Tag: torture

REVEALED: There Were Two CIA Torture Programs – Jeffrey Kaye – Medium

inferentialdistance:

argumate:

antoine-roquentin:

long and complex article, but basically we now have confirmation that there were actually two separate programs of torture run by two different cia departments, rather than a monolithic program. the first, run by the cia’s counterterrorism center, was a loose array of black sites around the world for interrogating the tens of thousands of prisoners taken under the auspices of the war on terror, which was poorly documented and produced deaths like that of gul rahman at the salt pit in afghanistan. the second was the more famous “rendition group”, run by the cia’s office of technical services and office of medical services, of MKULTRA fame. this was initially to compartmentalize the interrogation of high level al qaeda operatives from the more ground level work interrogating those associated with active combat in nations like iraq, somalia, and afghanistan, but quickly became a program of human medical experimentation in the hopes of producing the perfect torture system. it was hoped that co-operation with the federal bureau of prisons would insulate the cia from any criminal charges over conduct, given that human experimentation of this kind is technically illegal. both programs shared many personnel, especially at the higher levels, but were still separate.

League of Extraordinary Renditioners

The CIA: actually twice as evil as previously thought.

REVEALED: There Were Two CIA Torture Programs – Jeffrey Kaye – Medium

sixth-light:

theauspolchronicles:

nerdtasticami:

theauspolchronicles:

Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.

…what’s going on in Australia?

Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:

  1. The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
  2. The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!

Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”

BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!

Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.

OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”

Well Scott Morrison decided once to tell the Senate that he could release a few kids from detention centres but only if they voted for a bill that increased his powers to send refugees back to where they would suffer persecution and basically told them if they don’t vote for it the kids will continue to suffer. He held children as ransom for his own political power. Our Human Rights Commissioner slammed it as terrible to use kids as bargaining chips. You know what the government did? Personally attack her and ask her to resign over his bias. Our Prime Minister at the time complained that Australia was “sick of being lectured” by the UN over how we keep torturing refugees.

The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!

Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?

Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.

Oh and the government super doesn’t them to come here. The Abbott government spent $4.1 million on a propaganda movie to be shown overseas to deter refugees.

We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.

(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).

Papa New Guinea (Manus Island isn’t Australian, we just have a deal to pay another government to let us keep a torture prison on their land… hmm I feel like there’s a US equivalent somewhere too…) decided a while back “hang on, this is unconstitutional and horrible. You need to close down the detention centre on Manus.” So we “did.” And then made a new building on the same island to keep them in and forced them to go into it despite it not being finished. This was after guards physically beat the refugees to make them go to this new prison.

I could go on but you get the idea.

So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”

“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”

Let that sink in.

And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.

The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.

Also, that Australia/New Zealand immigration deal? Australia has slowly been taking away the rights of New Zealanders resident in Australia – including children born in Australia to Kiwi parents – and making it nigh-impossible for them to actually get Australian citizenship, basically all because of paranoia that brown people will move from NZ to Australia. They’re aggressively deporting Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders, even those who may have come as small children and have no memory of New Zealand, both for things like being convicted of any crime and for things like “being of bad character”. Or, rather, they don’t deport them. They put them in offshore prison camps and tell them they can’t leave until they agree to leave Australia. (It’s not that these things don’t affect Pākehā NZers, it’s that we’re not the real targets.) 

During our election campaign last year, the Deputy PM of Australia openly said that if Labour were elected to government it would be bad for Australia because they would encourage refugees to try and get to Australia hoping to be taken by New Zealand. They have an island fortress mentality Trump hasn’t even started to achieve. 

sad-commie:

cold-warrior:

thecringeandwincefactory:

class-struggle-anarchism:

Anthony Bourdain, in his book A Cook’s Tour

I lived there for three years. He’s not wrong. Kissinger is a fucking war criminal.

What does Kissenger have to do with what Pol Pot did?

https://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=1807

“For too long Pol Pot and his gang have been an iconic horror show
 in the west, stripped of the reasons why. And this extraordinary film, it has
 to be said, adds little to the why. When Pol Pot died in his bed a few years
 ago, I was asked by a features editor to write about him. I said I would, but
 that the role of “civilized” governments in bringing him to power, sustaining
 his movement and rejuvenating it was a critical component. He wasn’t interested.

The genocide in Cambodia did not begin on April 17 1975, “Year
 Zero.” It began more than five years earlier when American bombers killed
 an estimated 600,000 Cambodians. Phosphorous and cluster bombs, napalm and dump
 bombs that left vast craters were dropped on a neutral country of peasant people
 and straw huts. In one six-month period in 1973, more tons of American bombs
 were dropped on Cambodia than were dropped on Japan during the second world
 war: the equivalent of five Hiroshimas.

The regime of Richard Nixon and Henry
 Kissinger did this, secretly and illegally. Unclassified CIA files leave little doubt that the bombing was
 the catalyst for Pol Pot’s fanatics, who, before the inferno, had only minority
 support. Now, a stricken people rallied to them. In Panh’s film, a torturer
 refers to the bombing as his reason for joining “the maquis”: the Khmer Rouge. 

What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed. And having been driven out
 by the Vietnamese, who came from the wrong side of the cold war, the Khmer Rouge
 were restored in Thailand by the Reagan administration, assisted by the Thatcher
 government, who invented a “coalition” to provide the cover for America’s continuing
 war against Vietnam. “

Source: left-reminders

crazy-pages:

bigmouthlass:

fadingthebiscuit:

to-dance-beneath-the-diamond-sky:

naamahdarling:

naamahdarling:

little-limabean:

runtrovert:

Friendly reminder that 1200 calories is the recommended amount for a 5 year old

this hit me.

another fact is that 500 calories isn’t even enough for a new born.

why did I go so long convinced that going over 500 in a day was the end of the world?

Another friendly reminder that the United States used 1,000 calorie diets as torture for political prisoners and justified it using the diet industry.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/17/bush-torture-memos-commer_n_188190.html

In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).

And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.

Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call.  It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder.  The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.

Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.

Just bringin’ this back around like I sometimes do.

Wow. This really hit me hard.

EAT

Fun fact– calorie restriction exacerbates symptoms of pretty much *every* mental illness.

Anorexia has ~16% mortality rate, slightly higher than acted upon suicidal ideation. It’s more lethal than actively trying to kill oneself and this is why.

If you are giving your autistic child chlorine dioxide, YOU ARE A FUCKING ABUSER and you fail as a parent.

aegipan-omnicorn:

chronicallycozy:

butterflyinthewell:

Chlorine dioxide is basically bleach that gets peddled as a cure for autism.

Parents give this to autistic kids either by mouth or as an enema.

They assume the distress, pain, and mucus being vomited or pooped out is “ropeworms” aka they assume it is the autism “leaving the child’s body.” This is actually the mucous membranes from the child’s digestive tract being burned off.

These awful, horrible, very bad people are destroying their child’s body and causing them immense pain and distress because they want to cure autism. The child learns that if they act autistic, they get hurt, so they stop acting autistic and the parent calls that “cured”.

Any parent who does this should be in prison for child abuse.

If you know of a parent who is doing this to their child, report them to the authorities immediately and get those children out of that abusive home.

So I read up on it and what’s actually happening is much more nefarious than even what the post says. Well-meaning but dangerously misguided parents are unintentionally poisoning their kids, and it’s making it impossible to tell who’s doing it on purpose and who’s not.

So a mixture of sodium chlorite and hydrochloric acid is being sold under the name Miracle Mineral Solution, presumably to sound like a wholesome, “natural” treatment for a wide range of conditions including autism and Alzheimer’s. I also came across an article advocating its use to treat cancers.

In the body these chemicals combine to make the same kind of bleach you use to clean the house with. It’s dangerous and can’t feel good, but it usually isn’t lethal. The way these sick fuckers have tricked people into killing their kids is so sneaky it’s hard to tell what the parent’s intents are.

The way that the bleach becomes chlorine dioxide, a much more powerful, lethal bleach, is that people recommend drinking fruit juice with or directly after it. To most people this would seem harmless. “Fruit is all-natural and always healthy” they might think, but it acidifies the bleach, turning it into chlorine dioxide, which kills.

I have a feeling one reason they did this is that if chlorine dioxide gets banned or people realize what chlorine dioxide is, their product doesn’t technically contain chlorine dioxide, and unless people understand the chemical process, which they probably don’t, they still won’t realize the kind of damage they’re doing.

So don’t just report them if you know they’re using chlorine dioxide, report them if you hear them talk about Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) or if you see a bottle that looks like this.

Also, if you know anyone who’s using this to treat a condition, warn them. The 1 person I know of who’s died from this was actually an old man who was self-administering it.

[Image description: two rows of 4 fluid oz./125 ml bottles of “natural remedy” receding away from the viewer. The bottles on the left are green, and the logo reads MMS International, in large gold letters, with “MMS Solution” underneath. The bottles on the right are blue, and their logo reads “Citric Acid Solution” in large gold letters. Both feature the image of a green leaf over ripples on water. And both are labeled “Water Purification Drops.” Description Ends]

Signal Effing Boost.

dearwhitepeople:

weavemama:

weavemama:

THIS is the person trump claimed is going to “protect America,”…… this should honestly scare anyone who has a sense of basic human decency,  the president of the U.S should not be willingly letting people like this back into the real world. 

the thread came with a lot of source links so if anyone wants to read them, here they are: 

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/blogs/joe-arpaio-tent-city-a-concentration-camp-6500984

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/prisoners-hang-themselves-in-sheriff-joe-arpaios-jails-at-a-rate-that-dwarfs-other-county-lockups-7845679

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/jailers-show-a-paraplegic-whos-boss-6445591

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/blogs/joe-arpaio-goes-medieval-while-barack-obamas-america-is-a-million-miles-away-6500772

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/keeping-em-in-stitches-6431602

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arpaios-jail-staff-cost-ambrett-spencer-her-baby-and-shes-not-the-only-one-6433038

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/109-degrees-of-incarceration-6420876

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/sheriff-joe-arpaio-halts-public-voting-for-jail-mugshot-of-the-day-after-website-redesign-8690032

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/joe-arpaio-loses-new-times-co-founders-win-375-million-settlement-for-2007-false-arrests-6651491

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/victims-wonder-why-arpaio-let-sex-abuse-cases-languish-6463426

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/joe-arpaio-investigating-obamas-birth-certificate-at-no-cost-to-taxpayers-except-for-the-deputy-in-hawaii-right-now-6643711

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/a-phony-murder-plot-against-joe-arpaio-winds-up-costing-taxpayers-11-million-6629798

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/blogs/joe-arpaios-doomsday-arpaio-loses-aclu-civil-rights-lawsuit-mcso-enjoined-from-racially-profiling-latinos-6501634

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/joe-arpaios-investigating-federal-judge-g-murray-snow-doj-sources-say-and-using-a-seattle-scammer-to-do-it-6630628

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/joe-arpaio-sheriff-guilty-phoenix-9548481

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/snow-orders-arpaio-to-cough-up-new-montgomery-files-and-1-500-seized-ids-to-the-us-marshal-7514146

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arpaio-costs-county-more-than-44-million-in-melendres-expenses-7341280

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/maricopa-county-paying-10k-to-burglar-who-alleged-jail-guards-stood-by-during-beating-6627446

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/roger-byg-former-member-of-joe-arpaios-posse-arrested-on-child-porn-charges-6639596

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/dog-day-afternoon-6438729

in other words….. this man is a monster. 

Joe Arpaio is a literal piece of shit. He deserves to rot in a jail cell for the rest of his life.

Source: weavemama

j4ckwynand:

genoshaisforlovers:

If that photo doesn’t terrify you then you don’t understand what’s going on

This photo is more threatening than the ones where they were being pulled out of their chairs and zip tied

[Tweet from ADAPT reads, “he had them sent to jail without their wheelchairs clearly senator portman doesn’t care!”

Image is a police officer pulling an empty motorized wheelchair (mobility scooter?) down the street. Another officer and empty chair are in the background.]

Source: genoshaisforlovers