"I can teach you about torture,
but sooner or later you'll have to get involved. You'll have to lay
on your hands and try it yourselves ... The precise pain, in the precise
place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.''
-- Daniel Mitrione, head of the US Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission
in Uruguay in 1971, teaching classes in the art of torture
"The Iraqi people are now free. And they do not have to
worry about the secret police coming after them in the middle of the
night, and they don't have to worry about their husbands and brothers
being taken off and shot, or their wives being taken to rape rooms.
Those days are over." -- Paul Bremer, Administrator, Iraq Coalition Provisional
Authority, Sept. 2, 2003
"Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers."
-- President Bush, remarks to 2003 Republican National Committee
Presidential Gala, Oct. 8, 2003
The truth is that Iraq's torture chambers are
merely under new management.
Published on Saturday, January 31, 2009 by the Chicago Tribune
Obama Lets CIA Keep Controversial Renditions Tool
by Greg Miller
WASHINGTON - The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.
But even while dismantling these discredited programs, President Barack Obama left an equally controversial counterterrorism tool intact.
Under executive orders issued by Obama last week, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, or the secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the U.S.
"I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans."
Regarding the "Iraqi torture scandal"
Torture is nothing new in the US military. It is torture for
the US to drop bombs on large cities like Baghdad (imagine the stress
of living in a city under siege, hoping that the American's bombs don't
demolish your neighborhood). There was equal torture in Afghanistan (and
mass murder of prisoners) but no outrage in the US media.
Any serious effort to eradicate torture by the US empire would
need to abolish the special forces, the CIA the Department of Homeland
Security (one of its top leaders is a veteran of the notorious "Phoenix
Program" in Vietnam, a death squad / torture program run by the military
and CIA), and the new National Intelligence office headed by John Negroponte
(who helped the terrorist "Contra" war when he was ambassador
to Honduras).
TORTURE: AS AMERICA AS APPLE PIE (long list of articles on systemic torture
in US prisons, US support of torturing dictatorships and CIA / military
participation in torture) www.prorev.com/torture.htm
www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1212150,00.html
UK forces taught torture methods
David Leigh
Saturday May 8, 2004
The Guardian
.... The British former officer said the dissemination of R2I techniques
inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among
American troops. "The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last
week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they
are dealing with peopleresponsible
for 9/11".
I don't think I totally agree with this assessment of the situation
in this piece; mainly, that the U.S. can't control its own C4I (Command,
Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence) systems. Remember,
the Pentagon document from
1995, Strategic Assessment: The Internet. The DoD knew, early on,
that the Internet would be used for PSYOPS. Charles Swett states:
The Internet could also be used offensively as an additional medium
in psychological operations campaigns and to help achieve unconventional
warfare objectives. Used creatively as an integral asset, the Internet
can facilitate many DoD operations and activities.
Armed with this knowledge, do you honestly believe that the
military hasn't thought about the implications of allowing soldiers to
use open Internet connections in a warzone!? Impossible. The
article has a cavalier tone about the use of the Internet by troops. It's
almost as if the author of the piece assumes that soldiers have a right
to use the Internet to talk to their families. If the military was ACTUALLY
concerned about PSYOPS implications of Internet use, why is it available?
Why not simply eliminate it? Any number of schemes could be implemented
to lock down the systems such that only plain text emails of a certain
length (with content screened by AI filters) could be sent. Etc. Etc.
Perhaps, however, there is a PSYOPS objective in allowing the soldiers
to use the Internet.
We, the public, as consumers of allegedly "unauthorized" materials,
must use our skills of discernment more than ever. Remember, the DoD built
the technologies that became the Internet. They thought it all up in the
first place. They have roomfulls of men and women who design perception
management campaigns and write propaganda as their full time jobs. That
is, they think about attaining strategic objectives via the use of memes.
Since the Internet is the ultimate meme propagation system, it would be
foolish to believe that the U.S. military and intelligence community have
not done heavy research into the SIW (Strategic Information Warfare) implications
of this technology. Some intelligence operations are often predicated on the fact
that the target of a meme payload believes that they have come into possession
of privileged information by some unauthorized means. This came
to mind as most people (me included) automatically assumed that the torture
images we have all been bombarded with lately are, 1) authentic, and 2)
unauthorized. Consider the fact that the torture story grew legs and ran because
the television enabled media took it from the Internet backwaters of sites
like mine, and thousands of others, and made it a "real" story
in the consciousness of Joe and Jane Sixpack. Why did that happen? Why
did they start driving that meme? The same types of horrific torture occurs
routinely in U.S. prisons. Why isn't that a big story?
Bottom line: Do I think the pictures from Iraq are authentic? Yes.
Do I think their release was unauthorized? No. They let this stuff
out. These are scientifically engineered stimuli that were designed to
provoke unthinking, emotional responses. Not only is this a setup, but
it's an inside job. And the media are fully in on it.
I tend to believe that if U.S. intelligence wanted to keep what happened
at Abu Ghraib a secret, most of us wouldn't have ever heard of the place.
Even if the material eventually found its way onto the Internet, without
the television meme driving, these data would have simply languished in
obscurity on the Internet.
For example, there are thousands of sites dedicated to covering the chemtrail
situation, yet you NEVER see anything in the media about it, unless it's
some silly thing trying to maintain the witless, status quo dogma on the
subject. There are all order of sites that showcase easily viable alternative
energy technologies. Where is the hard driving, never ending news coverage?
No... It's TORTURE, TORTURE, TORTURE. Standard operating procedure of
U.S. forces/clients for easily 50 years. Taught to special forces as a
matter of routine. So, why now? Why is this a big deal to the media at
this point?
http://radio4houston.org/takingaim/takingaim021231.mp3,
at the 54:07/-04:10 point. Quoting an article by DIA military analyst
William M. Arkin in the October 27, 2002 Los Angeles Times (which is at
www.commondreams.org/views02/1028-11.htm), Ralph Schoenman discusses
the proposal by Rumsfeld's Defense Science Board of "a super-Intelligence
Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations
Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information
warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception. Among other things, this
body would launch secret operations aimed at 'stimulating reactions' among
terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction - that is,
for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves
to 'quick-response' attacks by U.S. forces."
"This is the smoking gun, brothers and sisters," says Schoenman.
"Rumsfeld and these people are carrying out provocateur operations
which are designated as 'terrorist' operations to provide the rationale
and the pretext and the cover for massive U.S. military response. This
is the signature of 9/11. This is the predicate for the new attacks
which we can expect involving smallpox that will bring into play the Northern
Command, the Northern Command which will bring military rule to the United
States. I say these things not to alarm, I say these things to present
the reality. This is the smoking-gun exposure of the real nature of this
ruling class. Let us prepare that resistance, city across city, union
to union, working-class resistance at the point of production, mass mobilizations
against the permanent war. It is a state that oppresses us, it is a state
of terror, it is lethal, it is without restraint, it is our responsibility
to mobilize now and make this new year one of resistance, brothers and
sisters, to the rule of our ruthless ruling class."
There is increasing evidence that U.S. doctors, nurses, and medics have
been complicit in torture and other illegal procedures in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Guantanamo Bay. Such medical complicity suggests still another disturbing
dimension of this broadening scandal.
We know that medical personnel have failed to report to higher authorities
wounds that were clearly caused by torture and that they have neglected
to take steps to interrupt this torture. In addition, they have turned
over prisoners' medical records to interrogators who could use them to
exploit the prisoners' weaknesses or vulnerabilities. We have not yet
learned the extent of medical involvement in delaying and possibly falsifying
the death certificates of prisoners who have been killed by torturers.
A May 22 article on Abu Ghraib in the New York Times states that "much
of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents"
and that records and statements "showed doctors and medics reporting
to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch
wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened
genitals."1 According to the article, two doctors who gave a painkiller
to a prisoner for a dislocated shoulder and sent him to an outside hospital
recognized that the injury was caused by his arms being handcuffed and
held over his head for "a long period," but they did not report
any suspicions of abuse. A staff sergeant–medic who had seen the
prisoner in that position later told investigators that he had instructed
a military policeman to free the man but that he did not do so. A nurse,
when called to attend to a prisoner who was having a panic attack, saw
naked Iraqis in a human pyramid with sandbags over their heads but did
not report it until an investigation was held several months later.
A June 10 article in the Washington Post tells of a long-standing policy
at the Guantanamo Bay facility whereby military interrogators were given
access to the medical records of individual prisoners.2 The policy was
maintained despite complaints by the Red Cross that such records "are
being used by interrogators to gain information in developing an interrogation
plan." A civilian psychiatrist who was part of a medical review team
was "disturbed" about not having been told about the practice
and said that it would give interrogators "tremendous power"
over prisoners.
Other reports, though sketchier, suggest that the death certificates of
prisoners who might have been killed by various forms of mistreatment
have not only been delayed but may have camouflaged the fatal abuse by
attributing deaths to conditions such as cardiovascular disease.3
Various medical protocols — notably, the World Medical Association
Declaration of Tokyo in 1975 — prohibit all three of these forms
of medical complicity in torture. Moreover, the Hippocratic Oath declares,
"I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and
judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing."
To be a military physician is to be subject to potential moral conflict
between commitment to the healing of individual people, on the one hand,
and responsibility to the military hierarchy and the command structure,
on the other. I experienced that conflict myself as an Air Force psychiatrist
assigned to Japan and Korea some decades ago: I was required to decide
whether to send psychologically disturbed men back to the United States,
where they could best receive treatment, or to return them to their units,
where they could best serve combat needs. There were, of course, other
factors, such as a soldier's pride in not letting his buddies down, but
for physicians this basic conflict remained.
American doctors at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere have undoubtedly been aware
of their medical responsibility to document injuries and raise questions
about their possible source in abuse. But those doctors and other medical
personnel were part of a command structure that permitted, encouraged,
and sometimes orchestrated torture to a degree that it became the norm
— with which they were expected to comply — in the immediate
prison environment.
The doctors thus brought a medical component to what I call an "atrocity-producing
situation" — one so structured, psychologically and militarily,
that ordinary people can readily engage in atrocities. Even without directly
participating in the abuse, doctors may have become socialized to an environment
of torture and by virtue of their medical authority helped sustain it.
In studying various forms of medical abuse, I have found that the participation
of doctors can confer an aura of legitimacy and can even create an illusion
of therapy and healing.
The Nazis provided the most extreme example of doctors' becoming socialized
to atrocity.4 In addition to cruel medical experiments, many Nazi doctors,
as part of military units, were directly involved in killing. To reach
that point, they underwent a sequence of socialization: first to the medical
profession, always a self-protective guild; then to the military, where
they adapted to the requirements of command; and finally to camps such
as Auschwitz, where adaptation included assuming leadership roles in the
existing death factory. The great majority of these doctors were ordinary
people who had killed no one before joining murderous Nazi institutions.
They were corruptible and certainly responsible for what they did, but
they became murderers mainly in atrocity-producing settings.
When I presented my work on Nazi doctors to U.S. medical groups, I received
many thoughtful responses, including expressions of concern about much
less extreme situations in which American doctors might be exposed to
institutional pressures to violate their medical conscience. Frequently
mentioned examples were prison doctors who administered or guided others
in giving lethal injections to carry out the death penalty and military
doctors in Vietnam who helped soldiers to become strong enough to resume
their assignments in atrocity-producing situations.
Physicians are no more or less moral than other people. But as heirs to
shamans and witch doctors, we may be seen by others — and sometimes
by ourselves — as possessing special magic in connection with life
and death. Various regimes have sought to harness that magic to their
own despotic ends. Physicians have served as actual torturers in Chile
and elsewhere; have surgically removed ears as punishment for desertion
in Saddam Hussein's Iraq; have incarcerated political dissenters in mental
hospitals, notably in the Soviet Union; have, as whites in South Africa,
falsified medical reports on blacks who were tortured or killed; and have,
as Americans associated with the Central Intelligence Agency, conducted
harmful, sometimes fatal, experiments involving drugs and mind control.
With the possible exception of the altering of death certificates, the
recent transgressions of U.S. military doctors have apparently not been
of this order. But these examples help us to recognize what doctors are
capable of when placed in atrocity-producing situations. A recent statement
by the Physicians for Human Rights addresses this vulnerability in declaring
that "torture can also compromise the integrity of health professionals."5
To understand the full scope of American torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib
and other prisons, we need to look more closely at the behavior of doctors
and other medical personnel, as well as at the pressures created by the
war in Iraq that produced this behavior. It is possible that some doctors,
nurses, or medics took steps, of which we are not yet aware, to oppose
the torture. It is certain that many more did not. But all those involved
could nonetheless reveal, in valuable medical detail, much of what actually
took place. By speaking out, they would take an important step toward
reclaiming their role as healers.
Source Information
From the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston.
References 1. Zernike K. Only a few spoke up on abuse as many soldiers
stayed silent. New York Times. May 22, 2004:A1.
2. Slevin P, Stephens J. Detainees' medical files shared: Guantanamo interrogators'
access criticized. Washington Post. June 10, 2004:A1.
3. Squitieri T, Moniz D. U.S. Army re-examines deaths of Iraqi prisoners.
USA Today. June 28, 2004.
4. Lifton RJ. The Nazi doctors: medical killing and the psychology of
genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
5. Statement of Leonard Rubenstein, executive director, Physicians for
Human Rights, June 2, 2004. (Accessed July 9, 2004, at http://www.aclu.org/news/NewsPrint.cfm?ID=13965&c=36.)
What a revelation to learn that the Justice Department lawyer who wrote
the infamous memo in effect defending torture is now a U.S. 9th Circuit
Court of Appeals judge. It tells you all you need to know about the sort
of conservative to whom George W. Bush is turning in his attempt to pack
the federal courts.
Conservatives once were identified with protecting the rights of the individual
against the unbridled power of government, but this is not your grandfather's
conservatism. The current brand running things in D.C. holds that the
commander in chief is above all law and that the ends always justify the
means. This has paved the way for the increasingly well-documented and
systematic use of torture in an ad hoc gulag archipelago for those detained
anywhere in the world under the overly broad rubric of the "war on
terror."
Those still clinging to the hopeful notion that photographic evidence
of beatings, dead detainees, sexual degradation and threats of electric
shock were all the work of a few twisted reservists aren't reading the
newspapers. Press accounts are following the paper trail up the chain
of command to a heated and lengthy debate inside the White House about
how much cruelty constitutes torture.
On Sunday, the Washington Post published on its website an internal White
House memo from Aug. 1, 2002, signed by then-Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay
S. Bybee, which argued darkly that torturing Al Qaeda captives "may
be justified" and that international laws against torture "may
be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted under
President Bush. The memo then continued for 50 pages to make the case
for the use of torture.
Was it as a reward for such bold legal thinking that only months later
Bybee was appointed to one of the top judicial benches in the country?
Perhaps he was anointed for his law journal articles bashing Roe vs. Wade
and legal protection for homosexuals, or for his innovative attack on
the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for the popular
election of U.S. senators. But it's hard to shake the notion that his
memo to Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales established Bybee's
hard-line credentials for an administration that has no use for moderation
in any form.
This president has turned his war on terror into an excuse for undermining
due process and bypassing Congress. For Bybee and his ideologue cohorts,
however, the American president is now more akin to a king, and legal
or moral restraints are simply problems that can be overcome later, if
anybody bothers to question the tactics: "Finally, even if an interrogation
method might violate Section 2340A [of the U.S. Torture Convention passed
in 1994], necessity or self-defense could provide justification that would
eliminate any criminal liability."
In fact, though, this was an argument of last resort for Bybee, whose
definition of torture "covers only extreme acts … where the
pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies
serious physical injury such as death or organ failure…. Because
the acts inflicting torture are extreme, there is [a] significant range
of acts that, though they might constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment, fail to rise to the level of torture."
Bybee's generous standard should bring comfort to the totalitarian governments
that find the brutal treatment of prisoners a handy tool in retaining
power or fighting wars. Even Saddam Hussein, who always faced the threat
of assassination and terrorism from foreign and domestic rivals, can now
offer in his defense Bybee's memo that his actions were justifiable, on
the grounds of "necessity or self-defense."
When confronted by the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee with
the content of Bybee's torture defense, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft responded
that the memo did not guide the administration. Yet, the Bybee memo was
clearly the basis for the working group report on detainee interrogations
presented to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld a year later. And if
Bybee's work was rejected as reprehensible, why was he rewarded -- with
Ashcroft's deepest blessings -- with a lifetime appointment on the judicial
bench only one level below the Supreme Court?
Frighteningly, the Bybee memo is not some oddball exercise in moral relativism
but instead provides the most coherent explanation of how this administration
came to one of its guiding beliefs: that to assure freedom and security
at home and abroad, it should ape the tactics of brutal dictators.
May 2, 2004
Sunday Herald (Scotland)
The Pictures That Lost The War
Grim images of American and British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners
have
not only caused disgust and revulsion in the West, but could have forever
lost
Bush and Blair the moral high ground that they claimed to justify the
invasion
of Iraq
Alexander Cockburn
Torture: as American as apple pie
May 5, 2004
Torture's back in the news, courtesy of those lurid pictures of exultant
Americans laughing as they torture their Iraqi captives in a prison run
by the U.S. military outside Baghdad. Apparently it takes electrodes and
naked bodies piled in a simulated orgy to tickle America's moral nerve
ends. Kids maimed by cluster bombs just don't do it anymore. But torture's
nothing new.
One of the darkest threads
in postwar U.S. imperial history has been the CIA's involvement with torture
as instructor, practitioner or contractor. Since its inception the CIA
has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly studying Nazi techniques
and protecting their exponents, such as Klaus Barbie. The CIA's official
line is that torture is wrong and ineffective. It is indeed wrong. On
countless occasions it has been appallingly effective.
Remember Dan Mitrione,
kidnapped and killed by Uruguay's Tupamaros and portrayed by Yves Montand
in Costa-Gavras' film "State of Siege"? In the late 1960s, Mitrione
worked for the U.S. Office of Public Safety, part of the Agency for International
Development. In Brazil, so A.J. Langguth (a former New York Times bureau
chief in Saigon) related in his book "Hidden Terrors," Mitrione
was among the U.S. advisers teaching Brazilian police how much electric
shock to apply to prisoners without killing them. In Uruguay, according
to the former chief of police intelligence, Mitrione helped "professionalize"
torture as a routine measure and advised on psychological techniques such
as playing tapes of women and children screaming that the prisoner's family
was being tortured.
In the months after the
September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, "truth
drugs" were hailed by some columnists such as Newsweek's Jonathan
Alter for use in the war against Al Qaeda. This was an enthusiasm shared
by the U.S. Navy after the war against Hitler, when its intelligence officers
got on the trail of Dr. Kurt Plotner's research into "truth serums"
at Dachau. Plotner gave Jewish and Russian prisoners high doses of mescaline
and then observed their behavior, in which they expressed hatred for their
guards and made confessional statements about their own psychological
makeup.
Start torturing and it's
easy to get carried away. Torture destroys the tortured and corrupts the
society that sanctions it. Just like the FBI after September 11, the CIA
in 1968 got frustrated by its inability to break suspected leaders of
Vietnam's National Liberation Front by its usual methods of interrogation
and torture. So the agency began more advanced experiments, in one of
which it anesthetized three prisoners, opened their skulls and planted
electrodes in their brains. They were revived, put in a room and given
knives. The CIA psychologists then activated the electrodes, hoping the
prisoners would attack one another. They didn't. The electrodes were removed,
the prisoners shot and their bodies burned. You can read about it in Gordon
Thomas' book "Journey into Madness."
In recent years, the United
States has been charged by the United Nations and also by human rights
organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International with
tolerating torture in U.S. prisons, by methods ranging from solitary,
23-hour-a-day confinement in concrete boxes for years on end, to activating
50,000-volt shocks through a mandatory belt worn by prisoners. And as
a practical matter, torture is far from unknown in the interrogation rooms
of U.S. law enforcement, with Abner Louima sodomized by a cop using a
stick in one notorious recent example.
The most infamous disclosure
of consistent torture by a police department in recent years concerned
cops in Chicago in the mid-'70s through early '80s who used electroshock,
oxygen deprivation, hanging on hooks, the bastinado and beatings of the
testicles. The torturers were white, and their victims black or brown.
A prisoner in California's Pelican Bay State Prison was thrown into boiling
water. Others get 50,000-volt shocks from stun guns. Many states have
so-called "secure housing units" where prisoners are kept in
solitary in tiny concrete cells for years on end, many of them going mad
in the process. Amnesty International has denounced U.S. police forces
for "a pattern of unchecked excessive force amounting to torture."
In 2000, the U.N. delivered
a severe public rebuke to the United States for its record on preventing
torture and degrading punishment. A 10-strong panel of experts highlighted
what it said were Washington's breaches of the agreement ratified by the
United States in 1994. The U.N. Committee Against Torture, which monitors
international compliance with the U.N. Convention Against Torture, has
called for the abolition of electric-shock stun belts (1,000 in use in
the U.S.) and restraint chairs on prisoners, as well as an end to holding
children in adult jails. It also said female detainees are "very
often held in humiliating and degrading circumstances" and expressed
concern over alleged cases of sexual assault by police and prison officers.
The panel criticized the excessively harsh regime in maximum security
prisons, the use of chain gangs in which prisoners perform manual labor
while shackled together, and the number of cases of police brutality against
racial minorities.
So far as rape is concerned,
because of the rape factories more conventionally known as the U.S. prison
system, there are estimates that twice as many men as women are raped
in the United States each year. A Human Rights Watch report in April of
2001 cited a December 2000 Prison Journal study based on a survey of inmates
in seven men's prison facilities in four states. The results showed that
21 percent of the inmates had experienced at least one episode of pressured
or forced sexual contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent
had been raped in their facilities. A 1996 study of the Nebraska prison
system produced similar findings, with 22 percent of male inmates reporting
that they had been pressured or forced to have sexual contact against
their will while incarcerated. Of these, more than 50 percent had submitted
to forced anal sex at least once. Extrapolating these findings to the
national level gives a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been
raped.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor
with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find
out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists
and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2004 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
"People were in prison so that prices could be free."
— dissident Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano
The American torture-training role …
"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount,
for the desired effect." — Dan Mitrione, head of the US "Office
of Public Safety" in Montevideo, 1969-1970
"The violent methods [of "routine torture"] which were
beginning to be employed [by "US advisers, and in particular Mitrione"]
caused an escalation in Tupamaro activity. Before then their attitude
showed that they would use violence only as a last resort." Alejandro
Otero, Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, CIA agent, demoted for
his testimony
"One of the pieces of equipment that was found useful was a wire
so very thin that it could be fitted into the mouth between the teeth
and by pressing the gum increase the electrical charge. And it was through
the diplomatic pouch that Mitrione got some of the equipment he needed
for interrogations, including these fine wires." — New York
Times’ A.J. Langguth, 1981 interview
Torture becomes a "normal, frequent and habitual occurrence"
including "electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under
the fingernails, burning with cigarettes, the slow compression of the
testicles, daily use of psychological torture", … "pregnant
women were imprisoned with their very young infants and subjected to the
same treatment" — unamimous conclusion of [Uruguayan] Senate
Commission of Inquiry into Torture
"Between 1969 and 1973, at least thirteen Uruguayan police officers
went through an eight-week course at CIA/OPS schools in Washington and
Los Fresnos, Texas in the design, manufacture and employment of bombs
and incendiary devices … there was no instruction in destroying
bombs" — report based on US State Department documents obtained
by Senator James Abourezk in 1973
"As subjects for the first testing they took beggars … from
the outskirts of Montevideo, as well as a woman apparently from the frontier
area with Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of
the effects of different voltages on the different parts of the human
body…. The four of them died." — Manuel Hevia Cosculluela,
former CIA agent and associate of Mitrione
Mitrione’s demise, and the role of the SOA …
Dan Mitrione was finally kidnapped in 1970 by the Tupamoros. They do not
torture him. They demand the release of some 150 prisoners in exchange
for him. With the determined backing of the Nixon administration, the
Uruguayan government refuses. … Mitrione’s dead body is found
on the back seat of a stolen car.
"Mr. Mitrione’s devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress
in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere."
— Ron Ziegler, White House spokesperson
Mitrione’s "Office of Public Safety" has trained over
a million policemen in the Third World. Ten thousand receiving advanced
training in the US. The OPS was finally abolished by Congress in the mid-70s.
But within a year Drug Enforcement Administration agents are engaging
in many of the same activities the OPS had been carrying out. —
1975 report of the General Accounting Office
A former Uruguayan intelligence officer declares that US manuals were
being used to teach techniques of torture to his country’s military.
He said that most of the officers who trained him had attended classes
run by the United States in Panama [i.e., the School of the Americas].
Among other niceties, the manuals list 35 nerve points where electrodes
can be applied. — San Francisco Chronicle, 11/2/81
We had the `public safety program' going throughout Central and Latin
America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by
interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA
taught it. Dan Mitrione, the famous exponent of these things, did 7 years
in Brazil and 3 in Uruguay, teaching interrogation, teaching torture.He
was supposed to be the master of the business, how to apply the right
amount of pain, at just the right times, in order to get the response
you want from the individual.
They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S. AID'
written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from.
They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and
fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between
the teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and you could crank
and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly,
that the human body can register.
Now how do you teach torture? Dan Mitrione: `I can teach you about torture,
but sooner or later you'll have to get involved. You'll have to lay on
your hands and try it yourselves.'
... All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do
was lie there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would bring
in doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next
class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw
them out on the streets, to terrify the population so they would be afraid
of the police and the government.
And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women
who was in this program for 2 years - tortured in Brazil for 2 years -
she testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, `The
most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture
were not raving psychopaths.' She couldn't break mental contact with them
the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people....
There's a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn't only
Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other people,
it's people that do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible
for doing these things, on a massive basis, to people of the world today.
And we do it in a way that gives us this plausible denial to our own consciences;
we create a CIA, a secret police, we give them a vast budget, and we let
"them" go and run these programs in our name, and we pretend
like we don't know it's going on, although the information is there for
us to know; and we pretend like it's ok because we're fighting some vague
communist threat. And we're just as responsible for these 1 to 3 million
people we've slaughtered and for all the people we've tortured and made
miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that they've slaughtered and
killed. Genocide is genocide!
The `Pre-emptive Strikes' bill. President Reagan, working through the
Secretary of State Shultz... almost 2 years ago, submitted the bill that
would provide them with the authority to strike at terrorists before terrorists
can do their terrorism. But this bill... provides that they would be able
to do this in "this" country as well as overseas. It provides
that the secretary of state would put together a list of people that he
considers to be terrorist, or terrorist supporters, or terrorist sympathizers.
And if your name, or your organization, is put on this list, they could
kick down your door and haul you away, or kill you, without any due process
of the law and search warrants and trial by jury, and all of that, with
impunity.
Now, there was a tremendous outcry on the part of jurists. The New York
Times columns and other newspapers saying, `this is no different from
Hitler's "night and fog" program', where the government had
the authority to haul people off at night. And they did so by the thousands.
And President Reagan and Secretary Shultz have persisted.... Shultz has
said, `Yes, we will have to take action on the basis of information that
would never stand up in a court. And yes, innocent people will have to
be killed in the process. But, we must have this law because of the threat
of international terrorism'.
Think a minute. What is `the threat of international terrorism'? These
things catch a lot of attention. But how many Americans died in terrorist
actions last year? According to Secretary Shultz, 79. Now, obviously that's
terrible but we killed 55,000 people on our highways with drunken driving;
we kill 2,500 people in far nastier, bloodier, mutilating, gang-raping
ways in Nicaragua last year alone ourselves. Obviously 79 peoples' death
is not enough reason to take away the protection of American citizens,
of due process of the law.
But they're pressing for this. The special actions teams that will do
the pre-emptive striking have already been created, and trained in the
defense department.
They're building detention centers. There were 8 kept as mothballs under
the McCarran act after World War II, to detain aliens and dissidents in
the next war, as was done in the next war, as was done with the Japanese
people during World War II. They're building 10 more, and army camps,
and the... executive memos about these things say it's for aliens and
dissidents in the next national emergency....
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by Loius Guiffrida,
a friend of Ed Meese's.... He's going about the country lobbying and demanding
that he be given authority, in the times of national emergency, to declare
martial law, and establish a curfew, and gun down people who violate the
curfew... in the United States.
And then there's Ed Meese, as I said. The highest law enforcement officer
in the land, President Reagan's closest friend, going around telling us
that the constitution never did guarantee freedom of speech and press,
and due process of the law, and assembly.
What they are planning for this society, and this is why they're determined
to take us into a war if we'll permit it... is the Reagan revolution....
So he's getting himself some laws so when he puts in the troops in Nicaragua,
he can take charge of the American people, and put people in jail, and
kick in their doors, and kill them if they don't like what he's doing....
Alan Dershowitz: "The US is now, currently engaged
in torturing people"
The law of torture
Radio Netherlands: 04/18/03
Transcript:
With US troops in Iraq having caught only a handful of high-level members
of Saddam Hussein's destroyed regime, pressure is mounting to discover
the whereabouts of remaining Iraqi fugitives. The invading coalition forces
have also failed to discover significant amounts of proscribed chemical,
biological, or nuclear weapons, undermining one of the key justifications
of the war, and increasing reliance on key information known only to Iraqi
prisoners.
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz says this pressing need for information
means that torture is now undoubtedly already being used by coalition
forces in Iraq. In this Radio Netherlands interview, he explains why he
believes it would be better to legislate the use of torture rather than
pretend it doesn't exist:"We know in every war prisoners of war who
are captured on the field are tortured to obtain information. It happened
in the First World War, it happened in the Second World War, it will happen
in any ongoing battle. And so the question is, should it be done with
accountability? The US Court of Appeal recently ruled that there is no
judicial control over what happens on the battlefield or what happens
in Guantanamo, and that's wrong. There should always be judicial control.
The US is now, currently engaged in torturing people in two different
ways. One directly; we're making people stand on tiptoes, with their arms
chained to walls, naked. We're slapping them, and pistol-whipping them
according to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, in one case
we refused to administer painkillers to someone we had shot and wounded
during capture. And then, even worse, indirectly; we are subcontracting
our torture to other countries. We are sending people to the Philippines,
to Jordan, to Egypt, to Morocco, countries that we know will torture people,
and we are making use of their torture information. So the worse thing
to do is not discuss it, we must discuss it, and it's the obligation of
an academic, of a professor, to discuss the undiscussable."
RN: "Is it better then to have some sort of legal precedent for
what is going on?"
"I think we should never do anything in a democratic society unless
we are prepared to include it within the law. If we are not prepared to
include it within the law we should not be doing it, and if we are doing
it, we should be prepared to have accountability, record-keeping, authorisation
from the President or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Democracy
requires accountability."
RN: "Why is it better to have it out in the open, if it is still
going to go on regardless?"
"Because it might not go on if we do it out in the open. There
might be public protests against it. There will be limitations imposed,
for instance the distinction between lethal and non-lethal physical force,
the requirement of a high degree of necessity. The only way you get limitations
is with public accountability, otherwise you get the slippery slope."
RN: "You have spoken a little about a torture warrant,
where investigators who are trying to get information from a suspect would
have to get a warrant, say, from a judge. Could you just explain to me
how that would work and under what circumstances."
"Well, I don't myself approve of torture. But I am arguing that
every democracy – the Netherlands, England, France, Germany, every
democracy, the US, Israel – will engage in torture, and my requirement
would be that if you are going to do it, you have to give advance approval,
you have to show the justification, you have to explain the sources of
your information, you have show it's the last resort, and you have to
allow the judge to impose limits on what you're allowed to do. For instance,
in Jordan, they torture the relatives of terrorists; we would not permit
that in a democratic country under any circumstances, the torturing of
innocent relatives. But a guilty terrorist, being subjected to painful
but non-permanent injury, might be permitted. These are the kinds of distinctions
and limitations that civilised society ought to be discussing."
www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/langguthleaf.htmlUS torture in Latin America (the case of Daniel Mitrione, US
torture advisor in Brazil and Uruguay - his work was immortalized in the
movie "State of Siege" and the book "Hidden Terrors"
by New York Times reporter A J Langguth)
Guantanamo detainees say US military tortured them
By Robert Verkaik and Ian Herbert
13 March 2004
Two of the British men freed from Guantanamo Bay have accused their
American captors of inhuman treatment, which included being beaten and
interrogated at gunpoint.
Jamal al-Harith, 37, told yesterday's Mirror newspaper how a squad of
five US military police attacked him with batons, fists, feet and knives
after he refused to receive an injection. Mr Harith, of Manchester,
said the squad, from the US military's Extreme Reaction Force, chanted
"comply, comply. Do not resist. Do not resist," while conducting
the attack. "They were really gung-ho, hyped up and aggressive,"
he said. "One of them attacked me really hard and left me with
a deep red mark from my backbone down to my knee." Half an hour
later, a second attack was carried out on him.
"The beatings were not nearly as bad as the psychological torture
- bruises heal after a week but the other stuff stays with you. The
whole point of Guantanamo was to get to you psychologically," Mr
Harith, a divorced father-of-three, told the newspaper, which paid him
for his story.
Tareq Dergoul, another of the five Britons released from the Cuban camp
on Tuesday, also alleges he was the victim of a botched operation which
led to the amputation of his arm in his first account of his two years'
detention. Mr Dergoul, 26, a former care worker from Bethnal Green,
east London, made it clear yesterday that he holds the British government
equally responsible for his ordeal.
Mr Dergoul is believed to have been captured by American forces near
the Taliban strong-hold of Tora Bora in Afghanistan before being taken
to Bagram airbase. It is understood that he suffered injuries to his
arm and had to have it amputated by an American medical team.
In a statement issued yesterday through his solicitor, Louise Christian,
it was clear that he was finding it difficult describing his terrible
experiences to his family. The statement said: "Tareq Dergoul has
started to try to give his family and his solicitor Louise Christian
an account of the horrific things which happened to him during detention
at Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo Bay. This has included an account
of botched medical treatment, interrogation at gunpoint, beatings and
inhuman conditions."
It added: "Tareq Dergoul condemns the US and the UK governments
for these gross breaches of human rights and demands the immediate release
of all the other detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
"Tareq finds it very difficult to talk about things and his family
believe his mental health has been severely affected by the trauma he
has suffered. We therefore appeal to the media to respect his privacy
and not to try and find him.
"His family do not anticipate that he will be speaking to any journalists
in the foreseeable future because of his poor health."
Ms Christian also made it clear yesterday that the publicist Max Clifford
would not be helping Mr Dergoul to sell his story. She said: "Max
Clifford has never met Tareq Dergoul and he never will."
In addition to the beatings, Mr Harith said the abuse at the camp included
US soldiers bringing in prostitutes and parading them naked in front
of devout Muslims.
On at least 10 occasions, prisoners who had never before seen an "unveiled"
woman would be forced to watch them parade up and down, touching their
own bodies. "It was a profoundly disturbing experience for these
men," he said. "They would refuse to speak about what had
happened. It would take perhaps four weeks for them to tell a friend."
Mr al Harithsaid he accidentally strayed into Afghanistan, believing
he had paid a lorry driver to take him to Turkey, via Iran. He was arrested
there on allegations of spying.
Camp X-Ray Regime
The regime, as Mr Harith describes it:
• Prisoners were shackled for up to 15 hours at a time in hand
and leg cuffs with links that cut into the skin
• They were kept in wire cages that were open to the elements,
as well as rats, snakes and scorpions
• Psychological torture included being denied water before prayers,
meaning Muslims could not wash according to their religion, and depriving
one inmate of food, while the others on a block ate
• Force feeding was used to end a hunger strike by 70 per cent
of the 600 inmates, which started after a guard kicked a copy of the
Koran
• When carrying out an amputation, US medical staff often removed
more of a limb than was necessary
• Prisoners were left malnourished by a diet of porridge and fruit.
Some food was 10 years out of date
• Treats included pizzas, ice cream and McDonald's and the occasional
chance to watch a James Bond film
www.amnestyusa.org/
countries/usa/document.do?id=F7CE0B13E65E100085256DF00050B882 Amnesty International Report: US Exports $20 million of Shackles,
Electro-Shock Technology Expanding Global Trade Supplies States US Condemned for Torture
December 2, 2003 (Washington, DC) – A new Amnesty International
report charges that in 2002, the Bush Administration violated the spirit
of its own export policy and approved the sale of equipment implicated
in torture to Yemen, Jordan, Morocco and Thailand, despite the countries'
documented use of such weapons to punish, mistreat and inflict torture
on prisoners. The US is also alleged to have handed suspects in the 'war
on terror' to the same countries.
The total value of US exports of electro-shock weapons was $14.7 million
in 2002 and exports of restraints totaled $4.4 million in the same period.
The Commerce and State Departments approved these sales, permitting 45
countries to purchase electro-shock technology, including 19 that had
been cited for the use of such weapons to inflict torture since 1990.
The report – The Pain Merchants – also reveals that the US
approved the 2002 export to Saudi Arabia of nine tons of Smith & Wesson
leg-irons. Former prisoners in Saudi Arabia have stated that their restraints
were stamped with the name of Smith & Wesson. In a 2000 Amnesty International
report, Phil Lomax, a UK national who was held for 17 days in 1999, recounted
how shackles used in Malaz prison in Riyadh, were made in the US: "When[ever]
we were taken out of the cell we were shackled and handcuffed. The shackles
were very painful. They were made of steel... like a handcuff ring. The
handcuffs were made in the USA."
"Although torture is endemic in Saudi Arabia, Smith and Wesson had
no qualms about exporting approximately 10,000 leg-irons to Riyadh, and
apparently sharing this lack of concern, the Bush Administration approved
the sale," said Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty
International USA (AIUSA). "For decades, human rights groups and
the US State Department have documented Saudi Arabia's cruel use of leg-irons
and shackles to inflict torture and force confessions. With this shameful
shipment, we can expect the torture of religious minorities and peaceful
protestors to continue for years to come."
Amnesty International acknowledges that the US government made several
positive changes in recent years, including creating an excellent export
policy predicated on human rights standards that created well-defined
export categories and required export licenses for electro-shock equipment
to all countries except Canada. However, Amnesty International is alarmed
that the policy is being improperly implemented. In particular, the policy
has not prevented the approval of exports even when there is a significant
risk of their use for torture in the destination country.
In 2001, the US approved three sales of electro-shock weapons to Turkey,
despite continued widespread use of such technology to torture. In a 2002
case, a 17-year-old schoolgirl who had been detained for distributing
leaflets calling for Kurdish education was stripped, threatened with rape
and tortured with electric shocks to her feet, legs and stomach.
"The US needs to completely close the loopholes that have allowed
the re-supply of this technology to countries that torture," said
Maureen Greenwood, AIUSA's Advocacy Director for Europe. "Representatives
Tom Lantos (D-CA) and Henry Hyde (R-IL) have worked to codify in law greater
oversight of torture equipment exports, and are currently working on legislation
that places restrictions on crime control exports to foreign governments
that have a record of repeatedly engaging in acts of torture. The administration
should give this legislation its unqualified support."
Worldwide, there are now at least 856 companies in 47 countries involved
in the manufacture or marketing of electro-shock technology, restraints
and chemical irritants that are prone to be used to torture. A 2001 survey
by Amnesty International found more than 80 such firms – 1 in 10
– were in the United States.
The number of manufacturers of electro-shock technology has more than
doubled since 1997, when Amnesty International documented 20 such firms.
For the period 1999-2003, Amnesty International found at least 59 manufacturers
of electro-shock weapons in 12 countries, including 8 firms in the US.
For the same period, Amnesty International found 21 manufacturers of leg
cuffs, leg-irons and shackles in 11 countries, of which six were US companies.
U.S. USED TORTURE IN AFGHANISTAN
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1417396,00.html
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG AND JAMES MEEK, GUARDIAN - New evidence has emerged
that US forces in Afghanistan engaged in widespread Abu Ghraib-style
abuse, taking "trophy photographs" of detainees and carrying
out rape
and sexual humiliation. Documents obtained by the Guardian contain
evidence that such abuses took place in the main detention centre at
Bagram, near the capital Kabul, as well as at a smaller US installation
near the southern city of Kandahar.
The documents also indicate that US soldiers covered up abuse in
Afghanistan and in Iraq - even after the Abu Ghraib scandal last year.
A thousand pages of evidence from US army investigations released to the
American Civil Liberties Union after a long legal battle, and made
available to the Guardian, show that an Iraqi detained at Tikrit in
September 2003 was forced to withdraw his report of abuse after soldiers
told him he would be held indefinitely.
Meanwhile, photographs taken in southern Afghanistan showing US soldiers
from the 22nd Infantry Battalion posing in mock executions of
blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the Abu
Ghraib scandal to avoid "another public outrage", the documents
show.
FILES SUGGEST U.S. TROOPS TRIED TO HIDE TORTURE
www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/02/18/files_suggest_us_troops_tried_to_hide_abuses/
BOSTON GLOBE - A former Iraqi detainee told Army investigators that a
US
soldier forced him to sign a statement that he had not been abused even
though American interrogators in September 2003 had dislocated his arms,
beaten his leg with a bat, crushed his nose, and put an unloaded gun in
his mouth and pulled the trigger, according to newly released internal
military documents. In addition, a sergeant at a military camp in
southern Afghanistan told an Army investigator in July 2004 that his
unit erased a series of digital photographs showing guards beating
detainees and aiming guns at hooded prisoners. The sergeant said the
pictures were deleted after photos from the Abu Ghraib prison appeared
in the media, out of the unit's fear that the pictures could spark a
second wave of scandal. . .
"These raise the question of how many other allegations of abuse
were
buried in the same way," said Jameel Jaffer, a staff attorney with
the
American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed a Freedom of Information
Act request seeking government documents on detainee abuses. "That's
very troubling because we already think that abuse was pervasive, but
maybe there is a whole layer of abuse that we haven't seen."
Stories from the Inside
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
Monday 07 February 2005
During the whole time we were at Guantanamo,"
said Shafiq Rasul, "we were at a high level of fear. When we first
got there the level was sky-high. At the beginning we were terrified that
we might be killed at any minute. The guards would say to us, 'We could
kill you at any time.' They would say, 'The world doesn't know you're
here. Nobody knows you're here. All they know is that you're missing,
and we could kill you and no one would know.' "
The horror stories from the scandalous interrogation
camp that the United States is operating at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are
coming to light with increased frequency. At some point the whole shameful
tale of this exercise in extreme human degradation will be told. For the
time being we have to piece together what we can from a variety of accounts
that have escaped the government's obsessively reinforced barriers of
secrecy.
We know that people were kept in cells that in
some cases were the equivalent of animal cages, and that some detainees,
disoriented and despairing, have been shackled like slaves and left to
soil themselves with their own urine and feces. Detainees are frequently
kicked, punched, beaten and sexually humiliated. Extremely long periods
of psychologically damaging isolation are routine.
This is all being done in the name of fighting
terror. But the best evidence seems to show that many of the people rounded
up and dumped without formal charges into Guantanamo had nothing to do
with terror. They just happened to be unfortunate enough to get caught
in one of Uncle Sam's depressingly indiscriminate sweeps. Which is what
happened to Shafiq Rasul, who was released from Guantanamo about a year
ago. His story is instructive, and has not been told widely enough.
Mr. Rasul was one of three young men, all friends,
from the British town of Tipton who were among thousands of people seized
in Afghanistan in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. They had been there,
he said, to distribute food and medical supplies to impoverished Afghans.
The three were interviewed soon after their release
by Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights,
which has been in the forefront of efforts to secure legal representation
for Guantanamo detainees.
Under extreme duress at Guantanamo, including
hundreds of hours of interrogation and long periods of isolation, the
three men confessed to having been in a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.
They also said they were among a number of men who could be seen in a
videotape of Osama bin Laden. The tape had been made in August 2000.
For the better part of two years, Mr. Rasul and
his friends, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, had denied involvement in any
terror activity whatsoever. But Mr. Rasul said they eventually succumbed
to long months of physical and psychological abuse. Mr. Rasul had been
held in isolation for several weeks (his second sustained period of isolation)
when an interrogator showed him the video of bin Laden. He said she told
him: "I've put detainees here in isolation for 12 months and eventually
they've broken. You might as well admit it now."
"I could not bear another day of isolation,
let alone the prospect of another year," said Mr. Rasul. He confessed.
The three men, all British citizens, were saved
by British intelligence officials, who proved that they had been in England
when the video was shot, and during the time they were supposed to have
been in Al Qaeda training camps. All three were returned to England, where
they were released from custody.
Mr. Rasul has said many times that he and his
friends were freed only because their alibis were corroborated. But they
continue to worry about the many other Guantanamo detainees who may be
innocent but have no way of proving it.
The Bush administration has turned Guantanamo
into a place that is devoid of due process and the rule of law. It's a
place where human beings can be imprisoned for life without being charged
or tried, without ever seeing a lawyer, and without having their cases
reviewed by a court. Congress and the courts should be uprooting this
evil practice, but freedom and justice in the United States are on a post-9/11
downhill slide.
So we are stuck for the time being with the disgrace
of Guantanamo, which will forever be a stain on the history of the United
States, like the internment of the Japanese in World War II.
http://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm European Parliament report on new technologies of
repression - amazing report on the new techniques of fascist repression
- should be mandatory reading for everyone concerned about the police
state
