Webmaster’s comment: This national disgrace is only the very tip of America’s torture iceberg. And of course, the principles of the CIA’s “no-touch torture” are a central component of covert, extra-legal, global gangstalking operations that have been conducted over the past 70+ years against innocent American citizens such as myself. As this website abundantly proves, “targeted individuals” (TIs) today are subject to remote “no-touch torture” every bit as excruciating as the tortures experienced by the innocent “detainees” in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and other torture centers.
To arrive at where we are today (arguably hell), many thousands of psychologists, doctors, and other medical professionals have had to betray their Hippocratic Oath at the behest and prompting of the CIA and all branches of the US military. As for the CIA-military personnel and psychologists directly involved in these crimes against humanity, they have a well-deserved destiny in Hell, which I’m sure they have either fulfilled or will soon fulfill when they die.
Does this spiritual death sentence also apply to the American taxpayers who knowingly or unknowingly supported these heinous activities over the past 70+ years? Are American citizens responsible for the actions of their government? Yes.
Epigraph Quotes
(comment to Article III):
JCDavis
October 3 2016, 3:43 p.m.
This was nothing compared to what the CIA did to Vietnamese in the Phoenix program. It’s hard to remember an organized group of sadistic psychopaths that were worse without going back to the SS–
“Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock (‘the Bell Telephone Hour’) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the ‘water treatment’; the ‘airplane’ in which the prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners…”
Comments to Video #VI.
Marketing Consultants
4 years ago
Targeted individuals
Bacon man Bacon sinper
1 month ago
So they lie let’s not torture the cia let’s kill them.
I. Guantánamo: psychologists who designed CIA torture program to testify
The Guardian –
Techniques included waterboarding and other forms of torture
Hopes that trial will cast more light on scale of program
Julian Borger in Guantánamo Bay
Mon 20 Jan 2020 05.00 GMTLast modified on Mon 20 Jan 2020 21.23 GMT
Protestors mark 18th anniversary of Guantánamo Bay detention camp and call for its closure and ‘accountability for torture’ near the White House, on 11 January.
Photograph: Mike Theiler/Reuters
The two psychologists who designed the US “enhanced interrogation” programme that included waterboarding and other forms of torture are due to give evidence in open court for the first time this week.
James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen will answer questions at a pre-trial hearing on the 9/11 attacks before a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay.
Lawyers for the defendants, who are among 40 detainees being held at prison camp on the island of Cuba, say it will be a unique opportunity to hold to account those responsible for approving and carrying out the use of torture, and to demonstrate that both the CIA and FBI were complicit in torture, with significant implications for any future trial of suspected 9/11 plotters.
Mitchell and Jessen were former air force psychologists who were tasked by the CIA in 2002 to establish a programme of severe interrogation techniques. They were paid $1,800 a day and in 2005 they set up a private company, which provided most of the interrogators and most of the security staff at the “black sites”, secret detention facilities. The company was paid $81m for its services before its contract was terminated in 2009.
“The perverse ‘work’ of these psychologists has dramatically set back the global fight against torture. The interrogation methods they championed have had a rippling effect around the world,” said Julia Hall, a human rights lawyer with Amnesty International who is attending the hearings.
The American Psychological Association has disowned Mitchell and Jessen for “violating the ethics of their profession and leaving a stain on the discipline of psychology”.
But both men have insisted they did nothing wrong, arguing they were asked to do things that were declared legal by the George W Bush administration, and that they had to prevent the worst excesses of other interrogators.
Defence lawyers and human rights advocates hope Mitchell and Jessen will cast more light on the scale of the torture programme, the culpability of senior officials and the role of the FBI, which has hitherto presented itself as uninvolved.
“The main points that I will be asking the witnesses about are the deep involvement of the FBI in the rendition detention and interrogation program, the huge bureaucracy that was necessary to support the use of coercive pressure as an interrogation tactic, and the elements of the CIA’s programme that didn’t involve Dr Mitchell and Dr Jessen at all,” said James Connell, lawyer for one of the defendants, Ammar al-Baluchi, who will lead the questioning of Mitchell this week. “There are many other people who are involved.”
Alka Pradhan, another Baluchi lawyer who will take the lead in questioning Jessen said the coming session was “probably one of the most consequential hearings we have had yet” in eight years of pre-trial hearings.
At the core of the prosecution case are a set of statements made by the defendants in 2007 to FBI investigators. The government contends that this was a “clean team” of investigators who had nothing to do with torture. The statements were therefore untainted and admissible in court.
Pradhan said the Mitchell and Jessen testimony would add to already considerable evidence that the FBI also had dirty hands.
“They knew that they needed ‘clean interrogations’ in order to be able to prosecute and eventually execute,” she said. The defence lawyers say there were FBI agents at the black sites during enhanced interrogations and that the FBI submitted questions for the interrogators to use, knowing torture was being used.
This week’s hearing has been complicated by a new set of secrecy rules introduced by the prosecution on Thursday, that prevents defence lawyers from citing references to the interrogation programme in published books, even though they had been cleared for publication by the CIA.
On the other hand, defence teams will be allowed to cite more details of dates, places and techniques used on detainees. The CIA has acknowledged that at least 39 prisoners were subjected to the enhanced interrogation techniques that included slamming detainees into a wall, confining them in a 21x30in (53x76cm) box, and waterboarding, the simulation of drowning by covering a prisoner’s face with cloth and pouring water on it. The UN and human rights groups have declared waterboarding and some of the other techniques to be torture.
Defence and prosecution lawyers are due to argue over classification and other procedural issues in closed session at the military commission built on the Guantánamo naval base near the detention camp.
Then the presiding judge, Col Shane Cohen, is expected to hold open sessions for at least some of the next two weeks.
Mitchell and Jessen agreed an out of court settlement in a civil suit brought by the American Council on Civil Liberties on behalf of Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ben Soud, who were released without charges after being tortured, and the family of Gul Rahman, who died under interrogation in 2002 in one of the CIA’s secret detention facilities around the world, known as “black sites”.
Rahman died after being left shackled overnight naked from the waist down in a freezing concrete cell. Mitchell and Jessen said they had complained about Rahman’s treatment but their warnings were ignored by senior CIA officials.
The psychologists said their interrogation programme had been designed to induce a “learned helplessness” in detainees that would make them more compliant. Mitchell wrote a memoir, Enhanced Interrogation, in which he claimed that the enhanced interrogation techniques helped foil al-Qaida attacks on the US.
“I concluded that it would be immoral and unethical to ignore my obligation to use what I knew to defend our citizens and our way of life against enemies who themselves had initiated the conflict and whose stated goal was to destroy us,” Mitchell wrote.
His claims over the programme’s success is disputed by a report by the Senate intelligence committee, which found that the enhanced interrogations produced no actionable intelligence.
II. The CIA’s torture program, as explained by the psychologists who designed it
By Lindsay [email protected]@vox.com Jun 21, 2017, 3:30pm EDT
Images of six men during their testimonies fill the screen
A screenshot from the New York Times report on the filmed depositions by John Jessen and James Mitchell. Screenshot of the New York Times
The former military psychologists who designed the CIA’s torture program are now describing it in their own words for the first time, reopening one of the grimmest chapters in Washington’s war on terror and providing disturbing details about what was done to detainees in the name of US national security.
The New York Times obtained video footage from depositions of the two psychologists, John Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. A report by Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Sheri Fink paints a troubling portrait of two men who say they were uncomfortable with some of what the CIA was asking them to do but continued their work anyway.
The psychologists were speaking in response to a lawsuit filed by two former prisoners and the family of a prisoner who died, none of whom were ever charged with a crime. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit, said all three men had been subjected to the CIA’s brutal techniques.
The report is particularly striking since we know that the president of the United States has made clear he has no moral objections to the use of torture, believes it generally works, and has only held back from authorizing it because of strong pushback from his national security team.
“Would I feel strongly about waterboarding? As far as I’m concerned, we have to fight fire with fire,” said Donald Trump in a January interview with ABC News.
We already know a lot about the CIA’s interrogation techniques from a 2014 Senate report, which found they were more brutal than had been initially thought and rarely led to much useful intelligence. But this is the first time the key individuals who approved and designed the program are speaking about it on the record.
“This is the first case against the CIA in which victims and survivors have had their day in court,” Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, said in an interview with Vox.
Here are the most disturbing takeaways from the New York Times report.
The psychologists believe their torture techniques caused no long-term harm
One of the main themes in Mitchell and Jessen’s depositions was their repeated claim that the techniques they designed and taught others to use were mostly painless and caused no long-term harm to the prisoners.
But the former detainees at the heart of the ACLU suit, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ben Soud, have said the techniques were painful.
In his deposition, a judge asked Salim if he could describe the pain he experienced while being subjected to a stress position, a technique in which the detainees’ wrists were tied together above their heads and they were unable to lean against a wall or lie down.
Salim said, “Maybe I need to tie you here for one hour so you can feel the pain if you want to know the pain.”
He then broke down crying.
The Senate report noted how one detainee was waterboarded 83 times over a period of days. At one point, he was completely unresponsive.
But, using casual and somewhat flippant language, Jessen and Mitchell claimed they didn’t think the techniques would cause long-term trauma. From the New York Times:
In his deposition, Dr. Mitchell, who once said that most people would prefer to have their legs broken than to be waterboarded, disagreed with a lawyer’s reference to the practice as painful. “It sucks, you know. I don’t know that it’s painful,” he said. “I’m using the word distressing.”
Both Salim and Soud suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Watt, and even participating in the trial has been an emotional and difficult experience for the men.
They had literally no problem smashing prisoners into walls
“Walling” is a technique in which prisoners were repeatedly slammed against an ostensibly flexible plywood wall. Jessen said it was “one of the most” effective techniques they used and claimed it did not cause pain.
“It’s discombobulating. It doesn’t hurt you, but it jostles the inner ear, it makes a really loud noise,” he said.
Jessen also described sleep deprivation, a technique in which “the detainee has handcuffs and they’re attached to the tether in a way that they can’t lie down or rest against a wall.”
Salim said the pain he experienced from that technique was excruciating: “A lot of pain in my arms, a lot of pains in my back and around my waist.”
The CIA bullied the two psychologists into continuing the program
Mitchell and Jessen said they wanted to stop or limit the use of waterboarding, but the CIA supervisors bullied them into continuing the program.
When those at the prison wanted to end the waterboarding sessions as no longer useful, C.I.A. supervisors — including Jose Rodriguez, then the head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center and a witness who testified under oath in the lawsuit — ordered them to continue.
“They kept telling me every day a nuclear bomb was going to be exploded in the United States and that because I had told them to stop, I had lost my nerve and it was going to be my fault if I didn’t continue,” Dr. Jessen testified.
Dr. Mitchell said that the C.I.A. officials told them: “‘You guys have lost your spine.’ I think the word that was actually used is that you guys are pussies. There was going to be another attack in America and the blood of dead civilians are going to be on your hands.”
They were paid $81 million for helping the CIA torture prisoners
Jessen and Mitchell argued that the CIA controlled the program and that they simply worked as contractors. Under the agency’s guidance, the psychologists said they proposed “enhanced interrogation techniques” and trained other people to use them. Over the course of several years, they received $81 million.
Mitchell said he urged the CIA to destroy videotapes showing torture
Even though Mitchell, one of the defendants, claimed the techniques he and Jessen developed caused no harm, he still encouraged the CIA to destroy video footage the agency had made of the interrogations.
He rationalized that decision by saying the videos were too graphic: “I thought they were ugly and they would, you know, potentially endanger our lives by putting our pictures out so that the bad guys could see us.”
The destruction of the tapes was central to investigations conducted by the Justice Department. In 2010, the department ruled that it would not file criminal charges over the destruction of the tapes.
The case filed by the ACLU on behalf of the three former detainees is scheduled for trial on September 5. But according to Watt at the ACLU, there’s already been some success achieved in having the two psychologists and top CIA officials testify under oath.
III. FORMER CIA DETAINEES DESCRIBE PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN TORTURE TACTIC: A MAKESHIFT ELECTRIC CHAIR
Alex Emmons
October 3 2016, 7:00 a.m.
TWO FORMER CIA captives recently described being threatened with a makeshift electric chair — a previously unreported torture method — while being held in the U.S. government’s infamous “Salt Pit” prison in Afghanistan.
In independent interviews with Human Rights Watch in August that were made public on Monday, Ridha al-Najjar, 51, and Lufti al-Arabi al-Gharisi, 52, described a metal device that had wires with clips that would attach to the fingers, and a helmet connected to wires.
“I saw an electric box, … the chair. They said, we will torture you with electricity here,” al-Gharisi said.
Al-Gharisi said he was forced into the chair and connected to the machine, but was never actually electrocuted.
Both men also described various forms of water torture, including having their heads dunked in a bucket of water until they couldn’t breathe, waterboarding, and being strapped to a board while submerged face down in a bathtub.
This is the first time al-Najjar and al-Gharisi, both of who are Tunisian nationals, have spoken out about their time in CIA custody.
There is no mention of electric chairs in the unclassified executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report that was released in December 2014.
“These terrifying accounts of previously unreported CIA torture methods show how little the public still knows about the U.S. torture program,” said Laura Pitter, senior national security counsel for Human Rights Watch. “The release of these two men without the U.S. providing any assistance or redress for their torture and suffering also shows how much the U.S. still needs to do to put the CIA torture program behind it.”
Both men are Tunisian citizens, and were released and repatriated to their home country last year. Neither was ever charged with a crime, and the U.S. government did not compensate either for their torture or 13 years of detention without charge.
The abuses the two men describe took place at the Salt Pit — a converted brick factory north of Kabul, Afghanistan, referred to in the Senate’s Torture Report as “Detention Site COBALT.” Many of the most sadistic abuses of the CIA program’s history took place at the facility, which al-Najjar and al-Gharisi refer to only as the “dark prison.”
CIA interrogators quoted in the declassified executive summary of the Senate report describe the prison as “a dungeon,” where detainees “cowered” when interrogators entered their cells, looking “like a dog that had been kenneled.”
Although the declassified summary did not mention electric shocks or an electric chair, it is possible that the full report — which contains a detailed account of each detainee’s interrogation — does. It remains classified by the Obama administration.
According to the Senate report’s summary, al-Najjar was the first detainee held in Detention Site Cobalt.
CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani told Human Rights Watch that the “CIA reviewed its records and found nothing to support these new claims.”
Al-Najjar’s Capture and Interrogation
U.S. and Pakistani forces captured al-Najjar near Karachi, Pakistan, breaking into his family’s home in May 2002. According to the Senate torture report, the CIA initially thought he was Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard, but the U.S. government has never publically presented evidence for that allegation.
Al-Najjar described the day he was transferred to the “dark prison” as the “worst experience of his life”: On that day an Arab interrogator entered his cell, demanding information, and when al-Najjar could not provide it, the interrogator said “wait until you see what happens to you where we take you next. At the next place we will hang you from your anus.”
Najjar’s interrogators then doubled him over and chained his wrists to his legs. They put a bag over his head, and inserted something into his rectum, he recalled.
Documents examined by Senate investigators noted that anal exams at the Salt Pit were often conducted with “excessive force.”
Two months after al-Najjar was transferred to the Salt Pit, in November 2002, Afghan detainee Gul Rahman was tortured to death there. He was dragged outside of his cell, stripped naked, beaten, and repeatedly immersed in cold water. After being put in an isolation cell overnight, he died of hypothermia. An internal CIA investigation admits that Rahman froze to death, but blames it on Rahman for rejecting his last meal, saying he denied his body “a source of fuel to keep him warm.”
In response to Rahman’s death, the CIA would release its first formal guidelines for detainee interrogation. But al-Najjar’s ordeal had begun months earlier.
Al-Najjar told Human Rights Watch that when he first arrived at the facility, he was stripped naked, thrown on a concrete floor, and doused with cold water. The same Arab interrogator that had threatened to hang him “from his anus” cocked a gun and held it to the back of his head, saying that if al-Najjar did not talk, he would kill him.
His interrogators would hang him from the ceiling for 24-hour periods, his wrists strapped to a metal bar over his head and his toes barely able to touch the ground. Often, according to al-Najjar, while he was in this position, guards would beat his legs and back with a baton, or punch him in the kidneys.
While in CIA custody, al-Najjar was kept in a dark room, and could only see when his interrogators shined a light in his face. He was fed every third day and forced to wear a diaper that was only changed every four days.
According to the Senate report, CIA officials initially recommended that interrogators utilize “Najjar’s fear for the well-being of his family to our benefit,” and said that interrogators should use “vague threats” to produce a “mind virus” that would cause al-Najjar to believe abuses would worsen until he cooperated. In August 2002, the CIA authorized an interrogation plan for al-Najjar that consisted of loud music, purposefully bad food, sleep deprivation, and hooding. But his mistreatment seems to have gone far beyond that.
On Sept. 21, 2002, less than a month into his time at the Salt Pit, CIA cables described al-Najjar as “clearly a broken man” and “on the verge of complete breakdown.” But his torture continued, and he was not transferred out of CIA custody until 2004.
Al-Gharisi’s Interrogation
U.S. and Pakistani forces captured al-Gharisi near Peshawar in Northern Pakistan in May 2002. His interrogators repeatedly accused him of having ties to al Qaeda — ties which he says he repeatedly denied to his interrogators. He would eventually be rendered to the Salt Pit and tortured for hundreds of days.
The declassified summary of the Senate’s report only says al-Gharisi was tortured without authorization from CIA headquarters and underwent at least two 48-hour stretches of sleep deprivation.
But al-Gharisi told Human Right Watch he suffered many of the same abuses as al-Najjar, including sleep deprivation, water torture, being threatened with an electric chair, and being hung from a rod while beaten with batons. During his interview, al-Gharisi pointed to spots where his teeth had been knocked out.
Al-Gharisi was transferred into military custody sometime in late 2003.
During the more than 10 years that the two men were in military custody, the International Justice Network filed a petition of habeas corpus in a U.S. court, requesting information on why they had been detained. The Justice Department argued that the U.S. military prison in Bagram was beyond the court’s jurisdiction, and the petition was ultimately denied.
Aftermath of Torture, Detention
During his time in CIA custody, al-Najjar claims to have suffered broken bones, broken hips, a broken ankle, damaged knees and a damaged jaw. He received treatment after being transferred into U.S. military custody, but declined to have arthroscopic surgery on his knee, worried that it would make it worse. A medical adviser for Physicians for Human Rights examined x-rays of al-Najjar’s leg, taken after he was released last year and confirmed that his ankle had been broken and that he had experience knee trauma.
Today, al-Najjar and al-Gharisi are dependent on their families, unable to find work due to lingering physical and psychological trauma, Human Right Watch said. Al-Najjar says he lives with chronic pain in his ankle, hips, and backbone, and that he has kidney pain, a hernia, and blood in his stool. Al-Gharisi says he has chronic pain, and blurred vision. He says he does not see a doctor, because he cannot afford one.
The U.S. has not compensated any of the 119 detainees held in CIA custody for mistreatment.
The full Senate torture report — reading in at over 6,000 pages — remains the most authoritative history of the CIA torture program to date. The executive summary was declassified over a year ago, but the CIA is still fighting to bury the full report. Apparently averse to learning lessons from the past, the Obama administration refuses to open any of the copies in its possession.
Last year, Congress passed a law requiring CIA interrogations to comply with the Army Field Manual, effectively prohibiting torture in the future.
But anti-torture laws did not stop the Bush administration. And following the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute any officials responsible for their crimes, torture remains an applause line for one of the U.S.’s major political parties.
Illustration based on statements by the two former detainees.
IV. CIA Officials Forced to Testify About Torture Program: Article with Videos:
Webmaster’s Comment: Satan’s Little Helpers.
A lawsuit against the two psychologists who devised a CIA torture program reached another new milestone last month, as three victims asked a U.S. court to rule in their favor and to find that the psychologists were liable for aiding and abetting the illegal program.
The ACLU has filed a motion asking the judge in the case to rule that James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played a critical role in designing, implementing, and profiting from the CIA torture program. Our clients are Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a fisherman from Tanzania; Mohamed Ben Soud, a Libyan citizen who opposed the Gaddafi regime; and Gul Rahman, an Afghan citizen who died as a result of his torture.
The motion came at the end of a months-long evidence-gathering process that was historic for survivors and victims of torture: It was the first time key people responsible for the program ever had to answer questions under oath in a civil lawsuit about torture. That discovery process shed new light on the CIA’s thinking; we provide video excerpts from those testimonies below.
The three plaintiffs — none of whom was ever charged with a crime by the United States — endured horrific cruelty at the hands of their torturers, including beatings, various forms of water torture, constant exposure to extreme temperatures and ear-splitting levels of music, confinement in stress positions designed to keep them awake for days at a time, and more. If the court finds that the defendants are indeed liable for aiding and abetting CIA torture, we’ll be fighting on behalf of our clients for damages and other liability claims in a trial later this year.
Our clients were among more than 100 men officially known to have been abducted and detained by the CIA in a network of secret prisons during the George W. Bush presidency. Previous lawsuits on behalf of the CIA’s victims, including those filed by the ACLU, were shut down at the insistence of the government, which claimed that they raised issues too secret for the justice system to hear. Salim v. Mitchell, however, marks the first time the program’s victims have been able to litigate their claims.
Below are excerpts from the depositions, conducted by the ACLU and our co-counsel from Gibbons law firm, of Jose Rodriguez, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and John Rizzo, who was acting general counsel at the agency for much of the program’s existence. They confirm that in devising and promoting the torture program, Mitchell and Jessen relied on theories that top CIA officials eagerly accepted with virtually no questions. All these years later, it remains jarring to hear the two men speak so matter-of-factly about a program hastily thrown together using perverse and unsupportable theories to brutalize helpless prisoners.
***
At the time of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the agency had no experience in detention or interrogation. (Webmaster Comment: You couldn’t make a bigger lie than this!). But on September 17, Bush authorized the CIA to capture and detain members of al-Qaida. (His order said nothing about interrogation, much less torture.) Mitchell and Jessen, two psychologists with experience training U.S. troops to resist abuse in case of capture, were brought on to devise what they called a “psychologically based program” that would use “fear and despair” to make prisoners talk.
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But neither Mitchell nor Jessen had any experience in real-world interrogations — only in mock sessions conducted on volunteer U.S. service members with protections in place to ensure their physical and psychological safety. “Nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in terrorism, or any relevant regional, cultural, or linguistic expertise,” notes a Senate study of the torture program, the executive summary of which was released in 2014.
Rodriguez, who was charged with steering the CIA’s new and dangerous authorities, did little to ensure Mitchell & Jessen’s qualifications.
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The CIA paid Mitchell and Jessen $1,800 per day to administer the torture of detainees. They ultimately earned millions for their work, both as individual contractors and through a company they created in 2005 to expand the program. By the time the CIA terminated its contract in 2010, it had paid Mitchell, Jessen & Associates more than $80 million in taxpayer money.
As Mitchell and Jessen were developing their torture techniques — referred to euphemistically by the government as “enhanced interrogation techniques” — the CIA wanted to ensure it could operate without the restraints of domestic and international law. In his testimony, Rizzo confirms that in the summer of 2002, after the CIA captured its first prisoner, he began a process to seek the formal commitment of the Department of Justice that CIA employees would not be prosecuted as a result of their brutal interrogations.
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The Justice Department refused to provide the CIA with that assurance. (It also never prosecuted anyone responsible for the CIA torture program.)
Rizzo also confirmed that Mitchell and Jessen were given extensive latitude to develop the program without the CIA undertaking basic research into the effects of using abusive methods on prisoners.
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Mitchell and Jessen’s techniques were built on a theoretical assumption that reducing detainees to a state of “helplessness” would make them compliant with interrogators’ demands. They based their theory on research into “learned helplessness” conducted in the 1960s on animals by psychologist Martin Seligman, who discovered that dogs that had been subjected to inescapable pain would eventually stop trying to avoid it. Seligman’s theory had never been tested on humans — because doing so would violate a host of laws prohibiting torture, cruel treatment, and human experimentation.
Senior CIA officials described their lack of interest in understanding the basis for the program Mitchell and Jessen were selling.
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Mitchell and Jessen were also tasked with evaluating their own work, from which they reaped huge profits. (The Senate report quotes complaints from CIA personnel over the clear conflict of interest, which the CIA later admitted was a mistake.) And from the very beginning, the program’s brutality was apparent: In the case of Abu Zubaydah, a detainee whom Mitchell and Jessen used as a test case, his torture persisted well after they were sure he could not provide information they had demanded.
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The torture of Abu Zubaydah and another early detainee was documented on more than 90 CIA videotapes, which Rodriguez famously ordered destroyed. After a years-long investigation, the Justice Department chose not to bring charges against him.
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As a deeply effective New York Times series makes clear, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ben Soud remain, all these years later, deeply traumatized by their torture. Salim continues to suffer from crippling flashbacks because of what he calls the “darkness,” along other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Alongside various physical ailments, Ben Soud too battles depression, anxiety, and more as a result of his treatment. The family of Gul Rahman — who died from hypothermia in 2002 after being tortured and left half naked and chained to the wall of a freezing-cold cell — has never been told where his body was taken and cannot give him a dignified burial. For our clients, along with every other prisoner who saw the inside of a CIA black site, the story of the torture program isn’t over. In fact, the refusal of the U.S. government to provide so much as an apology makes it much harder for them to heal.
But now, for three of the program’s victims, after many years of courthouse doors slammed shut in the face of survivors, there finally exists hope for justice.
V. CIA ‘torture’: Inside the ‘blackout box’ – BBC News youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGaG5-VL9P8
VI. How The CIA Reverse-Engineered It’s Torture Program
VII. CIA Torture: No More Secrets
VIII. In Contravention of Conventional Wisdom; CIA “no touch” torture makes sense out of mind control allegations
By Cheryl Welsh, January 2008
http://mindjustice.org/wisdom.htm
In Contravention of Conventional Wisdom
CIA “no touch” torture makes sense
out of mind control allegations
By Cheryl Welsh
January 2008
Also available as a pdf
Cheryl Welsh was invited to speak about mind control allegations at a recent workshop on ethics and interrogations by the workshop director, Jean Maria Arrigo PhD. Dr. Arrigo commented on this article:
In “CIA ‘No Touch’ Torture Makes Sense Out of Mind Control Allegations,” Cheryl Welsh provides a valuable overview of methods common to neuroweapons research and torture interrogation. Her essay is informed by the multitude of self-identified, experimental targets of neuroweapons researchers whom she represents. Scholars and journalists who are only able to track neuroweapons research and interrogation methods through government documents have biased the consensus reality in favor of government authorities who deceive the public. We owe thanks to Cheryl Welsh and her colleagues for their pioneering efforts to penetrate government deception through the phenomenology of self-identified victims of neuroweapons.
Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD, is an independent social psychologist and oral historian whose work gives moral voice to military and intelligence professionals. See, for example, Arrigo, J.M & Wagner, R. (2007). “Torture Is for Amateurs”: A Meeting of Psychologists and Military Interrogators. [Special issue]. Peace and Conflict, 11 (4).
Dedicated to the courageous and kind-hearted
Peggy Fagan of Houston, Texas,
who is enduring the new scientific version of torture.
Mind Justice HomePage
Table of contents
Introduction
I.A university professor uncovers CIA “no touch” torture
II. The beginnings of CIA “no touch” torture and how it spread
III. What is “no touch” torture?
IV. An example of “no touch” torture
V. The long history of U.S. torture
VI. CIA Cold War neuroscience-based mind control research
VII. CIA Cold War nonlethal weapons research
VIII. Why CIA “no touch” torture has been so successful
IX. All three programs are state tools for neutralizing the enemy without killing; for intelligence operations and counterinsurgency warfare
X. Mind control allegations by a Korean War POW, (prisoner of war), a Soviet political prisoner and Abu Ghraib detainees
XI. The banal and bizarre techniques of “no touch” torture
XII. The three key behavioral components of “no touch” torture
XIII. Torture as “a kind of total theater”
XIV. A comparison of “no touch” torture to mind control allegations
XV. The phenomenology of the torture situation
XVI. Comparing “no touch” torture techniques of sensory disorientation and self inflicted pain to mind control allegations
XVII.Conclusions: what everyone can agree on
Introduction
After the horrific pictures of prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib were displayed in front pages of newspapers around the world, the United States maintained that the U.S. government does not torture; Abu Ghraib was about a few bad officers. Evidence now proves that CIA “no touch” torture and worse were ordered by the executive branch and approved by top military officers. Surprisingly this scandal has much in common with another national security issue, neuroweapons, commonly referred to as mind control.
The field of neuroethics should begin now, according to bioethicist Dr. Jonathan Moreno in his 2006 book Mind Wars, Brain Research and National Defense. The influential book was reviewed in Nature and JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association). Most neuroscientists agree that advanced neuroweapons are over a half century away but the ethics of the new weapons need more planning than occurred for the atomic bomb. Moreno began the first chapter of his book describing the growing numbers of allegations of illegal government mind control targeting. He immediately dismissed them as conspiracy theory nut cases. A 2007 Washington Post Magazine article, “Thought Wars” followed suit. So why should anyone read further given these credible and highly respected expert opinions?
Much of what the public should know about the issue has gone unreported or uninvestigated. For example, after over a half century of classified research, not one publicly known neurological weapon has been deployed. This raises more questions than it answers. Putting aside the major and undebated points of the consensus position, the mind control allegations do sound crazy and on this singular point, most people, including experts and news reporters refuse any closer examination. Clearly, understanding why the mind control allegations sound so crazy would have significant consequences.
Two analogies help clarify the major problems for the mind control issue, secrecy and the lack of a thorough, impartial investigation;
Excerpt of a 1970s congressional hearing uncovering illegal CIA activities; [Senator Frank] Church, … persisted in blaming the plots [assassinations] on the CIA. The agency, he said, was a “rogue elephant on a rampage.” For proof, he pointed to the lack of documentary evidence that any president had ever approved an assassination. Former CIA director Richard Helms countered that it was absurd to expect to find such evidence. “I can’t imagine anybody wanting something in writing saying I have just charged Mr. Jones to go out and shoot Mr. Smith,” he testified. The Agency, he insisted, had simply carried out the wishes of the executive.
Even today, experts don’t understand how the U.S. secrecy system works. Similar to the torture scandal, until there is a national security scandal about neuroscience weapons, the public will remain uninformed about a serious public issue.
During a dairyman’s strike in 19th century New England, when there was suspicion of milk being watered down, Henry David Thoreau wrote; “Sometimes circumstantial evidence can be quite convincing; like when you find a trout in the milk.” Mind Wars and the Washington Post Magazine article examined the growing numbers of crazy sounding mind control allegations. But unlike Thoreau’s account, the publications only reported the convincing circumstantial evidence of “finding a trout in the milk” and dismissed the suspicions without a fair or impartial investigation. As a result, the mind control allegations made no sense.
Update: In the 2008 book “The Commission, the Uncensored History of the 9-11 Investigation,” Philip Shenon explained that explicit, very classified “kill orders” are now put in writing. On page 254 Shenon wrote: “MONs [memorandum of notification] were top-secret orders prepared by the White House to authorize covert operations abroad by the CIA. … there was an explicit, if highly secret, order given by Clinton to the CIA in late 1998 to kill bin Laden.”
I. A university professor uncovers CIA “no touch” torture
University of Wisconsin professor Alfred McCoy wrote the 2006 book, A Question of Torture, CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. It’s a compelling account of McCoy’s search for understanding the CIA’s “no touch” torture techniques used in the war on terror and the Iraq War. McCoy shows how “information extracted by coercion is worthless” and makes the case for a legal approach, “long and successfully used by the U.S. Marines and the F.B.I.” McCoy documents why CIA “no touch” torture is a “revolutionary psychological approach” and is the first new scientific innovation after centuries of torture. “Interrogators had found that mere physical pain, no matter how extreme, often produced heightened resistance.” Of course, the old brutal forms of physical torture are still around, for example torture in Argentina in the 1970s described in the classic, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell without a Number by Jacobo Timerman.
McCoy pieced together what “no touch” torture is and how it was spread globally. The CIA’s new “no touch” torture works by attacking and destroying the basis of personal identity. McCoy found that the techniques were bizarre, simple, even banal and yet devastatingly effective. McCoy discovered that the techniques had been scientifically proven in decades of CIA cold war research. Evidence of several government manuals helped prove that the techniques were disseminated “from Vietnam through Iran to Central America.”
“No touch” torture techniques sound strangely similar to mind control allegations. A comparison of “no touch” torture to mind control allegations raised the possibility that mind control allegations could be based on the well researched psychological theory for “no touch” torture. Torture victims exhibit symptoms similar to psychotic processes and organic disorders and experts say this is not mental illness but an outcome of the psychological component of torture. Psychotherapist Otto Doerr-Zegers, who has treated Chilean victims tortured under General Augusto Pinochet stated; “The psychological component of torture becomes a kind of total theater, a constructed unreality of lies and inversion, in a plot that ends inexorably with the victim’s self-betrayal and destruction. …” This is similar to the technique of “street theater” that mind control victims described in the Washington Post Magazine article. As torture victims are not mentally ill, mind control victims would not be mentally ill but rather have undergone and are undergoing a traumatic situation comparable to torture, such as the alleged illegal targeting with government mind control weapons.
The UCDavis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (CSHRA) and the UCDavis Center for Mind and Brain (CMB) further explain what psychological torture is and its effects on torture victims.
[CSHRA and CMB] have initiated a collaboration to investigate theneurobiology of psychological torture. …Psychological torture (henceforthPT) is a set of practices that are used worldwide to inflict pain or suffering without resorting to direct physical violence. PT includes the use of sleep deprivation, sensory disorientation, forced self-induced pain, solitary confinement, mock execution, severe humiliation, mind-altering drugs and threats of violence—as well as the exploitation of personal or cultural phobias.
The psychiatric sequelae of PT are severe. They include delirium, psychosis, regression, self-mutilation, cognitive impairment, and anxiety disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder. Neuroscience research on these and related mental disorders continues to establish their neurobiological underpinnings, thus challenging the popular view that PT is not physical, not serious, and perhaps not even torture at all.
The CSHRA and the CMB launched their collaborative efforts by holding The First UCDavis Workshop on the Neurobiology of Psychological Torture. The goal of this workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners from different specialties and research groups in order to set off a unified, long-term, research program on the ways in which PT affects the human central nervous system in an effort to understand it in relation to the more traditional forms of physical torture, and to establish clearly articulated ethical, legal, and medical descriptions of this set of practices. It is expected that these descriptions will help treat, document, and deter PT.
Supplemented by studies on the social, historical, and ethical ramifications of PT, the presentations made at The First UCDavis Workshop on the Neurobiology of Psychological Torture have been bound into The Trauma of Psychological Torture, a volume to be published by Praeger on June 30, 2008.
Please note that numerous torture experts, including CSHRA and CMB have completely shunned suggestions to investigate mind control allegations or to consider the issue. But this information may be helpful to the therapists of TIs (targeted individuals of mind control) who are coping with mind control targeting.
II. The beginnings of CIA “no touch” torture and how it spread
The science of psychological torture began because of fears of Russian brainwashing of defendants in the 1940s Moscow show trials and the Korean War POW (prisoners of war) brainwashing scare in the 1950s. The 2005 book, World as Laboratory, Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men by Rebecca Lemov described government psychological research for determining whether the Communists had developed new techniques of brainwashing. “Almost all [scientists] who were assigned to study the phenomenon of POW collaboration ended up in short order working for the CIA via one of its various ‘cut-outs,’ conduits, and false fronts, such as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, and the Scientific Engineering Institute, or in one of its own laboratories.” (Lemov, 219) McCoy described the research behind “no touch” torture and how it spread globally;
From 1950 to 1962, the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a billion dollars annually, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind. … If we trace a narrative thread through a maze of hundreds of experiments, the CIA research moved through two distinct phases, first an in-house exploration of exotic techniques such as hypnosis and hallucinogenic drugs, and, a later focus on behavioral experimentation by contract researchers, several of the most brilliant behavioral scientists of their generation …
While this Agency drug testing led nowhere, CIA-funded behavioral experiments, outsourced to the country’s leading universities, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc., produced three key findings that contributed to the discovery of a new form of torture that was psychological, not physical, … perhaps best described as “no-touch torture.” (McCoy outline, 2)
Across the span of three continents and four decades, there is a striking similarity in U.S. torture techniques, both their conceptual design and specific techniques, from the CIA’s 1963 Kubark interrogation manual, to the Agency’s 1983 Honduras training handbook, all the way to General Ricardo Sanchez’s 2003 orders for interrogation in Iraq. … Guantanamo perfected the three-phase psychological paradigm by attacking cultural identity and individual psyche. (McCoy outline, 14)
III. What is “no touch” torture?
McCoy explained what “no touch” torture is;
The CIA’s psychological paradigm for “no touch” torture fused two new methods, “sensory disorientation” and “self-inflicted pain,” whose combination, in theory, would cause victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and thus capitulate more readily to their torturers. Refined through years of practice, sensory disorientation relies on a mix of sensory overload and sensory deprivation via banal procedures, isolation then intense interrogation, heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, for a systematic attack on all human stimuli. The fusion of these two techniques, sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, creates a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the existential platforms of personal identity. (McCoy outline, 4-5) In 2004, the Red Cross reported: “The construction of such a system. … cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.” (McCoy outline, 9)
IV. An example of “no touch” torture
Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman interviewed journalist Jane Mayer about her August 8, 2007 New Yorker article, “The Black Sites: A Rare Look Inside the C.I.A.’s Secret Interrogation Program.” Mayer described detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his experience with “no touch” torture;
There, he [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] was subjected to a kind of a weird routine that someone described to me as kind of Clockwork Orange sort of thing, where he was put in goggles that blacked out the light and earmuffs of some sort that blocked out sound and deprived of any normal routine, such as meals or anything that would allow him to know what time of day it was or really have any kind of marker in his existence. And it’s a program that’s developed of sort of psychological terror, in a way, to kind of make people feel that they are completely dependent on other people, have no control over their lives, and it’s something that, the technique, that really comes out of the KGB days, way back in the Cold War. And apparently it’s something the CIA has put a lot of research into over time.
V. The long history of U.S. torture
The history of CIA torture runs parallel to CIA neuroscience-based mind control research and also CIA nonlethal weapons research. This is important because mind control allegations include descriptions of techniques that sound like all three CIA programs. It is possible that the related cold war CIA “no touch” torture, nonlethal weapons and neuroscience-based mind control programs have co-mingled for intelligence purposes. Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter and author Tim Weiner wrote the 2007 book Legacy of Ashes, History of the CIA. Weiner described the CIA torture programs and the U.S. secret detention centers around the world. This is a brief excerpt of the extensive programs;
The project dated back to 1948, when Richard Helms and his [American intelligence] officers in Germany realized they were being defrauded … The agency had set up clandestine prisons to wring confessions out of suspected double agents. One was in Germany, another in Japan. The third, and the biggest, was in the Panama Canal Zone. “Like Guantanamo, … It was anything goes.” … (Weiner, 64-5)
Senior CIA officers, including Helms, destroyed almost all the records of these programs in fear they might become public. (Weiner, 66)
The agency, as Cheney said that morning, went over to “the dark side.” On Monday, September 17, President Bush issued a fourteen-page top secret directive to Tenet and the CIA, ordering the agency to hunt, capture, imprison, and interrogate suspects around the world. It set new limits on what the agency could do. It was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officers and contractors used techniques that included torture. One CIA contractor was convicted of beating an Afghan prison to death. This was not the role of a civilian intelligence service in a democratic society. But it is clearly what the White House wanted the CIA to do. …
[The CIA] had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before, beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. …
Under Bush’s order, the CIA began to function as a global military police, throwing hundreds of suspects into secret jails in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and inside the American military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba. It handed hundreds more prisoners off to the intelligence services in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Syria for interrogations. (Weiner, 482)
VI. CIA Cold War neuroscience-based mind control research
Some CIA neuroscience-based mind control research is known to have continued into the 1970s and is still classified today. A January 29, 1979 Washington Post article entitled “Book Disputes CIA Chief on Mind-Control Efforts: Work Went on Into 1970s, Author Says,” reported;
Despite assurances last year from Central Intelligence Director Stansfield Turner that the CIA’s mind-control program was phased out over a decade ago, the intelligence agency has come up with new documents indicating that the work went on into the 1970s, according to a new book. John Marks, the author of the book, said the CIA mind-control researchers did apparently drop their much publicized MK-ULTRA drug-testing program. But they replaced it, according to Marks, with another super secret behavioral-control project under the agency’s Office of Research and Development.
The ORD program used a cover organization set up in the 1960s outside Boston headed by Dr. Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, who acted as a “figurehead,” said Marks in his book. The project investigated such research as genetic engineering, development of new strains of bacteria, and mind control. The book identifies the Massachusetts proprietary organization headed by Land as the Scientific Engineering Institute. The CIA-funded institute was originally set up as a radar and technical research company in the 1950s and shifted over to mind-control experiments in the 1960s with the exception of a few scattered programs. According to Marks, however, the ORD program was a full-scale one and just as secret as the earlier MK-ULTRA project.
In a March 14, 1987, Nation magazine editorial, Louis Slesin, editor of the trade publication, Microwave News, wrote; “Experts agree that nonionizing electromagnetic radiation (NIER) can affect behavior, but the question is whether the radiation can be harnessed and used on people at a distance. With its MKULTRA program the CIA began looking for the answer in the early 1950s.” Slesin described that in the 1979 book, “Search for the Manchurian Candidate, The CIA and Mind Control” by John Marks, Marks filed a freedom of information act (foia) request. The CIA replied that “it had a roomful of files on electromagnetic and related techniques to alter behavior and stimulate the brain.” But, “[the agency] refused to release the papers, and they remain classified.”
VII. CIA Cold War nonlethal weapons research
Nonlethal weapons are another outcome of CIA behavior control research. Steven Aftergood wrote about the initial stages of nonlethal weapons in the September/October 1994 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; “Details about programs to develop so called ‘non-lethal’ weapons are slowly emerging from the U.S. government’s secret ‘black budget.’ … The concept of non-lethal weapons is not new; the term appears in heavily censored CIA documents dating from the 1960s.” Dr. Barbara Hatch-Rosenberg described nonlethal weapons on page 45,
“Non-lethal” weapons may violate treaties
Development of many of the proposed weapons described on these pages has been undertaken by NATO, the United States, and probably other nations as well. Most of the weapons could be considered “pre-lethal” rather than non-lethal. They would actually provide a continuum of effects ranging from mild to lethal, with varying degrees of controllability. Serious questions arise about the legality of these expensive and highly classified development programs. Four international treaties are particularly relevant … The Certain Conventional Weapons Convention (also known as the Inhumane Weapons Convention).
Many of the non-lethal weapons under consideration utilize infrasound or electromagnetic energy (including lasers, microwave or radio-frequency radiation, or visible light pulsed at brain-wave frequency) for their effects. These weapons are said to cause temporary or permanent blinding, interference with mental processes, modification of behavior and emotional response, seizures, severe pain, dizziness, nausea and diarrhea, or disruption of internal organ functions in various other ways. In addition, the use of high-power microwaves to melt down electronic systems would incidentally cook every person in the vicinity.
Typically, the biological effects of these weapons depend on a number of variables that, theoretically, could be tuned to control the severity of the effects. However, the precision of control is questionable. The use of such weapons for law enforcement might constitute severe bodily punishment without due process. In warfare, the use of these weapons in a non-lethal mode would be analogous to the use of riot control agents in the Vietnam War, a practice now outlawed by the CWC. Regardless of the level of injury inflicted, the use of many non-lethal weapons is likely to violate international humanitarian law on the basis of superfluous suffering and/or indiscriminate effects.
In addition, under the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention, international discussions are now under way that may lead to the development of specific new protocols covering electromagnetic weapons; a report is expected sometime next year. The current surge of interest in electromagnetic and similar technologies makes the adoption of a protocol explicitly outlawing the use of these dehumanizing weapons an urgent matter.
VIII. Why CIA “no touch” torture has been so successful
McCoy explained;
CIA Paradigm: In its clandestine journey across continents and decades, this distinctly American form of psychological torture would prove elusive, resilient, adaptable and devastatingly destructive, attributes that have allowed it to persist up to the present and into the future. …
Elusive: Unlike its physical variant, psychological torture lacks clear signs of abuse and easily eludes detection, greatly complicating any investigation, prosecution, or attempt at prohibition.
Resilient: Psychological torture is shrouded in a scientific patina that appeals to policy makers and avoids the obvious physical brutality unpalatable to the modern public.
Adaptable: In forty years since its discovery, the Agency’s psychological paradigm has proved surprisingly adaptable, with each sustained application producing innovations. …
Destructive: Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, the CIA’s “no touch” torture actually leaves searing psychological scars. Victims often need long treatment to recover from a trauma many experts consider more crippling than physical pain. (A Question of Torture, 12)
These characteristics also apply to nonlethal weapons and neuroscience-based mind control. All three are emerging state tools of the future and can neutralize the enemy by controlling the behavior of the enemy. A 2005 book entitled, Torture, Does it Make Us Safer? Is It Ever OK? was co-published with Human Rights Watch. Some general reasons for why governments use torture as a state tool include the following. Governments torture because it is a way to obtain coerced confessions. The confessions can be used for propaganda purposes. Torture serves a variety of state purposes: “to terrorize certain elements of the population, to instill a climate of fear in the public more generally, and to break key leaders and members of these groups, uncovering their networks.” Other purposes of torture are to “obtain intelligence by any means,” “annihilate subversives” and “eliminate the enemy.”
Counterinsurgency warfare is taking place in Iraq and major newspapers have reported on the many detainees that have consistently alleged being subjected to “no touch” torture techniques. As reported in the September 16th, 2007 Sacramento Bee, General David Petraeus co-wrote the Counterinsurgency Field Manuel-U.S. Army Field Manual on Tactics, Intelligence, Host Nation Forces, Airpower, which Newsweek said, is “highly touted as the basis upon which the surge of U.S. forces this year would be organized.”
The book Torture, also included a description of “counterinsurgency warfare, in which torture was a principal weapon” and was developed “during the French experience in Indochina and Algeria.”
[The] “genesis of this new kind of warfare is the idea that the enemy takes the form of an invisible political organization hidden among the civilian population. One can know its leaders and its structure only by waging a war of information: by arresting masses of civilian suspects, interrogating them, and, if necessary, torturing them. … In the modern era, … the science of torture and similar abusive treatment has developed to break the physical and mental resistance of subjects before they expire or go mad and thus become useless as sources of information. … Torture is still about domination.”
IX. All three programs are state tools for neutralizing the enemy without killing; for intelligence operations and counterinsurgency warfare
By comparing mind control allegations to “no touch” torture techniques and the very classified nonlethal weapons program, the purpose of the bizarre sounding mind control allegations begins to make sense. Neuroweapons include the CIA’s still classified neuroscience-based mind control research, “no touch” torture and nonlethal weapons. All three are emerging state tools of the future that can reliably neutralize the enemy psychologically or without killing. The old, politically unacceptable methods of brutal physical torture and killing won’t be eliminated but surreptitious, scientifically proven, alternative methods are available to achieve an even greater national security advantage. All are ideal for counterinsurgency warfare, psychological operations and intelligence operations. The characteristics of “no touch” torture, nonlethal weapons and neuroscience-based mind control make them more inhumane than the atomic bomb.
X. Mind control allegations by a Korean War POW, (prisoner of war), a Soviet political prisoner and Abu Ghraib detainees
Three relevant examples out of the numerous available provide a general overview of the decades of mind control allegations and weapons. The details are compelling and rarely reported by mainstream press and illustrate why a comparison of “no touch” torture to mind control allegations is so applicable. The examples share the same Cold War history with CIA “no touch” torture, neuroscience-based mind control and nonlethal weapons programs.
The 1984 BBC TV documentary Opening Pandora’s Box described EMR [electromagnetic radiation] remote mind control developments and a claim of mind control by a Korean POW;
In the 1950s, intelligence agencies were interested in changing mental states. The theory is that brain waves can be tuned to a different EMR frequency and can change moods and character. … A CIA memo stated that they were looking for behavior control to enhance consciousness.
The Soviets had realized the same thing. Dr. Ross Adey, famous EMR researcher at Loma Linda Veterans Hospital, examined the Lida machine, from the Soviet Union. It was described as a machine to “rearrange consciousness.” The Russians claimed to use it for treatment of emotional disorders in the 1950s. Dr. Adey stated that the Lida machine is now obsolete. It used coiled wire inside ear muffs which acted like an antenna and emitted 1/10 sec pulses of EMR. Dr. Adey demonstrated that excited animals rapidly quiet down when exposed to the Lida EMR frequencies. There was one account that the Lida machine was used during the Korean war for brainwashing American Prisoners.
An interview of an alleged Russian victim, Andre Slepucha, was reported in a 1998 ZDF German TV documentary. He described what seems to be the first reported victim of some type of “microwave hearing.” Slepucha stated;
In November 1954 I came into contact with what today is referred to as “Psychotronic Treatment” for the first time. Back then they took me out of the concentration camp where, under Stalin, I had been imprisoned as a political prisoner, and brought me into an isolation cell in the KGB prison which was located in the Lubyanka. After an approximately two week long continuous occupation of the cell I suddenly experienced in the morning strong sounds in the head, very strong acoustic and visual hallucinations.
On the CNN news broadcast, Special Assignment by Chuck DeCaro, “Weapons of War, Is there an RF Gap?” November 1985, Dr. Bill van Bise, electrical engineer, conducted a demonstration of Soviet scientific data and schematics for beaming a magnetic field into the brain to cause visual hallucinations. The demonstration on reporter Chuck DeCaro was successful. Dr. van Bise stated, “In three weeks, I could put together a device that would take care of a whole town.” A December 13, 1976, Federal Times article, “Microwave Weapons Study by Soviets Cited” described the alleged Russian capability of microwave hearing;
The Defense Intelligence Agency has released a report on heavy Communist research on microwaves, including their use as weapons. Microwaves are used in radar, television and microwave ovens. They can cause disorientation and possibly heart attacks in humans. Another biological effect with possible anti-personnel uses is “microwave hearing.” “Sounds and possibly even words which appear to be originating intracranially (within the head) can be induced by signal modulation at very low average power densities,” the report said. According to the study, Communist work in this area “has great potential for development into a system for disorienting or disrupting the behavior patterns of military or diplomatic personnel.”
Jon Ronson, author of the New York Times reviewed book, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” wrote about alleged mind control experiments on Iraqi detainees. In an interview on April 14, 2005 at the Politics and Prose book store in Washington DC., Ronson discussed his book. (Tape available from Cspan, Book TV at www.booktv.org. Videotape # 186334)
And from the former detainees from Guantanamo Bay that I’ve interviewed it seems exactly the same things are going on there. I said to a man called Jamal al-Harith how do you feel, you know how did you feel at Guantanamo Bay and he said “felt like a laboratory rat.” And he said, “I felt they were trying stuff out on me.” …
And one example is with Barney the purple dinosaur. When it was announced a year ago that they were rounding up prisoners of war in Iraq and blasting them with Barney the purple dinosaur, it was treated as a funny story, because, by all the major news networks in America, you know… the torture wasn’t that bad. … It was disseminated as funny because who wants to replace a funny story with, as Eric [Olson] once said to me, with one that’s not fun. …
I was given seven photographs of a detainee who had just been given the Barney treatment as they called it. It was 48 hours of Barney with flashing strobe lights inside a shipping container in the desert heat. …
… The current chief of staff of the Army is a man called General Pete Shoemaker. … He’s well known to have an interest in these paranormal esoteric military pursuits. … So now is the time when I know that these ideas go to the very top [levels of the military].
One of the things you spoke of, the one that I have knowledge of is the frequencies. You can follow a trail of patents like footprints in the snow and the patents sometimes vanish into the world of military classification. And there’s many patents bought up by a man called Dr. Oliver Lowry. …
So we know that these patents have been bought up by the military. … And the detainees of Guantanamo I’ve spoken to speak of being blasted with frequencies, put inside music, high and low frequencies, masked with music.
…I think there’s no doubt they’re experimenting with this stuff. To add to that controversial suggestion. I think there’s a good chance that even though they’re trying this stuff out, it’s not necessarily true that it works. A lot of this stuff doesn’t work. This may or may not work. I don’t know.
XI. The banal and bizarre techniques of “no touch torture”
Psychological techniques used at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and secret prisons have included extremes of the following; manipulation of time, loud music, strobe lights, odd sounds, hooding, ear muffs, heat and cold, light and dark, isolation and intensive interrogation “and most importantly, creative combinations of all these methods which otherwise might seem, individually, banal if not benign.” As McCoy explains;
After a visit from the Guantanamo chief General Miller in September 2003, the U.S. commander for Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, issued orders for sophisticated psychological torture. As I read from those orders, please listen for the combined sensory disorientation, self-inflicted pain, and attacking Arab cultural sensitivities.
Environmental Manipulation: Altering the environment to create moderate discomfort (e.g. adjusting temperatures or introducing an unpleasant smell) …
Sleep Adjustment: Adjusting the sleeping times of the detainee (e.g. reversing the sleeping cycles from night to day).
Isolation: Isolating the detainee from other detainees. … 30 days.
Presence of Military Working Dogs: Exploits Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations …
Yelling, Loud Music, and Light Control: Used to create fear, disorient detainee and prolong capture shock. Volume controlled to prevent injury …
Stress Positions: Use of physical posturing (sitting, standing, kneeling, prone, etc.) (McCoy outline, 9)
XII. The three key behavioral components of “no touch” torture
McCoy described the principles underlying “no touch” torture;
Through covert trial and error, the CIA, in collaboration with university researchers, slowly identified three key behavioral components integral to its emerging techniques for psychological torture.
Discovery #1 Sensory deprivation In the early 1950s …Dr. Donald Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in just 48 hours. …after just two to three days of such isolation [sitting in a cubicle ..with goggles, gloves and ear muffs on.] “the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate.”
Discovery #2 Self-inflicted pain …Albert Biderman, Irving L. Janis, Harold Wolff, and Lawrence Hinkle, advised the agency about the role of self-inflicted pain in Communist interrogation. …During the 1950s as well, two eminent neurologists at Cornell Medical Center working for the CIA found that the KGB’s most devastating torture technique involved, not crude physical beatings, but simply forcing the victim to stand for days at a time, while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, the kidneys shut down, hallucinations began.
Discovery #3 Anyone can torture …Finally, a young Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, …conducted his famed obedience experiments, asking ordinary New Haven citizens to torture on command and discovering that, in contravention of conventional wisdom, anyone could be trained to torture. …[Milgram] did controversial research under a government grant showing that almost any individual is capable of torture, a critical finding for the agency as it prepared to disseminate its method worldwide. (McCoy outline, 4, Question of Torture, 32-33)
By the project’s end in the late 1960s, this torture research had involved three of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century-Hebb, Milgram, and Janis, as well as several presidents of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. (A Question of Torture, 33)
That notorious photo of a hooded Iraqi on a box, arms extended and wires to his hands, exposes this covert method. The hood is for sensory deprivation, and the arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. … Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, no-touch torture leaves deep psychological scars on both victims and interrogators. One British journalist who observed this method’s use in Northern Ireland called sensory deprivation “the worst form of torture” because it “provokes more anxiety among the interrogatees than more traditional tortures, leaves no visible scars and, therefore, is harder to prove, and produces longer lasting effects.” (Question of Torture, 8-9)
McCoy explained how CIA “no touch” torture changes its victims;
Insights from the treatment of Chilean victims tortured under General Augusto Pinochet’s regime offer a point of entry into this complex question. Psychotherapist Otto Doerr-Zegers found that victims suffer “a mistrust bordering on paranoia, and a loss of interest that greatly surpasses anything observed in anxiety disorders.” The subject “does not only react to torture with a tiredness of days, weeks, or months, but remains a tired human being, relatively uninterested and unable to concentrate.”
These findings led him to a revealing question: “What in torture makes possible a change of such nature that it appears similar to psychotic processes and to disorders of organic origin?” (Question of Torture, 10-11)
XIII. Torture as “a kind of total theater”
Doerr-Zegers explained that techniques of torture work by creating deception, distrust, fear, disorientation, a “kind of total theater” that leaves the victim disoriented and “emotionally and psychological damaged.” The similarity of the explanation below to “street theater” found in mind control allegations is remarkable;
As Doerr-Zegers describes it, the psychological component of torture becomes a kind of total theater, a constructed unreality of lies and inversion, in a plot that ends inexorably with the victim’s self-betrayal and destruction.
To make their artifice of false charges, fabricated news, and mock executions convincing, interrogators often become inspired thespians. The torture chamber itself thus has the theatricality of a set with special lighting, sound effects, props, and backdrop, all designed with a perverse stagecraft to evoke an aura of fear. Both stage and cell construct their own kind of temporality. While the play both expands and collapses time to carry the audience forward toward denouement, the prison distorts time to disorientate and then entrap the victim. As the torturer manipulates circumstances to “maximize confusion,” the victim feels “prior schemas of the self and the world … shattered” and becomes receptive to the “torturer’s construction of reality.”
Under the peculiar conditions of psychological torture, victims, isolated from others, form “emotional ties to their tormentors” that make them responsive to a perverse play in which they are both audience and actor, subject and object—in a script that often leaves them not just disoriented but emotionally and psychologically damaged, in some cases for the rest of their lives. (A Question of Torture, 10)
XIV. A comparison of “no touch” torture to mind control allegations
The Washington Post Magazine article included interviews of several TIs, or targeted individuals of mind control, as some call themselves. Highly acclaimed author Gloria Naylor is most recognized for her novel Women of Brewster Place, starring Oprah in a 1980s TV mini-series. Naylor wrote the novel 1996, about her personal experience of mind control targeting and “street theater.” The article also included an example of drug-induced paranoia for comparison;
Like Girard, Naylor describes what she calls “street theater,” incidents that might be dismissed by others as coincidental, but which Naylor believes were set up. She noticed suspicious cars driving by her isolated vacation home. On an airplane, fellow passengers mimicked her every movement, like mimes on a street.
Voices similar to those in Girard’s case followed, taunting voices cursing her, telling her she was stupid, that she couldn’t write. Expletive-laced language filled her head. …
Naylor is not the first writer to describe such a personal descent. Evelyn Waugh, one of the great novelists of the 20th century, details similar experiences in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh’s book, published in 1957, has eerie similarities to Naylor’s. Embarking on a recuperative cruise, Pinfold begins to hear voices on the ship that he believes are part of a wireless system capable of broadcasting into his head; he believes the instigator recruited fellow passengers to act as operatives; and he describes “performances” put on by passengers directed at him yet meant to look innocuous to others.
Waugh wrote his book several years after recovering from a similar episode and realizing that the voices and paranoia were the result of drug-induced hallucinations.
The psychological terror and mistrust bordering on paranoia of torture victims is remarkably similar to the mind control alleged by Naylor and the drug-induced paranoia of Waugh. The “street theater” described by most TIs also appears similar to the paranoia of mental illness and most people think “street theater” sounds crazy.
The addendum of Naylor’s novel 1996 included this description of some of the most commonly reported mind control symptoms;
Victims are subjected to various kinds of harassment and torture, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for years on end. Most believe that some type of technology can remotely track, target, and control every nerve in their bodies. Heart and respiration rate can speed up and slow down, and stomach and bowel functions are regulated. Illnesses and all types of pain can turn on and off in an instant. Microwave burns are reported.
Sleep deprivation is common and dreams are manipulated. Victims say, “They [whoever is targeting them] can see through my eyes, what I see.” Sometimes victims describe seeing the images of projected holograms. Thoughts can be read. Most victims describe a phenomenon they call “street theater.” For example, people around the victim have repeated verbatim, the victim’s immediate thoughts, or harassive and personalized statements are repeated by strangers wherever the victim may go.
Emotions can be manipulated. Microwave hearing, known to be an unclassified military capability of creating voices in the head, is regularly reported. Implanted thoughts and visions are common, with repetitive themes that can include pedophilia, homophobia and degradation. Victims say it is like having a radio or TV in your head. Less frequently, remote and abusive sexual manipulation is reported. Almost all victims say repetitive behavior control techniques are used and include negative, stimulus-response or feedback loops.
The counterintuitive and bizarre torture techniques are discernible within the mind control allegations. The mind control techniques seem to be psychological techniques to disorient the victim and cause him to feel completely controlled, dependent and at the mercy of his torturers. Similar to the “kind of total theater” for torture, “street theater” is almost certainly a part of the process of breaking one’s personality to gain behavior control over that person.
XV. The phenomenology of the torture situation
“What in torture makes possible a change of such nature that it appears similar to psychotic processes and to disorders of organic origin?” Doerr-Zegers found the answer lies in the psychological, not physical, “phenomenology of the torture situation;”
an asymmetry of power;
the anonymity of the torturer to the victim;
the “double bind” of either enduring or betraying others;
the systematic “falsehood” of trumped-up charges, artificial lighting, cunning deceptions, and “mock executions”;
confinement in distinctive spaces signifying “displacement, trapping, narrowness and destruction”; and
a temporality “characterized by some unpredictability and much circularity, having no end.” …
Thus, much of the pain from all forms of torture is psychological, not physical, based upon denying victims any power over their lives. In sum, the torturer strives “through insult and disqualification, by means of threats … to break all the victim’s possible existential platforms.” Through this asymmetry, the torturer eventually achieves “complete power” and reduces the victims to “a condition of total or near total defenselessness.” (Question of Torture, 10-11)
In torture, a torture situation is created according to Doerr-Zegers. In mind control allegations, there is a similar phenomenology of a mind control situation. TIs describe this as “an electronic prison.” Doerr-Zegers described the torture technique, 1) an asymmetry of power. In torture, the torturer has complete power and the victim is completely powerless. Similarly, TIs are targeted remotely and are completely powerless to stop the targeting. Doerr-Zegers described the torture technique, 2) the anonymity of the torturer to the victim. Torture victims do not know their torturer and similarly, there is the anonymity of the remote targeting in the mind control situation.
Most TIs described “street theater” or seemingly staged events which matches 3), 4) and 6). Doerr-Zegers described torture technique, 5) confinement in distinctive spaces signifying “displacement, trapping, narrowness and destruction.” Although TIs are not physically imprisoned, most victims describe the experience as very debilitating and compare it to “mental rape, an electronic prison, or total destruction of the quality of their lives.” Mind control poses a severe restriction on their former lives. Doerr-Zeger’s technique 6) a temporality “characterized by some unpredictability and much circularity, having no end” is also similar to sensory deprivation in mind control allegations. TIs routinely report the simple but extremely repetitive and negative, stimulus-response and feedback loops of their environment.
Contents | Top
XVI. Comparing “no touch” torture techniques of sensory disorientation and self inflicted pain to mind control allegations
The psychological effects achieved by torture and alleged mind control are similar. Mind control targeting tactics described by most TIs seem to contain the underlying “no touch” torture techniques of sensory disorientation and self inflicted pain. For comparison, here is McCoy’s description;
To summarize, the CIA’s psychological paradigm fused two new methods, “sensory disorientation” and “self-inflicted pain,” whose combination, in theory, would cause victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and thus capitulate more readily to their torturers … The fusion of these two techniques, sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, creates a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the existential platforms of personal identity. (McCoy outline, 5)
The intended effect of sensory disorientation for torture would be similar for mind control; to create an environment of radical uncertainty to enhance the break down of the person’s will and personality. Most alleged cases of mind control describe the considerable repetition of seemingly innocuous and banal stimuli in the TIs environment, as if engineered by computer. The addendum of Naylor’s book included this description; “Almost all victims say repetitive behavior control techniques are used and include negative, stimulus-response or feedback loops.” For comparison, here is McCoy’s description;
The CIA’s “sensory disorientation” became a total assault on all senses and sensibilities, auditory, visual, tactile, temporal, temperature, and survival. Refined through years of practice, sensory disorientation relies on a mix of sensory overload and sensory deprivation via banal procedures, isolation then intense interrogation, heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, for a systematic attack on all human stimuli. (McCoy outline, 4-5)
McCoy described the photos of the hooded detainee with “the arms extended for self-inflicted pain.” The torturer forces the prisoner to stand with arms extended and the prisoner has no control over his situation. The prisoner still has a sense of guilt at causing his own pain by his extended arms. This intended effect of self inflicted pain for torture seems to be similar to mind control. TIs who are remotely targeted with physical pain cannot escape. Although TIs go to extremes in trying to escape the physical targeting, they are unsuccessful. The psychological trauma is inflicted by the sense of causing one’s own pain. Many TIs report that the targeting causes TIs to become isolated from friends, families and in many cases TIs are unable to work. This common reaction to targeting seems to be a type of self-inflicted psychological pain.
Carole Sterling’s description of targeting is also found in the addendum of Naylor’s book and seems to illustrate the techniques of sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain. It is a typical TI description;
In 1997, Carole Sterling wrote a letter to the editor of the Star Beacon. She described her alleged targeting with EMR weapons technologies that within months, led to her suicide.
Dear Star Beacon, I am writing about something that happened to me which goes back to December 1995. I went to a conference in Nevada. The day following the last night at the conference, I noticed that I had an injection mark on the base of my spine which was sore. Then the nightmare started three days after my return to Washington, D.C. … It totally scrambled my brain, leaving me unable to think properly, simply functioning on sheer shock and horror, with total incomprehension of what was going on. It actually was debilitating. The room felt like a torture chamber. This forced me out of my home. I believe that the technology used, be it some type of a frequency assault, some sort of directed energy, in addition to whatever was injected in me, has caused damage to my brain. [I have] been living with this debilitating and excruciating pain for the last eight months so far.
TIs describe both psychological and physical targeting similar to torture. It seems logical to surmise that the successful psychological theories of “no touch” torture would cross over to more technically based remote, advanced mind control programs. This becomes a significant step forward in understanding the mind control issue. The mind control allegations are “the secret in plain sight.”
XVII. Conclusions: what everyone can agree on
Hard questions need to be asked of the experts. Who now controls the neuroscience weapons research and how advanced is it? As a result of U.S. secrecy, an educated guess is all that is possible. The public deployment of advanced remote neuroscience weapons will be a world changing event, affecting the lives of this generation and the next. The weapons involve national security, science, history, U.S. politics and geopolitics. Most importantly the weapons encompass human nature, good and evil and suffering. Most people are in agreement about one fact: unlike the atomic bomb, there has been a total lack of public input for neuroscience weapons and policy even though the research began in the 1950s and is still classified. Again, this raises more questions than it answers.
This article will be published in March 2008. See www.huntergatheress.com A special thank you to editor, Joan D’Arc for her encouragement and suggestions.
Comments to #III.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Alex Emmons
alex.emmons@theintercept.com
@AlexEmmons
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106 Comments (closed)
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Roger
October 9 2016, 12:11 p.m.
I used to teach SERE to fellow flyers in the military and also attended SERE training myself so was “tortured” by my own military as so many neocons talked about. This in no way makes torture, especially waterboarding something we should be doing.
I had the privileged of attending my first training in 1977 shortly after Vietnam so the school house commander and visiting instructors were guests of the North Vietnamese who were themselves tortured. They made it clear to us that we learned how to handle torture and living in non compliant prison conditions because the United States as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions did not and would not act with such disregard for International Law.
I remember teaching a class in the 90’s when a young Lieutenant asked me why we follow the rule of law when our enemies don’t. I replied that the first time we, the United States did not there would be Hell to pay. I further stated that that Hell would fall upon American soldiers, sailors and airmen like a thunder clap.
What happened in Iraq was that withing a week of the Abu Ghraib photos being released an American soldier was kidnapped and beheaded on the web. Abu Ghraib became the biggest single recruiting tool for foreign fighters to fuel the insurgency in Iraq and it along with Guantanamo is still a sore spot among Muslims worldwide.
As an Intelligence Officer, SERE Instructor, Combat Aircrew Member and just as a Professional Officer, I felt betrayed by an administration and Secretary of Defense that pushed what were clearly illegal orders. I also felt that the Officer and NCO Corps was severely harmed and still hasn’t recovered as numerous members just followed what were clearly illegal orders without questioning them.
cwradio
October 7 2016, 1:16 p.m.
“The U.S. has not compensated any of the 119 detainees held in CIA custody for mistreatment.”
One can expect nothing else from the 21st century’s Evil Empire.
Nick Nicholson cwradio
October 7 2016, 3:26 p.m.
As if libs and The Intercept would even find such a “compensation” satisfactory.
Jake Maverick
October 6 2016, 7:14 p.m.
You also have to wonder what other methods and things they’re still hiding.
I know some of it. Happens in UK to…and I believe by British G-men of some sort, impossible to know anything for sure.
Kylo Ren
October 4 2016, 9:41 p.m.
As the reports of the SSCI and CIA IG demonstrate, many Agency personnel frequently used tactics that any sane person would call torture and, of course, tactics that the CIA’s own guidelines did not even approve of (i.e. Albert el Gamil & Matthew Zirbel) The Justice Department and CIA approved many controversial techniques, but an electric chair was not one of them.
Did the Bush administration really think the RDI program could be “smoothly” run?
Ben Whitmore
October 4 2016, 7:44 p.m.
There can be no meaningful “war on terror” until abuses like this are fully admitted and compensated for, and the perpetrators held accountable. Until then it is just one criminal faction attacking others.
Karl
October 4 2016, 5:00 p.m.
…the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute any officials responsible for their crimes, torture remains an applause line for one of the U.S.’s major political parties.
Only one of the U.S.’s major political parties? Are you serious?
Every person who was in the chain of command during the CIA torture of terror SUSPECTS is a lying, sadistic coward. To claim that the torture of any prisoner was merely the result of insufficient oversight is a surefire formula for future abuse in absence of legal culpability.
Obama’s shameful failure to prosecute a single official responsible for the ILLEGAL torture of terror SUSPECTS in US custody hasn’t affected his popularity with African Americans who, when last polled, overwhelming approve (88%) of his Presidential performance.
Stefan
October 4 2016, 3:24 p.m.
Sick.
CelesteGuapo
October 4 2016, 2:32 a.m.
https://www.youtube.com/attribution?v=YnyK40A1iMo
Dr. MOSS DAVID POSNER was a Viet Nam draft resistor turned California physician,who rated 5 out of 5 stars with his patients.
He wrote about ADD, had a page at Peacepink, and he worked in the CA prisons, until he was finally forced out, because he kept extensive files about prisoner health, mental health; records of rape, torture and abuse in various CA prion facilities.
In short he was a criminal-a man who practiced a dangerous doctrine of ‘first do no harm.’
And, he believed he too was a target of malicious organized harassment.
The link above is one of his video’s advising targets of organized stalking on how to survive. In other words-Dr. Posner ( unlike Mona, or Glenn, apparently) knew that organized stalking is real, and actual.
He died in 2012.
stalked562 CelesteGuapo
October 4 2016, 11:37 a.m.
Sorry to hear.
Jake Maverick CelesteGuapo
October 6 2016, 7:17 p.m.
yes, so sorry to hear- dnt think i ever spoke to him but have been on Peacepink myself for fair few years. I’m well aware how bad it can get 🙁
John Rothery
October 3 2016, 10:21 p.m.
This is the behaviour of the leader of the “Free World” club, that New Zealand/Aotearoa is a member of.
It is unacceptable behaviour. The perpetrators should be held to account. Instead they lead respectable lives back in America. Their families and neighbours knowing nothing of their misdeeds.
This unaccountable behaviour makes it easy for citizens in other countries to turn away from the USA. Who wants to be associated with a country that tortures?
The failure of the American government to take any action against it’s criminals, makes it easy for countries like Brazil, India and South Africa, to justify it’s association with China and Russia, rather than the USA, and is making others think twice.
Unfortunately the forthcoming elections present little opportunity for the good people of America to correct the mistakes of the past, nor to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
John Rothery (Tauranga)
Stuart Meade John Rothery
October 4 2016, 12:10 a.m.
You note good points all. We here in Canada are in a Free Trade agreement with the U.S. and are slowly being drawn into their bed whether we like it or not. Rejecting them and their ongoing schemes that have nothing to do with the specifics of NAFTA are not an option. Should we balk at some scheme, they simply threaten to hold our goods up at the border for “thorough” checks. Our business community is then strongly motivated to lobby our government to capitulate. …Works every time!
We had our police complicit in schemes where they supplied dodgy information to the U.S. about a handful of citizens and landed immigrants. The U.S. then rendered them to torture, or had foreign governments arrest them and torture them. Canada has held those responsible safe and protected the U.S. from our courts.
Our recently defeated Conservative government entered into an agreement to buy 65 of the new stealth fights that are apparently a bag full of problems. This is to enter into military adventures around the world with the U.S. There’s a $800 million penalty should future governments cancel.
We now have to obtain clearance to board each and every passenger on international flights into and out of Canada. —And do so under a secrecy governance scheme which is totalitarian.
Under the above scheme, we now, after years of refusing to do so, enforce the million plus member No-Fly List, complete with its 14 peace activist nuns possibly, if they haven’t finally been removed.
We now have requirements that a Transportation Security Clearance be held by not only transportation workers crossing the border, but by domestic freight handlers as well. Again this scheme is governed by secrecy. Applicants have to submit to a secret investigation by U.S. and Canadian police of themselves, their family, friends, and associates, for secret criteria. Those failing are simply barred and designated a “security threat” without any reason given. We do know that a criminal record of any kind and any time will get a refusal. Also drug use or association with those that have a drug history. The file created is shared at the pleasure of the U.S.
There’s more but let this stand as further good reason to avoid involvement with them. Guaranteed it will not go well.
Truth Seeker
October 3 2016, 10:18 p.m.
Tazers are more fun on the Planet of the Apes.
I wonder how many electrocutions they performed.
Alejandro Grace Ararat
October 3 2016, 9:34 p.m.
The epitomy of TREACHERY perpetrated with deliberate wickedness (do call it a mistake you who chant francis scott while clothed in deliberate usa-patriotism. and the spirit of democracy. Not it is not usa, it is worst than all the kosher totalitarian regimes combined and with impunity domestically and abroad. Disgusting is short.
Wnt
October 3 2016, 6:54 p.m.
There’s something I do have to ask about though. On the video, I see the man move his arms but I never get a good look at his wrists. Is it possible to hang a man by his wrists “24 hours a day” for a month and not leave clearly visible, lasting scars from the ill-treatment? I have no doubt that the American torturers did wrong, but I’m still wary of believing everything.
bmull Wnt
October 3 2016, 9:13 p.m.
His account has the ring of truth. I think when he says hang he doesn’t necessarily mean it literally. They put your arms up in stress position so you can’t get comfortable. It’s excruciating but leaves no marks. Sometimes they also give you drugs to make the pain worse or to make it seem like it’s lasting longer than it is. You don’t remember the drugs.
Wnt bmull
October 4 2016, 1:44 p.m.
Can you give a reference about the drugs? I’ve long suspected that substances like naloxone would be used this way, but have never seen a clear report of it.
Christian C Holmer Wnt
October 4 2016, 3:27 p.m.
Naloxene. Hmm. Bmull?
0101
October 3 2016, 6:10 p.m.
https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/video/2016/10/03/video-ex-detainee-describes-unreported-cia-torture
This is his name, at least according to HRW – Lotfi al-Arabi El Gherissi, not al-Gharisi
W0X0F
October 3 2016, 5:47 p.m.
Electroshock therapy. That is what the System did to my WWI grandfather, a victim of mustard gas. Maybe it was good for terrorists too?
masmanz W0X0F
October 4 2016, 11:04 a.m.
You should try it, maybe it will help you too.
Syl
October 3 2016, 5:25 p.m.
It’s quite simple. Torture is illegal. Torture is ineffective. Torture does not make us safe. Torture empowers our enemies and endangers our allies.
Over a decade now of increasingly barbaric strategies. We cashed all of our goodwill checks, and now even our former allies have grown to despise us, to fear us. The leaders who went along with our schemes have been ousted and disgraced, and the new leadership has found better allies. Better allies like Russia, China, India, Iran. Why have we decimated our influence?
Did we defeat the terrorists? Have we bombed and bludgeoned fear to death? No, our policies and our lack of vision created more terrorists, more countries willing to fund them, more instability, more fear. Torture is a dead end, the path of ruined empires.
WolfesBane Syl
October 4 2016, 10:31 a.m.
These actions may seem counter-intuitive to a people who want peace however Strife is very profitable. Your government does not want peace it wants profit.
JCDavis
October 3 2016, 3:43 p.m.
This was nothing compared to what the CIA did to Vietnamese in the Phoenix program. I’t hard to remember an organized group of sadistic psychopaths that were worse without going back to the SS–
“Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock (‘the Bell Telephone Hour’) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the ‘water treatment’; the ‘airplane’ in which the prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners…”
Dreadlock Holmes
October 3 2016, 3:39 p.m.
It’s gonna be a long haul making America great again.
Mudbone
October 3 2016, 3:14 p.m.
Have you ever watched a kid take a leg off an insect ?
An electrocution ?
They did away with electrocution ( and hangings ) because ticket sales
went down .
Now we have death-sleep scenes , via drugs , and sales are up .
Best
October 3 2016, 3:11 p.m.
Hey! Good Times – for bad (or sociopathic) people…!!!
Mudbone Best
October 3 2016, 3:20 p.m.
Do you think theres a bit of it in us all ?
Maybe with a taste the appetite grows ?
Christian C Holmer
October 3 2016, 2:49 p.m.
Its truly remarkable how low tech state of the art torture techniques remained at gitmo and other black sites given our modern wealth of truly invasive health and medical technologies and all of the advances in modern neuroscience, biochemistry and psychopharmacology.
It would be unfortunate if the well trained Health, Medical and Psychiatric research staffs at any of the now known facilities (or the as yet unknown facilities that have no doubt replaced them) missed such a tremendous opportunity to pursue many DARPA or IARPA funded lines of academic inquiry into cutting edge science on the human animal (conscious or unconscious) without all those pesky Geneva Convention limitations on human experimentation.
You know like recording dreams or nightmares, implanting or removing memories, reconstructing what you are able to view through eyes that are not your own, using full spectrum light and sound to create and cultivate and even remotely encourage situation optimal emotional states in friend or foe alike using all the seen and unseen tangible and intangible tools at hand (full spectrum) wherever you find them. You know. Legitimate lines of scientific inquiry.
Or I guess these highly trained professionals can simply track the metabolic rates of the same stale pool of already fatigued long tortured test subjects confronted with a half assed electric chair after their last rectal feeding in a stress position.
Mudbone Christian C Holmer
October 3 2016, 2:58 p.m.
Have you Hillary ?
That’s state-of-art torture !!
Mudbone Christian C Holmer
October 3 2016, 3:02 p.m.
I meant to say :
Have you tried Hillary yet ?
That is state-of-art torture ,, pal .
Pragmatic Incremental-ism !
One twist at a time !!
Nowhere Man Mudbone
October 3 2016, 4:35 p.m.
And step on it…
Wnt Christian C Holmer
October 3 2016, 7:04 p.m.
There’s a lot I expect to see abused that no one is writing about. Let’s start with the researchers who have been mapping out how words are stored in the brain ( http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/27/475871745/scans-show-the-brain-groups-words-by-meaning ). They talk about using this for people with horrible injuries, but who’s kidding who? This is spy state technology. Then there are terahertz health effects – people keep looking at broad noise in the terahertz spectrum and alleging small effects that might be cancerous, but the real issue is using a highly monochromatic form to displace particular proteins from the DNA with specific, predictable effects, such as inducing depression or other debilitating symptoms. For that matter, I have yet to see any publication about the torturers even exploiting the full potential of short-acting opiates to induce positive feedback for specific behaviors without the victim even realizing he’s being addicted to some pattern of behavior (like talking). I mean, an addict only gets addicted to smoking because he *associates* the cigarette with the effect; if he got the same chemical high whenever he started sucking a penis, you could addict a hardcore heterosexual to it.
Robinab Christian C Holmer
October 3 2016, 9:13 p.m.
Wow. Very cool, innovative thinking. And nicely written. Kudos.
BUSA
October 3 2016, 2:26 p.m.
I have already put USA on my list of countries I never will visit, and I try to avoid products made in USA. Boycott USA!
Mudbone BUSA
October 3 2016, 3:32 p.m.
You sound like Madame DeFarge in the Tale of Two Cities .
Knitting vs Address Book .
Si1ver1ock
October 3 2016, 2:24 p.m.
Where is the report on secret prisons? Where they were? How much they cost? How many prisoners? Any Ghost Detainees? and so forth. Has the Government ever confessed to its crimes?
Someone should get a cadaver dog and go looking around the site for “the disappeared.”
There is no statute of limitations for murder.
Wasi Si1ver1ock
October 3 2016, 4:34 p.m.
Murder. What murder. It’s collateral damage or damaged collateral.
Mudbone
October 3 2016, 2:11 p.m.
A few facts :
1—- Obama has not stood up against CIA torture .
2—–Obama has not pardoned Edward Snowden for telling on the
NSA , CIA , FBI , DEA , DOJ , FEMA , DOD , ,, etc
3—–Obama is the biggest ” House Nigga ” since Clarence Thomas .
WolfesBane Mudbone
October 4 2016, 11:01 a.m.
Obama had good intentions but he was not allowed to proceed.
Your president is just a puppet.
stalked562
October 3 2016, 2:10 p.m.
MKULTRA continues, domestically DEW’s are used on civilians.
Covert, no touch, torture with complete deniability.
The FSU, Navy Shipyard and Baton Rouge shooters complained of being subjects.
RF weaponry is lethal over time.
Franz Bose stalked562
October 3 2016, 2:17 p.m.
There isn’t anything even close to “no touch” torture.
Stan Franz Bose
October 3 2016, 5:19 p.m.
You are an ignorant person. I presume you are an American too.
Mudbone stalked562
October 3 2016, 2:18 p.m.
RF—As in Radio Frequency ?
stalked562 Mudbone
October 3 2016, 3:08 p.m.
Radio Frequency Radiation, no touch.
See “Moscow Signal” used on U.S. embassy in Russia.
It was also used on weapon Protestors in Greenham, UK.
Also used in Iraq.
Mudbone
October 3 2016, 1:58 p.m.
To WNT :
” It remains classified by the Obama administration. ”
Does this make the incumbent ” House Nigga ” an accomplice ?
We already know that the Clintons are just a bunch of White Trash , right ?
Wnt
October 3 2016, 1:13 p.m.
However enraging the cowardice of the Obama administration may be, they deserve some credit for not being the ones this report is actually about. Whereas — this is the “helluva lot worse than water boarding” that Trump fans cheer on. And they’re the majority: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-poll-finds-majority-of-americans-believe-torture-justified-after-911-attacks/2014/12/16/f6ee1208-847c-11e4-9534-f79a23c40e6c_story.html
From the very beginning when the first vapid talking heads started talking about the four people to torture after 9/11 … at least two of them were totally, demonstrably innocent. The cheerleaders of torture are always eager to admit that they have to take harsh measures to deal with bad people, but you never hear them mention any remorse for when they do their worst to the people who won’t talk because they have nothing to tell.
barabbas Wnt
October 3 2016, 1:24 p.m.
We tortured some folks. I am quite positive that had Nazi Germany won the war, the successor to Adolf would have said the same thing and would by now be using drones and killing innocent persons. Perhaps this new program and the threat of a trillion dollars of mini-nukes is the guantanamo virus on a much larger scale.
The more things seem to change…
Northwestwoods barabbas
October 3 2016, 2:14 p.m.
Hitler did in fact use drones, and they were history’s first, only the allies called them buzz-bombs and the German military the Vergeltungswaffe 1 (V-1). However, unlike modern drones, their guidance systems were limited to 1940s state-of-the art, but they killed ya just as dead.
Mudbone Northwestwoods
October 3 2016, 2:36 p.m.
About those V-1 and V-2 guided missiles . Once launched there was no control . They used on-board gyros and accelerometers to follow a launch -to-target trajectory that was set at launch .
A Drone is flown by a CIA video wacko to target . And the video wacko then
decides if it will bring his score up .
Mudbone Mudbone
October 3 2016, 2:43 p.m.
And when it was all said and done guess who got a pass to America ?
Yep ,, old Warner and his rocket NAZI .
That crew got the first USA satellite into orbit .
HUNTSVILLE ALABAMA ?
Mudbone
October 3 2016, 1:09 p.m.
So , let me get this straight .
The CIA tortures and murders people and that is not a debate topic , right ?
Its done in the name of America with American money , and that is not a debate topic .
Could it be that the CIA is running the Debate Show ?
Ask Hillary ,, she knows .
Torontonian Mudbone
October 3 2016, 2:02 p.m.
LOL!!! Just the Debate Show?? seriously– how about running the Government
Mudbone Torontonian
October 3 2016, 2:55 p.m.
What the hell is a “GOVERNMENT ” ?
Mudbone
October 3 2016, 12:58 p.m.
Question : Why isn’t CIA torture a debate topic ?
Answer : Torture is the lesser evil .
That’s why we like Hillary !
Long live Torture and Pragmatic Incremental-ism .
barabbas
October 3 2016, 12:29 p.m.
criminal institutions
invading a sovereign country for their oil
murdering thousands and getting thousands of americans killed
selling weapons from libya to ISIS
murdering Palestinians to steal their land
threatening Americans who say #BDS
robbing the economy and depriving people to force fony loan values to steal their homes
we came, we saw, he died
subjugating America to the TPP
lucifer is jealous.
S
October 3 2016, 12:04 p.m.
Now imagine he was white…
Wasi S
October 3 2016, 4:39 p.m.
He was in his previous life. What I mean is his predecessor was white and Obama doubled down because putting them in Gitmo makes us “look bad”.
beak
October 3 2016, 12:00 p.m.
Jimmy Carter, the “human rights” president, advised the Shah of Iran to keep torturing his citizenry in the final days of his regime. The Shah’s regime used some creative methods of torture, like heating/wiring bed frames and tying people to them. The US gov’t was always there to aid and abet torture methods done in their interests. When there are complaints of the current Iranian regime, keep in mind whence they came. What goes on in Afghanistan is just par for the course. This has nothing to do with 9/11, this game was in play long before that. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard
Jackalope
October 3 2016, 11:28 a.m.
The purpose of torture is never to get information. Its true purpose is to terrorize the people who haven’t been tortured yet.
barabbas Jackalope
October 3 2016, 12:31 p.m.
sure nuf
Torontonian Jackalope
October 3 2016, 2:03 p.m.
Exactly and of course it gives great jollies to the twisted, sick people who do it and condone it
RB
October 3 2016, 11:14 a.m.
At inception, when our national security agencies were created, the CIA, FBI, NSA and 100% of all other agencies (federal, state, local) – were required to operate within the U.S. Constitution [a wartime charter]. There are emergency clauses already built in to the U.S. Constitution.
An American-style agency means there are “restraints” on government power dealing with all persons, citizens and non-citizens, on U.S. soil and U.S. controlled territories (14th Amendment) and U.S. citizens on foreign soil. That means these agencies can only perform searches if there is “probable cause” of a past crime for an “individual” – not targeting an entire group using guilt-by-association. Today 100% of agency personnel and contractors agree to a supreme loyalty oath, oath of office, to operate within constitutional boundaries as a condition of authority over other people.
That’s the root if the problem, it was built upon an illegal and flawed foundation in the first place. The big question is how do we “Americanize” our national security agencies so they resemble a constitutional agency instead of a communist-style Stasi or secret police?
barabbas RB
October 3 2016, 12:45 p.m.
Not possible.
You would have to declare a soverign state
The state has to redeclare rights etc
But then, by upstaging the arrogance and trespasses and evils of the follower states, your state would be branded as subversive
Then the shit hits the fan
RB barabbas
October 3 2016, 4:29 p.m.
If the U.S. Supreme Court does it’s duty in interpreting the letter & spirit of the U.S. Constitution -or- requiring a constitutional amendment – it is totally possible.
The high court started this slippery slope in the late 1960’s and 1970’s with the so-called “War On Drugs” where the court essentially gutted the 4th Amendment and distorted it’s meaning, instead of requiring a constitutional amendment. The remains Bill of Rights were destroyed after 9/11.
If the court would uphold it’s duty, a plaintiff harmed could reform these agencies without Congress – making them operate constitutionally.
Wasi RB
October 3 2016, 4:45 p.m.
So all it takes is one man huh who would’ve thunk it. The Messiah!
In fact, the only change we can implement is on the individual level. That is certainly true. But for that change to catch on to the rest of the majority and especially when the large majority is scared shi*tless, it’s near impossible.
barabbas RB
October 3 2016, 12:53 p.m.
one more thing-
i think wallstreet is anticipating this
mainstreet doesnt need wallstreet – they do not grow food
i think wallstreet is trying to corporatise to monopolise the food supply
wallstreet lives in a bubble and if your state cuts them off, they will declare war on your state and kill independents by raising prices and withholding resources
wallstreet thrives on wars.
Vic Perry
October 3 2016, 9:10 a.m.
Precisely the kind of thing that most liberals stopped complaining about by 2009, damn it.
So we could have done without that bit of partisan back-patting in the last sentence, Alex Emmons.
Jay-Ottawa Vic Perry
October 3 2016, 10:32 a.m.
The article does a good job of inspiring disgust with the CIA and its enablers. But yes, that last phrase in the last sentence grates like fingernails across a blackboard. One wonders whether TI’s writers have been encouraged to slip pins into The Donald’s balloon by way of helping Hillary, without mentioning her name.
There’s more, something laughable in the next to last paragraph, which can only be appreciated if read as irony:
“Last year, Congress passed a law requiring CIA interrogations to comply with the Army Field Manual, effectively prohibiting torture in the future.”
SignalDetected
October 3 2016, 8:52 a.m.
Think that 9/11 was a false-flag operation and read this article again.
Ask yourself, why is the US ‘keeps’ doing this? You’ll know what the governing regime in the US stands for. And, you will know how the militaristic new world order works.
Vic Perry SignalDetected
October 3 2016, 9:07 a.m.
You morons with your 9/11. Imperialism started before then. Did just fine in fact. Ciao idiot.
LRM Vic Perry
October 3 2016, 9:36 a.m.
The PNAC memo describing NeoCon/Zionist wet-dreams seem to have become a reality in the last decade, haven’t they?
Simply a coincidence?
Mr Green Vic Perry
October 3 2016, 10:21 a.m.
The CIA has been doing these tortures since 1947. William Blum’s book “Killing Hope” describes millions and millions of victims worldwide in the 1900s.
Vic Perry Mr Green
October 3 2016, 11:06 a.m.
Exactly.
Torontonian Vic Perry
October 3 2016, 2:07 p.m.
Your response is ridiculous– if you know for CERTAIN its wasn’t a false-flag, then please do tell. If not move along.
-Mona- Torontonian
October 3 2016, 3:25 p.m.
Do you know for certain that the moon landings weren’t faked? Enquiring minds want to know!
Vic Perry -Mona-
October 4 2016, 1:00 p.m.
Does anything exist outside of Torontonian’s head? Can we prove for CERTAIN we exist?
Christian C Holmer Vic Perry
October 4 2016, 3:24 p.m.
In quantum mechanics they call determining where consciousness ends and begins “the hard problem” chief…
barabbas SignalDetected
October 3 2016, 12:33 p.m.
ecommcon
thelastnamechosen
October 3 2016, 8:48 a.m.
This is a very important story to tell, but the famous photo from Abu Ghraib was of a mock electrocution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AbuGhraibAbuse-standing-on-box.jpg
The idea that this was previously unknown is kind of distracting from the importance of the story.
Miss V
October 3 2016, 8:45 a.m.
Now that the Senate has overridden Obama’s Veto does that mean that these men will be allowed to sue the USA?
I sure hope so. I am so tired of this private government, and this corrupt CIA that does nothing but give the USA a black eye. Time to tell the Americans how much we give the CIA for a budget and maybe it is time that we start disbanding this CIA. It has created nothing but a mockery of justice and no accountability for the USA government or military. Time to reign their corrupt sorry ANUSES in!
Joy Miss V
October 3 2016, 10:46 a.m.
“does that mean that these men will be allowed to sue the USA?”
As far as I can tell, the wording of the law may restrict it to suits from US Nationals and against foreign countries. However the text of the bill does reference other statutes and I haven’t looked at all of them. I”d be glad if maybe someone else could clarify?
generalwarrant Miss V
October 3 2016, 10:53 a.m.
quote” Time to tell the Americans how much we give the CIA for a budget and maybe it is time that we start disbanding this CIA.”unquote
Budget? Tell the American people? Hahahahahaha! Senator Pike must be rolling on the floor in gut splitting laughter. Search for the transcripts and the “report” of the Pike Committee and you’ll discover why. Moreover, search for the declassified CIA documents regarding said Committee and you’ll see what those lying sacks of shit did to keep the Committee from learning where the CIA got their budget from at the time. Moreover, President Ford “classified” the report, only to find it was leaked in it’s in entirety to the Village Voice. Most of the Congress don’t have a clue how the CIA get’s it’s budget, although certain “leaks” suggest each head of every agency has to “donate” part of their budget to the CIA..in secret of course.
As for “reigning” in the CIA? Ha. JFK found out the hard way. Moreover, Jim Garrison in 1967, gave an interview to Playboy after his investigation into the JFK murder, claimed, as have others, the CIA “IS” the government. Leaving Congress just a debating society with no power over the CIA whatsoever, and the executive is OWNED. So don’t hold your breath. But yeah…corrupt is a massive understatement. They redefine the word mafia. Drug and weapons running, undermining and overthrowing governments, torture…murder..blackmail… you name it. They own it.
barabbas generalwarrant
October 3 2016, 12:35 p.m.
makes sense to me
often wondered about that
presidents come and go
Torontonian barabbas
October 3 2016, 2:10 p.m.
“presidents come and go”– YUP and they are all the same and marketed to the US electorate” First black president”, “First female president”– it makes you want to barf if you live outside the US– and if you live in the US well times up — you guys have to do something or you are toast.
Phil Ferro
October 3 2016, 8:28 a.m.
Americans need to understand that we are the enemy of those within our government. Our country is run no different than by an “occupying force”. If that doesn’t send a chill down your back your in denial, your stupid or you are a bureaucrat or one their leeches…
24b4Jeff
October 3 2016, 8:20 a.m.
The only difference between our fine government and that of the Nazis is a matter of degree. As generalwarrant points out below, one of the two presidential candidates basking in the light of media attention has been party to this process. What he does not say is that the other promises to expand the program.
For a few decades after WW2 the world rejected the defense of many Germans who said they did not know what Hitler was doing. One can argue the plausibility of that argument, but it is definitely true that none of their newspapers or radio programs discussed the death camps or the activities of the Einsatz Reinhard. The same cannot be said for US citizens. It is quite clear: you vote for Hillary or Donald, and you are complicit to war crimes, past or future (or both).
ContinuousDeception 24b4Jeff
October 3 2016, 9:02 a.m.
Hear, hear. Well said.
Torontonian 24b4Jeff
October 3 2016, 2:12 p.m.
Ditto– well said
generalwarrant
October 3 2016, 8:05 a.m.
The mere fact, these sadistic, scumsucking CIA maggots haven’t been brought to justice for proven war crimes, is living proof the USG is trying to hide it’s war crimes behind a cloak of secrecy. Moreover, our Congress is a criminal conspiritor to hide these crimes, even though some members tried to expose them to the world, most of Congress wants them hidden forever, by locking away the Senate Torture Report. Furthermore, by intentionally NOT reviewing this report, every agency head who received a copy(DOJ/FBI etc)who refuses to open the report, is now a co-conspirator to war crimes, notwithstanding the crime of obstruction of justice. I know it. They know it.
The next time someone tells me the so called “rule of law” is the cornerstone of the US justice system, I’ll spit in their face. The real cornerstone, is BALD FACED LIES. The entire USG is just one big lie after another. And now, one of the biggest, contemptible, certified liars on the face of this planet are on the verge of becoming the POTUS. This country redefines the word… shameless.
generalwarrant generalwarrant
October 3 2016, 8:34 a.m.
As for Obama.. the second he said.. “..we must look forward..not backward”, I knew this bastard lied through his teeth to ME, and those who voted for him.
When he marginalized the enormity of the CIA’s war crimes, by saying.. “yes..we tortured some folks.”….I wanted to slap his face with every ounce of my being. That was the day I realized, Obama was nothing but a mouth piece for the CIA, a lying sack of shit, and a maggot who sold his soul to a legal Imperialism..notwithstanding.. Satan. I spit on the day I voted for this murdering psychopath.
I just pray he burns in hell for eternity.
ContinuousDeception generalwarrant
October 3 2016, 9:08 a.m.
McCaffery tried to tell folks the U.S. Military and CIA murdered some folks.
Re. hell: doesn’t exist.
Tag Herer ContinuousDeception
October 3 2016, 9:45 a.m.
While I agree with your sentiment, I think the subjects of this piece came as close as one could to the fires of hell, flames they’ll feel until the days they die.
generalwarrant ContinuousDeception
October 3 2016, 10:33 a.m.
quote”Re. hell: doesn’t exist.”unquote
Try telling that to the victims of CIA torture in blacksite dungeons.
Ted generalwarrant
October 3 2016, 1:42 p.m.
As for Obama.. the second he said.. “..we must look forward..not backward”
Yep. And with that statement, it ensures the torture ‘ball’ moves down the field ad infinitum. I believe this is a strict policy, never to be challenged by successive presidents. And that is so wrong on so many levels, I don’t even know where to start. Utterly amoral and vile.
Torontonian generalwarrant
October 3 2016, 2:14 p.m.
Exactly– now go do something positive with that rage– get the $%^#&@*#& money OUT of your system– follow the money– civil disobedience etc.
Miss V generalwarrant
October 3 2016, 8:49 a.m.
Will the Veto to Obama and the Saudis being able to be sued allow these people to sue us as well? It is time for it to happen and the USA government and military deserve it. I hope the families in Italy will also be able to sue over the gondola so called accident that nobody was held accountable for.
This could be a very interesting time coming up with no leaders on the horizon.
Jay-Ottawa
October 3 2016, 8:03 a.m.
The cover up of a crime can be judged more criminal than the original crime. Considering the long term ramifications of torture on both the victims and sponsors––torture which was administered widely and over many years, to the point where it became institutionalized, followed by no attempt to make restitution––at which point does the current administration’s continued cover up and non-punishment of systematic torture equal, or even surpass, the torture crimes of the previous administration?
nonanon Jay-Ottawa
October 3 2016, 9:20 a.m.
It’s here. We are now torturing in America, wirelessly, by mental institutions and hospitals, law enforcement, cut-outs for the CIA – begging for money. Electronic torture of your neighbor , co-worker, wife, is up for sale to the highest bidder, right now, in complete secrecy.
barabbas Jay-Ottawa
October 3 2016, 12:38 p.m.
it’s probably still simmering, waiting for someone to turn up the heat. Hellary wants to do that, feed it, bring to back to life, turn it into an economy. Ever notice how the witch never talks about the NDAA?
Medon
October 3 2016, 7:55 a.m.
I’d like to send the Senate Intelligence Committee sent to the Salt Pit as “detainees.”
Miss V Medon
October 3 2016, 8:54 a.m.
Why limit it? I would like to see anyone that had to even sign a dotted line regarding this sitting on a REAL electric chair. Even that would be better than they deserve. In my opinion stand this government, corporations that make the weapons, and military in front of a firing squad. Give them exactly what they deserve. Am I pissed at this government? You damn straight and anyone that isn’t is a complete fool!
Lauren Owen
October 3 2016, 7:35 a.m.
It was probably a antique version of mind reading what year was that?
black
October 3 2016, 7:16 a.m.
Comments to #IV.
History will not be kind for the outrageous decision to employ enhanced interrogation. Paid for by American taxpayers in the name of national security. 10’s of millions of taxpayer dollars to these bogus psychologist who broke an oath to do no harm.
REPLYJUNE 21, 201711:04 AM
Anonymous
Understanding the fullness of what torture is and does, makes it almost impossible to hold in your mind a picture of it happening to you or someone you love.
REPLYJUNE 21, 201711:46 AM
Anonymous
Sadly, none of the perpetrators of US torture will ever be punished for their crimes. This is so because, even more sadly, the majority of Americans support the use of torture. These facts almost assure that the US will torture again.
REPLYJUNE 21, 201711:47 AM
Anonymous
How prophetic. The next day this appears.
AP: *“In Yemen’s secret prisons, UAE tortures and US interrogates”*
June 22, 2017
https://apnews.com/4925f7f0fa654853bd6f2f57174179fe/US-interrogates-detainees-in-Yemen-prisons-rife-with-torture
JUNE 22, 201711:47 AM
Anonymous
We should never underestimate the moral and physical courage of these ACLU attorneys. They are noble people whose courage, conscience and conviction distinguish them among humanity and inspire us all to selfless acts of good. Thank you ACLU for all you do.
REPLYJUNE 21, 201711:57 AM
Anonymous
Good luck with this case — it’s so important.
REPLYJUNE 21, 201711:58 AM
Anonymous
Please keep the good work, ACLU. We need you now more than ever.
REPLYJUNE 21, 20171:02 PM
J. Ohlsson
THIS is why I support the ACLU with monthly donations. Who else will brewing these pieces of shit to justice?
REPLYJUNE 21, 20171:05 PM
Dan Stewart
I second the motion.
The ACLU was my first charitable donation some 35 years ago, and I’ve done so every years since. I’ve never regretted it for a second. It makes me proud, always has — even when they represent causes I don’t agree with, especially then.
Years after the torture took place, and long after most people and organizations have moved on, there’s the ACLU in the trenches fighting for justice for the weakest among us. A donation to the ACLU is the cheap and easy way to be part of that noble tradition.
JUNE 22, 201712:09 PM
Anonymous
Discover this report about sexual torture program
ZERO IMPUNITY – The US’s “psychological” weapon against terrorism