The Last Whistleblowers

November 23, 2011 By T Kelly 1 Comment

Whistleblowing in our federal government may soon be a thing of the past, not because whistleblowers face more vicious retribution than ever before — although that is true; and not because important acts of whistleblowing now result in fewer reforms and less accountability than they used to — although that is also true and is getting closer; but fundamentally because the actions against which we need whistles blown are publicly acknowledged.

How would one expose war or indefinite imprisonment or assassinations or drone attacks or wiretapping or profiteering or bribery or massive money transfers to Wall Street? I understand how, even a few years ago, such things could be exposed by courageous whistleblowers. I understand how retired officials who missed their chance at being timely whistleblowers can now expose the steps through which these crimes have been normalized. But I have a hard time understanding how one would leak to the media or reveal on one’s blog what has been openly acknowledged, legalized, formalized, and normalized.

Starting from the model of whistleblowers, one is tempted to suggest that we begin supporting those individuals who will resist immoral orders and assignments: resisters instead of whistleblowers. But we have one whistleblower for every 100,000 or so government employees informed of the abuses exposed. We are likely to have infinitely fewer inside resisters. Clearly we need a different model. We need to all be whistleblowers, since we all know about the crimes. We need to insist on viewing policies differently, rather than viewing different policies. We need to expose what happens where the bombs land and the defunding of human needs hit home. And we need to organize massive resistance from outside the government, with the potential for creating massive resistance within the government as well.

I expressed my concerns and raised these questions to some of our most praiseworthy whistleblowers at an event Monday evening in Washington, D.C.

Jesselyn Radack exposed the illegal treatment of the “American Taliban.” Thomas Drake exposed crimes and abuses, including warrantless spying, by the NSA, as well as the NSA’s pre-9-11 possession of information that could have prevented 9-11. Coleen Rowley revealed that the FBI, too, had possessed information that could have prevented 9-11. These whistleblowers were joined on Monday by Ray McGovern, Larry Wilkerson, and Peter Kuznick. I raised the above concerns to all of them.

The only answer they came up with in response to my question was the same answer everyone comes up with for everything these days, and — I think — the right answer: Participate in the Occupy movement.

Monday’s event was an annual presentation of Sam Adams Awards, in this case to Drake and Radack. Previous awards have gone to Rowley, Wilkerson, Katharine Gun, Sibel Edmonds, Craig Murray, Sam Provance, Frank Grevil, and Julian Assange. The award is named for the Sam Adams who in 1967 discovered that there were over 500,000 Vietnamese Communists under arms, over twice the number the Pentagon would admit to. Dan Ellsberg leaked the story to the press in 1968. Six days after the story ran, President Johnson complained bitterly about it. Six more days later he paused the bombing, opted for negotiations, and announced that he would not run for reelection.

Rowley, who was a Time Magazine person of the year in 2002 along with a woman from Enron and a woman from WorldCom, both of them whistleblowers, said that since that time we have not had any more major prosecutions for corruption. Rowley said that her banner at Freedom Plaza on Monday had read “Prosecute Corruption!“

TheRealNews.com will be posing video of Monday’s event.

Radack told her familiar story. She described Drake’s case as similar to hers, but worse in that he was indicted under the WWI-era Espionage Act, a law meant to go after spies, not whistleblowers or “leakers.” Obama has prosecuted more people under that act than all previous administrations combined, Radack pointed out.

Drake thanked Radack for her help on his case, crediting her work for his legal victory and his freedom. Drake said a vicious campaign against whistleblowers has come to full fruition under Obama. Whistleblowers under Bush and Obama, he said, have lost their jobs and been made unemployable. Drake lost his security clearance. Radack lost her law license and was placed on a No Fly List. “We are moving into tyranny and despotism,” Drake said in a passionate speech from prepared text. “I fear for the republic,” he said. “Today we have a frightening lack of accountability within the national security complex and it poses a direct threat to our personal freedoms and to our constitutional republic. Both cannot coexist. Our government has lost its constitutional compass; it has been tainted to its core. Yet it is our enshrined liberties that are our national security.”

Drake said the government had threatened him with “35 years in prison for simply telling the truth.“ “The government,” he said, “found out everything they could about me over many years before I was ever indicted and turned me into an enemy of the state.” And for nothing. “There was no need to go to the dark side,” Drake said.

Wilkerson agreed. Wilkerson said that he’d be in jail or dead right now if the people who would do that to him didn’t fear Colin Powell who knows where all the skeletons are hidden. This occurred to him, Wilkerson said, while he was listening to Drake.

In the very next breath, Wilkerson said that Powell is writing a book that will cover his UN speech and that Wilkerson himself is writing a book that will also cover that speech. He’ll want to check Powell’s facts, Wilkerson said. (How closely, given his analysis of what’s keeping him alive?) He also said that he did not even belong on the same stage with Radack and Drake — which circles back to what I thought Wilkerson was going to say kept him out of jail and the grave, namely his failure to blow the whistle in a more timely manner.

What stands out about every person who was part of Monday’s panel is how incredibly rare they are. What ought to go without saying, what would simply be required of students for example under the University of Virginia’s honor system, is an extremely unusual freak occurrence in our government in Washington, D.C. We do indeed need to reward such rare courage and sacrifice when decency and integrity are in such short supply and a culture of fear, loyalty, and conformism is ascendant in the halls of power and bureaucracy.

We are going to need to develop a counter culture, the culture one can see blossoming in the Occupy encampments, a culture in which honesty and integrity are the norm, a culture in which decent behavior leads to acceptance rather than ostracism. Sam Adams Award recipients can help show us the way.

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27815

Filed Under: USA, Whistleblowers

December Court Date For Manning In Wikileaks Case

November 22, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Bradley Manning, the US soldier alleged to have passed to WikiLeaks a trove of military and diplomatic documents, will have a first hearing before a military court next month, the Pentagon said Monday.

Manning, who has spent the past year-and-a-half in prison, is to appear before a December 16 tribunal in Fort Meade, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC, military officials said.

Army officials said Manning is to appear at an “Article 32 hearing,” the first step in a court martial that could end up in a life sentence.

“The primary purpose of the Article 32 hearing is to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the government’s case as well as to provide the defense with an opportunity to obtain pretrial discovery,” a Pentagon statement said.

It added that the hearing, which is scheduled to take place the day before his 24th birthday, is “similar to a civilian grand jury, with additional rights afforded to the accused.”

Manning allegedly gave gave thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, which later published them online. He is charged with “aiding the enemy,” a crime which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Manning is the only suspect facing trial in the United States for the document dump — a massive intelligence breach which led to an embarrassing daily drip of diplomatic revelations and military secrets in newspapers and websites around the world.

Manning, who was arrested in July 2010, served as a US intelligence official in Iraq.

His conditions in detention, which have included solitary confinement and being forced to sleep naked, have drawn the attention of Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and the British government.

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/december-court-date-for-manning-in.html

Filed Under: Law, USA, Whistleblowers

The President who told the Truth about The Illuminati

November 22, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20KDBELD20I&feature=share

In remembrance of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who 38 years ago today, was assassinated by the very ‘Powers That Be’ referred to in this speech.

Filed Under: Illuminati, USA, Whistleblowers

Post Mortem: Death investigation in America

November 17, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

In TV crime dramas and detective novels, every suspicious death is investigated by a highly trained medical professional, equipped with sophisticated 21st century technology.

The reality in America’s morgues is quite different. ProPublica, in collaboration with PBS “Frontline” and NPR, took an in-depth look at the nation’s 2,300 coroner and medical examiner offices and found a deeply dysfunctional system that quite literally buries its mistakes. We discovered cases in which blunders by doctors have put innocent people in prison cells, allowed the guilty to go free and left some cases so muddled that prosecutors could do nothing.

We surveyed almost 70 of the largest coroner and medical examiner systems in the country and learned that more than one in five physicians working in the country’s busiest morgues are not board certified in forensic pathology, the branch of medicine focused on the mechanics of death. Experts say such certification ensures that doctors who do autopsies have at least basic skills.

The National Academy of Sciences has raised questions about the professionalism of the country’s death investigation system, releasing a 2009 report describing the shortcomings of coroner and medical examiner offices, from inadequate resources to poor scientific training to substandard facilities and technology. The academy called for the creation of uniform federal standards for death investigation, recommending that certification in forensic pathology be mandatory for doctors. Their report also recommended replacing elected coroners with medical examiners.

ProPublica, with our partners, also took a close look at the special challenges posed by unexpected deaths of babies and toddlers. Our reporting showed that medical examiner and coroner offices have repeatedly mishandled those cases, helping put innocent people behind bars. We analyzed nearly two dozen cases in the U.S. and Canada in which people have been accused of killing children based on flawed or biased work by forensic pathologists, and then later cleared.

Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/post-mortem-the-story-so-far

Filed Under: Big Pharma, Censorship, Corporations, Corruption, Health, Libya, Money, Politics, Protests, Rights, USA, Whistleblowers

Fear: American Style

November 15, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Several Fridays ago, I attended an excellent panel discussion on Occupy Wall Street sponsored by Jacobin Magazine. It featured Doug Henwood and Jodi Dean - representing a more state-centered, socialist-style left - and Malcolm Harris and Natasha Lennard, representing a more anarchist-inflected left.

Natasha Lennard is a freelance writer who’s been covering the OWS story for the New York Times. After a video of the panel was brought to the Times‘ attention, the paper reviewed it as well as Lennard’s reporting and decided to take her off the OWS beat. Despite the fact, according to a spokeswoman for theTimes, that “we have reviewed the past stories to which she contributed and have not found any reasons for concern over that reporting.”

Even more troubling, Lennard may not be hired by the Times again at all. Says the spokeswoman: “This freelancer, Natasha Lennard, has not been involved in our coverage of Occupy Wall Street in recent days, and we have no plans to use her for future coverage.”

This is hardly the first time that the mainstream media has fired reporters for their political activities, even when there’s no hint of evidence that those activities have led to biased or skewed coverage. Even so, it’s worrisome, and ought to be protested and resisted.

Such political motivated firings fit into a much broader pattern in US history that - in my first book Fear: The History of a Political Idea - I call “Fear, American Style.” While people on the left and the right often focus on state repression - coercion and intimidation that comes from and is wielded by the government (politically driven prosecution and punishment, police violence, and the like) - the fact is that a great deal of political repression happens in civil society, outside the state. More specifically, in the workplace.

Think about McCarthyism. We all remember (or remember learning about) the McCarthy hearings in the Senate, the Rosenbergs, HUAC, and so on. All of these incidents involve the state. But guess how many people ever went to prison for their political beliefs during the McCarthy era? Fewer than 200 people. In the grand scheme of things, not a lot. Guess how many workers were investigated or subjected to surveillance for their beliefs? One to two out of every five. And while we don’t have exact statistics on how many of those workers were fired, it was somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000.

There’s a reason so much of US repression is executed not by the state but by the private sector: the government is subject to constitutional and legal restraints, however imperfect and patchy they may be. But an employer often is not. The Bill of Rights, as any union organiser will tell you, does not apply to the workplace. The federal government can’t convict and imprison you simply and transparently for your political speech; if it does, it has to paint that speech as something other than speech (incitement, say) or as somehow involved in or contributing to a crime (material support for terrorism, say). A newspaper - like any private employer in a non-union workplace - can fire you, simply and transparently, for your political speech, without any due process.

On this blog, I’ve talked a lot about what I call in The Reactionary Mind ”the private life of power”: the domination and control we experience in our personal lives at the hands of employers, spouses, and so on. But we should always recall that that the private life of power is often wielded for overtly political purposes: not simply for the benefit of an employer but also for the sake of maintaining larger political orthodoxies and suppressing political heresies. That was true during McCarthyism, in the 1960s, and today as well.

It was also true in the 19th century. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed it while he was travelling here in the 1830s. Stopping off in Baltimore, he had a chat with a physician there. Tocqueville asked him why so many Americans pretended they were religious when they obviously had “numerous doubts on the subject of dogma.” The doctor replied that the clergy had a lot of power in America, as in Europe. But where the European clergy often acted through or with the help of the state, their American counterparts worked through the making and breaking of private careers.

If a minister, known for his piety, should declare that in his opinion a certain man was an unbeliever, the man’s career would almost certainly be broken. Another example: A doctor is skillful, but has no faith in the Christian religion. However, thanks to his abilities, he obtains a fine practice. No sooner is he introduced into the house than a zealous Christian, a minister or someone else, comes to see the father of the house and says: look out for this man. He will perhaps cure your children, but he will seduce your daughters, or your wife, he is an unbeliever. There, on the other hand, is Mr So-and-So. As good a doctor as this man, he is at the same time religious. Believe me, trust the health of your family to him. Such counsel is almost always followed.

After the Civil War, black Americans in the South became active political agents, mobilising and agitating for education, political power, economic opportunity, and more. From the very beginning, they were attacked by white supremacists and unreconstructed former slaveholders. Often with the most terrible means of violence. But as WEB DuBois pointed out in his magisterial Black Reconstruction, one of the most effective means of suppressing black citizens was through the workplace.

The decisive influence was the systematic and overwhelming economic pressure. Negroes who wanted work must not dabble in politics. Negroes who wanted to increase their income must not agitate the Negro problem. Positions of influence were only open to those Negroes who were certified as being ‘safe and sane,’ and their careers were closely scrutinised and passed upon. From 1880 onward, in order to earn a living, the American Negro was compelled to give up his political power.

In the past few months, I’ve had a fair number of arguments with both libertarians and anarchists about the state. What neither crew seems to get is what our most acute observers have long understood about the American scene: however much coercive power the state wields - and it’s considerable - it’s not, in the end, where and how many, perhaps even most, people in the United States have historically experienced the raw end of politically repressive power. Even force and violence: just think of black slaves and their descendants, confronting slaveholders, overseers, slave catchers, Klansmen, chain gangs, and more; or women confronting the violence of their husbands and supervisors; or workers confronting the Pinkertons and other private armies of capital.

Source: https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/8404-fear-american-style

Filed Under: Banks, Campaigning, Censorship, Corporations, Corruption, Democracy, Income Inequality, Law, Media, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Occupy, Police, Politicians, Politics, Poverty, Protests, Rights, Surveillance, USA, War, Whistleblowers

The Wall Street Pentagon Papers: Biggest Scam In World History Exposed: Are The Federal Reserve’s Crimes Too Big To Comprehend?

November 15, 2011 By T Kelly 4 Comments

What if the greatest scam ever perpetrated was blatantly exposed, and the US media didn’t cover it? Does that mean the scam could keep going? That’s what we are about to find out.

I understand the importance of the new WikiLeaks documents. However, we must not let them distract us from the new information the Federal Reserve was forced to release. Even if WikiLeaks reveals documents from inside a large American bank, as huge as that could be, it will most likely pale in comparison to what we just found out from the one-time peek we got into the inner-workings of the Federal Reserve. This is the Wall Street equivalent of the Pentagon Papers.

I’ve written many reports detailing the crimes of Wall Street during this crisis. The level of fraud, from top to bottom, has been staggering. The lack of accountability and the complete disregard for the rule of law have made me and many of my colleagues extremely cynical and jaded when it comes to new evidence to pile on top of the mountain that we have already gathered. But we must not let our cynicism cloud our vision on the details within this new information.

Just when I thought the banksters couldn’t possibly shock me anymore… they did.

We were finally granted the honor and privilege of finding out the specifics, a limited one-time Federal Reserve view, of a secret taxpayer funded “backdoor bailout” by a small group of unelected bankers. This data release reveals “emergency lending programs” that doled out $12.3 TRILLION in taxpayer money – $3.3 trillion in liquidity, $9 trillion in “other financial arrangements.”

Wait, what? Did you say $12.3 TRILLION tax dollars were thrown around in secrecy by unelected bankers… and Congress didn’t know any of the details?

Yes. The Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves. The original copy of the Constitution spontaneously burst into flames. The ghost of Tom Paine went running, stark raving mad screaming through the halls of Congress.

The Federal Reserve was secretly throwing around our money in unprecedented fashion, and it wasn’t just to the usual suspects like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, etc.; it was to the entire Global Banking Cartel. To central banks throughout the world: Australia, Denmark, Japan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, England… To the Fed’s foreign primary dealers like Credit Suisse (Switzerland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Royal Bank of Scotland (U.K.), Barclays (U.K.), BNP Paribas (France)… All their Ponzi players were “gifted.” All the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations got their cut.

Talk about the ransacking and burning of Rome! Sayonara American middle class…

If you still had any question as to whether or not the United States is now the world’s preeminent banana republic, the final verdict was just delivered and the decision was unanimous. The ayes have it.

Any fairytale notions that we are living in a nation built on the rule of law and of the global economy being based on free market principles has now been exposed as just that, a fairytale. This moment is equivalent to everyone in Vatican City being told, by the Pope, that God is dead.

I’ve been arguing for years that the market is rigged and that the major Wall Street firms are elaborate Ponzi schemes, as have many other people who built their beliefs on rational thought, reasoned logic and evidence. We already came to this conclusion by doing the research and connecting the dots. But now, even our strongest skeptics and the most ardent Wall Street supporters have it all laid out in front of them, on FEDERAL RESERVE SPREADSHEETS.

Even the Financial Times, which named Lloyd Blankfein its 2009 person of the year, reacted by reporting this: “The initial reactions were shock at the breadth of lending, particularly to foreign firms. But the details paint a bleaker and even more disturbing picture.”

Yes, the emperor doesn’t have any clothes. God is, indeed, dead. But, for the moment at least, the illusion continues to hold power. How is this possible?

To start with, as always, the US television “news” media (propaganda) networks just glossed over the whole thing – nothing to see here, just move along, back after a message from our sponsors… Other than that obvious reason, I’ve come to the realization that the Federal Reserve’s crimes are so big, so huge in scale, it is very hard for people to even wrap their head around it and comprehend what has happened here.

Think about it. In just this one peek we got at its operations, we learned that the Fed doled out $12.3 trillion in near-zero interest loans, without Congressional input.

The audacity and absurdity of it all is mind boggling…

Based on many conversations I’ve had with people, it seems that the average person doesn’t comprehend how much a trillion dollars is, let alone 12.3 trillion. You might as well just say 12.3 gazillion, because people don’t grasp a number that large, nor do they understand what would be possible if that money was used in other ways.

Can you imagine what we could do to restructure society with $12.3 trillion? Think about that…

People also can’t grasp the colossal crime committed because they keep hearing the word “loans.” People think of the loans they get. You borrow money, you pay it back with interest, no big deal.

That’s not what happened here. The Fed doled out $12.3 trillion in near-zero interest loans, using the American people as collateral, demanding nothing in return, other than a bunch of toxic assets in some cases. They only gave this money to a select group of insiders, at a time when very few had any money because all these same insiders and speculators crashed the system.

Do you get that? The very people most responsible for crashing the system, were then rewarded with trillions of our dollars. This gave that select group of insiders unlimited power to seize control of assets and have unprecedented leverage over almost everything within their economies – crony capitalism on steroids.

This was a hostile world takeover orchestrated through economic attacks by a very small group of unelected global bankers. They paralyzed the system, then were given the power to recreate it according to their own desires. No free market, no democracy of any kind. All done in secrecy. In the process, they gave themselves all-time record-breaking bonuses and impoverished tens of millions of people – they have put into motion a system that will inevitably collapse again and utterly destroy the very existence of what is left of an economic middle class.

That is not hyperbole. That is what happened.

We are talking about trillions of dollars secretly pumped into global banks, handpicked by a small select group of bankers themselves. All for the benefit of those bankers, and at the expense of everyone else. People can’t even comprehend what that means and the severe consequences that it entails, which we have only just begun to experience.

Let me sum it up for you: The American Dream is O-V-E-R.

Welcome to the neo-feudal-fascist state.

People throughout the world who keep using the dollar are either A) Part of the scam; B) Oblivious to reality; C) Believe that US military power will be able to maintain the value of an otherwise worthless currency; D) All of the above.

No matter which way you look at it, we are all in serious trouble!

If you are an elected official, (I know at least 17 of you subscribe to my newsletter) and you believe in the oath you took upon taking office, you must immediately demand a full audit of the Federal Reserve and have Ben Bernanke and the entire Federal Reserve Board detained. If you are not going to do that, you deserve to have the words “Irrelevant Puppet” tattooed across your forehead.

Yes, those are obviously strong words, but they are the truth.

The Global Banking Cartel has now been so blatantly exposed, you cannot possibly get away with pretending that we live in a nation of law based on the Constitution. The jig is up.

It’s been over two years now; does anyone still seriously not understand why we are in this crisis? Our economy has been looted and burnt to the ground due to the strategic, deliberate decisions made by a small group of unelected global bankers at the Federal Reserve. Do people really not get the connection here? I mean, H.E.L.L.O. Our country is run by an unelected Global Banking Cartel.

I am constantly haunted by a quote from Harry Overstreet, who wrote the following in his 1925 groundbreaking study Influencing Human Behavior: “Giving people the facts as a strategy of influence” has been a failure, “an enterprise fraught with a surprising amount of disappointment.”

This crisis overwhelmingly proves Overstreet’s thesis to be true. Nonetheless, we solider on…

Here’s a roundup of reports on this Bernanke Leaks:

Prepare to enter the theater of the absurd…

I’ll start with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). He was the senator who Bernanke blew off when he was asked for information on this heist during a congressional hearing. Sanders fought to get the amendment written into the financial “reform” bill that gave us this one-time peek into the Fed’s secret operations. (Remember, remember the 6th of May, HFT, flash crash and terrorism. “Hey, David, Homeland Security is on the phone! They want to ask you questions about some NYSE SLP program.”)

In an article entitled, “A Real Jaw-Dropper at the Federal Reserve,” Senator Sanders reveals some of the details:

At a Senate Budget Committee hearing in 2009, I asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to tell the American people the names of the financial institutions that received an unprecedented backdoor bailout from the Federal Reserve, how much they received, and the exact terms of this assistance. He refused. A year and a half later… we have begun to lift the veil of secrecy at the Fed…

After years of stonewalling by the Fed, the American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed’s multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America….

We have learned that the $700 billion Wall Street bailout… turned out to be pocket change compared to the trillions and trillions of dollars in near-zero interest loans and other financial arrangements the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution in this country.…

Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations including two European megabanks — Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse — which were the largest beneficiaries of the Fed’s purchase of mortgage-backed securities….

Has the Federal Reserve of the United States become the central bank of the world?… [read Global Banking Cartel]

What this disclosure tells us, among many other things, is that despite this huge taxpayer bailout, the Fed did not make the appropriate demands on these institutions necessary to rebuild our economy and protect the needs of ordinary Americans….

What we are seeing is the incredible power of a small number of people who have incredible conflicts of interest getting incredible help from the taxpayers of this country while ignoring the needs of the people.

In an article entitled, “The Fed Lied About Wall Street,” Zach Carter sums it up this way:

The Federal Reserve audit is full of frightening revelations about U.S. economic policy and those who implement it… By denying the solvency crisis, major bank executives who had run their companies into the ground were allowed to keep their jobs, and shareholders who had placed bad bets on their firms were allowed to collect government largesse, as bloated bonuses began paying out soon after.

But the banks themselves still faced a capital shortage, and were only kept above those critical capital thresholds because federal regulators were willing to look the other way, letting banks account for obvious losses as if they were profitable assets.

So based on the Fed audit data, it’s hard to conclude that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was telling the truth when he told Congress on March 3, 2009, that there were no zombie banks in the United States.

“I don’t think that any major U.S. bank is currently a zombie institution,” Bernanke said.

As Bernanke spoke those words banks had been pledging junk bonds as collateral under Fed facilities for several months…

This is the heart of today’s foreclosure fraud crisis. Banks are foreclosing on untold numbers of families who have never missed a payment, because rushing to foreclosure generates lucrative fees for the banks, whatever the costs to families and investors. This is, in fact, far worse than what Paul Krugman predicted. Not only are zombie banks failing to support the economy, they are actively sabotaging it with fraud in order to make up for their capital shortages. Meanwhile, regulators are aggressively looking the other way.

The Fed had to fix liquidity in 2008. That was its job. But as major banks went insolvent, the Fed and Treasury had a responsibility to fix that solvency issue—even though that meant requiring shareholders and executives to live up to losses. Instead, as the Fed audit tells us, policymakers knowingly ignored the real problem, pushing losses onto the American middle class in the process.”

Even the Financial Times is jumping ship:

Sunlight Shows Cracks in Fed’s Rescue Story

It took two years, a hard-fought lawsuit, and an act of Congress, but finally… the Federal Reserve disclosed the details of its financial crisis lending programs. The initial reactions were shock at the breadth of lending, particularly to foreign firms. But the details paint a bleaker, earlier, and even more disturbing picture…. An even more troubling conclusion from the data is that… it is now apparent that the Fed took on far more risk, on less favorable terms, than most people have realized.

In true Fed fashion, they didn’t even fully comply with Congress. In a report entitled, “Fed Withholds Collateral Data for $885 Billion in Financial-Crisis Loans,” Bloomberg puts some icing on the cake:

For three of the Fed’s six emergency facilities, the central bank released information on groups of collateral it accepted by asset type and rating, without specifying individual securities. Among them was the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, created in March 2008 to provide loans to brokers as Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed.

“This is a half-step,” said former Atlanta Fed research director Robert Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisors Inc. in Sarasota, Florida. “If you were going to audit the facilities, then would this enable you to do an audit? The answer is ‘No,’ you would have to go in and look at the individual amounts of collateral and how it was broken down to do that. And that is the spirit of what the requirements were in Dodd-Frank.”

Here’s the only person on US TV “news” who actually covers and understands any of this, enter Dylan Ratigan, with his guest Chris Whalen from Institutional Risk Analytics. This quote from Whalen sums it up well: “The folks at the Fed have become so corrupt, so captured by the banking industry… the Fed is there to support the speculators and they let the real economy go to hell.”

The Progressive’s Matthew Rothschild has a good quote: “The financial bailout was a giant boondoggle, undemocratic and kleptocratic to its core.”

Matt Stoller on NewDeal 2.0:

End This Fed

The Fed, and specifically the people who run it, are responsible for declining wages, for de-industrialization, for bubbles, and for the systemic corruption of American capital markets. The new financial blogosphere destroyed the Fed’s mythic stature…. With a loss of legitimacy comes a lack of public trust and a vulnerability to any form of critic. The Fed is now less respected than the IRS…. Liberals should stop their love affair with conservative technocratic myths of monetary independence, and cease seeing this Federal Reserve as a legitimate actor. At the very least, we need to begin noticing that these people do in fact run the country, and should not.

The Sunlight Foundation shines a light on Bank of America and the Federal Reserve’s brother money manager BlackRock:

Federal Reserve Loan Program Allowed Bank of America to Benefit Twice

Bank of America was one of several banks that was able to play both sides of a Federal Reserve program launched during the 2008 financial crisis. While Bank of America was selling its assets to firms obtaining loans through the Fed program, the investment firm BlackRock—partially owned by Bank of America—was potentially turning a profit by using those loans to buy assets similar to those sold by Bank of America.

Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times jumps into the act:

So That’s Where the Money Went

How the truth shines through when you shed a little light on a subject….

All of the emergency lending data released by the Fed are highly revealing, but why weren’t they made public much earlier? That’s a question that Walker F. Todd, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, is asking.

Mr. Todd, a former assistant general counsel and research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said details about the Fed’s vast and various programs should have been available before the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform law was even written.

“The Fed’s current set of powers and the shape of the Dodd-Frank bill over all might have looked quite different if this information had been made public during the debate on the bill,” he said. “Had these tables been out there, I think Congress would have either said no to emergency lending authority or if you get it, it’s going to be a much lower number — half a trillion dollars in the aggregate.” [read more]

Welcome to the “global pawnshop:”

The Fed Operates as a “global pawnshop:” $9 trillion to 18 financial institutions

What the report shows is that the Fed operated as a global pawnshop taking in practically anything the banks had for collateral. What is even more disturbing is that the Federal Reserve did not enact any punitive charges to these borrowers so you had banks like Goldman Sachs utilizing the crisis to siphon off cheap collateral. The Fed is quick to point out that “taxpayers were fully protected” but mention little of the destruction they have caused to the US dollar. This is a hidden cost to Americans and it also didn’t help that they were the fuel that set off the biggest global housing bubble ever witnessed by humanity. [read more]

“No strings attached.” Financial reporter Barry Grey unleashes the truth:

Fed report lifts lid on Great Bank Heist of 2008-2009

The banks and corporations that benefited were not even obliged to provide an account of what they did with the money. The entire purpose of the operation was to use public funds to cover the gambling losses of the American financial aristocracy, and create the conditions for the financiers and speculators to make even more money.

All of the 21,000 transactions cited in the Fed documents―released under a provision included, over the Fed’s objections, in this year’s financial regulatory overhaul bill―were carried out in secret. The unelected central bank operated without any congressional mandate or oversight.

The documents shed light on the greatest plundering of social resources in history. It was carried out under both the Republican Bush and Democratic Obama administrations. Those who organized the looting of the public treasury were long-time Wall Street insiders: men like Bush’s treasury secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson and the then-president of the New York Federal Reserve, Timothy Geithner….

The Fed documents show that the US central bank enabled banks and corporations to offload their bad debts onto the Fed’s balance sheet. Now, in order to prevent a collapse of the dollar and a default by the US government, the American people are being told they must sacrifice to reduce the national debt and budget deficit.

But as the vast sums make clear, the “sacrifice” being demanded of working people means their impoverishment―wage-cutting, mass unemployment, cuts in health care, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.

The very scale of the Fed bailout points to the scale of the financial crash and the criminality that fostered it…. The entire US capitalist economy rested on a huge Ponzi scheme that was bound to collapse…

The banks were able to take the cheap cash from the Fed and lend it back to the government at double and quadruple the interest rates they were initially charged―pocketing many billions in the process….

The ongoing saga of the looting of the economy by the financial elite puts the lie to the endless claims that “there is no money” for jobs, housing, education or health care. The ruling class is awash in money.

Ben Shalom Bernanke is wanted for violating the United States Constitution, committing acts of financial terrorism and crimes against humanity. As a leading member of the Global Banking Cartel, he is considered a highly dangerous enemy combatant. Citizens of the United States hereby demand that he be properly detained under the laws and customs of war.

Source: https://pubrecord.org/nation/8622/pentagon-papers-wall-street/

Filed Under: Banks, Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporations, Corruption, Democracy, Economy, Federal Reserve, Money, Politicians, Politics, Poverty, USA, Whistleblowers

Undercover Policeman Admits Spying on Danish Environmental Activists

November 14, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

The controversy over the undercover policeman Mark Kennedy has deepened after he admitted spying on and disrupting the work of activists in another European country.

Kennedy has admitted that he infiltrated a Danish community centre that had housed progressive causes for more than a century, obtaining intelligence that helped police to storm it and close it down in violent raids.

He told a Channel Four documentary, to be broadcast on Monday, that he was used by police all over Europe to gather intelligence on activists.

The documentary describes him as the “go-to cop for foreign governments who needed information about their own activists”.

Kennedy said he was “under huge pressure to gather all this intelligence and feed it back” after European governments asked for his help.

Details of his deployment in Germany, Iceland, and Ireland have previously been revealed, leading to criticism that British police were interfering in the democratic affairs of other countries.

Kennedy said he went to 22 countries in total during his seven years under cover, pretending to be an environmental activist. The list also includes Spain, Poland, France, and Belgium.

His unmasking has led to the launch of 12 inquiries this year into a network of police spies that has operated in political movements over the past four decades. The inquiries are examining allegations ranging from alleged lying in court to the use of sexual relationships as a way of gathering information about campaigners.

Kennedy transformed himself from an ordinary policeman into a long-haired, tattooed protester who, operating under the fake identity of Mark Stone, spied on environmental, leftwing and anti-fascist groups from 2003.

He become trusted by other campaigners and soon started to become active in European protests. He said he was “getting sent all over the place” after the National Police Order Intelligence Unit, the secretive body he worked for, agreed to loan him out to police forces around Europe.

Police forces have secretive agreements to exchange undercover police officers across their borders.

Kennedy told the documentary-makers that he helped to close down the popular Copenhagen Youth House community centre. Since the late 1890s, the four-storey red brick building had been the base for a variety of trade unions, women’s groups, anarchists, anti-capitalist activists and musicians, and was visited by Lenin in 1910.

But it became the focus of huge controversy after the city council sold it to a rightwing Christian group and needed to evict the tenants. More than 650 people were arrested during three nights of clashes in 2007.

Kennedy said: “In Copenhagen, I got into a house full of squatters and gave the intelligence which allowed the police to storm the place.”

While undercover, he was hired by German police to infiltrate activists between 2004 and 2009, and reportedly committed two crimes including arson. The cases against him were dropped at the urging of the German authorities, who knew his real identity.

Kennedy – who was paid to tell his story in the Channel 4 documentary – said he had no job after leaving the Metropolitan police, nor the prospect of any work. He said: “How can I expect people ever to trust me again?”.

He said his life “is a pretty big negative” as he has left his wife and children and is separated from his girlfriend, who was an environmental activist and who helped to unmask him.

Five of the seven undercover police officers in the protest movement who have been exposed so far have admitted having or have been alleged to have had sexual relationships with activists they were keeping under surveillance, despite claims by senior police officers that this was banned.

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/13/undercover-policeman-admits-spying-danish-activists

Filed Under: Campaigning, Capitalism, Corruption, Environment, European Union, Money, Police, Politics, Pollution, Privacy, Protests, Rights, Surveillance, United Kingdom, Whistleblowers

Torture - From Guantanamo to Bahrain

November 14, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

“But the one person from Bahrain who fought for our freedom till the end was Nabeel Rajab from the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights.”

This was part of an interview with Juma Mohammed Al Dossary, a former Guantanamo prisoner from Bahrain, after his release in 2007.

Mohammed Khalid, a pro-gov and Salafist MP, who campaigned for release of the detainees and compensating them, asked in 2005: “What about the Guantanamo prison, which is out of the sight of all rights and humanitarian organizations, where the matter could be worse than Abu Ghraib or Afghanistan?”. He said that many released prisoners “had talked about being submitted to human suffering and sexual abuse during interrogation”.

Some of the torture and abuse described by AlDossary through his lawyer included: religious abuse like cursing and insulting beliefs, being urinated on and spat on by GI’s, being burnt by cigarettes, severe beating while in extreme positions, and being sexually assaulted by female interrogators. The sexual assault was mainly to offend the men or lure them to talk.

Fast forwarding and on the other side of the Atlantic in another island hosting a US base. This is basically some of what’s happening and has been happening in Bahrain for the past 30 years. Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a lawyer and consultant with HRW, worked with Rajab to secure the release of Bahraini Guantanamo prisoners.

He describes how the same Bahraini MPs who gave him a standing ovation rejected HRW’s findings when it came to their citizens’ claims and evidence of torture in Bahraini jails.

MP Mohammed Khalid, who stood firmly with Guantanamo’s detainees on the basis of universality of human rights, was instrumental in igniting sectarian hatred against Shia when protests erupted, and is now in the front-line campaign supporting government’s measures of mass detentions and military courts calling the protesters traitors and Iranian agents and using the most offensive anti-Shia language.

Nabeel Rajab, on the other hand, is facing a fierce propaganda campaign in an attempt to discredit him and assassinate his character accusing him of being an Iranian agent.

From a 1997 special report on torture in Bahrain to the UN Human Rights Commission:

“The methods of torture reported include: falaqa (beatings on the soles of the feet); severe beatings, sometimes with hose-pipes; suspension of the limbs in contorted positions accompanied by blows to the body; enforced prolonged standing; sleep deprivation; preventing victims from relieving themselves; immersion in water to the point of near drowning; burnings with cigarettes; piercing the skin with a drill; sexual assault, including the insertion of objects into the penis or anus; threats of execution or of harm to family members; and placing detainees suffering from sickle cell anemia (said to be prevalent in the country) in air-conditioned rooms in the winter, which can lead to injury to internal organs.”

These exact methods are being used now. Since Feb 14, 2011, four people have died in Bahraini prisons as a result of torture. The total number is more than 20 since 1971. Those recently killed in prison were: Hassan Maki, Ali Saqer, Zakaria Al-Asheeri (Journalist), & Kareem Fakhrawi (Businessman). Among the hundreds of prisoners are politicians, MPs, human rights activists, doctors, nurses, students, lawyers, journalists, news photographers, and bloggers. Severe torture and sexual abuse have been widely reported.

In an April 14 Time’s article, Joe Stork, deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch, expressed his concern: ”I very much fear there will be more death because there is no transparency in all this,”. He adds: “We’re not seeing where they’re being held, or their names, and it’s these kinds of conditions that make for torture and brutality and death.”

Bush’s administration was in a “war against terrorism”, in which alleged foreign fighters were flown to Guantanamo; the Bahraini Government on the other hand is in a war against its unarmed population. The situation in Bahraini prisons might be way worse than Guantanamo as Obama announced an end to torture. However, as the information in the previous report suggests or rather proves, the US government, along with that of the UK and other countries, is morally and historically responsible for what happened and what’s happening in Bahraini prisons.

On May 16th, NY Times reporter Nick Kristof tweeted: “Our close ally, Bahrain, has a consistent record of using sexual abuse of male and female detainees as a form of torture.”

The next report will deal in more detail with Sexual Abuse in Bahraini prisons. Testimonies of tens of prisoners and detainees will be presented. This is what lies beneath the fake and promoted liberal posture of Bahrain.

Bahrain: The Systematic Use of Sexual Abuse

Bahrain’s security apparatus and secret police were established by the British, and were headed by Ian Henderson, “The Butcher of Bahrain” for 30 years. The rationale is that the people of Bahrain are basically the subjects of their (the British’s) subjects (the Khalifas). Add to that, the mentality of the ruling “conquering” family who believe Bahrain is their private property (owning 30% of its land) and its people are their slaves. With naturalization of foreigners to work in the security forces, things became messier for Bahrainis. The people were not only subjected to a colonial power, and a non-compromising ruling family; but also subjected to an uneducated and ruthless foreign mercenary force.

Since Shiites are generally not allowed into security forces, the animosity they are faced with has an ugly anti-Shia and sectarian nature. The police and security forces feel no shame destroying their mosques, wrecking their cars, stealing their possessions, verbally abusing them and their beliefs, humiliating them, and even sexually molesting and abusing their children, men, and women. The systematic nature of such behavior means that it’s not just an anti-Shia sentiment that drives them, but a well-designed policy dictated from the high chair of the decision maker down the ladder to the recently shipped Pakistani mercenary.

Sexual Abuse is used and has been used systematically in Bahrain. The same methods used in the 80s, were used in the 90s, and are being used now. The main aim are to extract confessions and to crush the prisoner’s will and dignity. Of course, with time, it becomes just a normal perverted behavior of a sadistic security force. In a conservative society like that of Bahrain, a rape victim can face a multitude of psychological and social problems and in many instances refrain from speaking out. In recent events, the government is accusing protesters with all kinds of bogus charges, and most of the time these charges are baseless. Following an old protocol, interrogators force detainees to sign confessions after severely torturing them and sexually assaulting them, or threatening them with rape.

Below cases were documented after the latest uprising that started with protests on Feb 14. They are testimonies of people brutalized or detained by security forces. The below accusations and the nature of the subject and the crackdown suggest that there are many untold stories.

Post February 14, 2011:

1) In a short documentary “Bahrain’s Dark Secret” about recent events by SBS Australia, Nabeel Rajab describes a midnight raid on his house followed by his arrest. They used anti-Shia language with him, and threatened to rape him.

2) In the same documentary, a woman named Fatima expressed her sorrow over her husband’s arrest by 50 masked security personnel. She finds trouble describing how 5 men hit her, used profane-insulting language against her, and sexually harassed her. One of the men put his penis in front of her face.

3) Abdulhadi AlKhawaja, a prominent human rights activist, who’s in jail and facing charges, was threatened with rape. His torturers wanted to videotape him confessing and appologizing to the King; when he refused, he was taken to another room, where they used ”foul language and threatened him with rape,” “they also threatened to rape his activist daughter.”

“At this point the men started undressing and showing their private parts after which they started touching (Khawaja) inappropriately,”

“When they tried to take off his pants, he threw himself down and started hitting his head on the ground continuously until he almost passed out. Seeing this they returned him to his prison cell.”

4) In a report in the Herald Sun titled ” Men raped, tortured in Bahrain”, interviews were conducted with 6 Bahraini men on how they were tortured. A 20 year-old named Mohammed, who claimed he had nothing to do with the protests, was detained, tortured and raped!

5) A female doctor was tortured by a female interrogator. The next day, a male interrogator threatened her with rape:

He told her: “You must have had Mutah with demonstrators at the (Pearl) roundabout,” “I will have Mutah with you,”

Another interrogator threatened her: “I will hang you from your breasts and rape you,”

She later signed the confession.

6) Ayat AlQurmuzi, a student who read a poem critical of the royal family was imprisoned. Her family said she was severely tortured and abused. They said her torturers spat in her mouth, and wiped her face on toilets. She was also threatened with rape, and exposure of degrading photos on the internet. And according to the Independent, pictures of Ayat began showing up on pornographic and dating websites.

7) 28 Shiite employees working in Bahrain International Circuit were detained, tortured and fired from their jobs. They were stripped out of their clothes.

According to one employee: “They said they’d rape us. They tried to touch you in various places to make you feel it’s going to happen.”

8)A woman doctor in custody was threatened with rape; a security officer told her: “We are 14 guys in this room, do you know what we can do to you? It’s the emergency law [martial law] and we are free to do what we want.”

9) AlJazeera English interviewed a 16-year old schoolgirl who was taken from school, detained and tortured for three days along with three other girls. She says the police officer took her head-scarf off by force after slapping her. Security officers swore and spat on them, called them “prostitutes”, and threatened to rape them.

10) A report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) on the storming of Salmaniya Hospital by Bahraini forces, accused them of “torture, beating, verbal abuse, humiliation, and threats of rape and killing.”:

One of the armed men with a Saudi accent started shouting anti-Shia insults: “Grave worshippers! Sons of whores! Sons of Muta!”

An officer with a Jodranian accent threatened to rape a patient, named Ali. Ali was previously shot in the face with bird shot.

11) A prisoner in his 60s named Jawad told his family that they were forced to kiss a picture of King Hamad, and another of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia every morning. If they kissed them, their torturers would spit in their mouths; if they didn’t, they would urinate in their mouths.

12) France 24’s reporter Nazeeha Saeed was detained overnight; she was severely tortured, humiliated and insulted by female interrogators accusing her of links with Hizbollah and Iran. One of the interrogators held a plastic bottle and put it against her mouth; “Drink, it’s urine,” she said. Nazeeha knocked the bottle; the interrogator then poured it on her face.

13) Nabeel Rajab said he met another rape victim on June 12^th. She was kidnapped, blindfolded, taken to a deserted area, and raped by secret police. She reported this to a police station with no results. This is the second reported case according to Rajab.

Bahrain’s Security Forces: A History of Sexual Sadism

“There is one place in which one’s privacy, intimacy, integrity and inviolability are guaranteed – one’s body, a unique temple and a familiar territory of sensa and personal history. The torturer invades, defiles and desecrates this shrine. He does so publicly, deliberately, repeatedly and, often, sadistically and sexually, with undisguised pleasure. Hence the all-pervasive, long-lasting, and, frequently, irreversible effects and outcomes of torture.” Sam Vaknin, The Psychology of Torture

Unlike witnesses to horrors of war who usually share a collective memory with a community, victims of torture face a unique and special type of trauma. The physical and mental pain associated with torture and sexual abuse has been a subject of study in the past 50 years; intelligence agencies, good-willed psychiatrists, psychologists and philosophers have all showed special interest. No matter how much you read or watch about torture, or even if you work first-hand with torture victims, there’s no way you can truly comprehend the magnitude of their suffering.

Eliane Scarry, in her book “The Body in Pain”, says “Pain comes unsharably into our midst, at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed”. Psychologist Shirley Spitz, in a seminar about torture: “Torture is an obscenity in that it joins what is most private with what is most public. Torture entails all the isolation and extreme solitude of privacy with none of the usual security embodied therein”. She then tries to explain pain: “Pain is also unsharable in that it is resistant to language… Pain is not of, or for, anything. Pain is. And it draws us away from the space of interaction, the sharable world, inwards.”

Typically, torture victims suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They can experience insomnia, irritability, restlessness, attention deficits, night terrors, flashbacks, cognitive impairment, reduced capacity to learn, memory disorders, sexual dysfunction, social withdrawal, inability to maintain long-term relationships, or even mere intimacy, phobias, ideas of reference and superstitions, delusions, hallucinations, psychotic microepisodes and emotional flatness.

The torture and sexual abuse inflicted on Bahrainis, like that inflicted on Argentineans, Filipinos and others, is not only meant to crush the political prisoner, but to break-down the entire community; spreading fear, anguish, and mistrust. Many torture victims become anti-social and suicidal; and as witnessed in Iraq, Egypt and elsewhere, torture victims and their family members are among the easiest to recruit in terrorist and militant organizations.

In 2009, Chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin in a conference asserted: “the abuse of detainees in our custody has served as a recruitment tool for terrorists”. Despite 200 years of oppression and more than 40 years of torture, we haven’t seen serious violence or major terrorist acts in Bahrain by dissidents.

Sexual abuse is a tool that has been used in Bahrain for a long time; most torturers aren’t Bahrainis, and therefore, feel no sympathy towards the tortured.

The below cases were documented prior to recent events, in the 80s, 90s, & 2000s; they illustrate how sexual abuse and assault are basics in Bahrain’s Security Forces’ manual:

1) In a British documentary about Ian Henderson, “Blind Eye to the Butcher”, a former Bahraini prisoner Hashem Redha who’s currently living in the UK, was interviewed. He was most probably imprisoned in the 80s and early 90s era; he was severely tortured and his nose was disfigured. He described how he was tortured with sticks and hoses, and that they sexually assaulted him by putting a pencil in his anus. He also described how Henderson, himself, was supervising those torture sessions, and in one instance, he personally put his finger in the prisoner’s anus, and asked if the prisoner had confessed yet.

2) Robert Fisk interviewed a prisoner who “claims that in the 1980s he was sexually abused in Henderson’s headquarters by another British officer who forced a bottle into his anus in an attempt to persuade him to reveal the names of Shia opponents of Sheikh Issa’s regime. The man identified the Briton by name”. Fisk said he “have confirmed that a British officer of the same name worked for Henderson at the time”.

3) In 1996, Robert Fisk interviewed Sayed Hisham al-Moussawi, an opposition figure in exile was imprisoned and tortured. He claimed “British officer – not Henderson or ”Brian” – was present during the ill-treatment. He named a Briton who worked with Henderson as responsible for his torture in 1983”. Moussawi: ”[He] wanted me to confess to political activities. They beat my wife up in front of me and then the Briton pushed a bottle up my anus.”

4) Said Al-Eskafi claimed his son Ali, who died under torture, was sexually abused.

5) In an interview, a Bahraini who spent many years in jail describes how he was tortured severely, and that once when he asked for water, a torturer told another to urinate in his mouth. They also threatened him that they would rape his mother and sister. He says many detainees were raped and conditions were way worse than AbuGhraib.

6) Another prisoner, Tawfiq Mahrous, also said one of his torturers urinated in his mouth. He describes how rape used to happen in front of prisoners. According to Mahrous, officer, Jama’a Nafe’e was specialized in rape and sexual assault, and these acts happened under his supervision. He also goes on to describe how they used to put their heads in toilets.

7) From a 2010 Human Rights Watch Report titled “Torture Redux, The Revival of Physical Coercion during Interrogations in Bahrain”:

“Isa Abdullah Isa told Human Rights Watch that an officer said to him, “If you don’t confess, I will bring your wife and let all the guards have her, I swear to God.” Isa heard the officer tell someone to “start the car” before saying to Isa that he was going to get Isa’s wife. Isa said he then falsely confessed to giving a gun to another individual.”

“Isa Abdullah Isa reported that while he was blindfolded in a room at Adliya, guards tied a plastic flexible handcuff around his penis and forced him to drink a bottle of water. Every 15 to 30 minutes, the guards forced him to drink more water and Isa began to feel a strong urge to urinate. He cried out, asking to use the toilet, but the guards refused. Isa said he considered urinating where he stood, but the flexicuff prevented him from doing so. Eventually, a guard removed the flexicuff, but Isa still was not permitted to use the bathroom. He urinated on himself.”

“Naji Ali Hassan Fateel reported that while being suspended with his hands above his head officers told him that he had to cooperate. Otherwise, one of the officers told Fateel, security forces would arrest Fateel’s wife and put her with a Pakistani guard who would rape her. The officer said that the Pakistani’s regular “job” was to rape boys.”

“On the day of his arrest, Yassin Ali Ahmad Mushaima was being questioned regarding pipe bombs. When Mushaima said he knew nothing about bombs, guards removed his clothing and threatened to rape him. They also said that they would rape his sister and mother. At CID headquarters in Adliya, an officer taunted Ahmad Jaffer Muhammad by saying that he was going to have sex with Muhammad. Muhammad, who was blindfolded at the time, told Human Rights Watch that the threat terrified him.”

“They ripped my pants and shirt, and tore off all my clothes,” al-Hamadi said. “They made me lie on my side on the floor. I was handcuffed and they held my legs down. An Egyptian was holding an electric device and he put it on my sexual parts. He put it on and off many times.”Al-Hamadi reported that the device was never placed on his body for more than a second or two.”

“When al-Shaikh, who was blindfolded, said that he knew nothing about a gun, the officers removed his clothes and pulled his legs apart. Then, al-Shaikh said, they inserted what he believes was a baton into his anus for a few seconds. One of the officers said, “If you want to pretend to be a real man, we’ll show you how to be a real man.”

8) Maitham AlSheikh, mentioned above, who was tried in 2009 for alleged possession of arms, accused security forces of sexually assaulting him, and said that the doctor report proved it. In an interview, he also described how they hanged him upside down naked and used sticks to sexually assault him repeatedly. His torturers also electrocuted his genitals. His torture sessions would last up to 7 hours.

9) Essa Al Sarh, in an interview to BCHR also said Bassam Al Me’eraj, an officer, threatened him that he’ll bring his wife and undress her in front of him, if he didn’t sign the confession; which he signed after the threat.

10) Hassan Abdulnabi was imprisoned along with his wife. His torturers also threatened him they would rape his wife if he didn’t confess.

11) From a BHCR report about torture and sexual abuse: “the most recent case was in Dec. 2006 when Mossa Abdali, a human rights activist was allegedly abducted and subjected to physical and sexual abuse. As a result of such atrocities, Mr Abdali was granted political asylum in the UK starting August 2007”

12) In 2008, Mohamed Alsingace, the head of the Committee to Combat High Prices and detainee, told his family that was beaten and sexually molested by two security officers, Moftah (Bahraini) and Parvis (Non-Bahraini) in front of Sergeant Adnan Bahar. Two other detainees, Mahmood Hassan Saleh and Mohemmed Makki Ahmed complained about sexual abuse.

13) In 2008 as well, a number of opposition activists were arrested:

Hamed Ebrahim Fardan : “..I was stripped naked in full. They kept playing with my “penis”, tied it with a rope and pulled it until I fainted. Because of that, I lost control of urination (involuntary urination) for more than a week.” “They threatened to bring my wife and assault her before my eyes.”

Hameed Adnan Omran, Jawad Hameed Adnan, Jawad Hameed Adnan, Sadiq Sayed Ibrahim Jumaa and Kumail Ahmad Ali Mahdi all claimed they were threatened with rape and sexual assault. Abdulla Juma Abdalla was threatened and sexually molested.

14) In 2010, BCHR blamed “Bahraini authorities for torturing Shia clerics and stripping several human rights defenders off their clothes in order to humiliate them. The human rights center also reported that some of the detainees, among them Shia clerics, were tortured, mutilated and sexually harassed and abused inside their cells.”

15) In 2010, 76 children have been detained, many were subjected to torture and sexual abuse. Their ages range from 10 to 17 year old. BCHR received a number of complaints on cases of child abductions by armed militias in civilian clothing. They are taken blindfolded to unknown centers where they are “tortured, severely beaten, and stripped naked” and “photographed” and “sexually harassed”. The incarceration could take from several hours to several days. Among the abducted, Ahmed Ibrahim (15 years), Ali Jaffer Aradi (15 years), Jasim Ahmed Habib (16 years), and Ali Ibrahim (17 years) who were all abducted on the 15th of last August from the village of Arad. “They were tortured and then dumped naked in the dawn of the next day at one of the country’s coasts”.

“The youngest child arrested is Jihad Aqeel AlSari (10 years), who was arrested on the eve of the Universal Children’s Day, November 19, 2010. This came after the family had received a call that Jihad was to go to the Police Ceter, which he refused to do fearing for his life. His family believes that the reason for his arrest is to put pressure on his father, the Shiite cleric Mr. Aqeel AlSari who is a detainee accused of participating in what is known as the “terrorism network”, especially after speaking before the Court on October 28th about how he was tortured in detention.”

16) Also, more on abductions by secret police: in August, 2010 armed militia in civilian clothing kidnapped Hakeem Al-Ashiri and Hussein Ali Dawood from Dair area and took them to an unknown location. “Their clothes were stripped off entirely, and were photographed nude and they were sexually harassed.”

On August 15^th, Ali Hasan Al-Sitri, a law student and an activist, was abducted, tortured, and photographed naked. He was later told by an interrogator that this was only a message, and that his family members will be raped if he continued his activism. He was imprisoned for 2 days.

In another incident, Ahmed Ali Hussein Abdullah was abducted, tortured, stripped naked, rubbed with oil, sexually assaulted, and photographed. He was told that his photos will be published on the internet. He was questioned about his relation with the opposition, and he was threatened with raping his family members as well.

“Torture combines complete humiliating exposure with utter devastating isolation. The final products and outcome of torture are a scarred and often shattered victim and an empty display of the fiction of power” Shirley Spitz

Source: https://arabunity2011.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/torture-part-3-bahrain%E2%80%99s-security-forces-a-history-of-sexual-sadism/

Filed Under: Censorship, Family, Health, Human Rights, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Police, Politics, Poverty, Prison, Privacy, Propaganda, Protests, Psychology, Rights, Surveillance, Torture, War, Whistleblowers

What Are The Five Most Prevalent Forms of Torture And Why?

November 14, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

In 2000, human rights group Amnesty International and African social sciences organization CODESRIA published a handbook for watchdog groups monitoring prisons where torture is suspected.

The guide offers insight into just what qualifies as cruel, inhuman and degrading (CID) treatment.

The book also mentions the most common forms of torture.

The guide cites among the most common torture methods as “beatings, imposition of electricshocks, hanging by the arms or legs,” mock executions and forms of sexual assault, especially rape [source: Amnesty International]. While four are physical — or black torture - mock executions are white torture (psychological) [source: Ceseraenu].

There is little distinction between black and white forms of torture; both are equally insidious. As the humanitarian group SPIRASI puts it, “Methods of physical and psychological torture are remarkably similar, such that one should not separate their effects from each other” [source: SPIRASI].

What follows are the five most prevalent forms of torture that prisoners throughout the world endure:

5: Beatings

One study of 69 refugees found that 97 percent of survivors reported being beaten at the hands of their captors [source: Olsen, et al]. “Beatings are universal, although implements may vary,” writes Vincent Lacopino in “The Medical Documentation of Torture” [source:Locapino]. Beating torture can be as simple as punching, slapping or kicking a victim. Beatings may come spontaneously, or in conjunction with other methods. Tibetans held in Chinese prisons in the 1980s and 1990s reported suffering combinations of torture, including beatings and electric shock [source: Government of Tibet in Exile]. Beatings may also be delivered via instruments like hoses, belts, bamboo shoots, batons and other blunt weapons.

There are some specific methods to this kind of torture, too. Thefalanga (or falanka, depending on where in the world you’re being tortured) method involves beating the soles of the feet. This type of torture can leave victims’ feet insensitive to touch and temperature. It can also result in “pain in [victims'] feet and lower legs and a compensated gait pattern, usually with severe pain during walking” [source: Prip and Perrson].

4: Electric Shocks

Electric shock torture methods haven’t been around as long as many other widely used methods — humans didn’t figure out how to harness electricity until the late 19th century. Once established, however, electricity soon came into use as a method of torture. “Americans didn’t just develop electric power,” writes torture expert Darius Rejali, “they invented the first electrotorture devices and used them in police stations fromArkansas to Seattle” [source:Boston Globe]. Electrical shocks can be delivered using stun guns, cattle prods and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) devices.

This type of torture can be as crude as introducing a current to a victim via a cattle prod or other device designed to deliver a shock attached to a car battery. Shocks are used as a torture method because they’re cheap and effective. One 22-year-old Chechen survivor recounts being tortured with electricity at the hands of Russian military personnel: “They gave me electric shock under my fingernails and under the nails of my little toes so later I had to have the nails removed from my fingers and toes” [source: Amnesty International Danish Medical Group]. What’s more, shocks leave behind little obvious physical trace of the agony they produce. One expert suggests, “Torturers favor electric torture because it leaves no marks other than small burns that, one can allege, were simply self-inflicted” [source: Rejali].

3: Sexual Assault

Rape is a common form of torture, especially during wartime. Rape of men, women and children has occurred during conflicts across the globe. In the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, Muslim Bosnian womenwere subjected to systematic rape at the hands of Serb soldiers. In the Congo, from 2000 to 2006 alone, more than 40,000 women and children were raped [source:The Guardian]. In Rwanda in the early 1990s, an estimated 25,000 women were raped. Soldiers reportedly told their victims that they were “allowed to live so that [they] will die of sadness” [source: The Guardian].

Both men and women may suffer sexual assault. Whether the assaulter uses his or her body to inflict harm or brandishes a device to penetrate the victim’s body, the act is constituted as rape. What’s more, experts believe estimates of the number of men who’ve endured rape torture are low: “Men tend to underreport experiences of sexual violence. They may have doubts about their sexuality and fear infertility, and both sexes commonly experience sexual difficulties following sexual violence and may need reassurance about sexual function” [source: Burnett and Peel].

While sexual assault is defined specifically, some experts assert that all torture is a form of rape because the victim’s body is violated.

2: Hanging by Limbs

During the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong employed a form of torture called “the ropes.” In “Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress: From the Holocaust to Vietnam,” the book’s authors describe this type of torture many Americanservicemen faced after capture, explaining, “Although there were many variations of this torture, it usually took the form of tying the elbows behind the back and tightening them until they touched or arching the back with a rope stretched from the feet to the throat” [source: Wilson, et al]. The tension created in the muscles by this extreme tightening -exacerbated by hanging victims from their limbs — can cause lasting nerve damage.

Dissident Turkish national Gulderen Baran was tortured by police when she was in her early 20s. In addition to other forms of torture, she was hung by her arms, both on a wooden cross and from her wrists bound behind her. Baran suffered long-term damage to her arms, losing strength and movement in one arm, and the other suffering total paralysis [source: Amnesty International].

1: Mock Executions

A mock execution is any situation in which a victim feels that his or her death — or the death of another person — is imminent or has taken place. It could be as hands-off as verbally threatening a detainee’s life, or as dramatic as blindfolding a victim, holding an unloaded gun to the back of his or her head and pulling the trigger. Any clear threat of impending death falls into the category of mock executions. Water boarding, the method of simulated drowning, is an example of mock execution.

The U.S. Army Field Manual expressly prohibits soldiers from staging mock executions [source: Levin]. But reports of some U.S. military members staging these executions have emerged from the Iraq War. In 2005, one Iraqi man questioned for stealing metal from an armory was tortured by being asked to choose one of his sons to die for his crime. When his son was taken around a building, out of the man’s sight, he was led to believe that the son had been executed when he heard gun shots fired. Two years earlier, two Army personnel were investigated for staging mock executions. In one circumstance, an Iraqi was taken to a remote area and made to dig his own grave, and soldiers pretended he would be shot [source: AP].

American military are certainly not the only group to violate international law regarding mock executions as torture. In 2007, 15 Britons were captured by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. After their second night, the prisoners were lined up facing a wall, blindfolded and bound. Behind them, the detainees heard guns cocked, followed by the clicks of firing hammers falling against nothing [source: Daily Mail].

Despite bans against them, mock executions continue to be used as a means of torture — perhaps because of their effectiveness in breaking a detainee’s will. The effects of such threats on the victim’s life are deep and lasting: The Center for Victims of Torture say torture victims who’ve undergone mock executions reported flashbacks, “feeling as if they’ve already died,” and said they begged their tormentors to kill them to avoid further constant threat [source: CVT].

Source: https://science.howstuffworks.com/five-forms-of-torture5.htm

Filed Under: Human Rights, Money, Politics, Prison, Propaganda, Protests, Psychology, Rights, Torture, War, Whistleblowers

11 Shocking Things You now Realize to be True - But would Not Have Believed 3 Years Ago

November 13, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

We are living through a time of Great Awakening.

The people of our world are beginning to open their eyes and realize the stunning depth of the scams and collusion taking place all around them. These scams that steal their wealth, poison them with chemicals, enslave them with financial trickery and control their minds with propaganda. These scams are the very fabric of modern government, the mainstream media, universities and so-called “science” institutions.

Here are 11 of those scams that you probably never would have believed just 2-3 years ago; but nowyou probably realize these are true!

Welcome to the real world, my friends. Now that we recognize the depth of the scams, let’s change things for the better . (Occupy America!)

#1 - Most of the honey you buy in the grocery store contains no actual honey whatsoever

It’s true, the so-called “honey” isn’t even technically honey. Most of it is made of cheap “mystery” sweeteners, illegally imported from China, right under the nose of the FDA.

#2 - The fluoride that’s dripped into municipal water supplies is actually a highly toxic industrial chemical byproduct

This scam is exploding in the faces of all the ignorant dentists and doctors who have been pushing this poison for years. Once again, they were wrong; the “conspiracy theorists” were right.

#3 - Flu vaccines often contain live flu viruses and actuallycausethe flu as a way to worsen the flu season and scare more people into buying vaccines

It’s also true with MMR vaccines, which cause the measles. Flu vaccines are the greatest medical hoax that has ever been perpetrated on the world:

#4 - Ron Paul is deliberately stripped out of mainstream news reports, online polls and debate coverage in order to “game the system” against him

The power elite don’t really want “fair and open” elections in America, you see. It’s all about rigging the system to make sure a globalist puppet gets elected instead of a Man of the People.

#5 - The United States government openly trafficks illegal guns into Mexico as a way to cause gun violence in the USA

It all seemed so very clever until they got caught, and now it just seems flatly criminal. So why can the federal government run illegal guns and nothing happens to them, but if you or I do it, we go to prison for a long, long time?

#6 - Prestigious U.S. hospitals are widely engaged in black market organ trafficking and organ transplants

And why not? It’s profitable, and they can claim they’re “saving lives!” Make no mistake: the organ transplant industry is steeped in dark, psychopathic criminal activity.

#7 - The child sex slave industry is huge, highly profitable, and found everywhere across America (and the world)

You wouldn’t have believed this, probably, until the whole Penn State scandal recently made headline news around the world. As everybody now knows, Penn State sports officials routinely raped young children, even pimping them out to other criminal rapists who paid big money to rape young boys. This went on for 15 years right inside a prestigious university, right here in America.

Are you shocked? You shouldn’t be. Alex Jones has been sounding the alarm about this fora decade. Nobody listened to him. They couldn’t believe it was real. People would rather bury their heads in the sand than face reality.

And yet, this Penn State scandal just scratches the surface. The far deeper horrifying truth of all this is that Child Protective Services routinely kidnaps young American children and sells them into sex slavery — so-called “white slavery.”

That story has not yet been covered by the mainstream media.

#8 - Commercial chickens are routinely fed arsenic, and commercial cows are routinely fed chicken poop

Oh, you didn’t know that? When you eat conventional beef, you’re eating meat from cows who created that meat by consuming chicken poop. Yumm! Can I have some more poop on that burger, please?

#9 - “Natural” foods and cereals are routinely made with genetically modified ingredients

Oh, you thought “natural” meant better than organic? Non-GMO? Stop getting suckered by the cereal companies and dishonest food conglomerates. Know what you’re really eating:

#10 - The global banking industry is a criminal racket that steals wealth from working class People and redistributes it to the global wealthy elite

You wouldn’t have believed this five years ago, but now, looking at your own bank account, the job you lost, the house you can’t sell and the health care you can’t afford, it’s all sinking in: The global financial system is an engineered con that suckers working-class people into giving up all their wealth, piece by piece, until they die bankrupt. Indentured servitude…

#11 - The U.S. government routinely conspires with pharmaceutical giants to conduct criminal, inhumane medical experiments on innocent people

Recent revelations about the U.S. government’s secret medical experiments in Guatemala are just the tip of the iceberg here. Dr. Jona Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, also ran unethical medical experiments on people. In fact, the entire history of modern medicine (pharmaceuticals, vaccines, chemotherapy and more) is something of a “house of horrors” of inhumane medical experiments on innocent victims.

What else is true?

Ever wonder what else might be true about our world that you never would have believed just a few years ago? Maybe it’s time you started reading books byJim Marrsor evenDavid Icke.

Now is a good time to start listening to the Robert Scott Bell Show on www.NaturalNewsRadio.com where you’ll also hear news from Patrick Timpone.

Perhaps it’s time we all started questioning history, medicine, corporate science, banking institutions and all governments. Discard your blinders.

Maybe it’s time we opened our eyes to reality and stopped lying to ourselves about the depth of corruption and evil in our world. And why would we do that? Because that’s the first step to positive revolution where we work together to createa better world… a world where such criminality and suffering is ancient history.

Accept reality, in other words… and then CHANGE it for the better.

Source: https://www.naturalnews.com/034126_awakening_beliefs.html#ixzz1dY05OCLk

Filed Under: Animal Rights, Banks, Biotechnology, Capitalism, Censorship, Consumerism, Corporations, Economy, Employment, Environment, Food, Health, Human Rights, Income Inequality, Law, Media, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Monsanto, Nuclear, Occupy, Oil, Personal Opinions/Rants, Police, Politics, Population, Poverty, Prison, Privacy, Propaganda, Protests, Psychology, Radiation, Revolution, Rights, Science, Surveillance, USA, Vaccines and Medicine, Whistleblowers

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11 Shocking Things You now Realize to be True - But would Not Have Believed 3 Years Ago

#1 - Most of the honey you buy in the grocery store contains no actual honey whatsoever

#2 - The fluoride that’s dripped into municipal water supplies is actually a highly toxic industrial chemical byproduct

#3 - Flu vaccines often contain live flu viruses and actuallycausethe flu as a way to worsen the flu season and scare more people into buying vaccines

#4 - Ron Paul is deliberately stripped out of mainstream news reports, online polls and debate coverage in order to “game the system” against him

#5 - The United States government openly trafficks illegal guns into Mexico as a way to cause gun violence in the USA

#6 - Prestigious U.S. hospitals are widely engaged in black market organ trafficking and organ transplants

#7 - The child sex slave industry is huge, highly profitable, and found everywhere across America (and the world)

#8 - Commercial chickens are routinely fed arsenic, and commercial cows are routinely fed chicken poop

#9 - “Natural” foods and cereals are routinely made with genetically modified ingredients

#10 - The global banking industry is a criminal racket that steals wealth from working class People and redistributes it to the global wealthy elite

#11 - The U.S. government routinely conspires with pharmaceutical giants to conduct criminal, inhumane medical experiments on innocent people

What else is true?

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