Tag Archives: Interrogation

Iraq War embed Rob McClure, witness to war crimes he didn’t report, suffers phantom pain in gonads he never had.

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DENVER, COLORADO- Today Occupy Denver political prisoner Corey Donahue was given a nine month sentence for a 2011 protest stunt. Judge Nicole Rodarte’s unexpected harsh sentence came after the court read the victim statement of CBS4 cameraman Rob McClure, who said he still feels the trauma of the uninvited “cupping [of his] balls” while he was filming the 2011 protest encampment at the state capitol. Donahue admits that McClure was the target of a “nut-tap”, but insists it was feigned, as occupiers demonstrated their disrespect to the corporate news crews who were intent on demonizing the homeless participants even as Denver riot police charged the park. Though a 2012 jury convicted Donahue of misdemeanor unwanted sexual contact, witnesses maintain there was no physical contact.

Of course simply the implication of contact would have humiliated McClure in front of the battalion of police officers amused by the antic. That’s authentic sexual trauma, just as a high school virgin is violated when a braggart falsely claims to have of engaged them in sexual congress. Donahue was wrong, but how wrong? Can professionals who dish it out claim infirmity when the tables are turned?

Ultimately the joke was on Donahue, because his mark turned out to be far more vulnerable than his dirty job would have suggested. The CBS4 cameraman who Donahue picked on was a louse’s louse.

Off limits?
While some might assert there is no context which would excuse touching a stranger’s genital region, I’m not sure the rule of no hitting below the belt is a civility to which folks facing riot cops are in accord. Protesters can’t shoot cops, they can’t spit at cops, in fact protesters have to pull all their punches. Some would have you believe demonstrators should do no more than put daisies in police gun barrels, all the while speaking calmly with only pleasant things to say.

Let me assure you, simply to defy police orders is already a humiliation for police. What’s some pantomimed disrespect? Humiliating riot cops is the least unarmed demonstrators can do against batons and shields and pepper spray. Should the authorities’ private parts be off limits for a public’s expression of discontent? Jocks wear jock straps precisely because private parts aren’t off sides.

It’s tempting to imagine that all cops are human beings who can be turned from following orders to joining in protestations of injustice and inequity. This is of course nonsense. But it’s even more delusional to think corporate media cameras and reporters will ever take a sympathetic line to the travails of dissidents. Media crews exploit public discontent just as riot cops enjoy the overtime. Media crews gather easy stories of compelling interest from interviewees eager to have their complaints be understood.

Corey Donahue
On October 15, 2011, Rob McClure turned his camera off when the narrative wasn’t fitting the derogatory spin he wanted to put on the homeless feeding team which manned Occupy Denver’s kitchen, dubbed “The Thunderdome.” Donahue observed the cameraman’s deliberate black out of the savory versus the unsavory and reciprocated with the crowd pleasing nut-tap. In the midst of this circus, Colorado State Troopers, METRO SWAT, and city riot police charged the encampment and made two dozen arrests.

It was hours later, perhaps after reviewing police surveillance footage, that McClure conferred with police commanders and agreed to press charges for the nut-tap. Corey Donahue was one of the high visibility leaders of the crowd. He’d been involved in multiple arrests, but this time his bond would be higher and harder to post because instead of the usual anti-protest violations, Donahue would be charged with sex crime.

Ultimately Donahue sought political asylum in South America rather than face having to report for the rest of his life as a sex offender. The offense was only a misdemeanor and his trial was a miscarriage of justice. Attorney friends later convinced Donahue to return to the US because this crime was arguably not sex related and was likely to be overturned on appeal. Likewise, a sentence was unlikely to exceed time served as the “nut-tap” paled in comparison to the police brutality and excessive force which has since ensued. Neither Judge Rodarte or victim Rob McClure got the memo, and it wasn’t the first time McClure failed to frame public outcry in the context of brutal militarized repression.

It turns out McClure’s own self respect was probably way too fragile to have ventured to cast stones at the slovenly homeless occupiers.

Rob McClure
Cameraman Robert McClure had been an embedded reporter in Iraq in 2004. You might expect such a experience to have toughened him up, or expanded his empathy for critics of US authoritarian brutality, but that is to underestimate the culpability of the corporate media war drum beaters.

And McClure’s guilt ran deeper that that. According to his CBS4 bio, McClure was reporting from a major military detention center. It turns out McClure covered Abu Fucking Ghraib. In 2004 McClure’s assignment was to distort what happened there as rogue misconduct. No thanks to fuckers like McClure, the Abu Ghraib techniques were later confirmed to be standard protocol. The US torture and humiliation of prisoners was systemic.

McClure’s coverage for CBS4 specifically glorified Dr. Dave Hnida, otherwise a family physician from Littleton, but in the service of the military as a battlefield surgeon assigned to treat prisoners of war. While it sounds commendatory to attend to the health of our sworn adversaries, in practice that job involves most commonly reviving prisoners being subjected to interrogation. Hnida’s task was to keep subjects conscious for our extended depredations. Medical colleagues call those practitioners “torture docs”. They shouldn’t be celebrated. They should lose their medical licenses.

So that’s the Rob McClure who wrote Judge Rodarte to say that after all these years, having witnessed unthinkable horror and sadistic injustice, while still spinning stories to glorify American soldiers and killer cops and power-tripping jailers, the memory of Corey Donahue’s prank made his balls hurt.

Dem presidents won’t chose better supreme court justices than Repugs

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NOW we’re told the ultimate reason to prevent a Trump presidency is because he’ll appoint Supreme Court judges who will set progressive movements back for generations. You forget that President Obama’s latest nomination put the lie to that bugaboo. Put it to bed and burned it. Upon the fortuitous demise of one of the most corrupt justices ever, Antonin Scalia, who died literally, in bed with a crony patron, President Obama submitted for consideration as his replacement the conservative jurist Merrick Garland. Garland’s most notable legal achievement was to indemnify the US regime from charges of torture. I’m sure voters in 2008 elected Obama to uphold Democratic ideals not scuttle them. We’re being sold the same pitch with Hillary, really without any basis in fact, that a democrat will attempt to curb the Supreme Court’s antisocial conduct, as exemplified by the Thomas, Alito, Kennedy, Roberts cabal. The Garland nomination has also exposed the other lie, that Trump’s appointments could not be opposed. As we see with Garland still, SCOTUS nominees can be embargoed indefinitely.

Congress protests public right to guns. No checks & balances for constituents.

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I do like to see rule-breaking protest normalized, but that’s as far as I’ll go as an endorsement. These US Representatives won’t call an official sit-in to stop war, nor to defend Social Security or heathcare or to end torture or war crimes, but they’ll do it to abridge your rights. Until these MoFos sit-in to rein in the banks and the corporatocracy, I’ll be damned if I’m going to applaud them for wanting to curb the people’s right to bear arms. Take assault rifles from cops and private cops and the bank eviction posses before you deem it insupportable that your victimized constituents weren’t granted the second amendment for a reason. What utter dumbass charlatans! Who needs assault rifles? The Native Americans could have used them. The Puerto Ricans needed them. Hawaiians. Central America. Our slaves. Every African American male. You privileged shills!

Shit in a Sack

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?Cell House Three with 'Dog Cages' on the second floor, left.
From the front page of the Pueblo Star-Journal and Sunday Chieftain?, Dated Sunday November 6, 1977. The banner headline on the front page cried out in large bold lettering: NEWSMEN TOUR PRISON AND VIEW “LIVING HELL” By Bill Gagnon.

Canon City- A three-man reporter-photographer team from The Pueblo Chieftain and Pueblo Star-Journal stepped out of the bright and warm summerlike weather here last week and into a medieval chamber of horror- Cellhouse 3 at the Colorado State Penitentiary.

?Once inside the grim building, they were stunned by the sight of humans caged in filthy cells and living under the most wretched conditions imaginable, denied even the most simple and basic necessities of life – soap, towels, soaks, clean clothing, blankets and sheets. Yes , they even are denied the necessary materials to scrub and clean their steel hovels.

?For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, these unfortunate creatures are kept locked in their filth-covered cages with nothing to do except learn to hate an indifferent and unthinking society that keeps them there.

?Treated and looked upon as subhuman beings, even medical and dental services available to them are mediocre and to the point they are almost nil. And letters sent to them by loved ones outside the high, gray walls sometimes is delayed for weeks at the prison before being delivered to them.

?While these conditions observed first hand by the Pueblo news team in the prison’s so called “punitive segregation” section made a grown man ill, they were compounded by those seen in the narrow and darkened steel barred isolation cells in the solitary confinement wing. There, faceless and silent occupants huddle and cringe in the darkness amid the pungent stench of filth within the close confines of these cesspools like cubicles, almost concealed from those outside.

?Those confined to this living hell in the infamous Cellhouse 3 are stripped of all human dignity and respect. An aura of frustration and despair hands heavy throughout this living example of man’s inhumanity to man.

?Yet, despite such barbaric treatment, some find an inner strength which turns to outrage and they cry out to the world; “You can’t do this to me; I am a man!” But few outside the walls hear, or want to hear them.

?But the voice of one of these tortured men, David Anderson, in the form of a letter sent to the editors of these newspapers describing the deplorable conditions in maximum security, was heard. And it resulted in the assignment of this news team to investigate the shocking allegations.

?Note: the article also contained several photos of the conditions, and covered two full pages of the newspaper.

While I was confined there, Gerald Hayes, one of the prisoners, sat down in his cell, with an old razor blade, cut off his index finger.

With blood dripping from his hand, he scrawled a message on the wall of his cell “God! Help us, Convicts are people too.”

Gather round children, I’m about to tell you a true story. ?It happened nearly 40 years ago in the Colorado State Penitentiary. It happened in cell house three.

?Cell house three was isolated from the rest of the prison, it was built to house death row prisoners and other prisoners deemed problem prisoners.

?If you caused problems in cell house three, they would then send you to a special tier called the “Dog Cages” This was their jail within a jail within a prison. The “Dog Cages” was a 24/7 lock down in your cell. The only exception was when you were let out of your cell for an hour to take a shower. Some men lost their minds under those conditions. It was quite easy for a prisoner to become so confused after months, that he could not distinguish one day of the week from another.?

Many of the prisoners there committed self mutilation or suicide. In my efforts not to end up hanging from a dirty bed sheet as so many others, I chose humor as a means to hold on to my sanity.

?This is the story of one of those efforts.?

Since the beginning of time when we first started locking men in prisons, the prisoners have made knives for self protection. These homemade knives were called a “Shiv” or a “Shank” and over the years the prisoners found ingenious ways of hiding their “Shank” from the prison guards who were continually searching for the “Shank”.?

For many guards, finding a prisoners hidden contraband, made their day. And for some guards, finding a “Shank” was as near a sexual experience as they could get. They became ecstatic.?

With the hidden “Shank” and the prison guards lustful hunger to find it, I began to set up my plan.?

The chief “Shank” hunter of cell house three was well known; he was Lieutenant D. A. Davis, who was in charge of cell house three on the swing shift. Lt. D. A. Davis loved his job and the power he held over the prisoners lives, he never missed an opportunity to torment the prisoner with late delivery of their mail or medication, the two most important things to a prisoners.?

D. A. had on several occasions during the cold winter months, set the steam heater on the “Dog Cages” at the lowest setting, the control for the heaters were off tier in the control cage, there were many windows on the tier broken and snow would often blow onto the tier. Another little trick that seemed to give D.A. a lot of pleasure; when the food cart came to the cell house from the main dining room, he would let it set until the food was cold. He took joy in making the prisoners suffer, making sure to remind them he was in charge of every aspect of their lives’. ?

D.A. could also be cruel to the other prison guards. He was a Canon City hometown boy, who thought of the prison as their cottage industry, if a guard was from another city or another race ( D.A. was white) D.A. would made them also feel his wrath. guard Rodriquez had two strikes against him; he was Spanish from Pueblo.?D.A. was one of those spit and polish guards, sharp creases in his shirt and trousers, Lieutenant bars sparkling, I think he was afraid to sit down while in uniform for fear of wrinkling his trousers. He was an overweight heavy jowl bully with shifty eyes that seemed always searching as if his deeds would catch up with him.?

While Rodriquez was a complete opposite of D. A. in manner and dress.?

Rodriquez was a small quiet man, his uniform was always a little rumpled, in the several years I knew him, I never once saw Rodriquez mistreat a prisoner. He once confided to me that he thought being locked in a prison cell 24 hours a day was punishment enough and that he was not going to add to it. The empathy for the prisoners in his face was easy to see. He said that he had taken the job as a prison guard as a last resort only to take care of his family, after failing to gain employment in other areas. All the prisoners respected him for the kindness he showed them. Because of the way D.A. treated Rodriquez it could be said that he suffered as much abuse from D.A. as the prisoners did. ?

Rodriquez seemed always to have a slight smile whenever I made D.A. the brunt of one of my schemes, but he never said so with words. I think the enemy of our enemy can become our friend, it was Rodriquez who tossed the newspaper clipping ( Living Hell ) on my bunk one day, the news article was consider contraband and unavailable to the prisoners until I received that copy.

The Plan:
Timing was needed for my plan to be successful; It needed to happen just after D.A came on duty for the 3:00 swing shift, and there would need for one of the prisoners to be out of his cell for a shower. When a prisoner is out of his cell for showering, is the only time he would have access to the exterior windows you see in the photo above.?

I had acquired a small 8 inch by 12 inch plastic bag, in the bottom of this bag I place a 8 inch wooden stick and then took a nice big healthy shit in the bag, adding a smidgen of water so as to make the mixture runny. I rolled up the bag tightly and then wrapped it again in an old newspaper so that the contents were not visible. When you felt this concoction of stick, plastic and paper it felt like there could be a “Shank” hidden within. ?

The Hide:
I tied a short string in the center of this concoction and had the prisoner out for his shower lower it out the exterior window so that it hung between the second floor and the first floor. The time was about 3:15 and D.A. had just came on duty. The guard tower just yards away from the cell house had a clear view of the exterior of the cell house and I was sure what his reaction would be when he spotted it hanging there outside the window.?The prisoner out for his shower waited until the tower guard was on the back side of the tower before he lowered the bag out the window and tied it off on the bars.?

And just as I had planned; The tower guard spotted the bag hanging there a few minutes later, the Tower guard took out his binoculars for a closer inspection of the bag. Ah Ha! what are those convicts up to now? and then the next step, the guard picked up his phone to call the cell house and alert them to the mysterious bag hanging out the window on the “Dog Cage” tier. I heard the cell house phone ring.?
The Jig is up! D.A. the “Shank Hunter” was on the job.?

D.A. hollered out Lock-Up! meaning for the prisoner out for his shower to go to his cell. The cell block door slid open and D.A. came walking in as if he were doing a head count of the prisoners. He walked casually to the end of the tier, not looking at the widow where the bag was tied, on his return trip his demeanor was much different as he excitedly jumped to the window and pulled the bag up, ripping the sting from the bars. Glancing around he darted for the tier door with his prize in hand….of course, I hollered out “D.A. Come Back Here With My Shit!?

The prisoners all locked in their cells exploded in laughter.

?D.A. was still not sure of his prize as Rodriquez later told me of what happen when D.A. entered the cage. He feverishly began ripping opening the bag and discovered the sack of shit, he threw the bag on the floor and it splattered up on his pants. His face turned beet red with embarrassment as he remarked to Rodriquez he didn’t want to hear any talk of this incident. D.A. began to wretch and struggled to keep from vomiting. Of course we prisoners knew that we would have some new punishments coming from D.A., but hearing the laughter was so therapeutic, there are those moments when suffering and punishment reach a point that we don’t care what happen to us. ?

D.A. took a short leave to go home and change his pants.?

When Rodriquez came on the tier, he walked right up to my cell with the biggest smile I had ever seen on his face, and said I know you did it David and it was beautiful! my reply was “What are you talking about?”

The Moral of the story; When Shit Happens… make sure you’re not the one holding the sack.

Human rights for even Anders Breivik

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In retrospect, awarding the newly elected Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize was about as smartly ambitious as it gets. Everyone knows humanitarians don’t do it for the reward. A Nobel Prize is wasted if there’s not some eligible sociopath who might be influenced with the pressure to behave themselves. President Obama’s Nobel medal was an experiment in paying it forward. Who knows how much more bloodthirsty Obama might have gotten with his drones had not the Nobel committee tried to extort him with its higher expectations? The Nobel award givers took a lot of ribbing for their foolishness from those of us who weren’t idealist enough. AND SO IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE when Norway’s mass murdering overachiever Anders Breivik sued his jailers for abusing his human rights because he wasn’t getting sufficient visitors in his cushy prison suite, that the Norwegian supreme court would rule Breivik was right.

Of course they did. If you’re not going to give a death sentence to a crazed bigot who guns down 76 children, if you’re not going to throw him in a hole but instead give him a spacious accommodation, if instead of a life sentence you let him pursue university studies and limit his incarceration to twenty some years, then you don’t want to isolate your prisoner from human contact if it might appear even as a semblance of solitary confinement. Because lesser cultures do that.

Lesser capitalist flagship states isolate, execute and torture. I so appreciate that Norway wants to set a high bar, but I despair that the land of Guantanamo and waterboarding and indefinite detention and ILLEGAL detention and rendition and extrajudicial assassination and no habeus corpus can’t even see this bar to reach it.

Ask the candidates: who, as president, vows to jail Obama, Clinton and Bush?

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If Americans really want to differentiate which presidential candidate represents change, a good question would be, which will prosecute America’s celebrity war criminals? Who, among them, will jail past leaders guilty of crimes against humanity?

Obama 2008 didn’t do it. President Obama didn’t even close Guantanamo, end torture, or disarm drones. By failing to curb Pax America’s wars of aggression, Obama too should now stand in the docket. Wasn’t it hoped, as Bush and Cheney helivac’d from the White House, that Obama’s “change” meant calling that chopper back for a return to accountability? At minimum, superficially? Justice didn’t happen, Obama didn’t want to look back, and the villains remain to foul the political discourse as foils to perpetuate high crimes and to normalize the forgiving of greater trespasses.

Is American exceptionalism fathomless? ISIS hasn’t grown out of the terrible twos yet already John Kerry wants to charge it with genocide; not to haul ISIS perps before the Hague –extrajudicial assassination by drone circumvents that– but because genocide law holds that those who do not condemn it are its accessories.

How far does culpability reach among our active enablers of war crimes? It extends into our pool of candidates certainly, but how far? Does Senator Bernie Sanders, at one edge, consider himself an accessory to the crimes of past and current administrations? It’s possible Sanders voted against the wars, interventions and regime changes, but will he prosecute those who did not?

Donald Trump stands on the periphery as well, avaritic criminality is not alas a purview of the International Criminal Court, but he does seem an unlikely candidate for honoring the rule of law let alone conscience.

Still, would it hurt to ask? An independent party candidate might have the only acceptable answer. Who, as president, will honor humanity’s highest laws? Who will hold state terrorists accountable?

Obama nominates TORTURE JUDGE Merrick Garland to U.S. Supreme Court

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Elect a Democrat to the presidency to ensure progressive Supreme Court nominees. Elect a Democrat to end wars and prosecute war criminals. Elect a Democrat so we can close Guantanamo. After two years President Obama is finally hinting he’ll close Guantanamo (though missing the point, he’ll imprison its inmates elsewhere). The wars are not only ongoing, American troops are quietly mobilizing for a significant upcoming deployment, and Dick Cheney and ilk are still on television being consulted as experts. AND as concerns favorable supreme court justices, Obama has just nominated another moderate, Merrick Garland, who in his stint as appellate judge, defended George W. Bush’s torture and detainment policies in Guantanamo.

NE Patriots are serial cheaters, so are their namesakes. The unfair advantage is an essential of Capitalism.

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First the New England Patriots got caught spying on their adversaries, now they’ve been tweaking the air-pressure of their game balls to sneak a ballistic handling advantage. Rules be damned, Patriot quarterback Tom Brady prefers his ordnance two pounds psi shy, hollow-points –if you will– which are also against regulation. For how long have the Patriots been manipulating advantages? And how else? They weren’t satisfied with the home field advantage on Sunday. Maybe officials should bring protractors to investigate the Boston gridiron. A level playing field doesn’t likely suit the Patriots either.

OF COURSE it doesn’t. Who expects sportsmanship from “patriots?!” Patriotism is the antisocial insistance on your own cultural superiority. American exceptionalism is an endorsement of tactical superiority, covert war, disproportionate force, drones, extrajudicial assassination, death squads, snipers, collateral damage, and torture. Formal US policy is to FLAUNT international law. American materialism profits from insider trading, extortion, usury, and corporate hegemony uber alles! Why would our surrogate Sunday warriors pretend there is honor among thieves?

Of course America underinflates footballs to best our opponents. We also diligently deploy inspectors to ensure our intended defeatees can’t recallibrate theirs. Meanwhile our leaders dissemble when plausible deniability stretches thin.

Of course NFL officials are not discussing a Super Bowl disqualification for the recidivist Patriots. Instead they’re weighing minor penalties, no doubt manageable, if not tax deductible. If America’s best cheaters don’t advance to the Super Bowl, the outcome would be hypocritical. Go Team! America Fuck Yeah!

I’m kidding of course. Sack the quarterback, disqualify the Patriots, send whoever else to the Super Bowl, then march the entire US defense and offense departments to the Hague.

UPDATE 1/23:
While fans and media try to belittle the scandal (ie. “Deflate-gate” and “Ballghazi”), statisticians have noted a damning anomaly relating to the advantage gained from underinflated footballs. After the rules were changed to allow offensive teams to use their own footballs –Brady was among the quarterbacks lobbying for the change– New England’s ball handling superiority grew beyond the realm of probability.

Probably all teams know that well-inflated footballs fly further but underinflated balls are easier to grab. Maybe the purpose of making a personalized array of game balls available is so offensive teams can exploit alternate characteristics as needed. Maybe the NFL understood this when they granted the rule change. Maybe the Patriots just couldn’t pass up every opportunity to cheat, until the statistics made plain their greed. Whether by hubris or head-injury numbskulledness, Tom Brady and his receivers thought they coud break PT Barnum’s rule too.

The American Dream hinges on equality of opportunity and fair play, but of course Capitalism idealizes the unfair advantage.

Btw I abhor the theatre of corporate sports, but when it exposes the reek of America’s national character, I like to make sure to smell it.

The conceivability that climate change, torture, or Pope’s Catholicism isn’t.

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The January 2015 Smithsonian Magazine asks “Did Civil War vets suffer from PTSD?” which seems a progressive conceit from an arbitor of the accepted version of events. I think it’s useful to ask “Does a bear shit in the woods?” by which I mean, is it conceivable to you that bears don’t shit in the woods? Because your incredulity is critical. Apparently these days, history is written not by historians but by pollsters. Today the commonplace perception of history and science prevails as the dominant verdict. Whether Climate Change is real, or whether torture is torture, depends on how the public polls. Presumably truth being what we want it to be would poll favorably too.

While the Smithsonian’s question suggests to upend institutional dogma, dragging 19th century medicine into the 21st century, it’s actually the reverse. Doctors treating veterans have always known that nearly all people exposed to combat will suffer PTSD, ancient times didn’t favor acronyms perhaps, yet today’s spin doctors want public comprehension to pivot on a question, contingent upon whether is is. Of course DO BEARS sounds more objective than BEARS DO. It also smells of the dissembling of a torture doctor. TORTURE IS.

Film critics toe corporate line to re-kill messenger Gary Webb, after Hollywood

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Gary Webb
AT BEST “KILL THE MESSENGER” portrays suspiciously deceased journalist Gary Webb as a heroic sleuth who refused to compromise his principles. At best, the film re-reports the enormous crime which Webb exposed in his series DARK ALLIANCE, that the CIA’s support of the Nicaraguan CONTRAs in the 1980s involved facilitating the smuggling of drugs into the US, in such large quantities as to precipitate the crack cocaine epidemic, delivered to our major inner cities by the CIA. UNFORTUNATELY the film muddies the crack connection, as Webb’s detractors did back then. Two deliberate plot omissions suggest this is probably not a coincidence.

Conveniently the screenplay ends before the years when Gary Webb was able to elaborate on those links. By then he’d lost his audience. Unfortunately the film that might have given his life’s work a main stage reprise chose not to go that far. Does it matter anymore? These days the CIA and its covert cohorts are understood to have authored a litany of unimaginable evils. So it’s not too early to demonize the CIA. Evidently someone thinks the American public is not ready to be shown the racist stratagems of corportate class war.

Exposing the genesis of the crack attack on African American ghettos is clearly a missed opportunity for a film in 2014. Given Ferguson. Given the rising awareness of our government’s coordinated and premeditated containment and criminalization of dark-skinned populations. Let’s remember that while the US was fighting Nicaraguan rebels, it was also at war with the Black Liberation Army. Funding and arming drug warlords was the same strategy Brazil used to administrate the favelas, via proxy gangs. One might say that LA’s Bloods and Crips played domestic Contras set loose to destabilize community building efforts by militant Black Power.

UNPARDONABLE however are the film’s departures from the truth, which paint a curious fiction as if to indemnify the national press from its complicity with the intelligence community. Two lies will stand out to anyone who was there. (Did the filmmakers think their audience would be only millennials?)

First, the San Jose Mercury News was hardly a “local news outlet” unfamiliar with handling national stories and unknown to the average reader. The Mercury News was an award winning paper which competed with metropolitan mastheads. I can’t imagine its employees aren’t indignant by the film’s yokel characterization. The Los Angeles Times’ vindictive campaign to defame Gary Webb was hardly driven by professional embarassment over a missed scoop.

Second, the Contra-CIA drug smuggling link was suspected well before Gary Webb brought it to the mainstream. I remember during the Iran-Contra Hearings a decade earlier, the alternative media often lamented that the official investigation had been narrowed to exclude mention of the cocaine connection.

These amendments might be excused for simplifying the plot except that they minimize the breadth of the corporate identity of Webb’s censors. How very 90s of this narrative to pretend that Capitalist media outlets compete for news scoops like highschoolers at a science olympics. Newspapers and networks have always only ever peddled the themes their owners dictate. Media consolidation has only meant the manufacturing of public consent has become more uniform, perfectly illustrated by the collusion of the tag-team that hit Gary Webb.

AND AFTER HOLLYWOOD FAILED GARY WEBB, the film critics were waiting with daggers.

David Denby begins his New Yorker review by associating KTM with other crusading journalist thrillers, “some depicting real events, some not”, then pointing to director Michael Cuesta’s “paranoid” TV work, finally contriving that the film botches “many contraditory assertions.” Um, sorry, neither. But I do worry that giving all thumbs down will succeed in scaring away viewers. Denby finishes by making it all about actor Jeremy Renner, un-ironically aping the campaign waged on Gary Webb, overtly described in the film, shifting the focus from the story to all about the messenger.

The Washington Post dispatched one-time Webb adversary Jeff Leen to reprise the hatchet job begun when Gary Webb broke the story. Labeling Webb as “no journalism hero”, Leen’s rebuttal hangs on the technicality that no CIA “employees” were implicated, ignoring what everyone knows post-Blackwater, post-Wikileaks, that the US has long outsourced its crimes, from torture to food service. Dimwit.

If Columbus were alive today would he be rebuked for conquest and genocide?

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If Christopher Columbus were alive today, I’m positive the murderous opportunist would be the toast of parties hosted by Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, and the many other ignoble perpetrators of conquest, genocide, theft, torture, and crimes against humanity, who today parade their war crimes unchallenged and unpunished. That’s something of the point of protesting Columbus Day, in particular, the WHY NOW.

US torture industry defends its murder of Marvin Booker at Denver federal courthouse

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Stop whining murderous crybabies
DENVER, COLO- Well, you’ve almost missed the most compelling courtroom drama this side of television. Although even on TV you don’t see a judge having to repeatedly admonish the audience to refrain from reacting with audible incredulity at the clueless ambivalence, awkward dissembling, and brazen lies being told on the stand by sheriff deputies and their witnesses concerning the death of Marvin Booker, 56, in their custody on July 9, 2010. National law enforcement experts have been flown in to defend the Denver Sheriff’s Department policies. It’s been quite a laugh and the jury seems wise to the scheme. Closing arguments begin Friday. If you’ve followed the Denver Post coverage you can skip the next paragraph, but those who’ve been packing the federal courtroom these past three weeks can assure you, you haven’t been treated to the half of it.

Four years ago Marvin Booker, an itinerant African American street preacher who weighed 135 pounds, died under a pileup of Denver Sheriff deputies simultaneously restraining him, kneeling on his prone body, twisting his wrists, contorting his ankles with nunchucks, choking him by the neck, and Tasing him. All of these methods are permitted means of “pain compliance”. Denver County Jail deputies assert they were trying to stop Booker from struggling. Asked one juror: “Could you keep still if you thought you were being killed?”

They held Marvin Booker in a carotid choke hold for two and a half minutes, and tased him for up 27 seconds.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the anomalies. The deputies met afterward to get their stories straight. Surveillance footage is missing, video of inmate witness testimony is missing, the taser is missing! Now everyone’s memory has gone missing too, they even try the excuse in the present. “No I don’t recall seeing myself do that in the video just now.” But most of what may be damning video is gone. The deputies were said to be high-fiving themselves afterward in an area where the camera footage is missing.

The significance of the missing taser means follow-up investigations can conclude its use is unproved. Another taser with a timestamp indicating it was deployed at an event forty minutes later, was fired for eight seconds. The video and inmate witnesses suggest Booker was tased for 27 seconds, but because the first taser surrendered to investigators hadn’t been fired at all, authorities are allowing for the implausible: that Booker wasn’t tased at all.

[work in progress]

Video evidence supports uncompelling theory that ISIS is an army of one

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ISIS beheading videoWestern warmongers have caught on to viral videos for scaring up public support for military airstrikes against Iraq and Syria. So far three videos have emerged appearing to show a Western captive being beheaded by a faceless executioner presumed to represent “the Islamic State”. Though viewers are purported to be screaming for Islamic blood, the evidence at hand doesn’t implicate more than one person, himself faceless and of indeterminate identity, nationality and religious preference. It could be Mr. Califate himself, if the video is genuine –as usual we have only the CIA’s word on that– or it could be a mercenary under anyone’s employ. Apparently experts are convinced this is provocation enough to launch a war. I say, let the US and its military allies show the intellectual honesty to release videos of detainees they’ve tortured or of families they’ve executed with drones. If videotaped atrocities are going to govern international policy, let the global viewership determine whose side of the war they want to be on.

Obama: Yeah, we tortured some folks, and now we’re gonna bomb some folks

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NOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Not another war on Iraq! Not an intervention, not precision bombing, not saving a minority from massacre. If this rescue of Iraqis was about preventing a massacre, the US would be intervening with airstrikes against Israel. Last week President Obama admited that Bush-era CIA interrogation methods were torture. “We tortured some folks,” spoken with the same expectation of impunity as he now launches another illegal war.

Amanda Knox wishes Italy was like US where a black man in jail means whites go free

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Amanda Knox is disappointed with the Italian judicial system. In America of course, if you can pin the crime on a black guy, white perpetrators go free. For the 2007 murder of Meredith Kerchner, African male Rudy Guede is serving 16 years, but Italian judges are convinced he was an accessory. And remember, first Knox tried to give them ANOTHER. Knox is appealing her slander conviction for falsely naming Patrick Lumumba, and now, instead of speaking appreciatively of her two year respite from prison after political pressure muddled an appeals court reversal, Knox says she “expected more”. Not just that, she reminds us “this isn’t going to bring Meredith Kercher back.”

Post-Zimmerman, post Troy Davis, post Goddamn Iraq War, torture and war crimes, it could easily be argued that any nation has better courts than the US. Italy’s in fact convicted CIA agents who kidnapped an unconvicted suspect in Italy and rendered him for torture. In what other Western courts have today’s most grotesque perps been brought to justice? Italy has called for the agents’ extradiction but the US is not complying. Now American yahoos are cheering about resisting Knox’s extradiction. Both Knox and the CIA gents have been convicted and sentenced. Meanwhile the US is insisting that Julian Assange comply with extradiction and he’s not even charged with the crime.

I don’t care if Knox is extradited, or goes to prison. I’d rather no one did, she’s probably learned her lesson. How likely is it she’ll kill another roommate or follow another drunken murderous impulse. A psychotherapist ought to be able to assure us whether know is tapped out. Inequal justice isn’t rectified by punishing one side more.

What upsets me more is the pageant of Knox’s contempt and dishonesty to which the media offers no critique. It’s become the familiar meme of the 21st century, unblinking denial. There were psychopaths before George W. Bush, but I believe he pioneered the role as foil to modern media’s knave. There is no honor, there is no accountability, and on TV it isn’t even missing.

UN disinviting Iran confirms Syria talks aren’t about peace but Western victory

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So it turns out the “Syrian Peace Talks” were of the Mideast Peace variety: terminal consessions to an aggressor’s demands, as per usual Zionist. The US has successfully pressured the UN to rescind the invitation for Iran to join the Syrian peace conference, apparently because Iran doesn’t agree that a peaceful outcome must include President Assad’s abdication. Does regime change sound like a fair and impartial solution for Syria, or does it resemble the goal of the Western nations who continue to back the instability? As usual, instead of pursuing peace, the US is talking extortion.
 
NOW THIS: US expresses horror [that someone is vying to beat US record] of torture and execution –is what the headline should read. Can the US “express horror” at torture and execution, alleged no less?!

The Tattered Cover doubles down on its privilege to ignore Denver homeless

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Tattered CoverDENVER, COLORADO- Representatives of Occupy Denver met with both owner and manager of The Tattered Cover Bookstore last week hoping to avert taking public action against the popularly lionized bookseller for its passive support of the city’s Urban Camping Ban. There was hope that owner Joyce Meskis could reconsider her “neutrality” on the policy of oppression which has proved disastrous for Denver’s beleaguered street dwellers, at the very least, rescind her membership in the Downtown Business Partnership, the lobbying entity which conjured the ordinance.

INSTEAD Meskis told the Occupiers to redirect their efforts toward citizens instead of pressuring businesses to take sides. Meskis admitted she had not followed the city council hearings and so did not know that individuals have had no more clout there than have the homeless. The camping ban was proposed by a cabal of businesses, OD explained. Its repeal will no doubt require an outcry from the same. Meskis remained adamant that her business take no side. OD suggested that a bookstore of all places might want to hold itself to the higher ideals it propagates. What good is literacy if it does not elevate? Meskis held firm: the Tattered Cover must entertain both sides and allow customers to arrive at their own conclusions.

Imagine a dealer of books so pedantic. Really, are there two sides to human rights? Archbishop Desmond Tutu once wrote that neutrality helps the oppressor, never the oppressed. They haven’t read him, or maybe they disagree? More obnoxious than ignorance is arrogant ignorance. Even the illiterate do not argue against Edmond Burke’s “when good men do nothing.” What’s the point of enriching yourself with a business if it’s not to have more impact on your community?

Looking at the callous indifference of business leaders, who reserve their personal sympathies in the interest of dispassionate objectivity, you might as well be staring at an American general, a politician, or other such sociopath, the embodiment of Capitalism, void of humanity.

Fortunately people governed strictly by the bottom line are much easier to reorient than others whose values are ideological or moral. Attenuating their flow of customers brings businesses to heel. Money talks, and yes, it’s too bad the Tattered Cover has turned out to be the unlikely posterchild.

BUMMER? HARDLY. What we have is a opportunity to blow open the conservative liberal pretense that privileged first worlders need not soil themselves with taking sides. Wars happen, torture happens, neglect of the poor happens when community members, particularly the power centers of business, say nothing to oppose them. The Tattered Cover maintains its ambivalence is a principled stand. I think its acquiescence on the urban camping ban allowed the more preditory downtown businesses to rationalize their inhumanity, thinking “see, it’s not just us assholes.”

OD’s reluctant boycott continues undaunted this Friday at 5:30pm at the Tattered Cover’s LoDo store.

Tattered Cover boycott

FBI focus on Assata Shakur reveals pernicious discretion of Terrorist label

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MS. SHAKUR (né Joanne Chesimard) insists she did not kill the New Jersey trooper in 1973, that she couldn’t have, she’d been disabled by a police bullet to the back while her hands were raised. Shakur contends she was the victim of a legal lynching and before that a target of the USG’s COINTELPRO. Understanding now that many black activists of that era were deliberately assassinated by law enforcement, might the 17-yr old Shakur have been justified in defending herself? She was certainly justified in escaping her torturers in prison and then gaining political asylum in Cuba. She hasn’t killed a trooper since, so it’s odd then, isn’t it, that Assata Shakur is being added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List? She’s the “first woman” because it’s a terrorist-only list. Looking back, some of the best revolutionaries have been women. Retroactively designating enemies of the people is a strange development for President Obama who won’t even revisit the last administration to look for war crimes.
 
Certainly Assata Shakur speaks against US Capitalism but does she fit the profile of drone-strike eligibility? Apparently so and that’s telling. The intelligence community doesn’t want to stop acts of terror, it’s the ideology that terrorizes them.

Empire says behave or the next Bradley Manning or Hugo Chavez will be you

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Indefinite detention, solitary confinement, torture, and assassination are tools America does not hesitate to use to enforce its feudal corporate agenda. That the US didn’t dispatch Bolivarian hero Hugo Chavez like they did Yasser Arafat is belied by their protestation that such accusations would be far fetched. Wikileaks has already documented ceaseless US plots to eradicate Chavez, second only perhaps to their attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, whose last years bear a resemblance to what befell Chavez. It’s a testament to the magnanimity of both leaders that they didn’t immediately finger US dirty deeds. Because proved or not, it’s dispiriting and serves empire’s purpose that dissenters should take heed: you can spend the foreseeable future tortured behind bars, gunned down by a mob, under house arrest in London, incinerated via drone or LAPD’s “burner”, or tagged with carcinogens. The long arm of Western injustice gets their man.

Police are pretty much thugs here, there, and everywhere

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prisonMexico’s and the USA’s prison system is run by thugs!
 
Capitalism has long created and enforced a thug-like prison system. I have recently been told the experience of someone in this system and which thousands of people do too. I am also reading The Trial by Franz Kafka and  I was reminded of this experience. As I listened to this person in tears both of relief because he got out, but also because of complete fear for what happened to those not as lucky as him, I felt sorry for him because even if he was not put back in jail, he won’t be able to become anything else because of capitalism’s structure. And so here is his story and I hope that this will not be the fate of him, and that someday Mexico’s thug-jails will be gone as will the criminality produced by poverty  in an alienating system like Capitalism.

“I was at a party and two friends went to a store and stole some alcohol. They went back to the party and continued listening to loud music. The police showed up and  I tried to run. I would have gotten away but my brother was in the house and I couldn’t  leave him.

The police caught us and lined us up against a wall where they began to hit us. They hit the girl with the butt of their gun on her head and she fainted. They hit us on the shoulders, the head and the face and they kicked us and stepped on us. My brother yells as they hit him and I scream at them to let him go but they continue punching us on the face and then they put us in the car. My brother is sixteen and so he gets lucky and is only kept over night. I, however, was there for three months.

My  friend was sent to Topo Chico where they tied  him up and hit him with wooden boards. They then soaked  him and connected  him to the light where he was electrocuted.

They are tied up for three months where they lie in their own filth and some are shot in front of all the other prisoners. My friend owes the Zetas 20,000 Pesos and the police will continue to hit him until he pays the Zetas.  

Sometimes when the police shoot someone that is tied up, they offer a prisoner to take the blame in return for 20 years in prison but without being tied up in their own filth and without the daily starvation and blows.

Most of them are innocent but they get us on the street and they torture us to get money from us; which isn’t much and sometimes their parents are forced to accept the cruelty of which is bestowed upon their kids. Sometimes it’s 4,000, sometimes it’s 30,000 but if you don’t give them money, they torture you.

They get us to confess by putting us on a board and then a towel on our face which will become drenched with water and we’ll feel as if we’re drowning. We begin to get sick from the filthy cells. I have sores all over my skin and I can’t stop itching, but I almost forget it because of how happy I am to get out.

I got lucky but I’m sorry for others that don’t because they can’t afford the quota. We are all poor and we don’t receive decent educations because even the public education is expensive and so we resort to petty crime and then get caught… Sometimes, even those with money get caught.”

Mexico has thug-like prisons that are run by cops that are no better than the organized crime. In fact, the Zetas, a major cartel group, came from the Mexican police force. And by having this alienating system and prisons, it creates a circle of even more crime.  Good luck to all of the youth trapped in this unjust system that is full of corruption and which many people cannot escape.

NPR: women berserkers, oil whores, Goebbels Surge, presidential DNA

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I accidentally listened to NPR today, what an earful of crap! No wonder Americans are so uninformed, none more than self-identifying progressives, waylaid by Corporate Public shysters. Here’s what I overheard:
 
The Defense Department is running short on recruits so they need to draft women into combat roles. Leon Panetta has righted a constitutional injustice apparently and will deploy women into battle. Because women want equality to torture, join kill squads, shoot children, get PTSD, join ranks of homeless or commit suicide. Greatest gender advance since Virginia Slims.
 
NPR interviewed oil workers who shrug off risk like Algerian massacre and speak fondly of their rape of Africa. According to them it’s “all about the Benjamins” to pay cash for sports cars and ATVs, and international travel for access to “cheap women”. Funny, the interviewees declined to reveal their full names. The energy industry promises jobs, but decent people need not apply.
 
General “All Up In My Snatch” Petraeus is being credited with inventing a counterinsurgency tactic called “the Surge”. Yeah, we’ve heard of it. Formally just a word, the “tactic” is not military, but public relations, attributable to Joseph Goebbels, to minimize an escalation or troop buildup by pretending it’s temporary.
 
The Benghazi Kerfuffle, now a DC sideshow instead of the foreign relations comeuppance where US intervention operatives in Libya got their just-desserts, is being amplified to be a vehicle to kick off Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. The ex Secretary of State was praised for her gravitas and standing, leading MSNBC to suggest that “diplomacy is in her DNA”. Spouses share DNA? Are talking heads confusing DNA with VD?

berserker

Zero Dark Thirty has critics protesting that torture shouldn’t be shown to work, instead of torture being wrong

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Protest torture, don’t protest Zero Dark Thirty’s depiction of torture as working, even if the public account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden holds that it did not. Who’s your source for that, the CIA? No doubt countless plenty were tortured elsewhere in the actual narrative. How perverse for human rights groups to oppose torture based on it being ineffectual, instead of inhumane. Do you doubt torture works? Look at poor Bradley Manning, already pleading guilty. You’d think galvanizing the public against the horror of torture would be easier than trying to sell them a lie, that torture isn’t fiendishly effective. Remember the inane debate about what constitutes torture? That can be illustrated in less than a second, likewise its effectiveness. What sophistry. This is same patronizing social engineering which moralists envision to contort society to new-age morays expunged of sociopathic ills. Greed, slavery, war, genocide, all work perfectly well. That’s the problem

Gary McKinnon escapes US torturers, by staying outside US borders

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US efforts to extradite Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange and UK hacker Gary McKinnon, the latter thwarted today by UK courts, point to a puzzling question. Should it matter where accused are charged or tried if the US is looking for justice? The activities of both men are essentially curtailed by house arrest, so why is a timetable frustrated? Probably what the US can only achieve by extradition, where the public eye prevents CIA rendition, is INDEFINITE DETENTION. In American hands, that also includes psychologist-crafted “we don’t torture” torture. In effect, the Department of Justice has defined being within US borders as differential enough in the correctional scheme of things. House arrest in the UK is not a sufficient deterrent to would-be leakers and hackers apparently, US declared adversaries must be remanded to where the Empire already has its dissidents contained, in the custody of US borders.

Julian Assange and Bradley Manning put lie to Western pretense of freedom and rule of law

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The UK wouldn’t extradite Pinochet, but they’re threatening to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London to see that Wikileaks impresario Julian Assange is extradited to Sweden where a prosecutor wants to decide whether to charge him for sexual violations, more likely so that the Australian can then be rendered to the US to be imprisoned like Bradley Manning and face the death penalty for espionage. The US denies this intention, though it voted against Ecuador’s allies to hold a meeting about the continuing US-UK assault on journalism and whistleblowers. Can the Western empire let Assange and Manning escape severe reprimand? The two are only the mastermind and the alleged-source who’ve ignited the global uprising behind the anti- austerity movements, Arab Spring, and Occupy. President Obama cannot leave either off the hook without encouraging a deluge of more insider defections. Bradley Manning is already under torture in military custody, but Assange continues to evade US clutches. Should he escape to asylum in Ecuador where Obama’s exterminator drones can deal “American Justice”? The US has yet to condemn a white man to targeted assassination, but in the Global South, in darker-skinned populations, who will know? I favor Ecuador expanding its embassy to more than the first floor office, to offer Wikileaks an entire center of operations for as long as Julian Assange is confined under virtual house arrest. In Assange’s speech from the embassy balcony he repeated three times: “Bradley Manning must be released.” Journalists must be free to expose the crimes of the rich. Citing prison sentences for a Bahrain dissident and Russia’s Pussy Riot, Assange concluded: “There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”

Here’s the full text of Assange’s statement:

“I am here today because I cannot be there with you today. But thank you for coming. Thank you for your resolve and your generosity of spirit.

“On Wednesday night, after a threat was sent to this embassy and the police descended on this building, you came out in the middle of the night to watch over it and you brought the world’s eyes with you.

“Inside this embassy, after dark, I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape. But I knew there would be witnesses. And that is because of you.

“If the UK did not throw away the Vienna conventions the other night, it is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching.

“So, the next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the Embassy of Ecuador.

“Remind them how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world and a courageous Latin America nation took a stand for justice.

And so, to those brave people. I thank President Correa for the courage he has shown in considering and in granting me political asylum.

“And I also thank the government, and in particular Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino, who upheld the Ecuadorian constitution and its notion of universal rights in their consideration of my asylum. And to the Ecuadorian people for supporting and defending this constitution.

“And I also have a debt of gratitude to the staff of this embassy, whose families live in London and who have shown me the hospitality and kindness despite the threats we all received.

“This Friday, there will be an emergency meeting of the foreign ministers of Latin America in Washington DC to address this very situation.

“And so, I am grateful to those people and governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and to all other Latin American countries who have come out to defend the right to asylum.

“And to the people of the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden and Australia who have supported me in strength, even when their governments have not. And to those wiser heads in government who are still fighting for justice. Your day will come.

“To the staff, supporters and sources of Wikileaks, whose courage and commitment and loyalty has seen no equal.

“To my family and to my children who have been denied their father. Forgive me, we will be reunited soon.

“As Wikileaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all our societies. We must use this moment to articulate the choice that is before the government of the United States of America.

“Will it return to and reaffirm the values, the revolutionary values it was founded on, or will it lurch off the precipice dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world, in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the dark?

“I say it must turn back. I ask President Obama to do the right thing. The United States must renounce its witch-hunts against Wikileaks. The United States must dissolve its FBI investigation.

“The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff or our supporters. The United States must pledge before the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful.

“There must be no more foolish talk about prosecuting any media organisation; be it Wikileaks, or be it the New York Times.

“The US administration’s war on whistleblowers must end.

“Thomas Drake, William Binney and John Kirakou and the other heroic whistleblowers must – they must – be pardoned or compensated for the hardships they have endured as servants of the public record.

“And to the Army Private who remains in a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, who was found by the United Nations to have endured months of torturous detention in Quantico, Virginia and who has yet – after two years in prison – to see a trial: he must be released.

“Bradley Manning must be released.

“And if Bradley Manning did as he is accused, he is a hero and an example to us all and one of the world’s foremost political prisoners.

“Bradley Manning must be released.

“On Wednesday, Bradley Manning spent his 815th day of detention without trial. The legal maximum is 120 days.

“On Thursday, my friend Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Human Rights Centre, was sentenced to three years in prison for a tweet. On Friday, a Russian band were sentenced to two years in jail for a political performance.

“There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.

“Thank you.”

HRW says state-sanctioned torture is “crime against humanity” but not in US

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They keep piling it on against Syria. Human Rights Watch declared that SYRIA’S state-sanctioned torture constitutes a “crime against humanity” but not when America does it. SYRIA’S “torture centers” stink, not ours. ITS chemical weapons stockpile is a threat, not ours. ITS pilots and military commanders are defecting, alas, not ours. The pre-game show for the War on Syria isn’t even a remake of the Iraq or Libya war of aggression, it’s a rerun. Syrian Curveballs are whispering about unspeakable tortures called “Basat al reeh”, “Dulab” and “Falaqa”, failing to mention they got them from the Guantanamo manuals. Not only is Human Rights Watch silent about American torture, it ignores explosion of crimes against humanity which have resulted from the Western intervention into Libya.