22-12-2011, 04:38 AM
In kicking over old rocks looking for other things, I discovered (remembered) that the former Attorney General under Bush43, and U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, were involved in what was known back then as the Texas Youth Commission scandal. On March 17, 2007, the entire Texas Youth Commission governing board resigned.
What follows is drawn from this discussion thread (where I am Magmak1): http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/f...opic=72186
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http://www.statesman.com/news/content/regi.../6brookins.html
Youth Commission official had history of porn, petty crime violations
Abuse claims, other infractions went on for years, records show.
By Mike Ward
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
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http://www.lonestarproject.net/files/DOJletter.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/us/26y...tml?ref=us
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Gonzales Implicated In Cover-Up Of New Pedophile Scandal
Letter from Sutton's office legitimized raping of boys in minor's facility
What follows is drawn from this discussion thread (where I am Magmak1): http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/f...opic=72186
**
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/regi.../6brookins.html
Youth Commission official had history of porn, petty crime violations
Abuse claims, other infractions went on for years, records show.
By Mike Ward
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
**
http://www.lonestarproject.net/files/DOJletter.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/us/26y...tml?ref=us
***
Gonzales Implicated In Cover-Up Of New Pedophile Scandal
Letter from Sutton's office legitimized raping of boys in minor's facility
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, March 26, 2007
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/mar...candal.htm
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Hundreds could be freed from TYC
Panel concentrating on inmates who had sentences extended
01:37 AM CDT on Saturday, March 24, 2007
By EMILY RAMSHAW / The Dallas Morning News
eramshaw@dallasnews.com
AUSTIN Hundreds of Texas Youth Commission inmates could be released once a special panel reviews their cases, the special master overseeing the investigation of sexual and physical abuse at the agency said Friday.
link no longer focused/active
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/euro...=rss_world
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http://www.shalomctr.org/node/599
Physical & Sexual Abuse of Prisoners "Routine" in US
Fox Butterfield, NY Times, 5/9/2004
"...The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.
The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.
The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.
Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken....."
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Prisons? You remember the article by Catherine Austin Fitts on the aristocracy of prison profits, don't you?http://www.dunwalke.com/
Prisons?
According to Harry V. Martin and David Caul, as published in the Napa Sentinel August/September/October/November 1991 (http://www.whale.to/b/caul.html) :
Funding and experimentations of mind control have been part of the U.S. Health, Education and Welfare Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Central Intelligence Agency through the Phoenix Program, the Stanford Research Institute, the Agency for International Development, the Department of Defense, the Department of Labor, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the National Science Foundation."
"Those subject to the mind control experiments would be given indefinite sentences, his freedom was dependent upon how well the experiment went. One individual, for example, was arrested for joyriding, given a two-year sentence and held for mind control experiments. He was held for 18 years." (Sound like the Texas Youth situation?)
"A naked inmate is strapped down on a board. His wrists and ankles are cuffed to the board and his head is rigidly held in place by a strap around his neck and a helmet on his head. He is left in a darkened cell, unable to remove his body wastes. When a meal is delivered, one wrist is unlocked so he could feel around in the dark for his food and attempt to pour liquid down his throat without being able to lift his head.
Another experiment creates a muscle relaxant. Within 30 to 40 seconds paralysis begins to invade the small muscles of the fingers, toes, and eyes and then the intercostal muscles and diaphragm. The heart slows down to about 60 beats per minute. This condition, together with respiratory arrests, sets in for as long as two to five minutes before the drug begins to wear off. The individual remains fully conscious and is gasping for breath. It is "likened to dying, it is almost like drowning" the experiment states."
(Sound like Abu Ghraib and water-boarding?)
"The U.S. government has conducted three types of mind-control experiments:
One of the funding agencies to contribute to the experimentation is the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a unit of the U.S. Justice Department and one of President Richard Nixon's favorite pet agencies. The Nixon Administration was, at one time, putting together a program for detaining youngsters who showed a tendency toward violence in "concentration" camps. According to the Washington Post, the plan was authored by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch was told by John Erlichman, Chief of Staff for the Nixon White House, to implement the program. He proposed the screening of children of six years of age for tendencies toward criminality. Those who failed these tests were to be destined to be sent to the camps. The program was never implemented."
"There is strong evidence to indicate psychosurgery was still being used in prisons in the 1980's. Immediately after the funding announcement by LEAA, there were 50 psychosurgical operations at Atmore State Prison in Alabama. The inmates became virtual zombies. The operations, according to Dr. Swan of Fisk University, were done on black prisoners who were considered politically active."
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"The Violence Control Center was actually the brain child of William Herrmann as part of a pacification plan for California. A counter insurgency expert for Systems Development Corporation and an advisor to Governor Reagan, Herrmann worked with the Stand Research Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Hoover Center on Violence. Herrmann was also a CIA agent who is now serving an eight year prison sentence for his role in a CIA counterfeiting operation. He was also directly linked with the Iran-Contra affair according to government records and Herrmann's own testimony.
In 1970, Herrmann worked with Colston Westbrook as his CIA control officer when Westbrook formed and implemented the Black Cultural Association at the Vacaville Medical Facility, a facility which in July experienced the death of three inmates who were forcibly subjected to behavior modification drugs. The Black Cultural Association was ostensibly an education program designed to instill black pride identity in prisons, the Association was really a cover for an experimental behavior modification pilot project designed to test the feasibility of programming unstable prisoners to become more manageable.
Westbrook worked for the CIA in Vietnam as a psychological warfare expert, and as an advisor to the Korean equivalent of the CIA and for the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. Between 1966 and 1969, he was an advisor to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch under the cover of working as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers.
His "firm" contracted the building of the interrogation/torture centers in every province of South Vietnam as part of the CIA's Phoenix Program. The program was centered around behavior modification experiments to learn how to extract information from prisoners of war, a direct violation of the Geneva Accords.
Westbrook's most prominent client at Vacaville was Donald DeFreeze, who between 1967 and 1969, had worked for the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence unit and later became the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Many authorities now believe that the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville was the seedling of the SLA. Westbrook even designed the SLA logo, the cobra with seven heads, and gave De Freeze his African name of Cinque. The SLA was responsible for the assassination of Marcus Foster, superintendent of School in Oakland and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
As a counterinsurgency consultant for Systems Development Corporation, a security firm, Herrmann told the Los Angeles Times that a good computer intelligence system "would separate out the activist bent on destroying the system" and then develop a master plan "to win the hearts and minds of the people". The San Francisco-based Bay Guardian, recently identified Herrmann as an international arms dealer working with Iran in 1980, and possibly involved in the October Surprise. Herrmann is in an English prison for counterfeiting. He allegedly met with Iranian officials to ascertain whether the Iranians would trade arms for hostages held in Lebanon.
The London Sunday Telegraph confirmed Herrmann's CIA connections, tracing them from 1976 to 1986. He also worked for the FBI. This information was revealed in his London trial.
In the 1970's, Dr. Brian and Herrmann worked together under Governor Reagan on the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, and then, a decade later, again worked under Reagan. Both men have been identified as working for Reagan with the Iranians."
"A U.S. Navy psychologist, who claims that the Office of Naval Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons, used behavior modification techniques on them, and then relocated them in American embassies throughout the world."
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See also http://www.aches-mc.org/
ACHES-MC, originally founded for survivors of mind control experimentation, has identified additional survivors of other nonconsensual experimentation. These survivors include children, prisoners, mentally incapacitated and military personnel and their families-those who cannot freely give consent.
Control Unit Prisons (SHU) by Frank J. Atwood, MA
"Control units are supermax prisons that have been designed by government and prison authorities to control the thinking of prisoners, to determine what the prisoners will think about, through carefully contrived sensory deprivation tactics and by focusing the attention of prisoners on immediate concerns. These strategies disable prisoners through psychological, physical, and spiritual breakdown in order to compel mindless compliance by humiliation, intimidation, and demoralization."
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Rotun...ontrolunits.htm
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Cruel Science: The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research
by Alfred W. McCoy
Counterpunch, May 29/31, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/mccoy05292004.html
Frank Olson and MK-Ultra:
Frank Olson: http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Contents.html
Bill Buckley said Olson was murdered by the CIA: http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Statement...t-G.Thomas.html
"… the documents which have surfaced in Washington all too clearly pinpoint the role the two men played in covering-up the murder of Frank Olson. In a "Flash Secret" memo from Cheney to Rumsfeld, the future Vice President warns if the truth emerged "it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information"…. "At the time, Rumsfeld was White House Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford. Dick Cheney was a senior White House assistant to the President."
See also "It Didn't Start With Abu Ghraib: Dick Cheney, Vice President for Torture and War" by Jeffrey Steinberg, Executive Intelligence Review, November 11th, 2005 http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/...berg-Cheney.pdf
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Look for the treatise on "Subliminal Implanted Posthypnotic Suggestions and Scripts Using Acoustically Delivered and Phonetically Accelerated Posthypnotic Commands without Somnambulistic Preparation in the Subject for Intelligence and Counterintelligence Applications"
"…applications include misinformation dissemination, confusing and confounding leaders during critical decision moments, distorting significance of various facts to sway decisions and actions …, behavioral modification …, self initiated executions (suicides)."
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What do the Attorney General's stated policies say about minors, prison, abuse et al?
"As the legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzalesnow the White House counsel, and widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nomineeprepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda for Bush's review. Never before discussed publicly, the memoranda suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand."
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200307/berlow
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030620.html
See also Sister Helen Prejean's article on the "cursory" due process of Bush clemency and callousness toward human life.http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17670
These cases involved the infamous Henry Lee Lucas and the woman the "compassionate conservative" openly mocked, Karla Faye Tucker.
There's his Memorandum for the President, January 25, 2002 on the application of Geneva Convention to Al-Qaeda and Taliban POW's. This is otherwise sometimes described as "the Geneva Convention is obsolete" memo, thus negating treaties as the law of the land. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4999148/site/newsweek/
Jay S. Bybee, then the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the "conscience" of the Justice Department, said: "As commander in chief, the president has the constitutional authority to order interrogations of enemy combatants," Bybee wrote. Further, the president of the United States, acting under his inherent powers as commander in chief, can lawfully order torture, without regard to federal criminal laws or international law.
Furthermore, according to Mark Danner [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17730 ], author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror:
"By defining torture very narrowlyas an activity that causes pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death"this memo, by a kind of repellent verbal sleight of hand, makes it possible to treat many practices that plainly are torture, and are so recognized throughout the world, as something less than that."
This sounds an awful lot like a letter from a US Attorney that said that evidence of sexual abuse must include pain. (Do you think it might hurt but that the institutionalized victim might be impelled not to say so?) (There are YouTube videos you can find of male adult of prisoners being forcibly sodomized, but I'll refrain from providing the link.)
Further, says Danner:
"Though the administration had distanced itself from the so-called "torture memorandum" soon after it was leaked last June, and had quietly issued, a week before Gonzales was scheduled to appear before Congress, a more restrictive memorandum to replace it, Mr. Gonzales declined to dissociate himself from it. Instead, he implied that in the matter of interpreting and defining torture, and in making it possible for the government to apply it broadly, his hands were essentially tied: it was "the responsibility of the department [of justice] to tell us what the law means"though common sense suggests, and reports in The New York Times and elsewhere confirm, that the White House, and Mr. Gonzales himself, were instrumental in seeing that the Justice Department lawyers delivered the conclusions that the President wanted."
Sounds like tomhye's argument, huh? The AG's actions were restricted, huh?
Gonzalez has spoken up, of course, in development and defense of warrantless surveillance. "During an appearance on ''The Charlie Rose Show'' in June 2005, Gonzales was promoting the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act…. Gonzales told viewers, ''If you look honestly at the facts, one must conclude . . . that the act has not been used to infringe upon civil liberties.''http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_5520979
We now know differently... that it's been used as a tool for the purposes of maintaining domestic political control.
Gonzalez, as Attorney General, is also the fellow who exclaimed, in a typical NeoCon "rulling group mind set" twist of the English language, said that the Constitution does not expressly grant the right of habeas corpus, an expression so shocking that the arch-liberal Arlen Specter had to step in to clarify.
An excerpt of the exchange follows:
GONZALES: The fact that the Constitution again, there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There is a prohibition against taking it away. But it's never been the case, and I'm not a Supreme SPECTER: Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. The constitution says you can't take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn't that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an invasion or rebellion?
A video of the exchange, as well as a more complete transcript can be found on Think Progress. "Gonzales: There Is No Express Grant of Habeas Corpus In The Constitution", Think Progress, January 18, 2007.
Yes, yes, of course it will be argued that one has to be a fully-credentialed Constitutional scholar (or a sitting Justice on the SCOTUS that has yet to rule on the question) before one is qualified to "read" Constititional language but, the last time I checked, this was America where it is our right no, our obligation to have an informed opinion about such things.
Kuttner has called for the AG's impeachment: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial...d_be_impeached/
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US Attorney Johhny Sutton
What of the US Attorney who declined to prosecute?
According to t he USDOJ (http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/txw/us_attorney/index.html ): "Prior to becoming United States Attorney, Mr. Sutton served as an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and as a Policy Coordinator for the Bush-Cheney Transition Team assigned to the Department of Justice. Mr. Sutton served as the Criminal Justice Policy Director for then-Governor George W. Bush from 1995-2000, advising the Governor on all criminal justice issues, with specific oversight in the areas of criminal law, prison capacity and management, parole operations and legislative initiatives."
S-T: Had you gotten to know (current U.S. Attorney General) Al Gonzales?
JS: I did. He was the general counsel (in the governor's office) while I was criminal justice. I was the crime guy and he was the general counsel so I worked very closely with him and his team.
http://www.star-telegram.com/189/story/48117.html
Sutton was, of course, the prosecutor involved in the case in which Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were found guilty of wounding Mexican drug courier Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila in far West Texas near El Paso. There is plenty of controvery about this case, and Sutton appears to be in the cross-hairs of the conservative anti-immigrant anti-drug public, including those at WorldNet Daily. This was also previously discussed here at CGCS:http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...php/t71982.html
Several years earlier, ( see http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/...ey_sutton.shtml ), the recently-deposedCongresswoman Cynthia McKinney, in a letter to Attorney General Gonzalez, publicly blasted "U.S. Department of Homeland Security / Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Division agents - acting in the jurisdiction of U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton [with] a violation of the U.S. Constitutional right of a free press".
See also http://www.narconews.com/Issue38/article1374.html .
And http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2...232317/474 which says "the retaliation for writing the whistleblower letter was orchestrated by Sutton, who wanted to bury the letter because it was deemed "discovery material" (evidence) that threatened to compromise a career-boosting death-sentence case against a major narco-trafficker. That means … that a U.S. Attorney is now implicated in the cover-up of a U.S. government informant's participation in mass murder."
In a letter sent last month to congressional leaders, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), demands the following:
That the Committee on Homeland Security, or individual members of the Committee, request a confidential briefing from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas, and the Drug Enforcement Administration on the government actions surrounding the allegations by [this whistle-blower]..
That the Committee on Homeland Security schedules a hearing on the actions concerning [his] allegations of malfeasance and retaliation and subpoena appropriate witnesses to describe and explain those actions.
See also http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story...1962643,00.html
Sutton has also been a spokesperson for protection of children against online predators:http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news...4/24sutton.html
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...le8451.htm
Torture Inc.: Americas Brutal Prisons
Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals
Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?
By Deborah Davies
They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It's terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you're not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.
The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.'
If a prisoner doesn't drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There's a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.
Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can't crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.
Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.
Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.
The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.
And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.
But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas.
They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for Channel 4 that will be broadcast next week.
Our findings were not based on rumour or suspicion. They were based on solid evidence, chiefly videotapes that we collected from all over the U.S.
In many American states, prison regulations demand that any use of force operation', such as searching cells for drugs, must be filmed by a guard.
The theory is that the tapes will show proper procedure was followed and that no excessive force was used. In fact, many of them record the exact opposite.
Each tape provides a shocking insight into the reality of life inside the U.S. prison system a reality that sits very uncomfortably with President Bush's commitment to the battle for freedom and democracy against the forces of tyranny and oppression.
In fact, the Texas episode outlined above dates from 1996, when Bush was state Governor.
More at link…
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/911review/2006...ssador_to_italy
"Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts, we've done worse than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian.. … But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993…. ranging from sexual abuse, beating and stomping to boys called "faggots" for hours while being spat upon -- humiliation so bad that a Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it potentially mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a former STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic murder.
Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure settlements sucked it dry, and state health officials yanked its licenses after media reports of teen torture and cover-up, Sembler himself escaped punishment…. coast-to-coast trail of human wreckage had ensued during STRAIGHT's reign from 1976 to 1993 -- its survivors claimed physical, sexual and psychological trauma. … "My best guess is that at least half of the kids were abused," says Dr. Arnold Trebach, a professor emeritus at American University who created the Drug Policy Foundation to find alternatives to harsh laws. He has singled out STRAIGHT in his book "The Great Drug War" as among drug warriors' worst mistakes….
"While at the facility," wrote Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services Acting Inspector General Lowell Clary on May 19, 1993, "the team [of inspectors in 1989] received a phone call informing them that no matter what they found, STRAIGHT would receive their license." "If you do anything other than what I tell you on this issue, I will fire you on the spot," an HRS official was told. Clary wasn't positive, but evidence suggested that "pressure may have been generated by Ambassador Sembler and other state senators."
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Bush and the torturing of Iraq's children
By: Jack Dalton (Online Journal) (July 23, 2004)
"This country pontificates and pats itself on the back about being a nation of law, compassion, truth, justice and that believes in God. It does this while being eyeball deep in the commission of war crimes. If the torturing of children does not fit the definition of war crimes, nothing does.
There is no justification for the torturing of children for any reason, under any circumstances by anyone, anytime, ever . . . period, end of story.
Due to and because of this, I accuse George W. Bush and his entire administration of:crimes against humanity, Abuse of power and office, and war crimes. Each and every one of them, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al, should be tried for what they are . . . war criminals.
While children are being tortured in Iraq, the headline story on CNN is about the torturing of chickens by KFC suppliers. What has happened to this country's priorities? Where is its conscience and soul?"
As Mark Danner noted:
"The scandal is not what is to be revealed but what we already know."
http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/legaliz...dabuse.htm
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http://www.thenation.com/issue/april-16-2007
editorial | posted March 29, 2007 (April 16, 2007 issue)
A Wider Corruption
Whether Alberto Gonzales clears out his desk now or in a month is a technicality. His tenure as US Attorney General is over. The release in late March of a document that places him at a meeting to discuss the dismissal of US Attorneys--contradicting his earlier statements that he never participated in such conversations--adds significantly to the evidence that Gonzales lied about his involvement in the firings and their political motivation. At this writing, at least two Republican senators are openly calling for Gonzales's resignation. It is impossible to imagine his regaining the trust of Congress and the respect of Justice Department professionals.
The US Attorneys scandal is at once particular to the Justice Department and part of a much broader picture. The narrow scandal--the subject of scheduled testimony by Gonzales scapegoat Kyle Sampson and of Senate subpoenas to top White House staff--is bad enough: The allegation that Gonzales fired US Attorneys who would not elevate politics above professionalism goes to the heart of public safety and the rule of law. By itself, this scandal should finish not just Gonzales but Karl Rove, Bush's top political operative, and Harriet Miers, his former White House counsel, and anyone else involved. They all deserve investigation, and probably indictments.
But facts keep turning up, like jigsaw-puzzle pieces under the living-room couch, that fit into that even more alarming picture. In this bigger frame, the US Attorneys are but one example of how the Administration has undermined professionals and career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy. In these pages last fall, investigative journalist Dan Zegart detailed Bush team efforts to extend direct political control not only at the Justice Department but also deep into agencies where the White House has strong policy interests, such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department [see "The Gutting of the Civil Service," November 20]. In virtually every agency, Bush political appointees have undermined experts' rulings and recommendations on matters including drug safety, civil rights, tobacco litigation and air pollution enforcement while pushing a political agenda. And those efforts continue up to the present; the Washington Post reported on March 26 that witnesses have told Congressional investigators that the chief of the General Services Administration and a deputy in Rove's office joined in a late-January videoconference to discuss ways to help Republican candidates in the next elections.
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Prison Planet
Monday, March 26, 2007
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/mar...candal.htm
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Hundreds could be freed from TYC
Panel concentrating on inmates who had sentences extended
01:37 AM CDT on Saturday, March 24, 2007
By EMILY RAMSHAW / The Dallas Morning News
eramshaw@dallasnews.com
AUSTIN Hundreds of Texas Youth Commission inmates could be released once a special panel reviews their cases, the special master overseeing the investigation of sexual and physical abuse at the agency said Friday.
link no longer focused/active
****
Did Al Gonzales and Johnny Sutton blow the TYC case?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/euro...=rss_world
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http://www.shalomctr.org/node/599
Physical & Sexual Abuse of Prisoners "Routine" in US
Fox Butterfield, NY Times, 5/9/2004
"...The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.
The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.
The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.
Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken....."
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Prisons? You remember the article by Catherine Austin Fitts on the aristocracy of prison profits, don't you?http://www.dunwalke.com/
Prisons?
According to Harry V. Martin and David Caul, as published in the Napa Sentinel August/September/October/November 1991 (http://www.whale.to/b/caul.html) :
Funding and experimentations of mind control have been part of the U.S. Health, Education and Welfare Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Central Intelligence Agency through the Phoenix Program, the Stanford Research Institute, the Agency for International Development, the Department of Defense, the Department of Labor, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the National Science Foundation."
"Those subject to the mind control experiments would be given indefinite sentences, his freedom was dependent upon how well the experiment went. One individual, for example, was arrested for joyriding, given a two-year sentence and held for mind control experiments. He was held for 18 years." (Sound like the Texas Youth situation?)
"A naked inmate is strapped down on a board. His wrists and ankles are cuffed to the board and his head is rigidly held in place by a strap around his neck and a helmet on his head. He is left in a darkened cell, unable to remove his body wastes. When a meal is delivered, one wrist is unlocked so he could feel around in the dark for his food and attempt to pour liquid down his throat without being able to lift his head.
Another experiment creates a muscle relaxant. Within 30 to 40 seconds paralysis begins to invade the small muscles of the fingers, toes, and eyes and then the intercostal muscles and diaphragm. The heart slows down to about 60 beats per minute. This condition, together with respiratory arrests, sets in for as long as two to five minutes before the drug begins to wear off. The individual remains fully conscious and is gasping for breath. It is "likened to dying, it is almost like drowning" the experiment states."
(Sound like Abu Ghraib and water-boarding?)
"The U.S. government has conducted three types of mind-control experiments:
- Real life experiences, such as those used on Little Augie & the LSD experiments in safehouses of San Francisco and Greenwich Village.
- Experiments on prisoners, such as in the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.
- Experiments conducted in both mental hospitals and the Veterans Administration hospitals.
One of the funding agencies to contribute to the experimentation is the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a unit of the U.S. Justice Department and one of President Richard Nixon's favorite pet agencies. The Nixon Administration was, at one time, putting together a program for detaining youngsters who showed a tendency toward violence in "concentration" camps. According to the Washington Post, the plan was authored by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch was told by John Erlichman, Chief of Staff for the Nixon White House, to implement the program. He proposed the screening of children of six years of age for tendencies toward criminality. Those who failed these tests were to be destined to be sent to the camps. The program was never implemented."
"There is strong evidence to indicate psychosurgery was still being used in prisons in the 1980's. Immediately after the funding announcement by LEAA, there were 50 psychosurgical operations at Atmore State Prison in Alabama. The inmates became virtual zombies. The operations, according to Dr. Swan of Fisk University, were done on black prisoners who were considered politically active."
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"The Violence Control Center was actually the brain child of William Herrmann as part of a pacification plan for California. A counter insurgency expert for Systems Development Corporation and an advisor to Governor Reagan, Herrmann worked with the Stand Research Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Hoover Center on Violence. Herrmann was also a CIA agent who is now serving an eight year prison sentence for his role in a CIA counterfeiting operation. He was also directly linked with the Iran-Contra affair according to government records and Herrmann's own testimony.
In 1970, Herrmann worked with Colston Westbrook as his CIA control officer when Westbrook formed and implemented the Black Cultural Association at the Vacaville Medical Facility, a facility which in July experienced the death of three inmates who were forcibly subjected to behavior modification drugs. The Black Cultural Association was ostensibly an education program designed to instill black pride identity in prisons, the Association was really a cover for an experimental behavior modification pilot project designed to test the feasibility of programming unstable prisoners to become more manageable.
Westbrook worked for the CIA in Vietnam as a psychological warfare expert, and as an advisor to the Korean equivalent of the CIA and for the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. Between 1966 and 1969, he was an advisor to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch under the cover of working as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers.
His "firm" contracted the building of the interrogation/torture centers in every province of South Vietnam as part of the CIA's Phoenix Program. The program was centered around behavior modification experiments to learn how to extract information from prisoners of war, a direct violation of the Geneva Accords.
Westbrook's most prominent client at Vacaville was Donald DeFreeze, who between 1967 and 1969, had worked for the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence unit and later became the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Many authorities now believe that the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville was the seedling of the SLA. Westbrook even designed the SLA logo, the cobra with seven heads, and gave De Freeze his African name of Cinque. The SLA was responsible for the assassination of Marcus Foster, superintendent of School in Oakland and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
As a counterinsurgency consultant for Systems Development Corporation, a security firm, Herrmann told the Los Angeles Times that a good computer intelligence system "would separate out the activist bent on destroying the system" and then develop a master plan "to win the hearts and minds of the people". The San Francisco-based Bay Guardian, recently identified Herrmann as an international arms dealer working with Iran in 1980, and possibly involved in the October Surprise. Herrmann is in an English prison for counterfeiting. He allegedly met with Iranian officials to ascertain whether the Iranians would trade arms for hostages held in Lebanon.
The London Sunday Telegraph confirmed Herrmann's CIA connections, tracing them from 1976 to 1986. He also worked for the FBI. This information was revealed in his London trial.
In the 1970's, Dr. Brian and Herrmann worked together under Governor Reagan on the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, and then, a decade later, again worked under Reagan. Both men have been identified as working for Reagan with the Iranians."
"A U.S. Navy psychologist, who claims that the Office of Naval Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons, used behavior modification techniques on them, and then relocated them in American embassies throughout the world."
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See also http://www.aches-mc.org/
ACHES-MC, originally founded for survivors of mind control experimentation, has identified additional survivors of other nonconsensual experimentation. These survivors include children, prisoners, mentally incapacitated and military personnel and their families-those who cannot freely give consent.
Control Unit Prisons (SHU) by Frank J. Atwood, MA
"Control units are supermax prisons that have been designed by government and prison authorities to control the thinking of prisoners, to determine what the prisoners will think about, through carefully contrived sensory deprivation tactics and by focusing the attention of prisoners on immediate concerns. These strategies disable prisoners through psychological, physical, and spiritual breakdown in order to compel mindless compliance by humiliation, intimidation, and demoralization."
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Rotun...ontrolunits.htm
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Cruel Science: The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research
by Alfred W. McCoy
Counterpunch, May 29/31, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/mccoy05292004.html
Frank Olson and MK-Ultra:
Frank Olson: http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Contents.html
Bill Buckley said Olson was murdered by the CIA: http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Statement...t-G.Thomas.html
"… the documents which have surfaced in Washington all too clearly pinpoint the role the two men played in covering-up the murder of Frank Olson. In a "Flash Secret" memo from Cheney to Rumsfeld, the future Vice President warns if the truth emerged "it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information"…. "At the time, Rumsfeld was White House Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford. Dick Cheney was a senior White House assistant to the President."
See also "It Didn't Start With Abu Ghraib: Dick Cheney, Vice President for Torture and War" by Jeffrey Steinberg, Executive Intelligence Review, November 11th, 2005 http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/...berg-Cheney.pdf
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Look for the treatise on "Subliminal Implanted Posthypnotic Suggestions and Scripts Using Acoustically Delivered and Phonetically Accelerated Posthypnotic Commands without Somnambulistic Preparation in the Subject for Intelligence and Counterintelligence Applications"
"…applications include misinformation dissemination, confusing and confounding leaders during critical decision moments, distorting significance of various facts to sway decisions and actions …, behavioral modification …, self initiated executions (suicides)."
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What do the Attorney General's stated policies say about minors, prison, abuse et al?
"As the legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzalesnow the White House counsel, and widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nomineeprepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda for Bush's review. Never before discussed publicly, the memoranda suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand."
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200307/berlow
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030620.html
See also Sister Helen Prejean's article on the "cursory" due process of Bush clemency and callousness toward human life.http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17670
These cases involved the infamous Henry Lee Lucas and the woman the "compassionate conservative" openly mocked, Karla Faye Tucker.
There's his Memorandum for the President, January 25, 2002 on the application of Geneva Convention to Al-Qaeda and Taliban POW's. This is otherwise sometimes described as "the Geneva Convention is obsolete" memo, thus negating treaties as the law of the land. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4999148/site/newsweek/
Jay S. Bybee, then the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the "conscience" of the Justice Department, said: "As commander in chief, the president has the constitutional authority to order interrogations of enemy combatants," Bybee wrote. Further, the president of the United States, acting under his inherent powers as commander in chief, can lawfully order torture, without regard to federal criminal laws or international law.
Furthermore, according to Mark Danner [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17730 ], author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror:
"By defining torture very narrowlyas an activity that causes pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death"this memo, by a kind of repellent verbal sleight of hand, makes it possible to treat many practices that plainly are torture, and are so recognized throughout the world, as something less than that."
This sounds an awful lot like a letter from a US Attorney that said that evidence of sexual abuse must include pain. (Do you think it might hurt but that the institutionalized victim might be impelled not to say so?) (There are YouTube videos you can find of male adult of prisoners being forcibly sodomized, but I'll refrain from providing the link.)
Further, says Danner:
"Though the administration had distanced itself from the so-called "torture memorandum" soon after it was leaked last June, and had quietly issued, a week before Gonzales was scheduled to appear before Congress, a more restrictive memorandum to replace it, Mr. Gonzales declined to dissociate himself from it. Instead, he implied that in the matter of interpreting and defining torture, and in making it possible for the government to apply it broadly, his hands were essentially tied: it was "the responsibility of the department [of justice] to tell us what the law means"though common sense suggests, and reports in The New York Times and elsewhere confirm, that the White House, and Mr. Gonzales himself, were instrumental in seeing that the Justice Department lawyers delivered the conclusions that the President wanted."
Sounds like tomhye's argument, huh? The AG's actions were restricted, huh?
Gonzalez has spoken up, of course, in development and defense of warrantless surveillance. "During an appearance on ''The Charlie Rose Show'' in June 2005, Gonzales was promoting the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act…. Gonzales told viewers, ''If you look honestly at the facts, one must conclude . . . that the act has not been used to infringe upon civil liberties.''http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_5520979
We now know differently... that it's been used as a tool for the purposes of maintaining domestic political control.
Gonzalez, as Attorney General, is also the fellow who exclaimed, in a typical NeoCon "rulling group mind set" twist of the English language, said that the Constitution does not expressly grant the right of habeas corpus, an expression so shocking that the arch-liberal Arlen Specter had to step in to clarify.
An excerpt of the exchange follows:
GONZALES: The fact that the Constitution again, there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There is a prohibition against taking it away. But it's never been the case, and I'm not a Supreme SPECTER: Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. The constitution says you can't take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn't that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an invasion or rebellion?
A video of the exchange, as well as a more complete transcript can be found on Think Progress. "Gonzales: There Is No Express Grant of Habeas Corpus In The Constitution", Think Progress, January 18, 2007.
Yes, yes, of course it will be argued that one has to be a fully-credentialed Constitutional scholar (or a sitting Justice on the SCOTUS that has yet to rule on the question) before one is qualified to "read" Constititional language but, the last time I checked, this was America where it is our right no, our obligation to have an informed opinion about such things.
Kuttner has called for the AG's impeachment: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial...d_be_impeached/
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US Attorney Johhny Sutton
What of the US Attorney who declined to prosecute?
According to t he USDOJ (http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/txw/us_attorney/index.html ): "Prior to becoming United States Attorney, Mr. Sutton served as an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and as a Policy Coordinator for the Bush-Cheney Transition Team assigned to the Department of Justice. Mr. Sutton served as the Criminal Justice Policy Director for then-Governor George W. Bush from 1995-2000, advising the Governor on all criminal justice issues, with specific oversight in the areas of criminal law, prison capacity and management, parole operations and legislative initiatives."
S-T: Had you gotten to know (current U.S. Attorney General) Al Gonzales?
JS: I did. He was the general counsel (in the governor's office) while I was criminal justice. I was the crime guy and he was the general counsel so I worked very closely with him and his team.
http://www.star-telegram.com/189/story/48117.html
Sutton was, of course, the prosecutor involved in the case in which Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were found guilty of wounding Mexican drug courier Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila in far West Texas near El Paso. There is plenty of controvery about this case, and Sutton appears to be in the cross-hairs of the conservative anti-immigrant anti-drug public, including those at WorldNet Daily. This was also previously discussed here at CGCS:http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...php/t71982.html
Several years earlier, ( see http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/...ey_sutton.shtml ), the recently-deposedCongresswoman Cynthia McKinney, in a letter to Attorney General Gonzalez, publicly blasted "U.S. Department of Homeland Security / Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Division agents - acting in the jurisdiction of U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton [with] a violation of the U.S. Constitutional right of a free press".
"In particular, General Gonzales, I address this letter to you because many eyebrows have been raised here in Congress by the confluence of facts that demonstrate that Mr. Conroy, as a journalist, has reported a series of stories involving the "House of Death" case in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in which an undercover informant in the process of seeking to make a drug case for U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton's office, allegedly committed numerous homicides while under the protection of that office."
See also http://www.narconews.com/Issue38/article1374.html .
And http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2...232317/474 which says "the retaliation for writing the whistleblower letter was orchestrated by Sutton, who wanted to bury the letter because it was deemed "discovery material" (evidence) that threatened to compromise a career-boosting death-sentence case against a major narco-trafficker. That means … that a U.S. Attorney is now implicated in the cover-up of a U.S. government informant's participation in mass murder."
In a letter sent last month to congressional leaders, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), demands the following:
That the Committee on Homeland Security, or individual members of the Committee, request a confidential briefing from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas, and the Drug Enforcement Administration on the government actions surrounding the allegations by [this whistle-blower]..
That the Committee on Homeland Security schedules a hearing on the actions concerning [his] allegations of malfeasance and retaliation and subpoena appropriate witnesses to describe and explain those actions.
See also http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story...1962643,00.html
Sutton has also been a spokesperson for protection of children against online predators:http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news...4/24sutton.html
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...le8451.htm
Torture Inc.: Americas Brutal Prisons
Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals
Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?
By Deborah Davies
They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It's terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you're not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.
The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.'
If a prisoner doesn't drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There's a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.
Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can't crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.
Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.
Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.
The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.
And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.
But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas.
They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for Channel 4 that will be broadcast next week.
Our findings were not based on rumour or suspicion. They were based on solid evidence, chiefly videotapes that we collected from all over the U.S.
In many American states, prison regulations demand that any use of force operation', such as searching cells for drugs, must be filmed by a guard.
The theory is that the tapes will show proper procedure was followed and that no excessive force was used. In fact, many of them record the exact opposite.
Each tape provides a shocking insight into the reality of life inside the U.S. prison system a reality that sits very uncomfortably with President Bush's commitment to the battle for freedom and democracy against the forces of tyranny and oppression.
In fact, the Texas episode outlined above dates from 1996, when Bush was state Governor.
More at link…
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/911review/2006...ssador_to_italy
"Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts, we've done worse than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian.. … But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993…. ranging from sexual abuse, beating and stomping to boys called "faggots" for hours while being spat upon -- humiliation so bad that a Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it potentially mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a former STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic murder.
Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure settlements sucked it dry, and state health officials yanked its licenses after media reports of teen torture and cover-up, Sembler himself escaped punishment…. coast-to-coast trail of human wreckage had ensued during STRAIGHT's reign from 1976 to 1993 -- its survivors claimed physical, sexual and psychological trauma. … "My best guess is that at least half of the kids were abused," says Dr. Arnold Trebach, a professor emeritus at American University who created the Drug Policy Foundation to find alternatives to harsh laws. He has singled out STRAIGHT in his book "The Great Drug War" as among drug warriors' worst mistakes….
"While at the facility," wrote Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services Acting Inspector General Lowell Clary on May 19, 1993, "the team [of inspectors in 1989] received a phone call informing them that no matter what they found, STRAIGHT would receive their license." "If you do anything other than what I tell you on this issue, I will fire you on the spot," an HRS official was told. Clary wasn't positive, but evidence suggested that "pressure may have been generated by Ambassador Sembler and other state senators."
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Bush and the torturing of Iraq's children
By: Jack Dalton (Online Journal) (July 23, 2004)
"This country pontificates and pats itself on the back about being a nation of law, compassion, truth, justice and that believes in God. It does this while being eyeball deep in the commission of war crimes. If the torturing of children does not fit the definition of war crimes, nothing does.
There is no justification for the torturing of children for any reason, under any circumstances by anyone, anytime, ever . . . period, end of story.
Due to and because of this, I accuse George W. Bush and his entire administration of:crimes against humanity, Abuse of power and office, and war crimes. Each and every one of them, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al, should be tried for what they are . . . war criminals.
While children are being tortured in Iraq, the headline story on CNN is about the torturing of chickens by KFC suppliers. What has happened to this country's priorities? Where is its conscience and soul?"
As Mark Danner noted:
"The scandal is not what is to be revealed but what we already know."
"Most of us are so enmeshed in mass-mindedness that it is difficult to imagine an alternative to politicized conflicts and disorder that is not premised on some collective process of change. A focused reflection should convince you that the state's very existence depends upon men and women who are convinced that [a] the world is too complex for themselves to have any effective control over their lives, only collectivized efforts can be effective in overcoming such individual limitations, and [c] such collective responses to a complex world demands the exercise of centralized authority by wise and knowledgeable persons."
http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/legaliz...dabuse.htm
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"I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated."
--Bertrand Russell-----
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http://www.thenation.com/issue/april-16-2007
editorial | posted March 29, 2007 (April 16, 2007 issue)
A Wider Corruption
Whether Alberto Gonzales clears out his desk now or in a month is a technicality. His tenure as US Attorney General is over. The release in late March of a document that places him at a meeting to discuss the dismissal of US Attorneys--contradicting his earlier statements that he never participated in such conversations--adds significantly to the evidence that Gonzales lied about his involvement in the firings and their political motivation. At this writing, at least two Republican senators are openly calling for Gonzales's resignation. It is impossible to imagine his regaining the trust of Congress and the respect of Justice Department professionals.
The US Attorneys scandal is at once particular to the Justice Department and part of a much broader picture. The narrow scandal--the subject of scheduled testimony by Gonzales scapegoat Kyle Sampson and of Senate subpoenas to top White House staff--is bad enough: The allegation that Gonzales fired US Attorneys who would not elevate politics above professionalism goes to the heart of public safety and the rule of law. By itself, this scandal should finish not just Gonzales but Karl Rove, Bush's top political operative, and Harriet Miers, his former White House counsel, and anyone else involved. They all deserve investigation, and probably indictments.
But facts keep turning up, like jigsaw-puzzle pieces under the living-room couch, that fit into that even more alarming picture. In this bigger frame, the US Attorneys are but one example of how the Administration has undermined professionals and career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy. In these pages last fall, investigative journalist Dan Zegart detailed Bush team efforts to extend direct political control not only at the Justice Department but also deep into agencies where the White House has strong policy interests, such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department [see "The Gutting of the Civil Service," November 20]. In virtually every agency, Bush political appointees have undermined experts' rulings and recommendations on matters including drug safety, civil rights, tobacco litigation and air pollution enforcement while pushing a political agenda. And those efforts continue up to the present; the Washington Post reported on March 26 that witnesses have told Congressional investigators that the chief of the General Services Administration and a deputy in Rove's office joined in a late-January videoconference to discuss ways to help Republican candidates in the next elections.
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"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"