Secret US Prison Revealed

A former horse riding school in Lithuania was turned into a secret prison for al-Qaeda operatives. It had been suggested for years that the CIA operated secret prisons for the illegal torture of suspected enemy agents. In investigations by ABC News, Lithuanian government officials and unnamed former intelligence operatives, the CIA built the secret jail in 2004 and used it for more than a year, flying in at least eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan.

CIA ‘ran secret prison for al-Qaeda’ in Lithuanian riding school (Telegraph UK)

Lithuanian officials open new inquiry into secret CIA prisons (Boston Globe)

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Scientology Faces Allegations of Torture.

Guardian UK 11-18-2009

The Australian prime minister has said he would consider an inquiry into allegations of  forced abortions, assault, torture, imprisonment, covering up sexual abuse, embezzlement of church funds and blackmail.

Australian Senator Nick Xenophon has publically accused The Church of Scientology of being “a criminal organization.”

This comes less than a month after a French court convicted the Church of fraud and fined it more $900,000. The religion of John Travolta and Tom Cruise seems to be on the run.

AP 10-27-2009

In 2007, Germany banned the makers of Tom Cruise’s movie Valkyrie from filming at military sites in the country because he was a Scientologist. The German defence ministry said Scientology is a cult that masquerades as a religion to make money.

BBC 2007

 

US Government Experiments on Children

During my regular web digging today I came across a series of rather disturbing videos. These videos purport to show actual testimony before a US government panel, The President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experimentation, March 15, 1995.

The videos show witness after witness recounting acts of torturous experimentation they experienced as children. Torture including, electrical shock, radiation exposure and attempted mind control are consistent themes in testimony.

Never doubt that men in high places will do whatever they need to do to stay in power!

Read US Government Experiments on Children, An excerpt from “During The Cold War” by Carol Rutz

The testimony:

US Government Torture Manuals

The first manual is the “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation,” dated July 1963. This is the oldest and most abusive manual and  is the source of much of the material in the second manual. (KUBARK was a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency cryptonym for the CIA itself.)

The second manual, “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983,” was used in at least seven U.S. training courses conducted in Latin American countries, including Honduras, between 1982 and 1987. According to a declassified 1989 report prepared for the Senate intelligence committee, the 1983 manual was developed from notes of a CIA interrogation course in Honduras.

Both manuals deal exclusively with interrogation.  Both manuals have an entire chapter devoted to “coercive techniques.” These manuals recommend arresting suspects early in the morning by surprise, blindfolding them, and stripping them naked. Suspects should be held incommunicado and should be deprived of any kind of normal routine in eating and sleeping. Interrogation rooms should be windowless, soundproof, dark and without toilets.

The manuals advise that torture techniques can backfire and that the threat of pain is often more effective than pain itself. The manuals describe coercive techniques to be used “to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist.” These techniques include prolonged constraint, prolonged exertion, extremes of heat, cold, or moisture, deprivation of food or sleep, disrupting routines, solitary confinement, threats of pain, deprivation of sensory stimuli, hypnosis, and use of drugs or placebos.

Italian Court Convicts 23 Americans in CIA Rendition Case

Italy Convicts 23 Americans for C.I.A. Renditions (New York Times)

Italy Convicts Former CIA Agents In Rendition Trial (Reuters)

Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’

By Daniel Tencer at The Raw Story

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is “endemic” to the country’s justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a “totalitarian” state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Suspects in Uzbekistan’s gulags “were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”

“I was absolutely stunned — it changed my whole world view in an instant — to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves,” Murray said.