Paul’s isolationist message sets him apart from the rest of the Republican field, and many candidates have attacked his stances on dealing with Iran in particular. He’s in third place in the latest Iowa Poll, at 12 percent support, a level of backing that’s remained fairly steady over the last several months.

Paul said whistle blowers like Daniel Ellsberg – who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971 – and groups like WikiLeaks often aren’t considered heroic but are very important in a free society. Without Ellsberg, he said, people wouldn’t have known the Vietnam War “was all rigged.”

“In the same way we get information from groups like WikiLeaks confirming the fact that we actually went into Iraq and there was no Al Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, it was all a gimmick to get us into a war that we didn’t need to be in,” Paul said.

Politicians in Washington are generally in favor of protecting whistle blowers, but not on all topics, Paul said. In those cases “they come down very hard on the whistle blower.” The head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for publishing diplomatic cables.

“The area where neither the Democrats or Republican leadership seems to welcome any whistle blowing is when there’s an exposure on our foreign policy, the fallacies of why we go to war and what we do,” he said.

But Paul said that information is important, and the American people should know about those things prior to going to war.

“As a matter of fact, the best way to prevent this kind of dilemma for us getting the information after the fact, is we should have the information before the fact,” he said. “That is we should never go to war without a full examination and a declaration of war.”

Paul called U.S. foreign policy “deeply flawed” and said “it’s time for us to come home and mind our own business.” He particularly questioned the use of drone missile strikes and a new policy allowing assassinations of American citizens, like Anwar al-Awlaki and his son.

“You know that when the innocent get killed, because we go after one guy and some extras get killed, don’t you think they have a right to be a little bit annoyed with us?” he asked. “But here we are dropping drones on a daily basis.”

Paul said killing an American without charges, a trial or conviction is a dangerous precedent that throws out the whole system of protecting citizens’ rights.

“How intimidated do we have to be, how insecure do we have to be that we would assassinate a 16-year-old kid that is an American citizen because what is he going to do, is he going to launch a missile against us or something?” Paul said. “I fear much more the erosion of the protection of our liberties here at home and the erosion of our economy than I do from any foreign adversary.”

Paul made the comments at the National Federation of Republican Assemblies Straw Poll, which he won handily.

“People who are dependent on drugs in Vietnam need access to community-based, voluntary treatment,” Joe Amon, health and human rights director at Human Rights Watch in New York, said in a statement. “Instead, the government is locking them up, private companies are exploiting their labor and international donors are turning a blind eye to the torture and abuses they face.”

The government of Vietnam denies the report, calling it groundless.

Vietnam is one of 34 counties and regions receiving money under PEPFAR, a program initiated by former President George W. Bush. The U.S. government website say the southeast Asian country has received nearly $325 million under the program between 2004 and 2009.

Vietnam, as well as other countries in southeast Asia have been the most recent location of rapid HIV spread. The epidemic is fueled by the sex trade and intravenous drug use in that country.

A military helicopter. (U.S. Army)

Though the last U.S. troops left Vietnam in 1973, many veterans still live with the war. And at a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing Thursday at the U.S. Capitol, senators expressed concerns for everything from oversight to deficit spending in the discussion over whether to allow three new conditions to the Agent Orange Act. The legislation allows for compensation to veterans for the health effects from herbicide American planes sprayed to root out the Viet Cong.

[Security1] On August 31, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs approved three new ailments to the list of “presumptive” causes within the Agent Orange Act — ischemic heart disease, Parkinson’s Disease and hairy cell leukemia. The VA will be able to process new claims — as well as compensate earlier ones — at the end of October unless Congress votes to block it. VA officials estimate that this could add 250,000 new disability claims and cost about $42 billion over the next ten years.

Some have balked at the cost of providing more resources to health care given the deficit. President Obama’s Deficit Committee Co-Chairman, and former chair of the Veterans Affairs committee, Alan Simpson told the Associated Press about the Agent Orange Act rule-making authority, “The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess.” The group VoteVets called for his resignation, and Simpson has not apologized for the remarks. (Simpson did not respond to repeated requests for comment to TAI through the Deficit Commission.)

Alan Oates, chairman of the Vietnam Veterans of America Committee on Agent Orange, thought that was offensive. “It’s a slap in the face,” he said to TAI. Oates, who was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam and has Parkinson’s Disease (one of the ailments recently added to the Agent Orange Act by the VA), added, “It’s taking care of some of the budget problems on the backs of veterans. When you send veterans into war, that there’s a cost for that, there’s a cost for health care once that war’s over.”

Others at the hearing also thought the idea was ludicrous because health care for returning veterans was a given. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said, “This is part of the ongoing cost of war, more than guns and bullets and airplanes.” On the scientific link between Agent Orange and ischemic heart disease, Sanders said to VA Sec. Eric Shinseki, “I think we’re asking you to play God and you’re doing a good job but you’re not God.” He added, “Who is smart enough to make a determination? I’m not.”

Ischemic heart disease drew the most skepticism from the panel since it is common in older men (17 percent of men ages 60-69 have it, and 26 percent of men ages 70-79 have it).

Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Jim Webb (D-Va.) have also raised other concerns about the new measure. “Heart disease is a common phenomenon regardless of potential exposure to Agent Orange,” said Sen. Webb in a letter to Shineski. “I have spent my entire adult life one way or the other involved in veterans law. But I do think we need to have practical, proper procedures,” he added. (However, at the hearing, Webb balked at the notion that his hesitation was about cost. “This is not about cost, it’s not,” he said in Thursday.)

Burr has also spoken of similar concerns. “At some point we will have to look at the definition of exposure,” he told the AP.

Burr, the ranking Republican on the committee, was not present at the hearing and was co-chairing the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. (If Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski loses her re-election this November as a write-in candidate, then Burr is next in line to be ranking member of the committee.) Burr met with Sec. Shinseki on Thursday, and said his concerns had been answered satisfactorily. He said in a press release, “At the end of our discussion I was convinced that he [Gen. Shinseki] and his agency are prepared to handle these needed changes.”

Webb said in the letter to Shinseki, “The discussions were you could develop a chronological map overlay of where defoliants had been used, and then develop a nexus in someone’s service record on whether they had been in those areas. From that you could say whether these conditions would be presumptively acquired.” But many of the panelists at Thursday’s hearing said, that there’s little reliable data about what exposure was over forty years ago — therefore making it difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint causality. Oates agreed. “Putting the burden back on the veteran to prove exposure when there was so much misuse of the project would be impossible. Veterans can’t account for every moment and every place they were, they had a job to do,” he said to TAI.

The science linking ischemic heart disease to Agent Orange exposure suggests a “limited/suggestive connection” according to the Institute Of Medicine in its 682-page 2008 report. Of course, it’s difficult to pinpoint any individual case to dioxin exposure, as opposed to other risk factors such as high cholesterol, smoking, genetics or other factors.

Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at NIH and director of the National Toxicology Program at the Department Health and Human Services, said, “in humans, dioxin is not causing a unique cardiovascular disease, but increases the risk of developing ischemic heart disease, which has a significant background incidence.” As for the time that had passed between the Vietnam War and now, she said, “Dioxin can permanently alter gene expression. Especially in Vietnam, a young man under additional stress that early — dioxin exposure adds to additional factors.”

The United States government sprayed 20 million gallons of herbicides, mostly Agent Orange, a dioxin compound,during the Vietnam War to defoliate forest with the aim of depriving the Viet Cong and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam from cover, from 1962 until 1971. The agent had obvious ecological effects of killing crops, but also had significant health effects on both veterans and the Vietnamese people. In veterans, the agent has been shown to caused an elevated risk of soft tissue cancers, Hodgkin’s disease, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, spina bifida (in the children of veterans), soft-tissue sarcoma and chloracne.

The Agent Orange Act passed both houses of Congress unanimously in 1991. The act gave the VA the power to add new diseases to the list based on scientific literature reviews done by the Institute of Medicine.

Lieberman said he was open to supporting former WWF CEO Linda McMahon, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in the race.

“I said I’m open,” Lieberman told POLITICO. “Is it theoretically possible? Yes. I probably know Blumenthal better, but I know Linda McMahon – she was on the state board of higher education, and I met with her a couple of times in that capacity. This is the great privilege that voters of Connecticut gave me in 2006 as an independent. Wait and see.”

Lieberman’s comments came as a new Quinnipiac University poll showed state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D) leading McMahon 56-31 percent despite the recent controversy. This represents a drop in support — he led McMahon 61-28 in Quinnipiac’s March 17 poll — but the drop is far less severe than the one indicated by a Rasmussen Reports poll earlier this month that showed Blumenthal’s lead dropping by 10 points.

The Vietnam incident appears to be less of an issue in the campaign than was generally believed, as 61 percent of people in the poll said Blumenthal’s flap made no difference in whether they would vote for him. Thirty-three percent said it made them less likely to vote for him. Fifty-three percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with Blumenthal’s explanation.

“It looks like Connecticut voters forgive Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, or feel that there is nothing to forgive in the Vietnam service flap,” Quinnipiac Poll Director Douglas Schwartz said in a press release on the poll results. “While he has taken a hit with voters, his poll numbers were so high to begin with that he still maintains a commanding lead over Linda McMahon.”

According to the poll, 59 percent of people questioned opposed sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan with 39 percent in favor. Of the 59 percent opposed, 28 percent want Washington to withdraw all U.S troops, 21 percent are calling for a partial American pullout, and 8 percent say the number of troops should remain the same.

I don’t know what follows from a sentiment that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. Vietnam is a bit of a Rorschach test. But it’s obviously a bad thing. Although Matthew Yglesias points out that Vietnam ultimately didn’t turn out so bad in the long run!

Still, according to the recently released July 2007 memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, the technique was determined not to cause “serious physical pain or suffering” and not to violate the War Crimes Act. The War Crimes Act prohibits torture and “cruel and inhuman treatment.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A comparison of the inspector general report with legal memos released from the Office of Legal Counsel within the Justice Department, however, reveals that lawyers were so uncertain about how and whether sleep deprivation could be used legally that their advice to the CIA ranged from restricting its use to 48 continuous hours, to allowing it for 180 hours or more. And although the 2007 legal memo specifically mentions that the CIA said it might use the technique for 180 hours, the lawyers restricted their analysis, in footnote 7, to only the legality of its use for up to 96 hours. Meanwhile, the inspector general report discusses the contemplated use of sleep deprivation on Abu Zubaydah for up to 11 days at a time — or 264 hours straight.

None of the former interrogators, physicians, lawyers or government officials could explain to TWI exactly why the CIA and Justice Department lawyers changed the rules so sharply and frequently. A call to Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard Law Professor and director of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004 was not returned.

“How they go from 48 to 100 plus hours is anybody’s guess,” said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI special agent who worked in the Osama Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002. “I think that they were making the rules up as they went along,” he said, adding that “they outsourced a lot of this,” referring to the role, recently revealed by The New York Times, of Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two businessmen-psychologists who developed the interrogation procedures for the CIA but had no interrogation experience themselves.

But the experts on sleep deprivation all appear to agree – and the literature on the subject is remarkably consistent – that sleep deprivation is physically and mentally harmful, and largely ineffective at producing useful information. Still, it’s tempting for government officials desperate to get detainees to talk.

“It will elicit information, that’s true,” said Cloonan. “People will talk. But in point of fact the substance is what separates what works and what doesn’t. Did they provide actionable intelligence, and could you verify what was being told?” asks Cloonan. “There’s a big diff between compliance — giving information to stop what they’re being subjected to — and real cooperation, where they’re giving useful information.”

Scientists, physicians and interrogators all say that because sleep deprivation causes extreme confusion and even psychosis, it’s impossible to know if what the detainee is telling interrogators is true or not.

“Sleep deprivation has been extensively studied,” said Dr. Steven Miles, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, as well as the author of the book, “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors.” “It will cause people to speak. It does not produce reliable intelligence. It impairs the ability to concentrate in a way that allows the interrogatee to assemble coherent narratives. So it’s counterproductive in terms of information solicitation.”

A December 2006 report from the Intelligence Science Board of the National Defense Intelligence College says that sleep deprivation is associated with, among other things, “increased suggestibility,” adding: “On this last point it is worth noting that suggestibility increases specifically under conditions simulating an interrogation. At least one study has found that “the effect on suggestibility of one or two night’s sleep loss is comparable to the difference in suggestibility between true and false confessors.”

That’s such a basic fact for interrogators that in the book, “Introduction to Forensic Psychology,” by Curt and Anne Bartol, the glossary lists “Coerced-compliant false confessions” as “Admissions of guilt most likely to occur after prolonged and intense interrogation experiences, especially in situations where sleep deprivation is a feature. The suspect, in desperation to avoid further discomfort, admits to the crime even knowing that he or she is innocent.”

As Tom Parker, a former British Intelligence agent, now Amnesty International’s Policy Director for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights explained: “Sleep deprivation was never designed as an interview tool. It was used by the KGB and its precursors as a way to break people down to give false confessions. These techniques are not about getting people to tell the truth, they’re about breaking people down to kill their spirit.”

The justification for the technique originated with the idea of learned helplessness, based on studies conducted decades ago on dogs.

“They took dogs, tied them in a cage and shocked them,” explained Miles. “They showed that the dogs would act to resist or escape, unless the dogs learned there was nothing they could do to resist. Then they would just lie there and take it.”

The theory, explained Miles, is that “when used with other techniques it will induce dependence on the interrogator, which will cause the person to comply.” But all the research done on this from around the world reveals that “this technique simply does not gather intelligence.”

Sleep deprivation is always part of a package: as described in CIA inspector general report, prisoners were shackled, semi-starved, put in diapers and forced to stand that way. Their hands were cuffed along the wall close to their chins, according to Department of Justice memos. If they nodded off and stopped standing, the chains would pull at their wrists, waking them up.

Andrea Northwood, director of client services at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, recently told The Associated Press that her organization considers 96 hours of sleep deprivation to be torture.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was tortured in Vietnam, has also said that prolonged sleep deprivation is torture, and recently denied the claim in the CIA inspector general report that he was among several members of Congress who approved its use.

Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977-83, tortured by the KGB as a young man, famously described sleep deprivation in his book, White Nights:

“In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep… Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it,” he wrote. “I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them” — time to sleep.

Although the technique was prohibited by President Obama, some worry it could be revived in the future because it at least gets people to talk, and it’s generally perceived as less offensive than waterboarding, head-slamming or forced nudity. “Sleep deprivation may be seen as a tempting technique to restore,” wrote reporter Greg Miller in the Los Angeles Times recently.

In justifying the use of sleep deprivation in a 2005 memo, Justice Department lawyers argued that it was okay for CIA interrogators to keep terror suspects awake for seven and a half days straight — because “even very extended sleep deprivation does not cause physical pain.” They relied for that claim on the work of university researchers who found that people who were deprived of sleep for just one night had an increased sensitivity to certain types of pain. Justice Department memos dated May 10, 2005 cited this study to support the conclusion that severe sleep deprivation of up to 180 consecutive hours might cause some increased pain but not “severe physical pain” — even when used together with slaps, stress positions, water dousing and “walling” — slamming a detainee’s head repeatedly against a flexible wall.

“Because sleep deprivation appears to cause at most only relatively moderate decreases in pain tolerance, the use of these techniques in combination with extended sleep deprivation would not be expected to cause severe physical pain,” wrote Steven Bradbury, a principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, who signed the memos. (Bradbury has since left the department and works at a private law firm in Washington. He did not return calls for comment.)

But those same academic researchers have since called the Justice Department’s use of their work “nonsense.” “To claim that 180 hours [of sleep deprivation] is safe in these respects, is nonsense.” Dr. James Horne, with the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre, told the blog Obsidian Wings. “Prolonged stress with sleep deprivation will lead to a physiological exhaustion of the body’s defense mechanisms, physical collapse, and with the potential for various ensuing illnesses.”

In their studies, the doctors explained, the subjects were well-fed and could play video games and watch television. Detainees under interrogation, on the other hand, were often semi-starved and chained into place, not even allowed to go to the bathroom.

“In a manner, it’s like giving a drug to a patient: if you administer it in small doses for therapeutic reasons, it helps them. If you give it in huge volumes, it becomes toxic — and can even kill them,” another of the researchers cited, Dr. S. Hakki Onen, sleep specialist and geriatrician, told Time Magazine.

Although the Justice Department lawyers wrote that “extended sleep deprivation cannot be expected to cause ‘severe mental pain or suffering,’” the doctors vigorously disagree.

After several days, “the mental pain would be all too evident, and arguably worse than physical pain,” Dr. Horne said to Obsidian Wings.

Notably, a combination of techniques similar to those used by the CIA has been ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights. In the case Ireland v. U.K., the court held that a combination of sleep deprivation, hooding, wall-standing, continuous white noise, sleep deprivation and “the bread and water diet” violated international humanitarian law.

What’s odd, say former interrogators, is that the military knew this and for the most part, resisted using these techniques. The CIA, however, relying on inexperienced contractors who developed its interrogation strategies based on the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) training, seems to have completely ignored common knowledge.

“The point is you realize when you’re going through that [SERE] training, they tell you this isn’t about trying to get useful intelligence out of you, it’s about getting propoganda,” said Matthew Alexander, a 14-year veteran of the air force and leader of an elite interrogations team in Iraq and author of “How to Break a Terrorist.” (Matthew Alexander, seen here on The Daily Show, uses a pseudonym.) Sleep deprivation may be used for no longer than 48 hours in SERE training, according to the inspector general report. “They’re just trying to break down your will.”

“I think people misinterpreted that,” Alexander added. “Mitchell and Jessen, the psychologists, they took that learned helplessness theory, but they’d never done an interrogation. They were so off base.”

So what do Richard Holbrooke and Gen. Stanley McChrystal do? Consult Stanley Karnow, one of the best living U.S. chroniclers of … Vietnam. Karnow is an opponent of the war, so good for Holbrooke and McChrystal for talking with someone who questions the wisdom of the whole enterprise. And when members of McChrystal’s strategy review are conceding parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam, that’s a rather necessary intellectual enterprise.

But wouldn’t it be better to consult with more historians of Afghanistan? McChrystal’s review was heavy on security experts and light on regional ones. It’s a fine line between learning lessons of prior wars and reasoning through prior experience. The difference is properly adjudicated through actual, local knowledge.