The Authentic Cruelty of a Synthetic Man

Yes, I'm willing to see you suffer, and throw you in prison -- but don't expect me to admit it.

Mitt Romney, a polymer-based life form of nearly limitless pliability, is as long on cash as he is short on genuine convictions. For the Power Elite's political brokers, few traits are more endearing in a potential president than malleability. Romney's suppleness of spine helps explain how he was able to soak up $10 million in promised campaign donations from politically connected oligarchs during a day-long marathon fundraiser in Las Vegas.

Seeking an issue on which Romney takes a binding, definitive stand often seems like trying to overtake the horizon. Clayton Holden, a wheelchair-bound man and long-time medical marijuana patient, may be the only person who has ever seen Romney perform a plausible impression of Martin Luther (“Here I stand, I can do no other") regarding any subject.

Holden suffers from Duchene Muscular Dystrophy, an affliction that has left him with a twisted spine, inflamed nerve bundles, and unremitting chronic pain. When Holden was 16, his suffering was compounded when he was hit by a car while crossing the street in his wheelchair.

Like many others who suffer from debilitating pain, Holden has found that marijuana offers him relief while inflicting none of the side-effects that accompany many government-approved drugs. On at least ten occasions, Holden has been confronted by police, who – to their credit – have been willing to flout what they are required to call “the law” in favor of elemental decency. It’s only a matter of time before some armed functionary will be found who is sufficiently vicious to throw Holden in a cage. That’s the outcome that Mitt Romney would favor.

During an October 7, 2007 Republican presidential forum in New Hampshire, Holden politely but forcefully confronted Romney to ask him the same question he had posed to other candidates (only one of whom – no extra credit for guessing which one – actually gave him an unequivocal answer): Since Holden has to use marijuana to treat his affliction, would Romney be willing to see him and his doctors arrested and carried off to jail? 

Romney, as is his habit, tried to take refuge in persiflage, insisting – on the basis of what qualifications, he didn’t say – that synthetic marijuana would work just as well. He then sought to ooze his way out of the question by quipping that he doesn’t “arrest anyone."

The most remarkable aspect of Romney’s encounter with Holden is that he displayed none of his characteristic equivocation in defending drug prohibition. He yielded not so much as a millimeter in his insistence that medical marijuana is a "gateway drug"; this means that Holden and other patients who use it either have to settle for useless or harmful government-approved treatments or endure the punitive wrath of the divine State. The Mittster didn't even seek to palliate the feelings of this powerless, suffering individual by deploying a sympathetic platitude.

Presidential politics in our putrefying empire deals in the infliction of wholesale cruelty -- through the destruction of wealth, the propagation of aggressive violence, and the constriction of individual liberty. Like most people who aspire to the imperial purple, Romney doesn't like to be seen dispensing cruelty on an individual basis, which is why he ended the conversation with Holden as quickly as possible, and was palpably angry that this uncomfortable moment was caught on camera.

Owing to the influence of big-money campaign donation "bundlers," and dubious bookkeeping of the sort that that is common among the politically protected Wall Street denizens whose favor he ardently courts, Romney has emerged as the fundraising front-runner among among GOP presidential aspirants.  As Romney campaign minion Chris Slick memorably put it during the day-long grovel-fest in Vegas: “Today we demonstrate our ability to raise excessive and ungodly amounts of cash while other candidates are still pattering about in bumf*ck, Iowa somewhere. No one can come close to what our machine can do. No one.”

 By "our machine," Slick wasn't just talking about Romney's political campaign; he was referring to an interlocking network of pressure groups, lobbyists, and political criminals that  support, sustain, and profit from the Warfare State.

Slick himself is director of online operations for "ACT! for America," an anti-Muslim pressure group whose founder and chief spokesperson, Lebanon-born Brigette Gabriel (nee Nour Saman), tirelessly evangelizes on behalf of a war of annihilation against Islam. In a 2007 address at Rev. John Hagee's mega-church, Gabriel insisted that Muslims "have no soul". This which would mean, of course, that Muslims aren't merely mistaken or sinful, but that they aren't genuinely human.

There are many pressure groups who promote various elements of the War Party agenda ala carte. Gabriel's group will settle for nothing less than the Full Cheney combo meal: Permanent war abroad, unlimited regimentation at home, indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, institutionalization of torture, and so on.

It's worth pointing out that during the 1980s, Gabriel -- under her birth name -- was a correspondent/propagandist for a television network affiliated with the South Lebanon Army (SLA). During the horrific Lebanese civil war -- a multi-sided conflict in which no belligerent had a monopoly on unspeakable acts -- the SLA was an Israeli-supported militia that ran a notorious torture dungeon called Al Khiam Prison. Many of the methods now employed by Washington's Homeland Security State -- those not devised by the CIA, or reverse-engineered from Soviet sources, that is -- were field-tested on detainees in the Al Khiam prison.

While Romney is connected to all of this by the only most tenuous of threads, it's important to remember that he has spoken of the supposed need to "double Guantanamo" -- that is, to expand the use of indefinite detention and the application of torture techniques that have been cloaked in the Gestapo-derived euphemism "enhanced interrogation."

Whatever  transgressions Romney has committed against the current GOP line, the hints of calculated cruelty behind his smarmy demeanor make him irresistible to at least some of those who want to make war against Islam the central organizing principle of American life.

It is in Romney's profitable relationship with former U.S. Ambassador to Italy Mel Sembler that these separate strands of cruelty are woven together like the braids of a torturer's whip. In 2008, Romney appointed Sembler to serve as one of his ten national campaign fund-raisers.  Sembler, a retired shopping mall magnate from Florida, also served as chairman for the legal defense fund established on behalf of convicted felon Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. 

In addition to being an architect of the war in Iraq, Libby helped devise the legal framework for the globe-straddling archipelago of CIA torture facilities. In 2007, Libby was found guilty of perjury and obstruction in the case of outed CIA operative Valerie Plame; his prison term was commuted by George W. Bush, who --like Romney -- is someone whose sympathy for the powerful and corrupt is inexhaustible.

Long before the administration of Bush the Dumber made torture an official federal policy, Mel Sembler and his wife were promoting the use of torture and indefinite detention in the "war on drugs." In the early 1970s, they created a behavioral modification program called “Straight” that targeted youngsters who either had drug or alcohol addictions, or were considered to be “at risk” of falling prey to addiction. Many of the teenagers put into Sembler's program complained of physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse.

 Teen inmates at a Behavior Modification facility.

 "Straight" grew out of a federally funded pilot program called “The Seed,” which according to a 1974 Senate Judiciary Committee investigation used methods similar to the “highly refined `brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans” against US prisoners of war. 

Thus Sembler's "Straight" program was, in a sense, a progenitor of the Bush-Cheney "enhanced interrogation" regime.

“The Seed” was shut down in the mid-1970s, but Sembler's network (nine clinics in seven states) continued to receive funding from the same federal agencies that had underwritten the Communist-derived initiative. "Straight" was closed down in 1993, but by this time it had planted seeds of its own that sprouted up across the U.S. and abroad, where "drug rehabilitation" facilities employed "treatment" techniques that were indistinguishable from the criminal abuses carried out in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

A "Straight"-inspired drug "treatment" dungeon in Mexico.

 In her valuable book Help at Any Cost, investigative journalist Maia Szalavitz documented how programs constructed from Sembler's template had employed "punishments banned for use on criminals and by the Geneva Convention."

"Beatings, extended isolation and restraint, public humiliation, food deprivation, sleep deprivation, forced exercise to the point of exhaustion, sensory deprivation, and lengthy maintenance of stress positions are common," continued Szalavitz.

Some teenagers selected for forced enrollment in BM programs have been treated exactly like terrorist suspects -- snatched from their homes or the streets by rented thugs and then sent by way of “extraordinary rendition” to isolated detention facilities, often in foreign countries. The best-known professional child-napper is Rick Strawn, a retired Atlanta police officer whose personal history includes alcoholism and domestic abuse, as well as repeated accusations of child sexual exploitation.

The very model of authoritarian piety, Strawn conspicuously wears his "What Would Jesus Do?" wristband as he places handcuffs on the wrists of a teenager being forcibly conveyed to a distant, inaccessible dungeon. Often this is done with the knowing consent of criminally credulous parents following a "hard sell" by a pitchman for a behavior modification (BM) program, which is usually portrayed as an enhanced summer camp intended to impart "respect for authority" in a beautiful natural setting.

More than a few of the teenagers consigned to those facilities -- which have been uncovered in several states, as well as Mexico, Jamaica, American Samoa, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere -- had no documentable problem with drugs or alcohol, or any other self-destructive behaviors. But just as we're told that practically any development justifies "expanded vigilance" against terrorism, just about any adolescent problem or behavior can be depicted as an indication that the youngster is "at risk," and thus needs to be confined in a BM facility to get “straightened out" through means that include unambiguous torture.

At one BM facility in Puerto Rico, “teens were found bound and gagged with nooses around their necks,” reports Szalavitz. At "High Impact," a Mexico-based facility run by  the Utah-based World-Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), teenage detainees were locked in dog cages. One survivor of that gulag was nearly drowned to death by a group of older kids who -- having been made feral through prolonged mistreatment -- hoped that the murder would shut the program down. 

"The Hobbit."

Amberly Knight, former director of the WWASPS-affiliated Dundee Ranch in Costa Rica, testifies that food deprivation was commonly used to punish inmates, and particularly rebellious kids were taken to a tiny isolation room and forced to kneel on concrete for up to 14 hours a day.

Inmates at a WWASPS program in Samoa were sometimes held for hours in an "ISO Box," a three-foot by three-foot box akin to a North Vietnamese “tiger cage.” Others were hog-tied with duct tape or beaten by staffers. When the Samoan government began a child abuse inquiry, WWASPS hastily shut down the facility.

 
WWASPS's Spring Creek Lodge in Montana featured a tiny disciplinary cubicle called "The Hobbit" in which some inmates were confined for weeks or months at a time and fed nothing but beans and bananas. One counselor at Spring Creek was charged with sexually molesting two boys who had been imprisoned in The Hobbit.

Robert Lichfield.

In 2006, more than two-dozen families filed a lawsuit against WWASPS, alleging that inmates of the residential programs were “subjected to physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse.” Many of them had been directed to the program through Teen Help, a business operated by Utah businessman Robert Lichfield that served as a processing center for WWASPS. 

As it happens, Lichfield was co-chairman of WWASPS, and as of 2006 he was pulling in an estimated $90 million a year by funneling teens into a globe-spanning network of detention camps. At least some of that money used to fuel Romney's presidential ambitions. 

During the 2008 campaign, Lichfield was appointed by Romney to head his fundraising efforts in Utah.  In that capacity he helped raise $2.7 million for Romney, including $300,000 at a single event in St. George. All of this happened after Richfield's role in WWASPS was known. Romney dismissed Richfield in late Summer 2007 after a second lawsuit was filed on behalf of more than one hundred of the organization's victims. At about the same time, a "counselor" at a WWASPS facility was found guilty of assault and false imprisonment.

The lawsuit against WWASPS coincided with the housing bust. Like many other criminal enterprises that prospered during the bubble, WWASPS has gone out of business, even as the attorneys for Lichfield and his cohorts have employed every dilatory maneuver in their arsenal to hold the lawsuit in abeyance. 

In spite of all this, there still seems to be a market for a business specializing in teen "rehabilitation" through torture: Narvin Lichfield, Robert's brother and partner in crime, recently re-opened a WWASPS-inspired facility in South Carolina that had been shut down amid an avalanche of civil lawsuits and criminal charges. 

Apparently, there are still people who can scrounge up nearly $3,000 a month to purchase the services of people who specialize in "therapeutic" child abuse, and state officials willing to countenance such operations as an adjunct to the "war on drugs." There is a lot of ambient cruelty in late-imperial America, and Mitt Romney's presidential aspirations will depend on his ability to catalyze that cruelty into hard cash.

Once again: Thank you!

I wish to reiterate, and amplify, my thanks to everyone who has responded to my recent appeal; this has been a tremendous blessing to me and my family, and we are deeply grateful. I've made a start at expressing individual thanks to each of you who have donated to us, and I promise that I will get in touch with all of you as soon as I can. Thanks again, and God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Briefly Considered: A Prediction Partially Fulfilled

"Dr. Bob Jones III, chancellor of the fundamentalist Christian university in Greenville that bears his name, is looking past his religious differences with Gov. Mitt Romney and endorsing the Mormon for the Republican nomination for president, he told The Greenville News this afternoon.

`This is all about beating Hillary,'Jones said. `And I just believe that this man has the credentials both personally and ideologically in terms of his view about what American government should be to best represent the rank and file of conservative Americans.'....

Asked whether Romney’s religion was a stumbling block for him, Jones replied, `What is the alternative, Hillary’s lack of religion or an erroneous religion?... `As a Christian I am completely opposed to the doctrines of Mormonism,' he said. `But I’m not voting for a preacher. I’m voting for a president. It boils down to who can best represent conservative American beliefs, not religious beliefs.'"

Greenville (North Carolina) News, October 16, 2007


"I venture this prediction: If the Republicans lose control of the House on November 7, Romney will be the 2008 Republican nominee. Christian Right leaders accustomed to a `seat at the table' of political power will wrestle with their collective conscience, and win."

Pro Libertate, October 22, 2006

"Politically conservative Mormons and Evangelical Christians are divided by serious disputes over doctrine, but presidential aspirant Mitt Romney has found a way to bridge that chasm: He stands `foursquare behind the president' regarding his supposed authority to order summary imprisonment and torture of anybody upon whom he chooses to visit such treatment."

Pro Libertate, September 26, 2006


If "beating Hillary" were the real objective, Rev. Jones would be supporting the only authentic constitutional conservative in the presidential field, the stalwart and principled Rep. Ron Paul.


But the grim, unyielding reality is that Dr. Paul -- a man who is Christian to his chromosomes, and loves freedom with every molecule of his being -- is disqualified in the eyes of Jones and his ilk for theological reasons: The God Ron Paul serves is Jesus Christ, Prince of Peace and Sovereign Lord of all creation, not the supposedly almighty State.




Mitt Romney, a man so empty he makes Peer Gynt's onion look like an over-stuffed calzone, worships only power. So despite differences over doctrine -- you know, relatively inconsequential stuff dealing with where and how we'll spend eternity, as well as how we're supposed to treat each other during mortality -- Romney and Rev. Jones are on the same page of scripture. To wit: An adulterated version of Romans Chapter 13.


I don't know what dwells within the heart of Rev. Jones or the other pulpit whores who have joined the GOP's seraglio. It is clear that where political matters are concerned, people of that ilk are entirely fixated on power -- obtaining it, retaining it, exercising it, cultivating it, serving it. Their kingdom is entirely of this world. They eagerly promote war and bloodshed, tyranny and torture.














A map, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, graphically illustrating the geographic concentrations of Ron Paul's donor base.


Today, as he picked up Rev. Jones' endorsement, Mitt "Double Guantanamo" Romney also expanded his campaign team to include a national security adviser who blithely says he would commit or order torture "in a heartbeat." That fellow will be in suitable company with Mel Sembler, Robert Lichfield, and other prominent Romney backers who have profited from the torture of American teenagers.


A Personal Note

My friends -- those of you who are people of faith -- please, please pray on behalf of Korrin. She once again is seriously, dangerously ill, and I'm entirely at a loss in trying to help her. At present she's not in the hospital again (as I write, she's sleeping and we're receiving visits from a medical professional), but absent a dramatic turn-around, she's headed there once more.

This morning she was convinced that she was going to die. Please, keep her in your prayers.

In making that request I do not mean to slight or demean those of you, my friends, who are not believers. My faith is integral to who I am and how I view the world; it's why I am utterly obsessed with the matter of individual freedom and dignity, and why I detest war and tyranny to the uttermost depths of my soul. And at times like this my faith is the most important source of strength and solace.

I invite others to share it, but I have no right to impose it, even if that were possible: Each individual has to find it for himself. It's my hope that this is understood by those who share my passion for freedom but not my convictions about God.


Please be sure to visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

September 11, 1857

"You guys do know what that movie is about, don't you?" inquired the friendly young lady in the admissions booth as Korrin and I bought tickets to see September Dawn.

"Yes, of course," I replied, a twinge of puzzlement creasing my care-worn brow. "Are you required to offer a disclaimer of some sort for some reason?"

"No," she answered. "It's just that some people have been offended by the subject matter."

As we entered the theater in Nampa, I commented to Korrin that it seemed oddly fastidious of the management to express concerns about the content of that particular film, when elsewhere in the multiplex patrons -- by their own informed choice, one assumes -- were enduring an onslaught of adolescent sex humor (Superbad), reveling in hyper-violent revenge fantasies (War), or otherwise spending a couple of hours immersed in Hollywood-issue degeneracy.

I suspect that the reason September Dawn was singled out in this fashion was because it has been quietly but effectively branded an offense against "tolerance."

This is unfortunate: Of the films presently on offer, September Dawn is the only one representing a serious and commendable attempt to dramatize actual history -- in this case, the systematic, premeditated murder in southern Utah of 120 members of a California-bound wagon train.

The definitive (thus far) treatment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is Will Bagley's award-winning book Blood of the Prophets. The following clip offers a concise summary of the episode:




The victims were Arkansans led by Alexander Fancher, whose Hugenot ancestors had fled France following the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The perpetrators were militiamen and Paiute Indians whose efforts were organized and directed by local Mormon leaders. The atrocity was a calculated act of terrorism carried out in the context of the Mormon leadership's asymmetrical war with the federal government, which was becoming acute at the time the ill-fated wagon train arrived in Utah: President James Buchanan, believing (with some reason) that Mormon Prophet and territorial governor Brigham Young was bent on establishing a hostile theocracy, had dispatched a military force ("Johnson's Army") to remove Young and install a territorial government more to Washington's liking.

Critics have ruthlessly panned the film, many of them complaining that its depiction of fanatical Mormon murders and winsome Protestant victims is childishly one-sided. This criticism is sound, and the film -- as a work of entertainment -- would have benefited greatly had the director not been a stranger to subtlety.

But the problem here is with the story itself, which isn't fraught with ambiguities and complexities. The matter really was quite simple: Mormon priesthood leaders (the church has a lay priesthood), acting on oaths to avenge the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith and in accordance with the doctrine of "blood atonement," conspired to annihilate an entire wagon train of innocent, inoffensive people. They did so in the belief that they were doing God's will, and that the killings had been ordered by their religious leaders, who were for all intents and purposes infallible.

In recent months, the Mormon leadership has finally admitted that local church leaders were involved in the massacre; this concession comes after 150 years of stolid stonewalling on the subject, beginning with Brigham Young's cover-up campaign in which he acted as an accessory after the fact to mass murder. Roughly two decades after the event, John D. Lee, an adopted son of Brigham Young who had a hands-on role in the killing was the only one to be convicted and executed for the crime.

A tribute to a mass murderer: A statue of John D. Lee, the only individual convicted and punished for the killings at Mountain Meadows, can be found in downtown Washington, Utah.


Bagley contends -- convincingly, in my view -- that the crime itself was ordered by Brigham Young. September Dawn embraces that perspective, and in one of the few instances the film embraces nuance, the order from Brigham is portrayed more along the lines of "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" rather than as a blunt directive from a standard-issue cinematic villain.

Given the vilification of the Arkansans in Mormon folk mythology, there is some irony in current protests from Mormon media figures that September Dawn demonizes the Mormon assailants and beatifies the victims.

Folk accounts of the wagon train depict it as a cross between a pack of Hell's Angels in Conestoga Wagons and a traveling brothel: The women were slatternly, the men uniformly violent and abusive, the children little more than curs. Included in the company (once again, according to myth) were Missourians who had helped drive out the Mormons during the so-called Mormon War of 1838 -- and one of them boasted of having the very gun that killed Joseph Smith. By this account, the wagon train arrived in Utah and immediately began heaping abuse on the Mormon settlers and poisoning livestock in order to rile up the Indians.

To their credit, contemporary Mormon historians reject this depiction of the victims, even though they still try to compartmentalize blame for the massacre by laying it exclusively at the feet of local Mormon leaders. As September Dawn tells it, Brigham was "in the loop," but left it to his followers to handle the details. This strikes me as a very plausible depiction.

Writer-Director Jonathan Cain does a suitable job establishing his setting, in which he presents a personalized drama involving four key fictional characters: Bishop John Samuelson (Jon Voight), his sons Jonathan (Trent Ford) and Micah (Taylor Handley), and Emily Hudson (Tamara Hope), an Arkansan who falls in love with Jonathan.

Bishop Samuelson is a polygamous husband to eighteen women. His younger son Micah has already started a seraglio of his own, but Jonathan -- who believes that marriage should be the product of genuine love, not dutiful compliance to doctrine -- has no interest in marrying anyone, at least until he sees Emily. Tasked by his father to spy on the emigrants, Jonathan finds himself spending time with Emily, with predictable results: They quickly fall in love, despite the cultural chasm separating them.

Emily is a Pastor's daughter, which puts her in a position analogous to Jonathan. They have a brief but illuminating conversation in which the stark differences between their faiths are quickly sketched out: To Jonathan, the emigrants, like all non-Mormons, are "gentiles," and it puzzles him that Emily's father doesn't seek to control those under his pastoral care. Emily, apparently believing Mormonism to be simply another variant of conventional Christianity, is just as puzzled by Jonathan's casual acceptance of authoritarian notions and his unfamiliarity with the Beatitudes.

This scene, although somewhat overbroad and anachronistic in tone (Emily sounds a bit too much like a 21st Century Megachurch Evangelical, rather than a mid-19th century Protestant pioneer), does offer a useful illustration of the distance that separates Mormonism from mainline Christianity in terms of doctrine and practice. This is particularly true of the high-octane, theocratic version of Mormonism taught and lived in Brigham's Caliphate.

When in the film Jonathan casually tells Emily that his father considers the beliefs of the emigrants to be "abominations," the character is accurately giving voice to the Mormon perspective on mainline Christianity. When the film's version of Brigham Young (Terrance Stamp, whose experience in playing the Kryptonian megalomaniac Zod offered valuable training for this role) speaks of blood atonement -- shedding the blood of those whose sins supposedly aren't covered by the blood of Christ, so as to give them an opportunity for exaltation among the "Gods" -- his dialogue is taken directly from documented sermons and writings.

And when Bishop Samuelson insists that his Mormon priesthood leaders are immune to error, he is preaching sound and unassailable doctrine -- from the Mormon perspective, then and now.

The atrocity at Mountain Meadows was the predictable product of a familiar set of ingredients: A power-obsessed, authoritarian leadership that cultivated a siege mentality among its followers; a murderously perverted form of altruism in which lethal violence directed at the targeted victims was depicted as a form of compassion (it would expunge their sins, after all, and give them a chance for salvation); and a doctrine of obedience that relieved followers of moral responsibility for carrying out the orders of their leaders.

Every time, and any time, those ingredients are combined, people will die in large numbers. This was true of the wars of revolution and empire following the Jacobin revolution in France; it was emphatically true of the quasi-genocidal campaign to "civilize" the American Indians (somebody really should make a film about the Sand Creek Massacre); and it was true at Mountain Meadows.

But it is also true of the ongoing war in Iraq, as well. There is no moral or material difference between Brigham Young infecting his followers with war fever and then turning them loose on helpless Arkansans, on the one hand, and the cynical exploitation of terrorism by Bush and Cheney to manipulate our nation into invading Iraq, on the other.

After all, we're told, the president knows so much more than we do, and those who carry out his orders -- whether to destroy a city or sexually torture a child -- partake of the president's moral immunity. And the Iraqis should be grateful to us for the humanitarian violence we've inflicted on them: Don't they know this is their only chance to embrace the gospel of democracy?

Double Video Bonus

Gratuitous as it might seem, I'm offering clips of two incendiary performances by the incomparable Thin Lizzy. The songs selected are on-topic: They deal with the bloody consequences of fanatical self-righteousness.

"Massacre"

"If God is in heaven, how can this happen here? In God's name they used weapons for the massacre...."



"Holy War"

"We are chosen; we are one; we are frightened of no one ... and no one will win this war -- this is the way, this is the law."



Please be sure to check out The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

Mitt Romney and the Teen Torture Industry

George Romney's presidential ambitions were scuttled by his infamous remark that he had been "brainwashed" about Vietnam. It is to be hoped that Mitt Romney's statement that he wants to "double Guantanamo" will prove similarly fatal to his presidential bid:

As I've pointed out before, Romney's credentials as a social and fiscal conservative are as counterfeit as Pamela Anderson's mammalian anatomy (and just as beguiling to the weak-minded).


His only selling point to the Evangelical Nationalist voting bloc -- apart from his forgettably photogenic looks -- is his commitment to the doctrine of presidential omnipotence, particularly with respect to the detention and torture of suspected terrorists and "enemy combatants."


The applause that rewarded Romney's endorsement of Gitmo-plus indicates that for the central core of True Believers within the GOP, nothing is more important than preserving the president's power to detain and torture people at whim.


For several months I have been warning that behind Romney's public image -- he looks and acts like preternaturally well-preserved Osmond Brother -- we can find something very close to absolute evil: A variety of authoritarian "conservatism" that endorses the torture and sexual mistreatment of children. Those warnings have been vindicated by a lawsuit filed against Robert Lichfield, co-chairman of Romney's Utah Finance Committee.

We know what's behind the smiles: Mitt Romney and Pat Robertson strike a pose during Regent University's 2007 Commencement Ceremony.


Lichfield has helped raise $2.7 million for Romney in Utah, including $300,000 at a February event in St. George. Over the past decade, Lichfield has been co-chairman of the Utah-based World-Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), a corporation that makes $70 million per year running an archipelago of torture camps – many of them located off-shore – in which troubled American youngsters have been subjected to torture as a means of behavior modification (BM).

WWASPS is a major player in the "tough love" industry, which runs camps, retreats, and other private reform institutions for teenagers deemed to be incorrigible. The WWASPS approach is an outgrowth of methods pioneered by Straight, Inc., which operated a similar chain of BM facilities until being overwhelmed by lawsuits. Mel Sembler, the Flordia-based shopping mall magnate who operated Straight, Inc. with his wife Betty, is another key fundraiser for the Romney campaign.

The polluted fountainhead of these programs was a federally funded program called The Seed, which was exposed by a 1974 Senate Judiciary Committee investigation as employing the same “highly refined `brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans” against American POWs. And all of this was an outgrowth of the cynical, murderous fraud called the War on Drugs.

In her indispensable book Help at Any Cost, Maia Szalavitz documented how WWASPS and kindred programs “utilize punishments banned for use on criminals and by the Geneva Convention. Beatings, extended isolation and restraint, public humiliation, food deprivation, sleep deprivation, forced exercise to the point of exhaustion, sensory deprivation, and lengthy maintenance of stress positions are common.”

Some teenagers selected for forced enrollment in BM programs have been treated exactly like terrorist suspects, suffered “extraordinary rendition” at the hands of rented thugs. Many have been kidnapped from their beds (with the consent of parents who had succumbed to a “hard sell” by a BM program pitchman) and taken to an offshore detention facility in the Cayman Islands, Mexico, Costa Rica, Jamaica, American Samoa, Australia, France, or even the Czech Republic; yes, the BM industry, like the CIA's torture gulag, made use of assets in a former Iron Curtain nation.

The methods used by WWASPS personnel are likewise uncannily like the "enhanced interrogation techniques" referred to by Romney. (That phrase, as used by Bush and his minions, is a direct translation of the German expression used by the Nazi Gestapo to describe exactly the same methods.)

At one BM facility in Puerto Rico, “teens were found bound and gagged with nooses around their necks,” observes Szalavitz. At "High Impact," a WWASPS detention center in Mexico, teenage victims were locked in dog cages. (See the photo at left.) One survivor of that facility described how he was nearly drowned to death by a group of older kids who -- made feral through prolonged mistreatment -- hoped that the murder would shut the program down. Amberly Knight, former director of the WWASPS-affiliated Dundee Ranch in Costa Rica, testifies that food deprivation was commonly used to punish inmates, and particularly rebellious kids were taken to a tiny isolation room and forced to kneel on concrete for up to 14 hours a day.

We don't need no stinkin'... well, you get the point: A bathroom facility at the WWASPS "High Impact" gulag in Mexico.

Inmates at a WWASPS program in Samoa were sometimes confined for long periods in an "ISO Box," a three-foot by three-foot box akin to a North Vietnamese “tiger cage.” Others were hog-tied with duct tape or beaten by staffers. When the Samoan government began a child abuse inquiry, WWASPS hastily shut down the facility.

More like something from Gollum's diseased mind: This tiny torture cubicle at Spring Creek Lodge, a WWASPS camp in Montana, was called "The Hobbit."


WWASPS's Spring Creek Lodge in Montana featured a tiny disciplinary cubicle called "The Hobbit" in which some inmates were confined for weeks or months at a time and fed nothing but beans and bananas. One counselor at Spring Creek was charged with sexually molesting two boys who had been imprisoned in The Hobbit.

Mark Runkle, who spent two and a half years on the staff at the Spring Creek facility, has described how detainees would be rousted in the middle of the night and taken into the nearby woods for "tests of will."

"They take kids down to the Vermilion Bridge at night, blindfold them, and push them off into the river," Runkle recalled. "They take them off into the woods, and they come back hurt. They claim it's a mind-increaser. I think it breaks the kids down -- breaks their will down. Mentally, they do damage. Emotionally, too."


Last December, 133 plaintiffs – survivors of WWASP facilities, along with parents and other loved ones – filed a lawsuit (.pdf) against Richfield in the US District Court for Utah, claiming that inmates of the residential programs were “subjected to physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse.”

The parents suing Lichfield, notes The Hill, “sent their kids to WWASPS-affiliated schools such as Cross Creek Center for Boys in LaVerkin, Utah; Majestic Ranch Academy in Randolph, Utah; and The Academy at Ivy Ridge in Ogdensburg after they got in trouble for insubordination, drug use or petty theft. The parents learned of the boarding schools through Teen Help, a business owned by Lichfield that matched parents and their children with boarding schools around the country and [abroad] ... Plaintiffs have alleged that Lichfield made millions from the schools.”

Among the allegations of abuse outlined in the lawsuit are the following:

*Placement in isolation for long periods of time, and at times, including being locked in small boxes and cages, and locked up in basements, and forced to assume distorted and painful physical positions for long periods of time;

*Exposure to extreme (hot and cold) temperatures for long periods of time;

*[Being] kicked, beaten, thrown and slammed to the ground;

*[Being] bound and tied by hands and/or feet;

*[Being] chained and locked in dog cages;

*[Being] forced to lie in, or wear, urine and feces as one method of punishment;

*[Being] forced to clean and scrub toilets and floors with their toothbrush and then use the toothbrush afterwards; [...]

*Sexual abuse, which included forced sexual relations and acts of fondling and masturbation performed on them; [...]

*[Being] Threatened with severe punishment, including death, if they told anyone of their abuses and poor living conditions; [...]

*[Being] subjected to [a] buddy system where older students were allowed to physically, mentally, and sexually abuse younger students and manage them as part of a `cleansing' process....

This institutionalized perversion thrived in a program that Lichfield said was intended to combat the "breakdown of the family."

"When the family is not functioning, society suffers," he explained in a 1993 telephone interview. It's not obvious to rational people how officially sanctioned sadism can help fix what's been broken by the family's decline, but Lichfield has found sadism and sanctimony to be a profitable combination.


And there is something utterly horrifying about the fact that Romney tapped not one, but two key people in the Teen Torture Industry to raise money for his presidential campaign. This obviously raises questions about where and how those funds have been raised. But the more serious issue is this: Romney himself has embraced the use of torture, however euphemistically described, as a central function of the presidency.


Why should we doubt the seriousness of Romney's desire to "double Guantanamo," when some of his closest allies have been running a global detention and torture network for troubled American teenagers?


Point of personal privilege....

I first wrote about this subject for The New American magazine in March of last year. Last September, shortly before I was fired by the, ahem, heroes running that magazine's sponsoring organization, I touched upon the subject again in a piece about Mel Sembler published in the JBS News Feed.

Just before I was fired, I published a three-part series describing how the GOP's leadership and much of its rank and file -- the self-anointed Champions Of All That Is Decent -- had embraced torture, both at home (via Sembler's Behavior Modification programs and related efforts) and abroad (at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and elsewhere). See here, here, and here for that three-part series, as well as here for an essay -- clearly identifiable as a satire, albeit one inspired by a sense of mortal disgust over the repellent spectacle of bullying arrogance the GOP had become -- that serves as a sort of postscript.

Those essays, published on my own time and in a blog for which I alone was liable, figure prominently in the rationalizations used to justify my firing in letters to TNA subscribers. I say "rationalizations" -- plural -- because the people responsible for that decision have never settled on one clear reason for firing me.

The individual who took the initiative in having me fired has said on more than one occasion that the essays referred to above were hampering the organization's fund-raising and recruiting efforts, which prompts me to wonder why he was trawling for money and volunteers in that badly polluted authoritarian pond, rather than doing what Ron Paul has done: Offering an appeal to freedom-focused people irrespective of party label.

Surely, an organization devoted to "Less Government, More Responsibility, and - with God's Help - a Better World" shouldn't be inordinately concerned about offending the kind of people who can countenance child torture. You might want to ask that fellow about this, but only if you're not particular about being told the truth.

Please be sure to drop by The Right Source.