Category Archives: Torture

Asian Auschwitz…

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Trying to read up on the history of biological weapons (what with all the theories about the swine-flu vaccines circulating on the web, some wildly inaccurate, some more plausible), I came across this article on Z Net:

“ A New Type of Bomb

 After the 1942 failure, the Japanese army general staff lost all confidence in the efficacy of biological weapons. The pressure was on to find a new approach that would ensure the safety of friendly troops and deliver a more reliable, more devastating blow to the enemy.

 The new approach developed was to pack the pathogens in bombs or shells, which would be dropped from airplanes or delivered by artillery. This would satisfy both of the requirements, to deliver massive carnage while maintaining the safety of the attacking troops. At the same time, the only way to prevent disasters like that of the Zhejiang campaign was to improve communication among the troops.

 Two hurdles confronted the effort to load bombs with pathogens. The first was the need to keep the pathogens alive for long periods of time. The second was the need to develop a bomb made of materials that would break apart upon impact using little or no explosives; this would prevent the pathogen from being destroyed by heat. Alternatively, if a bombshell could not be made of fragile material, a pathogen that could withstand the heat of an explosion would have to be selected. When a bomb or a shell lands, people do not immediately gather at the point of impact, so it was necessary to convey the pathogen from that spot to wherever people were. Again a live host like a plague flea that would physically carry the pathogen and infect people was considered the best solution to this problem.

A bacteria bomb using the plague bacteria was developed to satisfy most of these requirements. The bomb used plague fleas packed in a shell casing of unglazed pottery made from diatomaceous earth (a soft, sedimentary rock containing the shells of microscopic algae). This same material was used in a water filter that Ishii had developed and patented. As this bomb would break apart using minimal explosive, it was expected that the plague fleas inside would survive the heat and scatter in all directions, to bite people and spread the disease. This bomb, called the Ishii bacterial bomb, was perfected by the end of 1944. In the beginning of 1945, the collection of rats went into high gear, and Unit 731 went to work cultivating fleas to be infected with the plague.

       Japan’s Defeat

 

The main force of Unit 731 left the unit headquarters by train soon after the Japanese surrender and returned to Japan between the end of August and early September 1945. Some members of the unit and officers of the Kwantung Army were captured by the Soviet military. Twelve of these POWs were tried by the Soviet Union at a war crimes trial in Khabarovsk in December 1949. In addition to members of Unit 731, officers of the Kwantung Army and the army’s chief medical officer were also charged as responsible parties. All of those charged were given prison sentences ranging from two to twenty-five years, but aside from one man who committed suicide just before returning to Japan, all had been repatriated by 1956. The record of the Khabarovsk trial was published in 1950 as Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow).

On the other hand, not one of the members of Unit 731 who returned to Japan was tried as a war criminal. Instead, the American military began investigating the unit in September 1945, and unit officers were asked to provide information about their wartime research, not as evidence of war crimes, but for the purpose of scientific data gathering. In other words, they were granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for supplying their research data. The American investigation continued through the end of 1947 and resulted in four separate reports. The investigation took place in two phases……

 The Hill and Victor Report concludes with the following evaluation: “Evidence gathered in this investigation has greatly supplemented and amplified previous aspects of this field. It represents data which have been obtained by Japanese scientists at the expenditure of many millions of dollars and years of work. Information had accrued with respect to human susceptibility to those diseases as indicated by specific infectious doses of bacteria. Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation.”

 The above account makes clear the nature of the crimes committed by the Ishii Unit. At the same, it is necessary to question the responsibility of the American forces who provided immunity from prosecution in exchange for the product of these crimes.”

 

More here on the experiments in the Daily Mail.

Majority of Church-Going Protestants in US Support State Torture?

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Some interesting findings from surveys of cross-cultural attitudes to torture cited at Will Grigg’s Pro Libertate blog:

“a country in which a bare majority, according to a recent global survey, opposes state torture.

That survey found that Americans are much likelier to support government-inflicted torture than citizens of Communist China, and marginally more indulgent of the practice than the residents of Muslim Indonesia and Muslim/socialist Egypt. Support for torture is also more widespread among Americans than among Iranians.…..

…A survey taken earlier this year documented that a majority (54 percent) of people who attend church at least once a week support torture.

Perhaps the most arresting discovery was that more than sixty percent of white, evangelical Protestants condone the practice. Torture advocates of this theological persuasion profess a “personal relationship” with Jesus Christ. That relationship must be, at best, a distant and superficial one…”

My Comment

I take Grigg’s point, but I’ve put a question mark next to this post’s heading, not because I find it implausible but because I’m always a bit skeptical of public surveys, especially, cross-cultural ones, unless they’re very extensive and prolonged. And conducted by people who have tremendous international experience. In this case, the survey of the church-goers apparently had its defects:

The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small.

Trauma and Brainwashing

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Since I’ve been posting about media spin and the brainwashing of the public, here’s an enlightening post at Humble Libertarian on post-traumatic stress disorder among vets, apparently at near-epidemic levels

What has that to do with brainwashing? Everything, as the video above shows.

Early victims of US brainwashing techniques were US army personnel, as experimentation in the CIA brain-washing program, MK-Ultra shows. They still continue to be victims of it.

Also read the CIA’s notorious Kubark manual on torture – which analyzes different techniques to induce compliance in subjects.

Repeatedly traumatizing someone (and sexual humiliation and violence are the easiest avenues to do this), breaks down their sense of identity. In all but the strongest people, it produces compliance, refusal to accept reality, escapism, psychosis, and addictions of all kinds.

In the strongest, it produces resistance. Either lawless resistance to the state, which is what we call criminal, or, in rare cases, the fierce concentrated resistance of the social or political activist, the revolutionary…and even the saint…

The victims produce the fodder that the state manipulates.
The survivors become the excuse for the state to ratchet up control.
Either way, the state grows.


Report of Extensive Rapes and Beatings at Irish Church Schools

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In the news:

“After a nine-year investigation, a commission published a damning report Wednesday on decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland’s castaway children.

The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests.

The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.

Wednesday’s five-volume report on the probe — which was resisted by Catholic religious orders — concluded that church officials shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.”

— More at AP

My Comment

This is sad and horrible. And not the first time for the Catholic church, as this HuffPo article on mission school abuse indicates and this piece on the abuse of Canadian Indians. And in other churches, some in India

(I’ll add a link here to a recent case).

Last year, I posted the debate over Satya Sai Baba’s alleged pedophilia. I say alleged, because when I actually read through the charges and counter-charges, there weren’t as many documented ones as I’d originally believed and some of the accusers didn’t seem credible. But it’s impossible to judge sometimes, because wealthy patrons can blow smoke in your eyes by dragging things out, publishing misleading PR releases that pass for news, and intimidating witnesses.

Alice Miller has written movingly about the abuse of children (she referred to a much broader category of abuse, not sexual abuse or beating, but things like verbal intimidation, humiliation, and the use of children to fulfill adult emotional needs that haven’t been met). For her it is the foundational trauma on which all adult wrong-doing is built. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but we should pay a lot more attention to how we treat children. If this had been done to prisoners, there would be have been an international outcry, and human rights groups would be descending en masse,

But when it’s done to children it just doesn’t seem the same thing..

But my interest here is in propaganda and mind control, not cruelty per se. I want to know how these sorts of things go on for so long (sixty years) without a public outcry.

Thirty thousand children went through this system.  These were well-funded institutions, in which most of the funds were used by the members of the orders and very little went to the children. Does this sound a lot like the behavior of states?

Churches, states, and corporations – when organizations become too large, their main thrust is self-perpetuation. And the people whom they were set up to serve (followers, citizens, consumers) become fodder in that process.

Add to that a powerful ideology and you understand how criticism can be hobbled and monstrous injustices committed without a word of protest.

On a personal note, I attended a Catholic college in India for my undergraduate studies. The nuns came from all over the south. Perhaps because the young women who attended were from relatively well-to-do backgrounds (running from middle-class professionals to wealthy business families and land owners), I don’t recall coming across anything like this. There was one rather unstable young woman who developed a crush on a nun and gushed about her interminably in purple prose, while the rest of us were trying to get through our reading for the night. But it was hilarious more than anything else.

Among the nuns I knew, the one who struck me as truly good through and through was young and rather child-like and simple in her ways. There was not an ounce of anything abusive, mean, or narrow-minded in her. She laughed all the time, I recall, and her chubby cheeks and round eyes could have been those of a small child. Whenever I was ill or having problems, she’d make me up a little soup, as she did for everyone. When she wasn’t working in the nursery, she worked a lot in the garden. She lived among flowers and children and music. She died in her twenties, a few years after I left.

Torture Files: Testimony of Richard Wurmbrand About Communist Torture

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“……I have been for years in prison with thieves and murderers. Even before having been put in prison I have been chaplain of a prison. A thief after he has stolen is a gentleman. He gives to the waiters the greatest tips and he invites girls and he invites you and he orders the best wines. He has not worked for his money. And such thieves are the communists. They have stolen half of Europe, they have stolen Russia, too. They have stolen a great part of Asia. And now they have what they have stolen and they are gentlemen and they expect the next occasion to steal again.

In this sense there is a relaxation with us, but it is not an essential one. We continue to have the avowed dictatorship of an atheistic party. We have one party. There can be no religious freedom where there is one party. We have elections. Now a joke is made with us that when God created Adam, He created only one woman, Eve, and He said to Adam, “You are free to choose for wife whomsoever you wish.” But there was only Eve. And so are the elections with us. (my emphasis)

Our Government doesn’t mind old women coming to church, but our childhood, our youth is poisoned with atheism. We are not allowed to counteract, and what bitter fruits will come out of this seed nobody can know.

Now you have asked another question, do we have open churches in Rumania? If somebody comes to Rumania – it is another situation in Russia – if somebody comes to Rumania, he is really impressed.

The Orthodox liturgy is something very beautiful. It is grand. And if you come in Rumania you see thousands of churches open, liturgies, sermons, many people in the church. And I have spoken with Americans who have been there and have told me, “I was very impressed.” And now there is really a certain religious liberty. In Rumania you are allowed to say as much as you like that God is good. You are not allowed to say that the Devil is bad. St. John the Baptist could have saved his life if he had said: “Repent because the kingdom of heaven is near.” Nobody would have touched him. He was touched when he said, “You, Herod, are bad.”

If Christ would have delivered a thousand “Sermons on the Mount” they would not have crucified Him. They crucified Him when He said, “You vipers,” then He was crucified.….”

Comment

One of the heroes of modern evangelical Christianity, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, on the state’s use of religion as propaganda, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1966.

Wurmbrand, a Lutheran pastor of Jewish origin who died in 2001, isn’t easily dismissed: he spoke 14 languages, was a professor of the Old Testament and suffered over a dozen years of torture in Romanian prisons, several in solitary confinement underground.

He’s worth reading again today for anyone inclined to romanticize communism in the last century. And for anyone concerned about the direction in which the west is heading today.

More on what Wurmbrand suffered (his wife, Sabina, lost her entire family and herself worked as a slave laborer):

“His captors dumped him at Calea Rahova, a spanking new prison for dissidents, enemies of the people and criminals of various stripes. The warders there gave him a new identity (Vasile Georgescu), and set about erasing his old one. The 39-year-old Wurmbrand was 6 feet, 3 inches tall, with a medium build, and enjoyed relatively hale health before his abduction. But after being subjected to physical and psychological depredations and humiliations during his first year in the gulag, he nearly expired, kept just this side of living by the facility’s doctors. Dead, of course, he would be incapable of divulging information.

In clear, straightforward, occasionally stomach-churning prose, Wurmbrand recounts his horrific tortures: sleep deprivation; starvation diet; made to race around his four-steps-by-two-steps cell for hours until he collapsed; beatings with truncheons and boots; water funneled down his throat until it filled his stomach, which was then violently kicked; the bastinado, a relic of the Spanish Inquisition in which the bare soles of the feet are flogged; guards urinating and spitting into his open mouth; drugged into delirium; terrorized by dogs kept inches from his throat; solitary confinement–speaking to no one except inquisitors–for nearly three years in a three-paces-by-three-paces cell, this one located 30 feet underground; tossed into the “carcer,” a constricting, closet-sized enclosure with metal-spiked walls. In short, he experienced his own personal Passion.

“It was an image of hell,” Wurmbrand reported, “in which the torment is eternal and you cannot die.” He confessed to any false charges concerning himself–adultery, homosexuality–but steadfastly refused to implicate other believers, irrespective of denomination.

Transforming solitary confinement into his crucible, Wurmbrand affirmed his faith and tried to keep sane by mentally composing approximately 350 sermons and 300 devotional poems, which he later claimed to have memorized by employing condensed rhyme schemes and mnemonic devices. (He published 22 of the former in 1969’s Sermons in Solitary Confinement.) Additionally, he “talked” with and “preached” to inmates in adjacent cells by tapping on the walls using Morse code, which the prisoners learned from each other; devised chess matches with himself, substituting bread crumbs for pieces; and held imaginary conversations with his wife Sabina and young son Mihai.

More than three years into his ordeal, Wurmbrand was hauled before a faceless quartet of judges for a 10-minute trial, found guilty of subversive activities and sentenced to 20 years’ hard labor. Wracked by tuberculosis, he spent four years rotting in a prison TB ward in the Carpathian foothills. With no medicine, many died. While there he learned that his wife had been arrested in 1950 and pressed into slave labor digging and carting dirt for the Danube-Black Sea canal, a project eventually abandoned as infeasible. Held for three years, she ate grass when necessary.

A member of the secret police whom Wurmbrand had earlier converted to Christianity helped secure his release in June 1956, and he rejoined Sabina and Mihai in Bucharest, where he resumed preaching. “I knew, of course,” he wrote, “that sooner or later I would be rearrested.” In January 1959 he was re-imprisoned during a renewed crackdown on the clergy, his old sentence–plus five years–reimposed. Plunged back into the black hole of the gulag, he endured extensive brainwashing designed to eradicate religious beliefs. Five and a half years later he walked away, his faith intact…..”

More in an obituary in 2001 in the New York Press.

On the other hand, the Independent in its obituary took a more reserved view of Wurmbrand’s experiences and testimony.

The Guardian also noted some criticisms of him.

Torture files: CIA on those non-existent UK torture flights post-9-11…..oops..

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“LONDON – CIA Director Michael Hayden acknowledged Thursday that two rendition flights carrying terrorism suspects refueled on British territory, despite repeated U.S. assurances that none of the secret flights since the Sept. 11 attacks had used British airspace or soil.

Hayden told agency employees that information previously provided to the British “turned out to be wrong.”

The spy agency reviewed rendition records late last year and discovered that in 2002 the CIA had in fact refueled two separate planes, each carrying a terrorism suspect, on Diego Garcia, a British island territory in the Indian Ocean….”

“Turned out to be wrong”? This is a news story? Or a PR release from the Agency?

And turns out Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean may after all have been used as a torture site.

We said it back in November 2005 in our book, “The Language of Empire, Abu Ghraib and the American Media” (Monthly Review Press). but it bears saying again: we are living in the early beginnings of a global police state run for financiers and bankers.

 

Shock Doctrine Sham: Torture without Milton Friedman…

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Memo to Naomi Klein — torture’s been around for centuries — with and without capitalism.

To wit.:

“‘I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,’ he said. ‘The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.’

Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: ‘The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.’

He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. ‘At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.

‘It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.’

His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. ‘An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,’ she said. ‘One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead…..”

More on the unpleasantness at Camp 22 in North Korea , by Antony Barnett at the Guardian.

Torture Files: torturing the truth

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“Consider the testimony before Congress Thursday of Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a counter terrorism expert who taught at the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school. He went through the waterboarding procedure to evaluate for himself if it was torture.

In my case, the technique was so fast and professional that I didn’t know what was happening until the water entered my nose and throat, It then pushes down into the trachea and starts the process of respiratory degradation. It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts. As the event unfolded, I was fully conscious of what was happening: I was being tortured.

Yes, he was being tortured. No if ands or buts. Torture. What part of that procedure is so hard for new Attorney General Michael Mukasey to understand?

In previous wars, the United States condemned torture. Now we not only endorse it but export it, sending prisoners overseas so other countries can extract misinformation through pain and suffering.

And what does this get us? False information that is used to launch illegal wars against other nations. Recent reports confirm that an al-Qaida operative was tortured to the point where he told us what we wanted to hear about Iraq, not was actually true.

When torture doesn’t work, we simply allow ourselves to be conned. CBS recently outed “Curveball,” the so-called “top scientist” from Iraq who fed us false information about mobile chemical weapons labs in Iraq. Turns out he was a low-level worker with an active imagination.

America on the world stage is viewed as both a bully and a bumbling joke that can’t do anything right. We ignore the United Nations, violate international law and turn Iraq into the safe-haven for terrorism that we falsely claimed was there before we launched an illegal invasion….”

More by Doug Thompson in “Where, and when, did we go wrong?”at Capitol Hill Blue.

Torture Files: The Parable of the Sower and the Seed

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“When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures….”

From Der Spiegel, in the New York Times.

Well, I hate to say I told you so….

But I wrote about this in relation to the torture of women in Iraq in July- August 2004.
and in relation to rendition flights in December 2005

and in relation to undisclosed abuse in February 2006.

and in relation to the way the media works in such things in November 2005

and in relation to the broader picture: opinion-making and legal culture in my book.

Investigative journalism is a bit irrelevant in all this, ultimately. Any one with a ear for truth can hear when people are lying. The real question is why do people not have a ear for lies anymore? Why are they selective about what lies they want to fall for and what they want to see through? I would venture to guess here — but I think — a little black humor here — I will wait for copyright protection first.

And even then, maybe, pass.

Why go out to educate people, I wonder. Who are they to me? They should be free to be ignorant.

Education, in my humble elitist opinion, is not for everyone. It is not a right. It is a privilege (and a punishment) for those who go looking for that sort of privilege and punishment. It demands self-discipline, humility before truth, and ethical behavior to your fellow man. And even then, it is not entirely in your hands how or where you get it.

It will come to you…. or depart from you as the spirit lists.

Let him who has ears hear…..

Torture files: John Donne on the abomination of torture..

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From an article in Harper’s on a sermon against torture in 1625 by poet, priest, and courtier, John Donne, via A Guy in the Pew:

“Recently I asked a clerical friend whether, considering the persistence of torture as a moral issue, he had thought of giving a sermon on the subject? He looked very uncomfortable and responded saying that his congregation was bipartisan and that he would be loathe to introduce a political issue as a sermon topic. It would fragment the congregation, he thought. Really?

I reject the notion that torture is a political issue of any sort. It is a great moral issue. And when those who have a clerical vocation fail to understand it and address it in those terms, they do their flock and themselves a great disservice.

Consider this John Donne sermon of 1625. It was delivered as his Easter Sunday sermon, which is important. Then as now, the Easter service drew the biggest crowd of the year. The Easter sermon was the minister’s minute in the spotlight—the moment when he would reach his greatest audience and make his reputation. And we know from John Donne’s correspondence, he was concerned about another audience: the king, his entourage and the courts. When Donne rose to deliver this sermon, torture was a heated “political” issue in England. Under the Stuart monarchs, the use of torture was viewed as a royal prerogative (how little things change). It was administered by judges, particularly by the national security court of seventeenth century England, the so-called Court of Star Chamber. John H. Langbein’s important book, Torture and the Law of Proof gives us very clear guidance into how torture was prescribed and used.

Over a series of centuries, the genius of the English law had been steadily to restrict and limit the use of torture, until at this point, under King James, it was controlled by the king’s judges and limited in practice through a series of special writs. Which is to say, legally it was far more constrained than it is today under an Executive Order issued by King James’s understudy in allegedly Divine Right governance, George W. Bush.

Donne delivered a direct blow against this system, the use to which it was put, and the suffering it caused. He makes no equivocations. And in the end he delivers his blows against even the king’s judges who administer the system. No one viewed Donne as a “political figure.” Indeed, owing to his Catholic background and sympathies, he eschewed court politics. Nor in the end was there anything “political” about the question of torture—it was an issue of ethics and of faith.”