traumatizing and long-lasting effects than the physical forms of torture. So when you put electrodes on somebody or give them a bunch of little cuts, or beat them up, it's terrible, but they don't have as hard a time being able to talk about being tortured than when they've been humiliated or have gone crazy or been put in stress positions that make them feel that if only they hadn't moved in just this position it wouldn't have hurt so much and they could have avoided talking. The psychological pressures that lead people to break, the research shows that they have much longer lasting scars and effects on people than the physical tortures.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Would you say that since Bradley Manning -- the alleged whistleblower in the WikiLeaks case -- or any prisoner -- is kept in isolation 23 hours a day that's torture?

STEVEN REISNER: Yup.

BETWEEN THE LINES: And the isolation alone, even if no other factors are there, has a really horrible detrimental effect for years afterward?

STEVEN REISNER: Not necessarily. It depends on the character of the person. Some people don't get traumatized.

There are certain things we've just decided over the centuries are wrong, and abusing prisoners as punishment or to get information from them is universally condemned, except at certain periods of time by certain regimes that -- until the Bush administration -- our government joined in condemning.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Steven Reisner, Isn't it true that the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association prohibit their members from being involved in coercive interrogations? What's the difference between these two groups and the American Psychological Association?

STEVEN REISNER: The difference is that the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association follow the World Medical Association; they basically say the role of a health practitioner is to help people and not hurt people. It's based on the ethical principal of do no harm. And the American Psychological Association has decided that their people can participate in coercive interrogations whose aim is to cause prisoners to speak against their will. And the American Psychological Association has joined the Justice Department under the Bush administration in deciding that the standards have to do with…how can I put this?... that the same standards that apply to any interrogator should apply to a psychologist. And that’s different than other health professionals. Other health professionals see themselves first as health professionals. The American Psychological Association has created a new category of "operational psychologist" and has basically joined with the military in saying that clinical psychologists can be military combatants whose aim is to debilitate the enemy, get information, and use people as if we're at war with them to undermine their mental and physical state if it helps the war effort.

BETWEEN THE LINES: You were in court last week, with support from the American Civil Liberties Union and the regarding the behavior of a fellow psychologist. I know you won't have a resolution for awhile yet, but can you explain what it's all about?

STEVEN REISNER: The story is that I have brought an ethics case against John Leso, [Army] Maj. John Leso, who was one of the health professionals at Guantanamo on the team that created the torture protocols that were used on two detainees very specifically and generally on just about all the detainees – some aspects of it were used on all the detainees. He's a clinical psychologist licensed in the State of New York. Unfortunately, the Board of Professional Discipline simply refused to investigate, so we brought a case in New York State Supreme Court to have the court order the Office of Professional Discipline to open an investigation. My argument was that a clinical psychologist who uses his psychological expertise, who's hired as a clinical psychologist for a client, which was the military, is hired to do harm to individuals, is violating the ethical principles of the New York psychology, of the code that we are all beholden to, in such a way that he should be investigated and his license should be taken away from him if it turns out that, based on the investigation, that this allegation is true.

See Steven Reisner’s torture complaint against Maj. John Leso.