Prison Interrogators' Gloves Came Off Before Abu Ghraib (HUGE!)

[wellst0nev0ter]

WASHINGTON — After American Taliban recruit John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instructed military intelligence officers to "take the gloves off" in interrogating him.

The instructions from Rumsfeld's legal counsel in late 2001, contained in previously undisclosed government documents, are the earliest known evidence that the Bush administration was willing to test the limits of how far it could go legally to extract information from suspected terrorists.

<SNIP>

What happened to Lindh, who was stripped and humiliated by his captors, foreshadowed the type of abuse documented in photographs of American soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

At the time, just weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. was desperate to find terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. After Lindh asked for a lawyer rather than talk to interrogators, he was not granted one nor was he advised of his Miranda rights against self-incrimination. Instead, the Pentagon ordered intelligence officers to get tough with him.

LA TIMES

IMPEACHMENT NOW!!!!

[slinkerwink]

1. The LA Times has been amazing in their reporting this year

[sniffa]

2. shut up!

can't you see the country is mourning reagan!?

fuck em aLL!! they're going down in a ring of fire.

[Just Me]

3. I would far prefer a prosecution than an impeachment.

This cabal has broken so many laws,...they should spend the rest of their lives in a high security prison.

[DinahMoeHum]

6. and as punishment, stripped of all their $$$ assets. . .

As the Eddie Murphy character in "Trading Places" observes, "It occurs to me that the way to hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people."


:evilgrin:

[soothsayer]

4. keep it up, Venus!

Keep bringing out those secrets, you lovely planet

[iconoclastic cat]

9. Hey, yeah---d'ya think it's an astrological thing?

I really know very little about it.

[truthisfreedom]

5. it goes back further. think supremes.

[seemslikeadream]

7. Game over, America

[David__77]

8. "Gloves off..." how gallant!

So 1950s. The implications are clear--"do whatever you want--just don't leave marks."

[bobthedrummer]

10. Truth Serums and Torture-from June 2002, some more names named

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2002/060402a.html

[seemslikeadream]

13. Frank Olson

The CIA and Its Secret Experiments

with MKULTRA & Germ Warfare.

America’s Great State Secret

by

Gordon Thomas

(Author of Seeds of Fire: China And The Story Behind The Attack On America)

MINDFIELD

· Sensational never-seen-before documents from inside the White House, CIA and other agencies.

· Reveals the documentary evidence that links US Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the cover-up of the death of top CIA scientist, Frank Olson.



· Explains how the CIA financed a ruthless and systematic assault of the human psyche – using a British-born psychiatrist to spearhead the assault.

· Names other world renowned physicians who were involved in the most sinister research programme ever created by any United States government – and its secret partner – the British government.

· Reveals how a woman was programmed to become a CIA assassin.

· Describes how a CIA chemist was murdered by his own colleagues after he had turned to the one man he thought he could trust – a London psychiatrist engaged in similar work.

· Reveals how “expendables” – the CIA generic name for those selected for killing – were secretly murdered after they had been experimented on in Europe.

· Describes how the CIA used prostitutes and mental patients in other experiments.

· Explains how the CIA deliberately pioneered the drug culture whose effects are still with us.

· Reveals how the CIA agent selected to monitor the experiments eventually died at the hands of a physician steeped in the methods perfected by the CIA.

· Identifies how the CIA experiments are still carried on in secret establishments in Israel and China.

· Uncovers CIA terminal experiments on Vietcong prisoners in Vietnam.

· Publishes the CIA Manual of Assassination – a shocking document describing how to commit state-approved murder.



“Meticulously researched, Mindfield is a deeply disturbing story of hideous government experiments using drugs and behavioural modification. Teaching hospitals on both sides of the Atlantic were used. Many of the doctors who performed those experiments remain in high office today and still conduct those experiments with impunity. Mindfield is a terrifying warning how easy it is for elected governments to sanction secret experiments to control human behaviour. Gordon Thomas has meticulously taken us from incredulity to awareness of the Machiavellian lengths our governments go to in our unsuspecting name. This remarkable book is essential reading for all those in a trusted role to care for people. In every sense it is an outstanding text that reveals the darker side of medicine.”

Professor Anne White
M.C.S.P. Bsc M.D. F.R.C.P.A.
Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine
Department of Psychiatry
McMaster University, Canada

http://www.gordonthomas.ie/mindfield.htm

[seemslikeadream]

14. Sweet dreams

"Sweet Dreams: LSD, the CIA and Mind Control". Goes into the history of MK-ULTRA and their experiments.


psychic abilities at their Cognitive Sciences Laboratory
http://www.lfr.org/csl/index.shtml


Transcripts of a 27-part series on mind control,
produced by Toronto radio station CKLN-FM seven years ago, can be found here (just scroll down the page for the links to each installment): http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/radio/ckln-hm.htm


Sirhan Sirhan and the "programmable patsy"


In his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, John Marks writes of the CIA's efforts to create a programmed killer via MKULTRA. He quotes a CIA veteran who says the program was unnecessary, as a mercenary can be found to kill anyone for a price. What is more useful is a programmed patsy. According to hypnotists, it's also easier. Marks writes further of a "programmed patsy":

"The purpose of this exercise is to leave a circumstantial trail that will make the authorities think the patsy committed a particular crime. The weakness might well be that the amnesia would not hold up under police interrogation, but that would not matter if the police did not believe his preposterous story about being hypnotized or if he were shot resisting arrest."

Even before Sirhan was identified as a subject, hypnotist William Joseph Bryan said on air in Los Angeles that the assassin was probably mind-controlled, and later bragged to prostitutes about his work for the CIA and having hypnotized Sirhan.

Sirhan was found to be extremely suggestible to hypnosis, and exhibited evidence of having been hypnotized previously, with hypnotic blocks still impeding his memory of the events. There's plentiful evidence that he was in an altered state at the time of the killing, only coming out of it in the police station.


http://www.webcom.com/~lpease/collections/assassinations/rfk.htm

[aquart]

11. We tortured an American citizen?

I want public hangings. No torture. Just hang BushCo in a public square. Times Square would be nice. Herald Square. Union Square. Yes, Union Square, the first border of the frozen zone after 9/11. Set up the gallows next to the statue of Gandhi.

[seemslikeadream]

12. The apple never fell far from the hanging tree

WITHOUT SANCTUARY


Lynchers often paraded their victim down the main street, through black neighborhoods, and in front of "colored schools" that were in session.

Jesse Washington, seventeen years old, was the chief suspect in the May 8, 1916, murder of Lucy Fryer of Robinson, Texas, on whose farm he worked as a laborer. After the lynching, Washington's corpse was placed in a burlap bag and dragged around City Hall Plaza, through the main streets of Waco, and seven miles to Robinson, where a large black population resided.

His charred corpse was hung for public display in front of a blacksmith shop. The sender of this card, Joe Meyers, an oiler at the Bellmead car department and a Waco resident, marked his photo with a cross (now an ink smudge to left of victim).

This card bears the advertising stamp, "katy electric studio temple texas. h. lippe prop." inscribed in brown ink: "This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe."

Repeated references to eating are found in lynching-related correspondence, such as "coon cooking," "barbecue," and "main fare."
http://www.musarium.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html

[robbedvoter]

15. Kick!

[LeftHander]

16. Letter To The Editor Published May 13th

Letter Sent to the Waukesha Daily Freeman and Milwaukee Journal Sentinal

Published by the Waukesha Freeman Thursday May 13,

We should not be surprised or shocked at the torture of prisoners held in Iraq, Afghanistan or Gauntanamo Bay at the hands of Americans. It all fits a pattern of abuse that is inherent in our society. We as a nation put punishment before justice and violence over compassion time and time again. I am not talking about "yellow ribbon, candle light vigil" compassion, but true compassion that demands that we do no harm and genuinely sacrifice our own comfort to help others.

Our criminal justice takes a back seat to the punishment in the form of the death penalty, mandatory sentencing, zero tolerance and three strikes laws. These take away the ability of Judges to protect those whose punishment does not fit the crime. We have super max prisons that are one step away from a concentration camps. We watch violence and torture as entertainment on our televisions. We have a concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay that operates outside of the law on essentially U.S. leased and controlled land in Cuba. We are one supreme court ruling away from enabling the imprisonment of American citizens without due process.

Looking back, is it not ironic that the first casualty in the war on terrorism CIA Agent Mike Spann was killed as a result of a prison uprising? What do we think the treatment was like there that caused unarmed men to take over a prison knowing many would surely die? Ask the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. He was there.

To those who say that the actions of the "few soldiers" who committed the acts of torture is not a reflection of our society should replay a video of recent high school hazing incidents, where our children beat and torture each other. Recall too, the brutal beating death of Matthew Shepard for no other reason other than being different. Look at the motivations that resulted in Columbine, Oklahoma City and even 911. Our national landscape is littered with tragic events that are a result of our nation's lack of real compassion.

We as a nation are leaders in gun violence, road rage, domestic abuse, physical and sexual child abuse and a host of other maladies of human nature. Now we can be added to the list of countries that use torture.

To say that the events that occurred in Abu Ghraib prison is that of a few "bad apples" is to deny our own dark side and relegate the systemic use of torture as an aberration is misguided. Torture is just another symptom of a much bigger problem.

The Bush Administration and our local conservative radio hosts Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling will likely argue that people will "politicize the actions of a few bad apples" to "further their agenda" and will "hinder the war on terrorism and undermine the efforts of our soldiers in the field."

This is what we all want to hear. Unfortunately, it does nothing to stem the tide of violence and suffering that America leaves in it's wake.

[seemslikeadream]

17. John Walker Lindh

from Kadie


Lindh case possible sign of abuse (John Walker Lindh)


Lindh case possible sign of abuse
Captors instructed to 'take gloves off' while questioning

Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Washington -- After American Taliban recruit John Walker Lindh of Marin County was captured in Afghanistan, the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld instructed military intelligence officers to "take the gloves off" in interrogating him.

The instructions from Rumsfeld's legal counsel in late 2001, contained in previously undisclosed government documents, are the earliest known evidence that the Bush administration was willing to test the limits of how far it could go legally to extract information from suspected terrorists.

The Pentagon and Congress are now investigating the mistreatment of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in late 2003 and trying to determine whether higher-ups in the military chain of command had created a climate that fostered prisoner abuse.

What happened to Lindh, who was stripped and humiliated by his captors, foreshadowed the type of abuse documented in photographs of American soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

more... http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/06/09/MNGUG737901.DT...

[Rex]

18. But Bushy Jr. said Osama wasn't a priority!

If they were willing to torture people to get Osama's whereabouts, then why is Osama still on the loose? This doesn't pass the smell test IMHO.

[Disturbed]

19. Osama

"If they were willing to torture people to get Osama's whereabouts, then why is Osama still on the loose?"

Perhaps the people that they tortured didn't know where Osama was?

There was a a CIA report last year that they suspected that Osama fled Bora Bora and went to Indonesia. This makes more sense than him staying in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

The Torture Scandal seemed to be fading but now is re-emerging in an explosive way. Rumor has it that the CIA are leaking documents to bring BushCo down as payback for BushCo outing two of their agents, usurping their power via OSP and scapegoating the CIA for faulty intell pre-invasion of Iraq.

[alfredo]

21. We knew there would be revenge for the

crap the junta has pulled on the military. I think the leaked memo came from within the military in the pentagon, not the suits.

Remember, the military distrusts the suits.

[seemslikeadream]

20. Analyzing the Walker Working Group Report (aka the Torture Memo)

It is to be remarked that, amidst pages of handwaving, vague references to dicta, and regurgitations of expansive theories of executive authority from Op. O.L.C., the authors of the memo nowhere mention the one obvious precedent - the Steel Seizure case.

And for good reason - it blows their analysis right out of the water. Consider than the famous tripartite schema passage in Justice Jackson's concurrence, familiar from every con-law textbook: "When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter. Courts can sustain exclusive presidential control in such a case only by disabling the Congress from acting upon the subject. Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system." Youngstown Co. v. Sawyer, 343 US 579 at 637-8.

The federal anti-torture statute, 18 USC 2340 et seqq., is about as good an example of the "express ... will of Congress" as one could ask for -- and one clearly made under an expressly designated congressional power (Art. I, sec. 8, clauses 10-11). Does one actually have to be able to read the Constitution to go to work for the DOD legal division, or is that now optional?

more
http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/apologia_pro_tormento_analyzing_the_first_56_pages_of_the_walker_working_group_report_aka_the_torture_memo.html