Mel Sembler bankrolls Cheney front ...

[Ed Jewett]

FromThe Weekly Spin, October 28, 2009
(Center for Media and Democracy)

GOP Funder Bankrolling Cheney Family Front Group, "Keep America Safe"
Source: Newsweek, October 23, 2009

Melvin Sembler Major Republican fundraiser and Florida real estate developer Melvin Sembler is providing the financial backing behind the new political front group Keep America Safe (KAS), headed by Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. KAS serves as a mouthpiece for policies supported by Dick Cheney, who, since leaving office, has denounced the U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the Bush administration's use of torture, and opposed President Obama's plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. KAS is preparing to run a series of radio and Web ads criticizing President Obama's policies on national security in the districts of vulnerable Democratic members of Congress. In addition to bankrolling KAS, Sembler is a former chair of the Republican National Committee, and served as executive director of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's legal defense fund. Sembler also helped fund the propaganda group Freedom's Watch, which also promoted Bush and Cheney's pro-military policies.


For more on Melvin Sembler:


#1) Magda Hassan's own file here at DPF

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...el+Sembler

#2) Recent letters to two Senators and a Representative:
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/bio/...4137097196

"THE STRAIGHTS

"They run very close to really performing psychic murder."

Marge Robertson, executive director of the Cincinnati Chapter of the ACLU, speaking of Straight, Inc., from Cincinnati Post
.
"According to sworn testimony, Straight often left restrained group members sitting in their own urine, feces or vomit until suitable concessions were extracted.

From Treatment, Thought Reform, and the Road to Hell by Dr. Barry Beyerstein, a leading Canadian researcher on opiates and brain functioning who operates a laboratory at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada"

"FOX News on Sembler and Straight, 2002:
.
These six girls are all telling 60 Minutes reporter Ed Bradley the same thing. That if you didn't follow the rules at Straight they would be sat upon. The third girl on the right says that girls were sitting on every part of her body except for her face for 2 hours and she thought she was going to die. The girl on the left said when they sat on her she couldn't breath and she thought she was going to die.

Straight is about child abuse. It is about child abuse on a grand scale. It is about depriving American kids of food and sleep; of beating them and painfully restraining them without cause. It's about making kids discuss their deepest, darkest sexual fantasies and activities in front of other kids; about making kids soil their pants; about watching kids while they defecate to make sure Straight hasn't made them so depressed they will commit suicide. It is about spitting in a child's face. Straight is about cajoling or scaring a kid into admitting to drug use or sexual activity he hasn't actually engaged in to frighten parents into paying; it is about showing parents pictures of dead kids in morgues to scare parents further into submission. It is about paying politicians to say nice things about Straight.

Marketing to white families. As you found out from the above links, Straight is in reality a very destructive, mind-control cult. Straight is responsible for the intentional physical and mental abuse of tens of thousands of American teenagers. What's more Mel and Betty Sembler and Straight marketed their program almost exclusively to white families as described in the following link:
http://thestraights.com/reports/white-ki...
.

Making $95 million by treating white kids for addictions they did not have. Another disturbing fact about Straight is that Straight treated many kids for addictions they simply did not have as documented in the following link:

http://thestraights.com/frontpageextensi...

#3) "... a 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. The Web sites Fornits.com and TheStraights.com have collected many of their stories. Posts Kelly Caputo, an '88 alumna: "I don't think I will ever be the same. My every thought has been violated, confused, degraded and warped."

"Inspector Lowell Clary of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services found that reports of illegally restrained and stomped-on teens had been swept under the rug, likely with help from Republican state senators, who went unnamed, but made phone calls urging the clinic stayed open. A "persistent foul odor" hung over this use of power, said a St. Petersburg Times Op-Ed. "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."

excerpts from

http://911review.org/Alex/US_Ambassador_cultist.shtml
applauding the death of STRAIGHT.

#4) "Libby's Defense Team"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/dis...04x5411171

#5) "The Sembler Report"
Report Prepared By:
International Survivors Action Committee
(ISAC Corporation)
www.isaccorp.org
A special thanks to Wes Fager for all his research
December 9, 2002
http://www.isaccorp.org/straight/semblerreport.pdf

[Magda Hassan]

Mel Sembler was the US ambassador to Australia during Bush the imbecile's time (and John Howard). I believe it was during his time that we ended up with our very own branch of the FBI. A bit out of their jurisdiction I thought.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Below is part of the context for STRAIGHT:

I have interviewed two women who believe that, as children of military intelligence families in the post-WW2 years, they were subjected to the type of behaviourist experimentation conducted by Harry Harlow on monkeys.

Note details of Harlow's biography, with several similarities to that of MK-ULTRA shock therapist Ewen Cameron:

Harlow studied largely under Lewis Terman, the developer of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test, who helped shaped Harlow's future. After receiving a Ph.D. in 1930, Harlow changed his name from Israel to Harlow.

Directly after completing his doctoral dissertation, Harlow accepted a professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In terms of departmental development, his most significant achievement was his persuasion of the University to construct the Primate Laboratory, one of the first of its kind in the world. Under Harlow's direction, it became a place of cutting-edge research at which some 40 students earned their Ph.D.s.

Harlow received numerous awards and honors, including the Howard Crosby Warren Medal (1956), the National Medal of Science (1967), and the Gold Medal from the American Psychological Foundation (1973). He served as head of the Human Resources Research branch of the Department of the Army from 1950-1952, head of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council from 1952-1955, consultant to the Army Scientific Advisory Panel, and president of the American Psychological Association from 1958-1959.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow

Harlow's extreme behaviourist beliefs led him to create the Pit of Despair for his monkeys:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair

The "Dark Side" of "learned helplessness" almost certainly has older scientific/psychological roots than Jessen and Mitchell. However, their alleged involvement as outlined above is fascinating.

In Harlow's classic experiment, two groups of baby rhesus monkeys were removed from their mothers. In the first group, a terrycloth mother provided no food, while a wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk. In the second group, a terrycloth mother provided food; the wire mother did not. It was found that the young monkeys clung to the terrycloth mother whether or not it provided them with food, and that the young monkeys chose the wire surrogate only when it provided food.

Whenever a frightening stimulus was brought into the cage, the monkeys ran to the cloth mother for protection and comfort, no matter which mother provided them with food. This response decreased as the monkeys grew older.

When the monkeys were placed in an unfamiliar room with their cloth surrogate, they clung to it until they felt secure enough to explore. Once they began to explore, they occasionally returned to the cloth mother for comfort. Monkeys placed in an unfamiliar room without their cloth mothers acted very differently. They froze in fear and cried, crouched down, or sucked their thumbs. Some even ran from object to object, apparently searching for the cloth mother, as they cried and screamed. Monkeys placed in this situation with their wire mothers exhibited the same behavior as the monkeys with no mother.

Once the monkeys reached an age where they could eat solid foods, they were separated from their cloth mothers for three days. When they were reunited with their mothers, they clung to them and did not venture off to explore as they had in previous situations. Harlow concluded from this that the need for contact comfort was stronger than the need to explore.

The study found that monkeys who were raised with either a wire mother or a cloth mother gained weight at the same rate. However, the monkeys that had only a wire mother had trouble digesting the milk and suffered from diarrhea more frequently. Harlow's interpretation of this behavior, which is still widely accepted, was that lack of contact comfort was psychologically stressful to the monkeys.

The importance of these findings is that they contradicted both the then common pedagogic advice of limiting or avoiding bodily contact in an attempt to avoid spoiling children and the insistence of the then dominant behaviorist school of psychology that emotions were negligible. Feeding was thought to be the most important factor in the formation of a mother-child bond. Harlow concluded, however, that nursing strengthened the mother-child bond because of the intimate body contact that it provided. He described his experiments as a study of love. He also believed that contact comfort could be provided by either mother or father. Though widely accepted now, this idea was revolutionary at the time.

Critics of Harlow's research have observed that clinging is a matter of survival in young rhesus monkeys, but not in humans, and have suggested that his conclusions, when applied to humans, overestimate the importance of contact comfort and underestimate the importance of nursing.[3]

Harlow first reported the results of these experiments in "The nature of love," the title of his address to the sixty-sixth Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., August 31, 1958.

From around 1960 onwards, Harlow and his students began publishing their observations on the effects of partial and total social isolation. Partial isolation involved raising monkeys in bare wire cages that allowed them to see, smell, and hear other monkeys, but provided no opportunity for physical contact. Total social isolation involved rearing monkeys in isolation chambers that precluded any and all contact with other monkeys.

Harlow et al. reported that partial isolation resulted in various abnormalities such as blank staring, stereotyped repetitive circling in their cages, and self-mutilation. These monkeys were then observed in various settings. Some of the monkeys remained in solitary confinement for 15 years.[4]

In the total isolation experiments baby monkeys would be left alone for three, six, 12, or 24[5][6] months of "total social deprivation." The experiments produced monkeys that were severely psychologically disturbed. Harlow wrote:

No monkey has died during isolation. When initially removed from total social isolation, however, they usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by ... autistic self-clutching and rocking. One of six monkeys isolated for 3 months refused to eat after release and died 5 days later. The autopsy report attributed death to emotional anorexia. ... The effects of 6 months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that 12 months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; 12 months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially ...[1]

The pit of despair is a colloquial term for the vertical chamber apparatus, a device used in experiments conducted on rhesus macaque monkeys during the 1970s by American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow and his students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.[1] The term was first used by Harlow himself to describe his intentions for its use, and was subsequently adopted by critics of his research. The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of human clinical depression.

The vertical chamber was little more than a stainless-steel trough with sides that sloped to a rounded bottom. A 3/8 in. wire mesh floor 1 in. above the bottom of the chamber allowed waste material to drop through the drain and out of holes drilled in the stainless-steel. The chamber was equipped with a food box and a water-bottle holder, and was covered with a pyramid top [removed in the accompanying photograph], designed to discourage incarcerated subjects from hanging from the upper part of the chamber. [2]

Harlow placed baby monkeys in the chamber alone for up to one year. Within a few days, they stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed from the chamber, and most did not recover.

Harry Harlow was also, visibly, from time to time, the US Army's Head of Human Resources Research and a consultant to the US Army Scientific Advisory Panel.

Let's just break that down. There were periods when Harlow officially ran the US Army's scientific research into "human resources"?

Monkeys?

Yes. And more.

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...php?t=2019

[Ed Jewett]

Mel Sembler was the US ambassador to Australia during Bush the imbecile's time (and John Howard). I believe it was during his time that we ended up with our very own branch of the FBI. A bit out of their jurisdiction I thought.

The PANopticon sees everywhere; no shadows, hidden corners, or hiding places are allowed, no matter how far down under, up top, out back or far out.

[Ed Jewett]

Jan, thanks for your illumination on Mr. Harlow et alia. I believe that the more we know, understand and expose this kind of thing (and the sooner), the better off we will all be. That someone could and would do these types of things to a fellow human, an under-aged person or -- ack! -- there own child is reprehensible. That it is institutionalized, studied, and made policy is ... well, words fail me, and there is no emoticon I've seen that covers it.

[Ed Jewett]

Mel Sembler is mentioned in a copy-written article by Wayne Madsen entitled "Reagan ambassador decimated Italy's intelligence capabilities in the Arab world" found here: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/...6237.shtml