The CIA’s Phoenix Program
President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was part of the Catholic minority, populated his government and military with Catholics, fomenting widespread unrest among the country’s Buddhist majority. In this image taken June 11, 1963, Buddhist monk Quang Duc burns himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection to protest persecution of Buddhists. Source
This was one of the most brutal and corrupt series of events in American history, involving the most violent acts of torture and terrorism conducted on an unbelievably widespread scale against the innocent civilians of Vietnam. Like all such American programs in the third world, this was an organised program of genocide, one which the US government and media denied then, and continue to deny today in spite of volumes of documented proof. The objective of the Phoenix Program – and many similar since, conducted by the US military and the CIA – was to eliminate by destruction the entire social infrastructure of the Vietnamese resistance to American colonisation. This was accomplished by mass murder on an unprecedented scale, astonishing use of terror tactics against civilians, and one of the most brutal torture programs ever initiated in the history of the world. [1]
A man named Barton Osborne who was assigned to this CIA and military project at the time, wrote that “It was basically a psychological operation, and it was very well done. Americans have done it many times before. The theory is you don’t kill the leader, you kill his children, or his family. Basically, what you do is you destroy the chief’s family … when the guy [returns home], he sees this mess – you know, his wife beheaded, and her infant child stripped out of her abdomen, and beheaded and bleeding on her body, hung from a rafter, [excrement] all over the walls, those kind of things – that’s how you do it.So the whole operation loses its fighting will. And that’s basically “The American Way.”Osborn testified further before the US Congress, “I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died. Not a single suspect survived interrogation … and the majority were either tortured to death or thrown out of helicopters.”
Phoenix Program: CIA’s TERRIFYING Vietnam Mission
One American official who was an “advisor” in the Phoenix program stated, “It was common knowledge that when someone was picked up [to be ‘interrogated’] their lives were about at an end.” I won’t go into details of the inhumanities inflicted on the victims but one example of the ingenuity of Americans is worthy of note. Barton testified that the “interrogators” (There is always the pretense of an interrogation, suggesting questioning for vital military information. The pretense is always false.) would take a six-inch wooden dowel and pound it into a man’s ear and into his brain, then letting him wander around crazed, until he died.
“There are chilling accounts of direct CIA atrocities in South Vietnam, particularly in the Bien Hoa Mental Hospital in Saigon. It is reported that in 1966 Dr Lloyd H. Cutter and two other psychiatrists were sent with an electroshock machine provided by the Technical Services Division of the Office of Public Safety (OPS), to test whether certain depatterning exercises worked on the brain to alter human behavior. Utilizing the Phoenix ladder, Viet Cong prisoners were brought to the hospital and given excessive shock treatments. For one week straight, they were subjugated to 60 shock treatments every day. Not a single captive survived.“ [2]
US President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara shortly after the start of the Tet offensive. Photo: East News. Source
All the brutal inhumanities, and the very existence of the Phoenix Program itself, were vehemently denied by the authorities and the media until Barton’s testimony and the publication of several books on the program. Upon being forced to appear before the US Congress to testify, then CIA Director William Colby admitted the existence of Phoenix and the deaths of perhaps 20,000 Vietnamese civilians. The Vietnamese have a much higher number of confirmed deaths from this program, many official and apparently documented estimates ranging well over 250,000. American officials dismiss Vietnamese claims on the basis that “Vietnamese statistics are notoriously unreliable.” Barton had testified there were “quotas” of nearly 2,000 such torture deaths to be performed each month, for a program that lasted ten years or more, all under the watchful eye of Robert McNamara.
You can read the RAND Corporation’s version of their internally-conceived and created Phoenix Program that was designed for Vietnam, [3] with RAND telling us that “Phoenix made positive contributions to counterinsurgency in South Vietnam”. Even more usefully, RAND claims that “One of the major advantages of Phoenix was that it was a relatively low-cost program”. What more do you need to know about the RAND Corporation and the people who work for it?
Douglas Valentine wrote a book on this portion of US military atrocities in Vietnam, titled THE PHOENIX PROGRAM. Publiishers Weekly wrote, “No book to date conveys the hideousness of the Vietnam war as thoroughly as this one.” You can access and read it in pdf format here. [4]
There was of course the traditional and mandatory Congressional investigation that exposed the crimes then quickly buried the evidence and airbrushed the entire episode from public memory. The investigation stated “the Phoenix Program had been used by the CIA as “an instrument of mass political murder” to neutralize politicians and activists who opposed America’s puppet government in Vietnam.” After the Congressional investigations, various authors published books on the program, T.P. Wilkinson and Douglas Valentine for two, but the media refused to publish reviews of these and other books, bitterly attacking the authors and their sanity. A common tactic was to claim the authors were suffering from “serious psychological scars” from their wartime experience and were therefore not credible witnesses. Most wrote that the object of the program was to identify and terrorise every supporter of Vietnam and every opponent of the American presence in Vietnam, and that “What followed was murder and torture … on a grand scale. Untold thousands died and were tortured.”
CIA Kubark Manual of Interrogation
In fact, the Phoenix Program was following prior CIA experience in the destruction of nations, and became a template the US would use in many other nations, post-Vietnam, in Nicaragua, Iraq, Libya, most of Central and South America, as well as Africa and Asia. This is what the Israelis do in Palestine against the Arabs, and was what the Americans did when they spawned the massive genocidal massacre in Indonesia. It is worthy of note that a Director of the new US Department of Homeland Security was a major officer in the Phoenix Program, with many citizens concerned the same tactics will essentially be utilised to dispel dissention within the US. Valentine wrote of the “insidious” infiltration of these methods into the militarisation of the US police and their new “methods of population control and suppression of dissent“. One author wrote that “It is no accident that the torture methods [Barton] documented [in Vietnam] are strikingly similar to those revealed in the December 2014 Senate torture report [for Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib], since Vietnam was the first testing ground for “a new paradigm in the practice of torture developed by the CIA”.” He stated further the CIA “had launched a multi-billion-dollar research program” on the methods for such programs. It should be noted too that the CIA had prepared, from its extensive experience, a 1,000-page torture manual which it not only applied as a template around the world, but used as the prime teaching material in the curriculum at its famous “torture university”, the School of the Americas, and which it shared with all the 50 dictators the US installed around the world.
A South Vietnamese woman mourns over the body of her husband, found with 47 others in a mass grave near Hue, April, 1969. (AP Photo/Horst Faas)
The “targets” of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam were civilians, not soldiers, as has been true for US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq and so many other nations. The local population who rebel against American oppression and terror are invariably categorised as “terrorists” to be hunted down and killed. This was precisely Obama’s policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with his use of drone aircraft, targeting and killing members of the domestic population who object to the American presence in their country. One former US military official wrote that the US was a country “where all common decency” has disappeared. An American author, William Shirer, wrote in 1973, at the time of the intense and inhuman conflict in Vietnam, “Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished — only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina.”
Operation Paperclip – The Fourth Wave
Human Experimentation, Torture and Terrorism
Masaji Kitano, the second commander of the Japanese Army Unit 731, wrote the confessions on the human experiments and bacterial warfare conducted by Unit 731 in China to investigators of Fort Detrick of the U.S. Army, after he was extradited to Japan by the United States in 1946, according to Jin Chengmin, curator of the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by the Japanese Army Unit 731. Source
This is part of what some choose to call “the great scientific exodus” to America during and after World War II, but this exodus was not quite according to the myth created for the gullible American public. After the war, the US government transplanted in total probably about 10,000 German and Japanese scientists to the US, many for their industrial and scientific knowledge, but in this portion of Paperclip virtually all immigrants were war criminals fleeing certain prosecution and possibly death for their crimes. Many were too prominent to be placed in American society and so were given new identities and hidden in the US military where they would attract less public attention, only to be released as memories faded. One of the more famous was Werner von Braun who created the American missile and space technology, but there were many more with their skills in military matters, in obscene human experiments, in torture, biological warfare and much more, all treasured immigrants for the US military machine. The sum of their “contributions” to American society and world unrest can only be guessed at.
From Nazi General
to CIA Spy
I have discussed the portions of Operation Paperclip that related to the theft of German corporations, property, assets, inventions, patents and IP. I will deal here with the remainder of these waves of immigration / forcible transfers from Germany and Japan to the US, which also fall under the Paperclip umbrella. These involved not secrets of military or commercial benefit but those related to politics, espionage and the dark side of terrorism, torture and world domination. One portion involved the Americans’ determination to build a European espionage and black ops network to contain Russia and obtain political control of Western Europe. It included the recruitment of a vast espionage network, led by a man named Reinhard Gehlen, that included a substantial ‘black ops’ capacity with a specialty in attracting and training domestic terrorists. Operation Gladio, which produced decades of US-sponsored terrorism in Europe, was a direct result of this portion of Paperclip.
The other even more sinister and deadly category was the Americans’ pathological interest in interrogation and torture, in chemical and biological warfare, and in human experimentation, which led to the importation of thousands of individuals from both Germany and Japan, specifically for the purpose of transferring to American minds the world’s collection of documented perversion in these areas. For many decades, these imported ‘experts’ served their American masters on secret projects at Fort Bragg and Fort Detrick. As one author noted, “The US military was not slow to apply much of this knowledge, using their newly-gained experience in biological weaponry against civilians in Greece, Korea and Viet Nam.” These programs never stopped. They briefly reared their heads in public during Korea and Vietnam, during the exposure of the US military’s so-called “University of the Americas”, and yet again during the Iraq war and in the torture prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. It is worth noting that much of this “research” occurred while George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA. And so another direct result of Paperclip was the CIA’s vast MK-Ultra program that included brainwashing, torture, with a terrible litany of human abuse that endures to this day.
Josephe Mengele and son in S. Paulo, Brazil. Source
Many historical commentaries tell us that some Nazi war criminals, such as the German physician Josef Mengele, escaped to South America after the war, but that was never true. Mengele and others in this category were imported to the US during Operation Paperclip to perform the same kind of medical research in America they had performed in Germany and Japan. In the case of Mengele, it was only due to the discovery and revelation of his real identity that he became a political liability to the US government who then transferred him to Brazil and financed him in several business endeavors. The story of Mengele (and others) escaping from Germany to South America is a total fiction that was fabricated by the Americans as a plausible cover story to hide their actions.
Operation Paperclip was as massive a logistical enterprise as that of any major war campaign, involving enormous pre-planning and coordination that included literally dozens of government agencies and departments, ancillary groups like the Library of Congress, hundreds of US corporations and countless thousands of individuals. Today this operation is generally identified as a post-war immigration/transfer to the US of German scientists and technicians, primarily those with useful commercial and military knowledge and skills, but it began in a different place and expanded far beyond this limited historical version. As in virtually every other area, American history has been revised, rewritten, deleted and sanitised to prevent the truth from escaping into the world at large.
As a result of Operation Paperclip, The US Army’s Chemical Corps at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and its Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick were staffed with an abundance of highly qualified personnel, their so-called “Medical Research Laboratories” containing hundreds of foreign Ph.D.s and MDs, but also including many more hundreds of scientific and professional personnel drawn from leading American universities like Harvard Medical College, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton, Cambridge, Duke, Columbia, Cornell, and Stanford. As noted elsewhere, the CDC was also active in this area, having received many of the imported scientists from both Germany and Japan. The military not only seconded these people to its staff but employed thousands more who performed their research with military or CIA funding while remaining in the private sector at various universities, hospitals and private research firms. In many cases, the military had initiated secret contracts with mental institutions and psychiatric clinics to perform a wide variety of clandestine experiments on patients that involved drug testing as well as exposure to biological pathogens, all with the intent of devising weapons for the military that could be deployed on mass populations and with more limited application for use by the CIA that could be targeted at individuals to cause disability or death. From this enormous catalogue of interests there arose a kind of formal relationship between the CIA, Edgewood, and Fort Detrick’s SOD that was originally given the name of Project MK/NAOMI, initially focused on the development and deployment of biological weapons but that saw some major portions spun off to focus on other specific interests – the main one being human programming and mind control.
US President Harry Truman agreed in late 1946 to authorise Operation Paperclip as “a program to bring selected German scientists to work on America’s behalf during the Cold War”, but he specified that the program exclude war criminals or those considered as security risks. The US military, the CIA, the Departments of State and Commerce, all simply ignored Truman’s instructions. They deleted incriminating files, produced forged documents and references, and simply lied, to bring these individuals into the US. It was in fact a conspiracy by the US military and the Departments of State and Commerce to ignore Presidential directives and bypass multiple American laws to achieve objectives decided entirely by the puppet-masters of the deep state (more about which later), and without the knowledge of the nation’s elected government.
Blowback_ America’s Recruitment – Christopher Simpson
In a great many cases, these “imports” were effectively ‘hired into’ the US military and hidden on domestic military bases to avoid public scrutiny and government oversight. These people resurrected a long list of murderers, gangsters, war criminals as good Christian soldiers and famous Americans. Werner von Braun was one, even becoming a national hero and Walt Disney celebrity, but there were many thousands of others. All of this information has been deleted from the official narrative and no longer exist as part of the historical record. The stories still exist as what are essentially popular historical novels which fade from attention over time, with the knowledge being lost. In 1988, Christopher Simpson wrote a book titled, “Blowback, America’s recruitment of Nazis”, in which he noted that:
“… the existence of U.S. operations employing ex-Nazis has remained a carefully kept secret in the West. There has been a certain convergence of powerful interests, rather than the great conspiracy that some critics have alleged, that has kept this story buried. The American government, for example, has not been inclined to publicize the men and women involved in sensitive “national security” missions. Many U.S. documents concerning these programs have been systematically purged from the files and destroyed, and the majority of the records that remain are still classified above “secret.” Most of the men who put together the U.S. program-including the CIA’s former chief of clandestine operations Frank Wisner and his boss, CIA Director Allen Dulles-are dead. Most of those who are still alive refuse to talk.”
Simpson also wrote of the most dangerous wave of German and other European immigrants, the large-scale programs that brought many thousands of individuals to the US as rewards for participating in US-sponsored ‘black ops‘ in Europe and also to train others in these skills to be utilised against the USSR. Simpson noted that the CIA secretly financed many European Right-Wing Fascist organisations that were clearly extremist in ideology, and spent millions of dollars within the US in “advertising and staged media events”, presenting these people as simple European “refugees and freedom fighters” deserving American support. This was not a small program; there were tens of thousands of these individuals imported to the US, virtually all experienced right-wing political activists with serious criminal intent and, as Simpson noted, “blessed with the patronage of the CIA”
More Background
A page from WikiLeaks’ website in 2012.
When Wikileaks released their enormous volume of top-secret information on the US government’s worldwide network of torture prisons and prison ships, the world seemed surprised to learn of the US complicity in torture. But in fact, the US has been actively engaged in torture since at least 1900, and carried out extensive waterboarding against the Philippino population as part of its “civilian pacification program” and colonisation of the Philippines during the Spanish-American war. After the Second World War, the US not only imported hordes of military scientists from defeated Europe, but also imported and protected as many as 10,000 condemned war criminals, those skilled in the most inhumane methods of human experimentation, “enhanced interrogation” and torture.
The Americans were especially pleased to have Shiro Ishii who was the head of Japan’s notorious Unit 731 Program and who, according to the US Justice Department “conducted inhumane and frequently lethal pseudo-medical experiments on thousands of captured prisoners and civilians, including live dissections”. While European agencies were hunting down these war criminals for arrest, the US government was smuggling them into America, unpunished, desperate to acquire their accumulated knowledge. Almost all of these men would have faced the gallows at the trials in Nuremburg if the Americans had not intervened, given them amnesty and transported them to the US.
When the US overthrew the government in Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, they also designed and installed his dreaded Savak Secret Police, which was especially famous for torture. According to researchers, not only did the US design this secret police and torture regime, they actually managed it on a daily basis, down to the selection and running of agents. I would note that there were persistent rumors at the time that Jews from Israel, likely from the Mossad, were present in at least an “advisory” capacity in the torture practices in Iran. And there were persistent questions as to who was actually responsible for the “design” of this extensive torture program.
Human Resource Exploitation Manual-CIA
At around the same time, the CIA in the Philippines and Indonesia spent ten years developing a massive 1000-page torture manual based on live experimentation that was subsequently distributed for decades to all their dictator-puppets in Central and South America. It was until at least well into the 1980s that the US was still distributing this euphemistically-titled “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983”, teaching its dictators all the fine points of torturing their own people.
And it was in Central and South America that the CIA participated so actively in the training of torture methods. In the Chapter titled ‘The Dark Side’, you will read of the US’ infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, that was created in 1946 – 78 years ago – as the world’s only torture university, using the most sophisticated and up-to-date techniques by the US Army’s best instructors. Its purpose was to train Latin American and other military officers and soldiers all the fine points of “enhanced interrogation” techniques, torture and other means of civilian repression, so the US could export this savage brutality to its military colonies in Latin America. For many decades, the US actively taught, and supported, torture as a means of civilian population control, including the numerous CIA-sponsored “death squads” in Central America. None of this is a secret any longer. This so-called school, which has “graduated” more than 60,000 so-called “students”, was kept a dark secret until intense pressure in 1996 forced the Pentagon to release the school’s training manuals which were discovered to advocate and instruct on torture methods among a great deal of other civilian violence.
In an interesting May, 2009 article in the Los Angeles Times, the authors stated, “The US has had a 45-year history of torture. The difference between American involvement in South American atrocities in 1964 and ‘enhanced interrogation’ now is that modern-day US officials appear proud of themselves. This was our greatest moment. We detained suspected terrorists indefinitely without charges (many of whom were innocent), without lawyers, without a hearing. We tortured many and sent many to foreign venues where greater torture could be inflicted. We gave military trials to 3 of the more than 700 we imprisoned. Of those tried before military courts, two are free, one remains in prison. We broke the Guinness World Record for the number of times we waterboarded one suspect.”
It is not generally known, but Taiwan is among the locations in Asia where the US spread its torture regime. When the US decided to abandon China and Mao after the Second World War, and to throw its lot in with Chiang Kai-Shek, American torture methods were taught and implemented in Taiwan as well. According to one American author: “At the time, I was researching a book on the United States’ role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Tom Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator’s files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture.“ He tells us the stories came not only from Iran, Greece and the Americas, but also from Taiwan.
By the early 1960s, the CIA had collected and absorbed the results from its MK-ULTRA psychological research and other programs into what became known as the KUBARK counterintelligence Interrogation handbook, which formed a scientific basis for their interrogation methods. CIA instructors regularly taught US military personnel about the use of interrogation techniques like hooding of prisoners for sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, nakedness, humiliation, etc. Even today, many of the torture techniques developed in the MK-ULTRA studies and other programs are being used at US military and CIA prisons such as Guantanamo Bay and Baghram.
When some of this information became public during US Congressional hearings, the major US news media mainly focused on sensational stories related to LSD, “mind-control”, and “brainwashing”, seldom using the word “torture”. But this wasn’t simple brainwashing; these morally-deformed CIA researchers had conducted countless torture and medical experiments in major American universities, and had tortured, raped, and psychologically abused many thousands of people including young children, killing a great many in the process and driving many others permanently insane. The CIA enlisted medical professionals to gather and collect data on their torture practices in order to scientifically refine their techniques and, according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights, “to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies”. These physicians were also used to help judge the emotional and physical impact of the techniques so as to “calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation”.
Of course, the CIA did their best to deny the allegations, claiming they never performed any experiments on anybody, and they managed to destroy most of the records of their activities rather than be forced to submit them to the authorities. But their activities continue as before, and with constant new refinements. In August 2010, American weapons manufacturer Raytheon announced that it had partnered with a California prison where it used prisoners as test subjects for a new non-lethal weapon system that “fires an invisible heat beam capable of causing unbearable pain.” The Military Commissions Act of 2006 legalised many of these methods of torture for use by the CIA in their secret prisons, with the result that “Torture is now solidly installed in America’s repressive arsenal, not in the shadows where it has always lurked, but up front and central, vigorously applauded by prominent politicians.”
US President George Bush: “We do not torture”.
Recently, almost 2,000 photos that were taken at the torture prison at Abu Ghraib, and that have remained classified top-secret and never released to the public, were shown to a small group of US politicians. The Senators who viewed these photos have described them as “gut-wrenching”, photos of soldiers raping female prisoners and young boys, some depicting prisoners beaten to death, and many gross acts of sadism. In one set of photos, a prisoner’s legs were beaten so severely with iron bars that they were simply masses of fleshy pulp and would have to be amputated. After the private circulation of these photos, US President George Bush famously stated in a press conference, “We do not torture”.
His next act was to pressure the US Congress to exempt the CIA from all restrictions regarding “torture cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of prisoners in US custody, and stated that unless Congress agreed to the exemption, his White House would veto the legislation. This process, created under Bush and continued and enhanced under Obama, transforms the US President from an executive of the nation’s laws to a dictator with the power to over-ride any national or international law on a whim. Both men assert that “Whatever the President does, is legal”. Nothing else to say.
A report produced a few years ago by an international team of medical and other professionals detailed the active participation of American medical staff in the military’s massive torture programs. The report stated that US physicians helped design, enable and participated in “torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of illegal prisoners. Doctors were directed to monitor the CIA’s interrogation techniques in an effort to improve their effectiveness, which practice amounts to “unlawful experimentation” as defined by international law. The CIA and Pentagon of course rejected the report’s findings, claiming that the medical staff in the torture prisons were “consummate professionals” who “routinely provide not only better medical care than any of these detainees have ever known, but care on par with the very best of the global medical profession”.
Americans began to revise their attitudes toward torture in 1977 when the London Sunday Times published a major exposé of the torture of Palestinians by the Jewish military and Israel’s agency, Shin Bet. [5]
Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Torture. Source
Given the depth of the Jewish lobby in the US and the number of Israeli supporters in the US Congress and the Jewish-controlled media, US government apologists for Israel suddenly began arguing that techniques like sensory deprivation, prolonged stress positions while hooded, incarceration in “cells” the size of packing crates, somehow weren’t really torture, or were morally justifiable under the “ticking time bomb” theory. It is worth noting the persistent reports of Jewish interrogators from Israel being present in the US prisons and torture facilities in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. To add fuel to this fire, the deranged Jewish Harvard Law Professor began recommending the idea of what he called “torture warrants”, which were court-issued permissions to torture prisoners for information. In his words, people would be “subjected to judicially-monitored physical measures designed to cause excruciating pain without leaving any lasting damage.” One of his recommendations was the insertion of needles under the fingernails. [6] [7]
During his term as US President, George Bush denied these practices in spite of the overwhelming photographic and other evidence, but all members of the US administration now freely admit their complicity in these ongoing practices. One author wrote that “Perhaps Bush’s most important legacy is his embrace of torture”, and one could today make the same claim about Obama’s White House, the State Department and the entire US Congress. American civilians as well have accepted and embraced their government’s torture regime to the extent that additional revelations on the subject no longer appear anywhere in the news.
Almost as unforgiveable as the torture practices themselves are the callous hypocrisy and the bold dishonesty displayed by the US administration. In one of his first speeches after his election as President, Obama declared to a joint session of Congress, “I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture. We can make that commitment here tonight”. But those words had hardly left his mouth when he sent his Justice Department lawyers on a tour to explain to American judges that his administration would continue the same torture regime initiated by George Bush. The judges were further instructed that any “captives” seized by any branch of the US government and “rendered” to secret prisons to be tortured, had no standing in US courts and that the regime had no legal obligation to permit these people a defense, nor even to admit any of its actions to any US court. Obama was declaring that his administration was in fact above all US and international law. To further seal this commitment, Obama then signed into law a provision prohibiting any captives or torture victims from being brought to the US for trial, as a means of escaping requirements for legal charges and evidence against these so-called enemies, and also as a way to avoid facing evidence of their torture. Obama was adamant that these arbitrarily-designated “enemy combatants”, most of whom were illegally kidnapped, and virtually all of whom were innocent of any crimes, would have absolutely no standing or legal protection anywhere in the world. This is the country that CIA perception managers and the Zionist media present as the defender of freedoms, human rights and the rule of law.
Black Sites and Floating Prisons
Countries known to have participated in the CIA‘s Detention and Interrogation Program, according to the 2013 Open Society Foundations‘ report on torture. The map includes countries that hosted CIA-run black sites, allowed for or aided the illicit kidnapping of terrorism suspects, and/or detained and interrogated suspects in their own facilities in coordination with the CIA.[1][2] Source
After the events of 9-11, the US military and the CIA embarked on a massive program of torture, creating in the process the largest network of torture prisons and facilities in the history of the world. Most of these have never fully come into the light. The world knows about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the latter having been closed due to the unfavorable publicity but in fact simply transported to a much larger prison at Baghram that holds a reported 50,000 prisoners and torture candidates. The UK Independent reported that there were in total 54 countries involved in the CIA’s “programme” of rendition. “Programme”, indeed, and a very extensive one, but with the loss of records and the circling of the wagons by the White House, most of the truth about American torture practices will likely never be known. But it is recorded that many tens of thousands of civilians in more than a dozen nations were arbitrarily arrested and tortured. A great many of these, certainly hundreds and perhaps many thousands from Iraq and Afghanistan alone, were tortured to their deaths, but the casualty totals are lost. Most of these people have been removed to third countries outside the apparent jurisdiction of US law and courts, without charges being brought, and with no rights whatever. They have no right to face legal charges, to a hearing or a trial, no right to representation, nor even to confirmation of their current existence. They have simply been ‘disappeared’ without notification of any kind to their families or anyone else. For all purposes, they no longer exist. This is especially true of the inmates incarcerated onboard the American prison ships, which appear to be a subject forbidden to the US media.
The true picture is frightening. The US military, the CIA and Israel’s Mossad, have established these centers in foreign nations where they have full effective immunity and operate without oversight of either their own or local governments and with a total news blackout so no one outside the area can have knowledge of their activities. In countries like Iraq and Libya, which are today under the absolute control of the US military they have, by laws they themselves wrote, a total exemption from all domestic law, while simultaneously claiming no subjection to US law by virtue of their being in a foreign country. Further, all international law is considered irrelevant and thus simply ignored. It is similar with the US military bases and the so-called scientific or health research facilities constructed in so many remote locations in the world, the US installation in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean being a prime example. In every case, the US browbeats the local government to agreeing that Americans are not subject in any way to the domestic laws of that country, and in all these locations, nobody, especially including the elected representatives of the US government, have any knowledge or hope of knowledge of what actually transpires. This is a major world power acting with total lawlessness and in total secrecy while committing what are assuredly some of the most reprehensible crimes against humans. Since the Zionist world media are all on the same page, the news blackout is total. Perhaps the biggest lie is that these unknown tens of thousands of unfortunate humans are being held for interrogation, when that claim clearly defies all logic and common sense. These establishments are in no way interrogation centers but torture facilities.
New York prison ship. Source
In 2008 the UK Guardian published a series of articles detailing results of their investigations on American torture prisons, and documenting that the US was indeed operating secret torture prisons in foreign countries outside of US and international jurisdiction, and also a series of prison ships used for the same purposes. The Guardian claimed this information emerged through a number of sources, including “statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners”. The Guardian reported that in 2005 a UN representative spoke of “very, very serious” allegations that the US was secretly detaining terrorism suspects in various locations around the world, notably on vessels in the Indian Ocean, and stated that “US authorities have not denied that ships have been used to incarcerate detainees”, and have in other circumstances admitted that specifically the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu were used as prison ships.
A US navy spokesman, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, said a few people may have been put on ships “for a few days” but, according to the Guardian, declined to discuss reports of US naval vessels being used as floating prisons and refused all comment on Diego Garcia. Other US officials have not been so reticent. The Guardian reported that in 2004, US Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, spokesman for the US joint chiefs of staff, was questioned on prison ships, specifically the USS Peleliu, and replied: “I don’t know the specifics. Central command determines for either medical considerations, for the protection of those individuals, for the isolation in the sense of not having forces that would try to come get somebody out of a detention center, for a security aspect, and obviously an interest to continue interrogation.” It was also reported that retired General Barry McCaffrey, a professor of international security studies at the West Point Military College, publicly claimed on two separate occasions the US was holding some thousands of people at locations that included Diego Garcia. And President George Bush himself admitted in September 2006 that the CIA operated a secret network of “black sites” in which terrorist suspects were held and subjected to torture, which detention facilities have proven to include those in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, Djibouti, Guantánamo Bay, Diego Garcia, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.
From the Guardian article: “Ben Griffin, a former SAS soldier, said that individuals detained by SAS troops in a joint UK-US special forces taskforce had ended up in interrogation centers in Iraq, including Guantánamo Bay. “These secretive prisons are part of a global network in which individuals face torture and are held indefinitely without charge. All of this is in direct contravention of the Geneva conventions, international law and the UN convention against torture.” The article went on to state that immediately after Griffin’s statements, “the UK Ministry of Defense obtained a high court injunction preventing him from making any further allegations.”
An analysis of the floating prison ships was published by the human rights organisation Reprieve, who claimed that according to their research the US had used as many as 17 ships as floating prisons. According to the Guardian, Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, said: “They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers.” He added that by its own admission, the US government was at that time detaining at least 26,000 people in these secret prisons, and that “information suggests up to 80,000 have been ‘through the system'”, all without charges or trial, without access to attorneys or any kind of defense, and with absolutely no rights whatever. These people have simply been ‘disappeared’ and will likely never be heard from again. Reprieve says the US has used as many as 17 US naval vessels as floating prisons, 15 of them operating around Diego Garcia, including the following: (USS) Bataan, Ashland, Peleliu, (USNS) Stockham, Watson, Watkins, Sister, Charlton, Pomeroy, Red Cloud, Soderman, Dahl, MV PFC William B Baugh, Alex Bonnyman, Franklin J Phillips, Louis J Huage Jr, and James Anderson Jr.
In addition, the US built a top-secret “Black Site” buried in the jungles in Indonesia that they refer to as a “Peace Medicine Facility” which is most likely a set of medical labs for testing biological pathogens on unwilling victims. Just as the Americans were obscenely eager to get to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the H-Bombs were dropped, to ‘examine and catalog’ the results of their new monstrosity, so the US is still obscenely eager to test, examine and catalog the results of their new barbarities. Most of these people have been removed to third countries outside the apparent jurisdiction of US law and courts, without charges being brought, and with no rights whatever. They have no right to face legal charges, to a hearing or a trial, no right to representation, nor even to confirmation of their current existence. They have simply been ‘disappeared’ without notification of any kind to their families or anyone else. For all purposes, they no longer exist. No nation in history has so consistently, for so many decades, and with such deliberate planning and intent, organised such a widespread torture regime as the US has done. It has spanned more than 100 years and involved countless dozens of countries and facilities. No one comes close to matching that record on such a worldwide basis.
Diego Garcia is located in the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Archipelago, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest continent. Source
The situation of Diego Garcia was particularly troubling, given its isolation and the persistent reports of “black operations” military activity existing there. Diego Garcia is a small coral atoll in the Indian Ocean which once belonged to Mauritius but was severed by the British government in the 1960s and taken as a military outpost to be used by the US. The several thousand inhabitants were forcibly removed to other locations. Documented proof was obtained that the CIA used this island as a transit point for its aircraft while transporting kidnapped prisoners to various torture facilities around the globe. The island now contains a massive military base stupidly named “Camp Justice”, 4,000-meter runways, the highest level of radar and other electronic facilities, and apparently a large and secret prison. About 4,000 Americans are employed at this base, and no one is permitted entry under pain of death. Aircraft or surface vessels will be destroyed if approaching too closely. One news article stated that “Pentagon officials have denied the existence of a CIA interrogation center on the island and the CIA has refused to respond to inquiries about its alleged existence”. However, a series of articles in the Washington Post did provide some information. Both the US and the UK have steadfastly denied any criminality at Diego Garcia, though both governments were forced to admit they had lied about its use for “renditions”. The Washington Post stated that “Manfred Novak, the UN’s special investigator on torture, has said he has credible evidence from sources he cannot reveal that detainees were held on Diego Garcia”, and there have been many leaked press reports of a large CIA interrogation center there, very far away from prying eyes. Diego Garcia is on the world’s radar for another reason, the fact that this atoll is by far the most likely resting place of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Torture Revisited
A 14th century depiction of witches being tortured and burned alive.From the 12th to the 15th centuries, in particular, increasingly sadistic methods of torture arose, driven by a desire to either extract confessions from victims or to enforce punishment on them. Source
William Blum began an article on American Exceptionalism and American Torture with this quote from US President Obama: “One of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past, face our imperfections, make changes and do better”. Indeed, this is a fervent belief of most Americans, that their various freedoms, including speech and press, combined with their intrinsic high moral standards, do result in their openly facing and debating their transgressions, and ‘fixing’ things. This is a claim that requires examination based on reality, on ‘the facts on the ground’, rather than with the standard tools of jingoism and myth. Let’s look at America’s torture history and specifically on activities related to the recent Senate report on the US’ torture regime since 2001.
The Boston Globe published an article by Stephen Kinzer who wrote in part: “Release of the long-delayed US Senate report on CIA abuses should make Americans proud …”, stating it is “reasonable” for Americans to be proud when reading this torture report since security forces in other countries abuse people and lie about it, but it is only America that publishes reports of its crimes.” And when details of abuses are published, they become hard to deny. This defective genius then tells us that the Senate report will “serve as an example to other countries wrestling with the challenges of facing their past”, and that admitting their wrongdoing “is a sign of strength and maturity”. He tells us, “It is better to come clean than to leave questions of responsibility hanging forever”. As you will soon see, it is only Americans, in their vast delusion of ‘goodness’, who are so able to convert a vice to a virtue, shame and repugnance suddenly transforming into rationalisation and self-adoration. “Yes, we were bad, but because we admit we were bad, that makes us good again. And most especially it makes us even better than, and morally superior to, other nations who don’t admit they were bad. And this moral superiority absolves us from all our sins and our god smiles on us once again.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to our Mr. Kinzer that he should maybe forget about setting an example to other countries “wrestling with the challenges of facing their past” and focus on facing his own nation’s past.
In December of 2014, the US Senate finally completed and released a summary of a Congressional report on America’s torture regime, dealing only with the activities of the CIA in only two torture prison facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan. The report provided substantial evidence that the CIA had engaged in savage and inhumane activities for years, with the most unimaginable physical and mental damage being inflicted on completely innocent civilians, to the extent that in some cases CIA officers actually watching the torture experienced such anguish they choked up with tears and requested to be transferred out of the facility. Further, the report produced massive evidence that the CIA, the White House and the cabinet had consistently lied at all levels about the existence of the extensive torture programs. It was almost surreal to see the huge flurry of apparent shock and surprise emanating from US Senators and Congressmen and from the US media itself. Human rights organisations were suddenly screaming for punishments to be levied against those responsible, and the United Nations itself demanded that all those responsible “must be charged” and held accountable for this vast litany of crimes. Media pundits were reacting in horror, and whining about the “damage” to America’s worldwide reputation – as if that were the only important consideration.
But where have these people been for the past 100 years? The US has always been engaged in torture on a grand scale. You have read the story of Frank Olson, a CIA biological research employee who was killed by the CIA for fear he would go public with information on the agency’s torture programs and its use of biological weapons. That was in 1953, more than 60 years ago, when Olson found himself unable to stomach what he called “terminal interrogations”, in which the CIA tormented captured foreign spies, CIA agents of questionable loyalty, and various ‘disposable people’ until they died. It was a common practice, often performed with the willing participation of the UK’s MI6. This was all public knowledge, and only one small part of the long list of inhuman activity conducted for many decades by the CIA, to say nothing of the many tens of thousands of Latin American dictators and assorted thugs who were taught these methods in the School of the Americas and assisted in perpetrating their American-inspired atrocities for almost 40 years throughout Central and South America. How can anyone be surprised to learn a few more details of yet one more American torture program? Where has Amnesty International been for most of its life? Why would the United Nations suddenly get religion and demand that criminal charges be laid for these crimes after almost fifteen years? Why didn’t the UN demand the closing of America’s torture university, and why doesn’t it make that demand today?
The CIA records that were examined, clearly stated that all that torture of all those individuals for all those years, produced nothing useful, yet they continued. The important point is that this was not a matter of harsh interrogations executed on a few occasions per prisoner but in continuing sessions of brutal torture on the same individuals for months and years, knowing that it would be unproductive and useless in terms of gathering information. The question then is why they would continue, the only possible conclusion being that extraction of information was never an intended result of the process, which leaves us with the frightening judgment that they did it because they enjoyed it. The supporting documents for the CIA’s MK-ULTRA and other programs stretching back 60 or 70 years have made it abundantly clear that these malignant maggots infesting the US military and intelligence agencies were “doing research” on destroying minds, on determining levels of pain and suffering that could entirely collapse a person’s psyche to the point where they were incapable of functioning as humans. Thanks to both the CIA and the British intelligence agencies, there were also vast programs of mental and psychological torture. One army psychiatrist who worked in a torture center said they learned psychological torture techniques that were “destined to destructure the personality of the prisoners without touching them”. They were never performing ‘interrogations’. They wanted to know how much physical pain and mental and emotional suffering a human being could endure, and what would be the psychological effects of that suffering.
US Torture Prisons in Iraq and the US Congress Hearings
In a report in the American Conservative on December 15, 2014, Philip Giraldi made the points that while the Senate report on the CIA’s kidnapping and torture programs were blunt in their language and stated flatly that the treatment of prisoners was more brutal than anyone had been led to believe, they also stated that no useful information had been obtained. He also stated that the authorities’ ‘rebuttals’ totally ignored the ethical and legal implications by steadfastly insisting that no torture actually took place, that these were just ‘enhanced interrogations’ that saved thousands of lives, at the cost of only one death and that by hypothermia rather than torture.
In his words, “Congress are largely unrepentant, believing as they do that exposing government torture is worse than the torture itself. Many do not appear to believe that there was anything wrong with what the CIA did. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has already said “If I had to do it all over again, I would do it”. In an attempt to avoid the accountability issue, the Senate report summary does not actually blame anyone and does not recommend any legal action against the senior officials either at CIA or in the White House who ordered the torture. Nor are the actual torturers being held responsible for what they did.”
He noted that the report merely summarised the findings of an investigation that took four years, and had an additional five-year delay before a condensed (and heavily redacted) version could be produced. He wrote that “the crimes of torture and abuse … were never a secret to anyone. The whole world knew at all times that these crimes were happening. Despite this, and (demands) they be stopped, the United States insisted on going through with them. We are therefore facing premeditated war crimes committed by America, while fully aware of their enormity. The torture program carried out by the CIA over the years was approved by the White House and … the president, who were obviously fully aware of everything going on and agreed to it. As the whole world knows, these torture crimes are not the only aspect of the terrorism America practices against many countries of the world, a serious issue paid for by many nations and peoples of the world. They are only one part of many other war crimes America has committed.”
QUESTIONING…
It seems bizarre that the US Congress would pursue such a restricted agenda involving only two torture prisons when far more atrocious crimes have been regularly perpetrated for so many decades. Why only Guantanamo Bay and Baghram? What about all the other torture prisons that are still open and functioning in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other nations? Why was there no mention at all of America’s torture prison ships that are still plying the oceans of the world entirely without oversight or accountability? They are not only commonly known, but the names of some of these ships have been revealed. What of the so-called “Peace Medicine” facility still in operation by the CIA and US military in Indonesia, where the CIA and military are almost certainly using disposable persons as unwilling victims in biological pathogen testing? Why didn’t Congress raise the issue of the black site at Diego Garcia? Why didn’t they insist on travelling to some of these sites to witness first-hand the prisoners and the conditions? Why didn’t they travel to interview officials from the dozens of other countries where the CIA and military still have these torture prisons? Why would they permit the CIA to “refuse” to testify? Why didn’t they hold to account the CIA and other officials who lied under oath to the Committee? Why did they permit the White House to refuse to release the thousands of classified documents on the torture facilities and practices?
And even in this new Congressional report, the dirtiest aspects of the history of American eagerness for torture are severely underplayed. The report mentioned only a few injuries and one death during these activities when there have certainly been hundreds and likely thousands of deaths. How did these people miss, for example, the prisoner in Iraq who was so badly beaten with iron bars that both his legs “were just a mass of pulpy flesh” and would have to be amputated? Why did the Congressional report neglect to examine the many reported cases of prisoners violently driving their own heads into concrete walls and the iron bars of their cells, driven by unspeakable madness to these attempts at suicide? And how could they claim the perpetrators of that atrocity were just “looking for useful information”? How did they miss the hundreds of cases where prisoners were regularly forced to perform oral sex for their torturers under threat of executing that person’s entire family? There are countless documented examples of the most horrid kind, thousands of instances of the most inhumane and degrading moral perversions that probably exceed anything in the world’s prior history. The report virtually avoided an examination of the practice of waterboarding, pretending to state a few mild facts while ignoring the real issues. For one thing, some prisoners were waterboarded more than 300 times. Why does the US congress imagine this happened? In their simple minds, are they thinking the “interrogators” were saying to themselves, “Well, we’ve waterboarded this man 298 times and he hasn’t yet told us anything useful, but let’s try again. Maybe on the 299th time, he will finally relent and give us some information.“
Everybody Lied, Obstructed, Covered Up
Two other threads running through this new episode are first that almost everyone involved lied about everything while those who could have prevented these atrocities happily accepted the lies and hid their heads in the sand, and secondly that the perpetrators and half the elected politicians are loudly defending the torture regime with no suggestion of even shame much less regret. John Brennan, director of the CIA, strongly defended CIA officers who carried out brutal interrogations, describing them as “patriots”. According to him, the CIA’s massive torture program “had value”, even though no useful intelligence was obtained. George Bush also publicly defended the CIA, also calling them “patriots”, saying the US was “fortunate to have these people working hard at the CIA”, and that any criticism of them is “way off-base.” Even worse, the pathological monstrosity we know as Dick Cheney is defending his leadership, claiming in defiance of all the evidence that the Senate report is “a bunch of crap” and that his torturers produced valuable intelligence and prevented “thousands of deaths”.
Congress and the media seemed shocked to learn that the two primary “designers” of the current torture regime were paid more than $80 million for their work, but this knowledge had always been available to anyone who cared to look. Congressional leaders now claim this torture program was “more gruesome and widespread” than they had been led to believe, but that is unforgivable dishonesty since again informational details have been available, even online, to everyone. James Mitchell, one of the highly-paid authors of this peculiarly American demonstration of freedom and human rights, claims “I’m just a guy who got asked to do something for my country”, adding that he and his partner “are proud of the work we have done”, and are no doubt deeply satisfied with the $80 million they received in payment.
All this was done by Presidential dictate, permitting international kidnapping – the so-called “renditions”, denying international laws and protections, arrests without charge, unlimited detentions without trial.
And President Obama, the great Nobel Peace Prize winner, just shrugged and said offhandedly, “Ahh, we tortured some folks”, but, and in contradistinction to all his claims about America having lost its moral compass and his having taken action to terminate these atrocities, the facts on the ground were rather different. Alyona Minkovski wrote in an article in the Huffington Post that the White House “refused to hand over more than 9,000 CIA documents to the committee, and was engaged in a legal battle with the New York Times to release 1,700 documents from a Department of Justice investigation. None of this sends the message that America has renounced torture.” This is essentially the same process that occurred all the other times the CIAs torture and other crimes were revealed: evidence was immediately destroyed, the CIA, Military and White House refused to cooperate with investigations and, in spite of dragging the mess through the media for a short while, nothing ever changed. No evidence whatever that America “faced its crimes” or admitted its guilt, or “fixed” anything. That’s why we’re here again. In commenting on these atrocities, Raf Sanchez wrote in the UK Telegraph that “American law specifically prohibits the use of torture, which it defines as person acting under the guise of legal authority “to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering” on someone under their physical control, or doing something to “disrupt profoundly the senses or personality”. He also noted that this law is not limited to US territory, but that American citizens can be prosecuted if they torture anywhere in the world. It is most likely that Obama and his aides are fearful that if they initiate prosecutions against those from the Bush regime, they may face charges themselves for Obama’s drone strikes and much else.
It needs to be firmly pointed out that the CIA and the military were doing what their elected leaders approved, and that is where the responsibility lies, in both the White House and the Congress. Of course, the CIA and military lied to the nation and to its elected representatives, but Americans were willing victims in this fictional charade. If reporters care enough to ferret out the truth, Senators can do the same. The government agencies are already busy attempting to deflect all the blame on a few “rogue” employees, but these events have been part of the fundamental structure of the US government for so many decades that such claims need to be finally exposed. American politicians from the White House to Congress are equally liars and torturers as are the deformed malignant scum within the CIA. All those responsible at the top need to be named and held to account; it is the leaders who need first to be tried and hung, not the followers. As to the followers, if the excuse that “I was just following orders” wasn’t good enough to avoid the gallows at Nuremburg, it isn’t good enough to avoid the gallows now. Everyone involved in this sordid inhumanity should be hung by the neck until dead, starting with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and continuing through to most of the CIA, and finally penetrating the secret government itself who promoted all of this. And it should be added here that all of this applies equally to the American invasions and destruction of Iraq and Libya which were based on the same kind of lies and lawlessness. The US and the world need a formal commission to examine the entire truths of the destruction of these two nations, with accountability for the perpetrators. Someone needs to investigate, and someone needs to be held accountable, for the million civilians killed in Iraq on a war based entirely on lies. Madeleine Albright needs to be held accountable for the 500,000 babies she killed in Iraq. Sadly, none of this will ever happen, and this torture frenzy will soon die as well, swept under the carpet of American freedom and democracy long before anybody pays for these crimes.
At the same time as the US Congress released its report on American torture practices, Brazil did the same, with Dilma Rousseff, the country’s president, weeping on national television as she discussed the vast abuses in that nation inflicted by the former US-installed military dictatorship. Rousseff herself was one of the many victims of the military at that time, with Brazil’s 2000-page report naming almost 400 individuals who were responsible for the atrocities. The report also exposed and blamed in detail both the US military and CIA and the UK government for their having trained the Brazilian military in these torture techniques, many of whom were “educated” at the School of the Americas in Panama and the US. But the entire US Congress as well as the whole of the American people, and virtually all of the civilised world, have apparently been asleep for at least the past 60 or 70 years, and knew none of this.
Philip Giraldi pointed out, as many others have, that the Senate investigation process was incomplete at best. Neither victims nor torture practitioners of these black sites were interviewed, and the CIA not only refused to permit any of its employees to testify but they destroyed untold but massive volumes of evidence, including the 92 interrogation videotapes that existed from a torture prison site in Thailand. The CIA claimed the tapes were destroyed to protect the identity of the torturers, but Giraldi claims the argument to be ridiculous, stating he has seen interrogation tapes and claims they focus only on the victim, the torturer (interrogator) being only a voice in the background. He also wrote that given the content of internal CIA emails, it was clear the tapes were destroyed to eliminate evidence of what were surely reprehensible and shocking war crimes, and to prevent evidence to justify criminal charges. He said to keep in mind that “nearly everything CIA does overseas is illegal”.
Along with Brennan, former CIA director Michael Hayden also lied extensively about the torture practices, including lying under oath to Congress, which, like torture, is a crime in the US. But nobody is calling the police because “as a matter of practicality” only minor public citizens can be found guilty of perjury in the new America. The US Justice Department has already made clear it is not going to prosecute anyone, no matter what they did, mostly because it is much more interested in prosecuting whistleblowers than criminals. It was not only the CIA but the military and all vermin infecting the White House who lied, buried the truth, withheld vital information and destroyed evidence, but nobody has been held to account. Those same people – the torturers – are mostly all still serving in high-level positions and are not only not being prosecuted but are instead protected, rewarded and promoted. The CIA and other parties not only lied openly to the Congressional committee, they destroyed in advance most of the evidence of their crimes, then wiretapped all the Congressional communications systems to determine how much these people really knew, and to learn where they obtained the information.
True to form, and with the eager compliance of the US media, Brennan, the White House, the media, and Senators and Congressmen insist on referring to this vast malevolence as “detention programs” and “enhanced interrogations”, avoiding as much as possible any use of the word ‘torture’. According to Brennan, the CIA were just “jailers” and questioners, not torturers, so everything is really mostly okay. And to further trivialise the unspeakable inhumanity of these acts, Brennan and many others have now deleted even the term ‘enhanced interrogation’ from their vocabulary, blithely referring to these atrocities simply as “EIT’s”, an expression with no meaning and that invokes no emotional horror. US Congressman Peter King, another bright light in the democratic nebula, stated, “We’re not talking about anyone being burned or stabbed or cut or anything like that. “We’re (just) talking about people being made to stand in awkward positions, have water put into their nose and into their mouth. Nobody suffered any lasting injuries from this.”
It wasn’t only the White House and CIA who lied and engaged in a massive cover-up. The Huffington Post reported that someone from within the US Senate was busy repeatedly accessing and scrubbing all Wikipedia entries to remove the word ‘torture’ or suggestions that “enhanced interrogation” was a euphemism for torture. The Senate staffer was apparently arguing his action “was removing bias” from the entries.
The Senate Committee torture report failed to deal with the things most needing exposure, because Guantanamo Bay was only the tip of the iceberg, with countless thousands of civilians brutalised in these American prisons all over the world, many tortured to death. All this was done by Presidential dictate, permitting international kidnapping – the so-called “renditions”, denying international laws and protections, arrests without charge, unlimited detentions without trial.
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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 34 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chap. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
2186604556@qq.com
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NOTES
[1] The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22309162-the-phoenix-program
[2] Mercy of the Wicked: The CIA’s Phoenix Program
https://greydynamics.com/mercy-of-the-wicked-the-cias-phoenix-program/
[3] The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency — RAND_OP258
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP258.pdf
[4] THE PHOENIX PROGRAM
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/THE-PHOENIX-PROGRAM-Valentine.pdf
[5] Systematic Torture Of Arabs Exposed By Newspaper
https://www.wrmea.org/1996-may-june/systematic-torture-of-arabs-exposed-by-newspaper.html
[6] Alan Dershowitz’s Torture-Warrant Proposal: A Critique
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315488039_Alan_Dershowitz’s_Torture-Warrant_Proposal_A_Critique
[7 ] Tortured Reasoning Alan Dershowitz – PBS
https://www-tc.pbs.org/inthebalance/pdf/dershowitz-tortured-reasoning.pdf
2186604556@qq.com
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Other works by this Author
(Prisoner of War Camps in America + CIA Project MK-ULTRA)
Democracy – The Most Dangerous Religion
NATIONS BUILT ON LIES — VOLUME 1 — How the US Became Rich
NATIONS BUILT ON LIES — VOLUME 2 — Life in a Failed State
NATIONS BUILT ON LIES — VOLUME 3 — The Branding of America
Police State America Volume One
Police State America Volume Two
THE WORLD OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
False Flags and Conspiracy Theories
Kamila Valieva
