Political paralysis over torture

Jun 10, 2009
Political paralysis over torture
By Alfred W McCoy

If, like me, you've been following America's torture policies not just for the past few years, but for decades, you can't help but experience that eerie feeling of deja vu these days. With the departure of George W Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of President Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years.

Like Chile after the regime of General Augusto Pinochet or the Philippines after the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Washington after Bush is now trapped in the painful politics of impunity. Unlike anything our allies have experienced, however, for Washington, and so for the rest of us, this may prove a political crisis without end or exit.

Despite dozens of official inquiries in the five years since the Abu Ghraib photos first exposed our abuse of Iraqi detainees, the torture scandal continues to spread like a virus, infecting all who touch it, including now Obama himself. By embracing a specific methodology of torture, covertly developed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over decades using countless millions of taxpayer dollars and graphically revealed in those Iraqi prison photos, we have condemned ourselves to retreat from whatever promises might be made to end this sort of abuse and are instead already returning to a bipartisan consensus that made torture America's secret weapon throughout the Cold War.

Despite the 24 version of events, the Bush administration did not simply authorize traditional, bare-knuckle torture. What it did do was develop to new heights the world's most advanced form of psychological torture, while quickly recognizing the legal dangers in doing so. Even in the desperate days right after 9/11, the White House and Justice Department lawyers who presided over the Bush administration's new torture program were remarkably punctilious about cloaking their decisions in legalisms designed to pre-empt later prosecution.

To most Americans, whether they supported the Bush administration torture policy or opposed it, all of this seemed shocking and very new. Not so, unfortunately. Concealed from Congress and the public, the CIA spent the previous half-century developing and propagating a sophisticated form of psychological torture meant to defy investigation, prosecution or prohibition - and so far it has proved remarkably successful on all these counts. Even now, since many of the leading psychologists who worked to advance the CIA's torture skills have remained silent, we understand surprisingly little about the psychopathology of the program of mental torture that the Bush administration applied so globally.

Physical torture is a relatively straightforward matter of sadism that leaves behind broken bodies, useless information and clear evidence for prosecution. Psychological torture, on the other hand, is a mind maze that can destroy its victims, even while entrapping its perpetrators in an illusory, almost erotic, sense of empowerment. When applied skillfully, it leaves few scars for investigators who might restrain this seductive impulse. However, despite all the myths of these last years, psychological torture, like its physical counterpart, has proven an ineffective, even counterproductive, method for extracting useful information from prisoners.

Where it has had a powerful effect is on those ordering and delivering it. With their egos inflated beyond imagining by a sense of being masters of life and death, pain and pleasure, its perpetrators, when in office, became forceful proponents of abuse, striding across the political landscape like Nietzschean supermen. After their fall from power, they have continued to maneuver with extraordinary determination to escape the legal consequences of their actions.

Before we head deeper into the hidden history of the CIA's psychological torture program, however, we need to rid ourselves of the idea that this sort of torture is somehow "torture lite" or merely, as the Bush administration renamed it, "enhanced interrogation”. Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, psychological torture actually inflicts a crippling trauma on its victims. "Ill treatment during captivity, such as psychological manipulations and forced stress positions," Dr Metin Basoglu has reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry after interviewing 279 Bosnian victims of such methods, "does not seem to be substantially different from physical torture in terms of the severity of mental suffering."

Secret history of psychological torture
The roots of our present paralysis over what to do about detainee abuse lie in the hidden history of the CIA's program of psychological torture. Early in the Cold War, panicked that the Soviets had somehow cracked the code of human consciousness, the agency mounted a "Special Interrogation Program" whose working hypothesis was: "Medical science, particularly psychiatry and psychotherapy, has developed various techniques by means of which some external control can be imposed on the mind/or will of an individual, such as drugs, hypnosis, electric shock and neurosurgery."

All of these methods were tested by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s. None proved successful for breaking potential enemies or obtaining reliable information. Beyond these ultimately unsuccessful methods, however, the agency also explored a behavioral approach to cracking that "code”. In 1951, in collaboration with British and Canadian defense scientists, the agency encouraged academic research into "methods concerned in psychological coercion”. Within months, the agency had defined the aims of its top-secret program, code-named Project Artichoke, as the "development of any method by which we can get information from a person against his will and without his knowledge".

This secret research produced two discoveries central to the CIA's more recent psychological paradigm. In classified experiments, famed Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to drug-induced hallucinations and psychosis in just 48 hours - without drugs, hypnosis, or electric shock. Instead, for two days student volunteers at McGill University simply sat in a comfortable cubicle deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves and earmuffs. "It scared the hell out of us," Hebb said later, "to see how completely dependent the mind is on a close connection with the ordinary sensory environment, and how disorganizing to be cut off from that support."

During the 1950s, two neurologists at Cornell Medical Center, under CIA contract, found that the most devastating torture technique of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, was simply to force a victim to stand for days while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions and hallucinations began - a procedure which we now politely refer to as "stress positions”.

Four years into this project, there was a sudden upsurge of interest in using mind control techniques defensively after American prisoners in North Korea suffered what was then called "brainwashing”. In August 1955, president Dwight Eisenhower ordered that any soldier at risk of capture should be given "specific training and instruction designed to ... withstand all enemy efforts against him”.

Consequently, the air force developed a program it dubbed SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) to train pilots in resisting psychological torture. In other words, two intertwined strands of research into torture methods were being explored and developed: aggressive methods for breaking enemy agents and defensive methods for training Americans to resist enemy inquisitors.

In 1963, the CIA distilled its decade of research into the curiously named KUBARK Counter-intelligence Interrogation manual, which stated definitively that sensory deprivation was effective because it made "the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure ... strengthening ... the subject's tendencies toward compliance." Refined through years of practice on actual human beings, the CIA's psychological paradigm now relies on a mix of sensory overload and deprivation via seemingly banal procedures: the extreme application of heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, feast and famine - all meant to attack six essential sensory pathways into the human mind.

After codifying its new interrogation methods in the KUBARK manual, the CIA spent the next 30 years promoting these torture techniques within the US intelligence community and among anti-communist allies. In its clandestine journey across continents and decades, the CIA's psychological torture paradigm would prove elusive, adaptable, devastatingly destructive and powerfully seductive.

So darkly seductive is torture's appeal that these seemingly scientific methods, even when intended for a few Soviet spies or al-Qaeda terrorists, soon spread uncontrollably in two directions - toward the torture of the many and into a paroxysm of brutality towards specific individuals. During the Vietnam War, when the CIA applied these techniques in their search for information on top Vietcong cadre, the interrogation effort soon degenerated into the crude physical brutality of the Phoenix Program, producing 46,000 extrajudicial executions and little actionable intelligence.

In 1994, with the Cold War over, Washington ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture, seemingly resolving the tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices. Yet when president Bill Clinton sent this convention to Congress, he included four little-noticed diplomatic "reservations" drafted six years before by the Reagan administration and focused on just one word in those 26 printed pages: "mental”.

These reservations narrowed (just for the United States) the definition of "mental" torture to include just four acts: the infliction of physical pain, the use of drugs, death threats or threats to harm another. Excluded were methods such as sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain, the very techniques the CIA had propagated for the past 40 years. This definition was reproduced verbatim in Section 2340 of the US Federal Code and later in the War Crimes Act of 1996. Through this legal legerdemain, Washington managed to agree, via the UN Convention, to ban physical abuse even while exempting the CIA from the UN's prohibition on psychological torture.

This little-noticed exemption was left buried in those documents like a landmine and would detonate with phenomenal force just 10 years later at Abu Ghraib prison.

War on terror, war of torture
Right after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, Bush gave his staff secret orders to pursue torture policies, adding emphatically, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." In a dramatic break with past policy, the White House would even allow the CIA to operate its own global network of prisons, as well as charter air fleet to transport seized suspects and "render" them for endless detention in a supranational gulag of secret "black sites" from Thailand to Poland.

The Bush administration also officially allowed the CIA 10 "enhanced" interrogation methods designed by agency psychologists, including "waterboarding". This use of cold water to block breathing triggers the "mammalian diving reflex", hardwired into every human brain, thus inducing an uncontrollable terror of impending death.

As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker, psychologists working for both the Pentagon and the CIA "reverse engineered" the military's SERE training, which included a brief exposure to waterboarding, and flipped these defensive methods for use offensively on al-Qaeda captives. "They sought to render the detainees vulnerable - to break down all of their senses," one official told Mayer. "It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences." Inside agency headquarters, there was, moreover, a "high level of anxiety" about the possibility of future prosecutions for methods officials knew to be internationally defined as torture. The presence of PhD psychologists was considered one "way for CIA officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture".

From recently released Justice Department memos, we now know that the CIA refined its psychological paradigm significantly under Bush. As described in the classified 2004 Background Paper on the CIA's Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques, each detainee was transported to an Agency black site while "deprived of sight and sound through the use of blindfolds, earmuffs and hoods". Once inside the prison, he was reduced to "a baseline, dependent state" through conditioning by "nudity, sleep deprivation (with shackling ...), and dietary manipulation".

For "more physical and psychological stress", CIA interrogators used coercive measures such as "an insult slap or abdominal slap" and then "walling", slamming the detainee's head against a cell wall. If these failed to produce the results sought, interrogators escalated to waterboarding, as was done to Abu Zubaydah "at least 83 times during August 2002" and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad 183 times in March 2003 - so many times, in fact, that the repetitiousness of the act can only be considered convincing testimony to the seductive sadism of CIA-style torture.
In a parallel effort launched by Bush-appointed civilians in the Pentagon, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld gave General Geoffrey Miller command of the new American military prison at Guantanamo in late 2002 with ample authority to transform it into an ad hoc psychology lab. Behavioral Science Consultation Teams of military psychologists probed detainees for individual phobias like fear of the dark. Interrogators stiffened the psychological assault by exploiting what they saw as Arab cultural sensitivities when it came to sex and dogs. Via a three-phase attack on the senses, on culture and on the individual psyche, interrogators at Guantanamo perfected the CIA's psychological paradigm.

After General Miller visited Iraq in September 2003, the US commander there, General Ricardo Sanchez, ordered Guantanamo-style abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. My own review of the 1,600 still-classified photos taken by American guards at Abu Ghraib - which journalists covering this story seem to share like Napster downloads - reveals not random, idiosyncratic acts by "bad apples", but the repeated, constant use of just three psychological techniques: hooding for sensory deprivation, shackling for self-inflicted pain, and (to exploit Arab cultural sensitivities) both nudity and dogs. It is no accident that Private Lynndie England was famously photographed leading an Iraqi detainee leashed like a dog.

These techniques, according to the New York Times, then escalated virally at five special operations field interrogation centers where detainees were subjected to extreme sensory deprivation, beating, burning, electric shock and waterboarding. Among the thousand soldiers in these units, 34 were later convicted of abuse and many more escaped prosecution only because records were officially "lost".

'Behind the green door' at the White House
Further up the chain of command, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, as she recently told the Senate, "convened a series of meetings of NSC [National Security Council] principals in 2002 and 2003 to discuss various issues ... relating to detainees". This group, including vice president Cheney, attorney general John Ashcroft, secretary of state Colin Powell and CIA director George Tenet, met dozens of times inside the White House situation room.

After watching CIA operatives mime what Rice called "certain physical and psychological interrogation techniques", these leaders, their imaginations stimulated by graphic visions of human suffering, repeatedly authorized extreme psychological techniques stiffened by hitting, walling and waterboarding. According to an April, 2008 ABC News report, Ashcroft once interrupted this collective fantasy by asking aloud, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

In mid-2004, even after the Abu Ghraib photos were released, these principals met to approve the use of CIA torture techniques on still more detainees. Despite mounting concerns about the damage torture was doing to America's standing, shared by Powell, Rice commanded agency officials with the cool demeanor of a dominatrix. "This is your baby," she reportedly said. "Go do it."

Cleansing torture
Even as they exercise extraordinary power over others, perpetrators of torture around the world are assiduous in trying to cover their tracks. They construct recondite legal justifications, destroy records of actual torture and paper the files with spurious claims of success. Hence, the CIA destroyed 92 interrogation videotapes, while vice president Cheney now berates Obama incessantly (five times in his latest Fox News interview) to declassify "two reports" which he claims will show the informational gains that torture offered - possibly because his staff salted the files at the NSC or the CIA with documents prepared for this very purpose.

Not only were Justice Department lawyers aggressive in their advocacy of torture in the Bush years, they were meticulous from the start, in laying the legal groundwork for later impunity. In three torture memos from May 2005 that the Obama administration recently released, Bush's Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stephen Bradbury repeatedly cited those original US diplomatic "reservations" to the UN Convention Against Torture, replicated in Section 2340 of the Federal code, to argue that waterboarding was perfectly legal since the "technique is not physically painful". Anyway, he added, careful lawyering at Justice and the CIA had punched loopholes in both the UN Convention and US law so wide that these Agency techniques were "unlikely to be subject to judicial inquiry".

Just to be safe, when Cheney presided over the drafting of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, he included clauses, buried in 38 pages of dense print, defining "serious physical pain" as the "significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ or mental faculty". This was a striking paraphrase of the outrageous definition of physical torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to ... organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" in John Yoo's infamous August 2002 "torture memo", already repudiated by the Justice Department.

Above all, the Military Commissions Act protected the CIA's use of psychological torture by repeating verbatim the exculpatory language found in those Bill Clinton-era Ronald Reagan-created reservations to the UN convention and still embedded in Section 2340 of the federal code. To make doubly sure, the act also made these definitions retroactive to November 1997, giving CIA interrogators immunity from any misdeeds under the Expanded War Crimes Act of 1997 which punishes serious violations with life imprisonment or death.

No matter how twisted the process, impunity - whether in Britain, Indonesia or America - usually passes through three stages:
1. Blame the supposed "bad apples".
2. Invoke the security argument. ("It protected us.”)
3. Appeal to national unity. ("We need to move forward together.")
For a year after the Abu Ghraib expose, Rumsfeld's Pentagon blamed various low-ranking bad apples by claiming the abuse was "perpetrated by a small number of US military". In his statement on May 13, while refusing to release more torture photos, Obama echoed Rumsfeld, claiming the abuse in these latest images, too, "was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals".

In recent weeks, Republicans have taken us deep into the second stage with Cheney's statements that the CIA's methods "prevented the violent deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people".

Then, on April 16, Obama brought us to the final stage when he released the four Bush-era memos detailing CIA torture, insisting: "Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." During a visit to CIA headquarters four days later, Obama promised that there would be no prosecutions of agency employees. "We've made some mistakes," he admitted, but urged Americans simply to "acknowledge them and then move forward." The president's statements were in such blatant defiance of international law that the UN's chief official on torture, Manfred Nowak, reminded him that Washington was actually obliged to investigate possible violations of the Convention Against Torture.

This process of impunity is leading Washington back to a global torture policy that, during the Cold War, was bipartisan in nature: publicly advocating human rights while covertly outsourcing torture to allied governments and their intelligence agencies. In retrospect, it may become ever more apparent that the real aberration of the Bush years lay not in torture policies per se, but in the President's order that the CIA should operate its own torture prisons. The advantage of the bipartisan torture consensus of the Cold War era was, of course, that it did a remarkably good job most of the time of insulating Washington from the taint of torture, which was sometimes remarkably widely practiced.

There are already some clear signs of a policy shift in this direction in the Obama era. Since mid-2008, US intelligence has captured half a dozen al-Qaeda suspects and, instead of shipping them to Guantanamo or to CIA secret prisons, has had them interrogated by allied Middle Eastern intelligence agencies.

Showing that this policy is again bipartisan, Obama's new CIA director Leon Panetta announced that the agency would continue to engage in the rendition of terror suspects to allies like Libya, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia where we can, as he put it, "rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment". Showing the quality of such treatment, Time magazine reported on May 24 that Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who famously confessed under torture that Saddam Hussein had provided al-Qaeda with chemical weapons and later admitted his lie to senate investigators, had committed "suicide" in a Libyan cell.

The price of impunity
This time around, however, a long-distance torture policy may not provide the same insulation as in the past for Washington. Any retreat into torture by remote-control is, in fact, only likely to produce the next scandal that will do yet more damage to America's international standing.

Over a 40-year period, Americans have found themselves mired in this same moral quagmire on six separate occasions: following exposes of CIA-sponsored torture in South Vietnam (1970), Brazil (1974), Iran (1978), Honduras (1988) and then throughout Latin America (1997). After each expose, the public's shock soon faded, allowing the agency to resume its dirty work in the shadows.

Unless some formal inquiry is convened to look into a sordid history that reached its depths in the Bush era, and so begins to break this cycle of deceit, expose and paralysis followed by more of the same, we're likely, a few years hence, to find ourselves right back where we are now. We'll be confronted with the next American torture scandal from some future iconic dungeon, part of a dismal, ever lengthening procession that has led from the tiger cages of South Vietnam through the Shah of Iran's prison cells in Tehran to Abu Ghraib and the prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

The next time, however, the world will not have forgotten those photos from Abu Ghraib. The next time, the damage to this country will be nothing short of devastating.

Alfred W McCoy is the JRW Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan Books), which is also available in Italian and German translations. Later this year, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, a forthcoming book of his, will explore the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security measures here at home.

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Multiple intelligences and a re-definition of meritocracy?

Multiple intelligences and a re-definition of meritocracy?

SINGAPORE - After I finished my “O” levels and was deciding which stream to go into, my parents exhorted me to enroll into the science stream of my junior college. Like any other pragmatic parents, they too harbored the notion that one does not have any future if he sticks to the arts stream. Their advice didn’t fall on deaf ears and I went on to earn a science degree, and am currently working in a science-related field. However, what I found most disconcerting is the apparent biasedness towards math and sciences, perhaps influenced by the belief that the pursuit of further studies within the related fields will lead to a professional degree (read medical and engineering degrees) or higher qualifications which is a job guarantee. We know that is generally not true nowadays in the case of engineering.

To digress, the theory of multiple intelligences was proposed by Howard Gardner in 1983. This theory proposes that people possess different types of intelligences, and one may be stronger in certain types of intelligences as compared with his peers, but weaker in other types. Thus, a child exhibiting superior speaking and writing skills may not be necessarily more intelligent than a child who is not proficient in those aspects. In the same vein, a child who displays superior multiplication skills may not be necessarily more intelligent than one who is apparently lacking in that area. It could be that the latter is more superior in terms of other intelligence types or is looking at the multiplication process at a deeper level than the one who could easily memorize his multiplication tables. There are eight types of intelligences: 1)Bodily-kinesthetic 2)Interpersonal 3)Verbal-linguistic 4)Logical-mathematical 5)Naturalistic 6)Intrapersonal 7)Visual-spatial 8)Musical

Those who are strong in the bodily-kinesthetic component should learn better in activities involving muscular movement. They are generally good at physical activities and are potential athletes, dancers, actors, surgeons and builders. Those who are good in the interpersonal component have the ability to empathize with others, and they make good leaders. No one will doubt that such a component is a necessary ingredient for success. Those who are good in the verbal-linguistic component have excellent speaking and writing skills, which make them potential journalists, poets or orators. Those who are strong in the logical-mathematical component are adept at logical reasoning, abstract thinking and numbers. This area correlates strongly with the traditional measurs of intelligence (IQ). Those who are strong in the naturalistic component are said to be sensitive to nature and have the ability to nurture, grow and interact with living things. Those who are strong in the intrapersonal component are good at self-reflection and have a clear idea of their goals, motivations and emotions. They have a tendency for thoughts-based pursuits, and have the potential to be philosophers, theologians or scientists. Those who are strong in the musical component have great sensitivity to sounds, rhythm, tones and music. They have a potential for a career in music either as instrumentalists or singers.

In Singapore, much of the focus is on the logical-mathematical component, which correlates strongly with traditional IQ. It is not uncommon for parents concerned with their kids’ development to invest in educational resources to ensure improvement in the area of math and sciences. And there is a multitude of tuition centres out there providing classes in those areas, some even boasting testimonials of grade improvements by a wide margin. If one observes our leadership, specifically the current cabinet using the basis of degrees obtained in a discipline as a yardstick, this will lead to an interesting observation that our cabinet is filled with members who are strong in the logical-mathematical component, judging by the science, medical, engineering, mathematics and economics degrees in their resumes. Does it surprise you that our leadership shows a predominance of individuals who are strong in the logical-mathematical component?

The pertinent question is will Singaporeans or Singapore embrace multiple intelligences, and appreciate that a child who is not as proficient in the logical-mathematical component is not necessarily less intelligent than his more proficient peers? If Singapore does embrace multiple intelligences, it will perhaps lead to a re-definition of meritocracy. Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term “meritocracy” in 1958 to denote a society that organizes itself according to IQ-test scores. 25 years later, the theory of multiple intelligence was born and the latter argues that the traditional intelligence tests do not sufficiently take into account the wide ranging abilities that humans display. Thus, in a way, multiple intelligences can be seen as one that addresses the weakness of traditional IQ tests.

It will be a good thing if Singaporeans were to embrace multiple intelligences. Multiple intelligences is in a way a wholesome view of our abilities, and encourages educators and parents not to view children according to a narrowly defined subset of “meritocratic abilities”. And this will be good for a child’s development as he will not feel necessarily put down if shown to be lacking in certain components of multiple intelligences as compared with his peers. In a way, it teaches us to embrace different people for their strengths and talents. As a child going into my teens, I struggled with multiplication and division, especially with numbers pertaining to zeros. If I divide a number by 0, I was told that I will get infinity. But I was taught that if one multiplies a number by zero, the answer would still be zero. Thus, if I multiply a very, very big number by zero, will I get zero? For example, if 10/0 = infinity, then I figured that conversely, infinity x 0 = 10, but I was taught that wasn’t the case because multiplying something by 0 will get 0! At that time, I thought I was very poor in maths, but after reading Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory, perhaps I was just thinking deeper into the subject, and that is a comforting fact.

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Man-in-the-street Paying Back Temasek Losses?

Man-in-the-street Paying Back Temasek Losses?

I called my friend when news broke that civil servants will not be receiving their mid-year bonus and asked him how he was coping. He replied half-jokingly that it was to be expected because the government had to recoup their investment losses somehow. I found that to be an interesting take on things and laughed together with him (me laughing harder of course as he was the one who suffered the real monetary loss).

Shortly thereafter, I learnt about the Medisave Minimum Sum increase which registers the largest jump of $11,000 from the previous year as compared to a relatively modest $4,500 to $6,500 year-on-year increase in each of the preceding 5 years. Was inflation really THAT exceptionally bad in 2008/2009 as compared to 2007/2008?

source: CPF Board

Then today, I learnt that house owners now have to top-up any shortfall into their CPF accounts should they sell their flats below valuation. In a nutshell, what this means is that if you had bought your flat in 1999 for say $300,000 using money from your CPF account, you would technically 'owe' $300,000 + 2.5% CPF Ordinary account interest x 10 years. That works out to $375,000 that needs to be returned to your account (assuming you bought your flat WITHOUT taking any loans). You would therefore need to sell your flat for above $375,000 before you can even think about 'earning' a profit from the sale.

Consequently, if you sell your flat for anything less than this value, you can't even dream of seeing anything in cash - everything goes into the CPF account. Apparently, when you sell below the valuation (valuers are HDB appointed and IRAS licensed, by the way), you are obligated to top-up the difference between sale price and valuation back into your CPF account as well. This was reportedly 'enforced loosely' - until now.

When sale prices are naturally heading southward and people in difficulty are finding themselves forced to sell their flats cheaply to save themselves, it is a mystery to me why the authorities would put such folks in a catch-22 situation - if they keep the flat, they wouldn't be able to service the loans; and they can't sell their flat either because they would be obligated to come up with cash to make up the difference (which they obviously don't have).

Any which way I look at this, it seems as though only the CPF/HDB coffers will benefit - if the top-up is made, the actual financial loss of the sale is borne by the house owner (who forks it all out in cash), and if there is a default in the housing loan repayment, HDB can simply repossess the flat and resell it for a (handsome) profit.

So, that brings me to ask the question, "who stands to benefit the most" and the answer seems to be an obvious CPF/HDB/Civil Service which invariably leads back to the same coffers (more or less) - Ministry of Finance, which in turn finances Temasek Holdings.

In any case, it sure doesn't look as though the man in the street is in anyway a better position to deal with the current difficult financial situation - in fact, it just got worse.

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MP Seng Han Thong: FACE IT

FACE IT
By Seng Han Thong

In this self-penned article published in the latest issue of the People’s Action Party (PAP)
magazine, Yio Chu Kang MP Seng Han Thong, 59, recounts the events leading up to the
attack on Jan 11, the impact on his family, and his recovery process from 15 per cent
burns over his body, which has required him to be hospitalised for 28 days and undergo
several skin grafts.
I NEVER expect to meet with such a misfortune at a community function where we cared
for and shared with our needy families and senior citizens with many grassroots leaders
around.
One good friend asked me: Were you brave and upbeat from the beginning? Indeed, in
life, we always encounter challenges, problems, issues which need our immediate
response. As to this misfortune, what had happened had happened. I was set on fire and
suffered severe burns on my face, shoulder, arms and chest. There was no use blaming
anyone or carping on it. I could not undo the incident. So, the best way and only way is
to face it, rather than fear it, and overcome it rationally and decisively.
I was more determined to fight on despite the physical pain and sufferings and to focus
on my recovery when I saw Cabinet Ministers, current and former MPs, grassroots
leaders, union leaders, community leaders, colleagues, friends and relatives all coming in
full force to give my family and me support and encouragement. Their visits greatly
boosted the morale and confidence of my family members at this difficult period. My
family members, especially my mother and wife, gained faith each day when they saw
how I was able to relate my progress to the visitors.
I suffered 14 per cent burns. My second younger sister told my mother, “Brother in fact
suffered 28 per cent as the skin grafting would take 14 per cent of his good skin from his
thigh and back.” She was right that I had to bear with this extra pain and bleeding of the
donor part, especially in the night. I did not tell my family as they had already suffered
too much because of my predicament.
Indeed, from the family statement which I read later when I was able to read the
newspaper cuttings prepared by my sister, I could imagine how painful it was to them. It
said, “We are struggling with reality. The sight of our loved one, who is so full of life
and now lying in great pain, unable to speak, immobilized, hooked to a respirator and an
array of medical equipment, is so shocking.”
It added that the pain felt by the family, especially my mother, is beyond any description
and imagination.
My mother, wife, siblings and their spouses as well as my daughter took turns to come in
from early in the morning to take care of me and the strings of visitors. They were
worried and tired, but with the strong support from the Party, the grassroots, relatives and
friends, they were also confident of my recovery.
The misfortune happened on a busy Sunday. I had finished handling out bursaries and
hongbaos to about 150 needy students and senior citizens and was just settling down to
lunch when the attacker approached from behind, poured thinner on me and set me on
fire.
Before I left home that morning, I told my mother and wife that I had to attend to two
community Rice Parties, one late afternoon function and one wedding dinner. I was
supposed to leave the first lunch early and to come back home to fetch my wife for the
second Rice Party as we were both invited.
My wife was waiting for my call. But when the phone finally rang, it was the disastrous
news that I was burnt and was being rushed to Singapore General Hospital. She met me
in hospital, in shock and in tears.
On the way to the SGH in the ambulance, I tried to console the temple chief, Mr Aw
Chui Seng, who was also burnt while trying to save me. We were having lunch together
and he was seated just next to me. I looked at my hands and fingers. They had been
badly burnt. What I did not know then was that my injury went beyond this.
When we reached the Accident and Emergency department, my eldest younger sister was
already there. She was joined by my mother, wife and daughter. All were in tears. My
mother lamented and sighed: “You worked so hard. You don’t deserve this.”
Doctors told me that they would do whatever they could to save me. I have faith in our
system, our doctors and nurses. I knew that I was about to be operated on. The doctors
told me about the various options they might take and asked for my preference. I replied,
“You are the expert, just take the option you deem best.”
Party Secretary General, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Mrs Lee, together with Dr
Balaji and his wife arrived shortly, PM Lee consoled me and said “Han Thong, it is really
unfortunate, it is really unfortunate. Be reassured that the doctors will do their best. Just
concentrate on getting well and we (MPs from AMK GRC) will cover the work of Yio
Chu Kang.”
I was still able to respond to PM and Mrs Lee but thereafter, I was sedated. I did not
know that MM Lee, DPM Wong, Minister Teo Chee Hean and many others had also
rushed to the hospital, until much later, when I learnt it from the press reports.
In the first five days when I was confined to the ICU, I was intubated and my swollen
arms were tied to the bed to prevent me from pulling the tube out of my mouth in case I
had nightmares in my sleep. Many tubes were entwined around my body as I was
hooked on to many machines. I could not talk. Nor could I eat or drink, or sleep well. I
knew that the skin from my thigh and back had been removed for the grafting and the
pain was excruciating. But each day, I felt better with the string of doctors and nurses
attending to me and telling me about my progress, though I could not then respond.
One day I heard a voice saying “I am Lee Kuan Yew”. I then realized that Minister
Mentor Lee was at my bedside checking my condition with the doctors. He was very
concerned about my vital organs and senses, especially my hearing and eyesight. I learnt
of this subsequently when the doctor told me that MM Lee came to see me a second time
on the second day of my admission. He told MM Lee that I could hear him and thus I
heard MM Lee calling me. I could sense the anxiety in his voice but could not respond a
word to him.
MM Lee came the third time when I was out of the Intensive Care Unit. After eight days
in bed, I had to get back my balance by learning to walk in the room. I could also read
the newspapers and tune in to the radio. When he saw me catching up with the outside
world, he reassured me, “We have the best burns centre in this region and it is lucky that
your eyesight and hearing were not affected.” I was indeed fortunate that the thinner did
not trickle down my face, otherwise I would have been more disfigured and the injury
could have been worse. I thanked him for his care and concern and told him that my
mother was especially traumatized. Subsequently, I saw MM Lee talking to my mother
and wife. Each time he visited me, he gave me and my family the motivation to battle
on.
On one of the nights, it was way past ten and I was unable to sleep. My family had left
for the day and I was flipping through the Visitors’ book. It is a book of encouragement
and inspiration, containing the greetings and well wishes of the many visitors. I learnt
that many of our comrades, including former MPs, had visited me but they were not able
to see me as I was receiving treatments. Just then, MM Lee came by for a night visit. I
was very surprised to see him in my ward at that hour. I told him that I was receiving
hyperbaric treatment to speed up the recovery of my wounds, especially my ears. I was
deeply touched by his concern and asked him to also take good care of Mrs Lee at home.
My hands were skin grafted and I had intensive occupational and physiotherapy to
prevent stiff hands. As part of the hand therapy, I was advised to practise my
handwriting. As the Lunar New Year was round the corner, I started signing my selfmade
greeting cards for the doctors and nurses who have been taking care of me. I also
signed the cards for friends and comrades who visited me.
MM Lee visited me the fifth time on the day before Chinese New Year eve. I was signing
the cards when he came by and he was happy to note that I could sign without much
difficulty. I wrote “Good Health and Good Life” on the card for him and wished him a
happy new year with the card and two mandarin oranges.
Party Whip and NTUC Secretary General Lim Swee Say visited me the day after the
incident when he just touched down from an overseas trip. He told my mother that he felt
sad as I was suffering from very severe swelling and he could not recognize me. He
reassured my family not to worry about the medical cost as I am fully covered under the
insurance scheme. SG Lim came back the same day again to console my family. On
Chinese New Year Day, SG Lim and Mrs Lim came to wish me well. I presented to him
the greeting card with the message: “Press on in the year of the Oxen. Do not fear of the
opposite tides.”
During the NTUC annual Workplan Seminar, SG Lim cited my Chinese New Year card
to encourage the labour movement to embrace positive energy even in adversity to 500
unionists and NTUC staff. Indeed, it was the positive energy from all visitors, including
many brothers and sisters from the labour movement, who gave me this positive energy
to fight on. They are the workers from different sectors, on different shifts, including taxi
drivers, who rushed to see me after their duties.
I was discharged after a 28-day stay. The day before, PM Lee and Mrs Lee visited me
and told me they were happy that I was going home. My family and I were in good spirits
as we were clearing the room and packing my belongings. Doctors and nurses also bade
farewell to me. PM Lee noted that I need to undergo physiotherapy treatment after my
discharge and wished me a speedy recovery. Two days later, PM Lee attended the
Chinese New Year dinner at Yio Chu Kang and updated the residents on me. PM also
conveyed my message to the residents.
The doctor-in-charge, Associate Professor Colin Song, gave me home hospitalization
leave followed by light duty medical leave up to July. PM Lee called to enquire about my
progress and reminded me not to worry about constituency work. All these while,
Comrades Inderjit Singh, Wee Siew Kim, Lam Pin Min and Lee Bee Wah have been
covering my Meet-The-People Sessions and other community functions. I am deeply
grateful for their support and help.
Indeed, I am grateful to all comrades who showed their care and concern during the
period when all were busy in Parliament for the budget debate. Many Ministers and MPs
came more than once. Deputy Prime Minister Wong also brought along New Year card
and oranges. DPM Jayakumar gave me the book Pedra Branca co-authored and coautographed
by him and Professor Tommy Koh. Party Chairman Lim Boon Heng
assured the smooth running of the branch. Comrades Mah Bow Tan and Tharman shared
with me their preferred quotes. Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong followed up by calling
my house from time to time to update himself.
And when Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan and MCYS Minister Vivian who was the
former chief of SGH visited me, it was as if they were returning home checking on all
details to ensure that I got the best. Transport Minister Raymond Lim knew that I was
concerned about the livelihood of taxi drivers and informed me that he had announced
many measures which would help the cabbies too. Dr Lee Boon Yang related to me the
life philosophy. Foreign Minister George Yeo shared with my family anecdotes and also
expressed his views in his blog. Comrade Tuck Yew carried a pot of orchid all the way to
the ward while Hwee Hua was always the first visitor of the day to wish me good
morning. Chee How came again and again to share with my family members his care
and concern.
My sister shared with Minister Teo Chee Hean who visited me several times and had
conversations with my mother that she observed these PAP values in everyone. She said
that though the Ministers, MPs and Party members were busy, they all found time to visit
me. Most importantly, they were sincere and compassionate. These visits had given my
family much comfort, trust and confidence.
It was indeed home sweet home. My younger brother bought a set of air refresher and
dehumidifier machine so that I could have a clean and dry environment to recuperate and
recover. Our family also had a belated reunion dinner the next day, which happened to
be the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year. My son, who is pursuing his study overseas,
called to welcome me home. He had sent me a huge get-well card hand designed by him.
He wanted to rush back on hearing the news but was advised not to. My family kept him
updated daily.
Through out my stay in hospital, many of my old friends and former colleagues from the
media and publications industry whom we had not met for a long time, visited me and
touched me very much. Mr Mok Lee Kwang, 83, Editor during the Nanyang Siang Pau
days, came with a staff in his right hand. When he saw me, his tears flew without saying
a word. I knew that the sight of me pained him. I saw from his eyes that he wished me to
be stronger. I got his message but could not utter a word at that moment. When Lim Jim
Koon, Editor of Zaobao visited me with many journalist friends, he said, “Han Thong,
you will emerge stronger. We all wish you well”.
Many other colleagues from SPH visited me, including Chairman of SPH, Dr Tony Tan
and journalists and management staff of various divisions. They brought along books,
magazines and newspapers to cheer me up. Their well wishes carried in so many words,
spoken or unspoken, had one common message : they all wanted me to be stronger.
Despite what has happened, I have been in high spirits all this while. The impairment is
just physical and I know that I am making great progress. In fact, when I was taken off
the respirator and took my first drop of water, I already told myself that “The worst is
over and I must have the positive energy to ensure a speedy recovery.” I also reminded
myself not to look back. A nurse had asked me if I had looked at the mirror to see my
progress. I told her it was not necessary because I could see it from my daughter's face.
It is my family – my mother, wife, children, brother and sisters, in-laws and relatives,
the bigger family of PAP comrades, the Cabinet and fellow MPs and the biggest family
of Singapore with our grassroots leaders, friends and well wishers many of whom I do
not know, that give me the strength to carry forth.
I am now on the road of recovery, slowly but steadily. I receive physiotherapy and
occupational therapy treatments as an outpatient. Each time, my mother and my wife
accompany me as my youngest sister ferry us and coordinate with the hospital. They
know that I still have months of therapy to go through before I will regain most of my
capabilities but they are positive. They know that as a burns victim, my lifestyle will not
be the same in the next one two years, but they are optimistic.
As President Nathan told me during his visit: In life, we must have faith. We might not
be able to stop something from happening. But when it happens, we must have faith to
deal with it.
My mother and wife also said to me, “

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MP Seng Han Thong recounts fiery attack

June 9, 2009

MP recounts fiery attack

By Kor Kian Beng
		Mr Seng receives occupational therapy treatment. -- PHOTO: PETIR

View more photos

MR SENG Han Thong was about to have his lunch when he felt something like cold water trickling down his neck. The next thing he knew, he was ablaze.

Only when the Yio Chu Kang MP was being taken to hospital in an ambulance did Mr Seng notice that his own hands and fingers were 'black and charred'.

The ordeal in his own words On the first time that Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew visited him in hospital. MM Lee visited Mr Seng five times in total: 'One day, I heard a voice saying: 'I am Lee Kuan Yew'. I then realised that Minister Mentor Lee was at my bedside, checking my condition. He was very concerned about my vital organs and senses, especially my hearing and eyesight. ... more RELATED LINKS PAP magazine article: Face it

'What I didn't realise was that my injuries went far beyond this,' said Mr Seng, giving his first account of that fateful day on Jan 11 this year when a resident allegedly poured thinner on him before torching him.

It appeared in the latest issue of the People's Action Party (PAP) magazine, Petir, published once every two months. In his two-page article titled Face It, Mr Seng looked back on the attack, the impact on his family, and his journey of recovery from the 14 per cent burns on his face, shoulders, arms and chest.

He was hospitalised for 28 days at Singapore General Hospital (SGH), underwent several skin graft operations and is now attending weekly therapy sessions.

Mr Seng, 59, expressed his thanks to Cabinet ministers, current and former MPs, grassroots leaders, unionists and community leaders, former colleagues and editors from the media, and ordinary Singaporeans, including taxi drivers, who had visited him at SGH.

Mr Seng's attacker was former cabby Ong Kah Chua, 70, who is now in remand at the Institute of Mental Health. Ong is accused of pouring thinner on Mr Seng and setting him alight at Yio Chu Kang Community Club, where the MP was handing out hongbao to the needy and bursaries to students.

In the first five days when he was in the intensive care unit, Mr Seng said his swollen arms were tied to the bed to prevent him from pulling out the tube that was placed in his mouth.

Despite his ordeal, Mr Seng, who was discharged on Feb 7, is philosophical about the injuries he suffered.

'In life, we always encounter challenges and situations which need our immediate response...The best and only way to deal with such a blow is to face it, rather than fear it, and overcome it rationally and decisively,' he said.

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