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!

The Bush Regime's Revolution in Legal Affairs

Sure, he was rich, but he wasn't particularly wise: Lydian King Croesus (enthroned) receives a visit from the Athenian lawgiver, Solon, in this depiction by the Dutch master Gerard von Honthorst.


If audacity were wealth, John C. Yoo would be richer than Croesus. But then, if wisdom were breath, he would have died of asphyxiation long ago.


Yoo has become properly notorious as a key legal architect of the Bush Regime's version of fuhrerprinzip -- the doctrine that the powers of a "war president" are essentially limitless, and include the right to order the torture of anyone upon whom he chooses to inflict such treatment, including innocent children.


He is the chief author of the so-called "Bybee Memorandum," the August 1, 2002 document that provided pseudo-legal justification for torture under the color of supposed presidential authority. (Jay S. Bybee, who signed the memo composed by Yoo, was the assistant Attorney General for the White House Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time; he has since been appointed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.)


In recent days, thanks to the commendable persistence of the ACLU*, the Bush Regime has been compelled to disgorge another torture memorandum written by Yoo, this one composed on March 14, 2003. (Part one is here; part two, here.) Building seamlessly on the previous memo, this second installment in Yoo's apologia for torture was written for the apparent purpose of trumping objections to torture offered by high-ranking military personnel.


The second Yoo memo was largely a refinement of the first, differing primarily in the brazenness with which the case was made for official impunity: It asserted plenary immunity to criminal laws on behalf of those who committed acts of torture and even mutilation while acting on presidential orders. Physically maiming a detainee was described as a legally defensible tactic as long as the torturer was "fulfilling the executive branch's authority to protect the federal government and the nation from attack after the events of September 11, which triggered the nation's right to self-defense."


Thus if an intelligence officer or military interrogator were to cripple, blind, disfigure, or otherwise permanently mangle a prisoner under orders from the executive branch, he would be immune to prosecution. The same claim was made on behalf of those who tortured detainees to death.


Yoo's second memo was issued just a few days before the Bush administration attacked Iraq, and roughly a year before the disclosure of grotesque atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib -- the latter being the undeniable offspring of the policy adumbrated in the Yoo-authored memos. Commentator Marty Lederman is incontestably correct in stating that the Yoo memos, the second in particular, constitute "the source of the Nile for the abuses that occurred in Iraq in 2003."


Given that the original Yoo-authored "Bybee Memorandum" made all of the essential claims of unlimited executive power and derivative immunity for presidentially appointed torturers, why was the second one necessary? According to legal analyst Scott Horton of Harper's, the second memo was part of an effort by the deranged neo-"conservatives" running the "war on terror" to bring the military to heel.


From the beginning of the "war on terror," Horton observes, interrogators were authorized to employ torture at Gitmo and Afghanistan's Bagram Air Force Base. But while Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their epigones were ardently pushing for torture, "the intelligence professions were actually pushing back" against the practice. The same was true of career military legal officers, particularly Navy general counsel Alberto Mora.



The furious opposition to torture among uniformed personnel at the Pentagon prompted a tactical retreat by the neo-cons. Rumsfeld "suspended" the use of torture in December 2002, and William J. Haynes, Rumsfeld's legal counsel, instructed the OLC produce a second torture memo intended to placate the military lawyers.



In April 2003, a Pentagon Working Group on Iraq approved the findings of the second Yoo memorandum. In fact, they had no choice, since the White House, in an homage to the Brezhnev-era Soviet Politburo, informed the Working Group that its members were required to accept those findings. The effort to build a "consensus" on this matter was simplified by another Soviet-style touch: The top lawyers from each of the military services were excluded from the Working Group, and weren't informed about the contents of the second Yoo memorandum until more than a year later -- by which time the phrase "Abu Ghraib" had entered the colloquial vocabulary.


As far as the Bush Regime was concerned, legal objections to torture rooted in the Constitution, statutory law, the UCMJ, the Geneva Conventions, and centuries of Anglo-Saxon common law were irrelevant, because Deus vult -- with the holy personage of the Dear Leader serving as a substitute for the Deity.


Yoo displayed exactly the right combination of sycophancy and sophistry to win the coveted role of composing the Regime's briefs on behalf of torture. But he's just one unremarkable specimen from a large and thriving population of totalitarian pseudo-conservative legal activists.


Key legal architects of the torture policy have been offered posts in the judiciary. As noted above, Bybee was appointed to a spot on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Haynes was nominated for a post on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in November 2003. Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Haynes nomination in familiar lock-step -- make that goose-step -- fashion; however, Senate Democrats, in an all but unparalleled gesture of principled rebellion, filibustered the nomination to death.


So Haynes continued as General Counsel for the Defense Department until last February 25, when he suddenly resigned.


Oddly enough, after seven years of "public service," Haynes developed a sudden urge to return to private life immediately following the publication of an article in The Nation exposing his role in rigging capital trials of six detainees in Gitmo. This accusation came not from some ACLU lawyer in Poindexter glasses, or some pachouli-scented "peace creep," but from Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the Military Commission at Gitmo.


According to Col. Davis, Haynes told him in August 2005 that the trials of Gitmo detainees "`will be the Nuremberg of our time'." Davis, in reply, pointed out that some of the defendants at Nuremberg had been acquitted, a fact which conferred some credibility on the proceedings in the eyes of some skeptics.


A very sound criticism of the Nuremberg Tribunal was that it was an exercise in "victor's justice" -- a forum in which the accusers were also the prosecutors and the judges. And it shouldn't be forgotten that the Soviet Union, which sat in judgment of the Nazis at Nuremberg, began the war as allies of the Reich. Perhaps Davis had those criticisms in mind when he referred to the PR value of acquittals, should they occur at Gitmo:

"I said to [Haynes] that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process."

Davis, however, didn't understand that the Bush Regime wouldn't settle for anything less from him than the Full Vyshinsky: He was to be chief prosecutor in a neo-Stalinist show trial, the preordained outcome of which would validate the Regime's wisdom.

"[Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals.'" Davis recalled. "`If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions.'"

Davis resigned his position on October 4 of last year, just hours after learning that Haynes had been placed above him in the chain of command. Following Davis's disclosures, the Pentagon issued a statement "disputing" the former prosecutor's account of the conversation. Haynes made no public comment, but given his hasty resignation this is clearly a case of res ipsa loquitur.

Weep not for Haynes. True, he was denied a seat on the federal judiciary. However, later this month he begins his new job as corporate general counsel at Chevron, that charming little Mom-and-Pop business whose tanker fleet once included a vessel named after Condoleeza Rice.

John C. Yoo likewise landed on his feet with a teaching position at Berkeley Law School. Unlike Bybee and Haynes, however, Yoo's retirement from "public service" has been disturbed by some lingering legal unpleasantness, in the form of a lawsuit filed by attorneys representing Jose Padilla.


Mr. Padilla is an American citizen, albeit hardly an exemplary one. He was designated an "unlawful combatant" by George Bush in 2002 and held for more than three years without trial or legal recourse of any kind. During that time he was tortured by his captors, who (according to one Regime official) were deliberately trying to destroy Padilla's mind and personality.


All of this followed Yoo's prescriptions for unaccountable wartime presidential power. In fact, from Yoo's perspective Padilla should be abjectly grateful that he was not blinded, maimed, or crippled during his detention. And Yoo -- who, once again, considers such treatment to be perfectly just and legal when ordained by His Holiness the Decider (peace be upon him) -- simpers that the lawsuit filed on Padilla's behalf is nothing less than another form of terrorism.


Yes, those who commit torture and other abuses are covered by "qualified immunity," but
Padilla's lawsuit "shows that qualified immunity is not enough," whined Yoo in a January 19 Wall Street Journal Editorial. "The legal system should not be used as a bludgeon against individuals targeted by political activists to impose policy preferences they have failed to implement at the ballot box. The prospect of having to waste large sums of money on lawyers will deter talented people from entering public service, leading to more mediocrity in our bureaucracies. It will also lead to a risk-averse government that doesn't innovate or think creatively."


Yoo is not being sued because of a difference over "policy preferences"; he's being sued for his role in a criminal conspiracy to subvert the Constitution. His is a thoroughly mediocre mind, and what meager talents he possesses are confined to the realm of corrupt self-promotion. The repellently fascinating aspect of this tissue of special pleading, however, is the implicit assumption that those employed by the executive branch must be entirely free from accountability of any kind -- at least in the context of an open-ended war.


As is so often the case in examining the Bush Regime's assault on what remains of our heritage of liberty under law, we're drawn irresistibly to the early 1930s in search of apt parallels.


Politicized "justice": Christian truth-teller Sophie Scholl on trial before the Nazi "People's Court."




In his study Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, Ingo Mueller describes how the Nazified German legal system extended the kind of unqualified immunity Yoo covets to those who committed crimes on behalf of -- ahem -- Homeland Security:



"Since it was important for the courts to prosecute only the right sort of criminals, a whole series of laws and decrees passed after the Nazis seized power specified that the penalties for political offenses were to be increased; at the same time, a generous amnesty was provided for offenses committed `during the national revolutionary struggle of the German people, in preparation for this revolution, or in the struggle for the German homeland.' In addition, [an influential German jurist] ... argued that the `national aim' should be generally recognized as grounds for immunity. He referred to the decisions of the Supreme Court based on the doctrine of `national emergency,' which suggested such a line of reasoning. Of course [contended this jurist], judges should hand down fair decisions, `but objectivity finds its limits in the German understanding of the law when the national security is placed in doubt'; every judge is `a son of his country' and as such must `place the vital interests of the nation unconditionally above what is formally the law.'" (Emphasis added.)


As we can see, Germany in the early 1930s was blessed with an abundance of "talented" and "creative" public servants, as well.





On sale now!












Dum spiro, pugno!

*I know, I know: It pains me to make yet another favorable reference to the ACLU, but one must give credit where it's due.

The Torture State's Domestic Face

Caveat Lector: The following essay includes exceptionally disturbing video footage and one very offensive photograph. They are both indispensable to the story told below.

An additional note: Literally minutes after I posted this essay, the embedded videos of Hope Steffey's molestation were removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim by the television station that originally aired them. The video is still available here.

This sort of thing isn't supposed to happen -- at least not to attractive, middle-class, middle-aged American women.

We've become at least somewhat inured to the spectacle of sadistic violence being inflicted on dusky-skinned foreign terrorist suspects, or the occasional (make that “increasingly frequent”) violent death of black Americans, both young males and elderly women, as a result of paramilitary police raids.

Some of us have read the complaints of accused criminals who have been “lit up” by corrections officers in jails or brutalized in prison. And it's not difficult to find accounts of similar treatment inflicted on illegal aliens held in ICE detention facilities (the most notorious of which was built with the help of illegal immigrant labor, of course).

But, hey – the perps had it coming, right? And why should we be upset if some border-jumper gets roughed up a bit? After all, isn't that how things are done al otro lado de la frontera?

Hearts unmoved by such cases tend to melt at the spectacle of a slender, helpless woman shrieking in fear and impotent rage as she is pinned down and violently disrobed by skinheads wearing the uniform of Ohio's Stark County Sheriff's Department.

Don't get me wrong: The outrage over the sexual violation of Ohio resident Hope Steffey, who was arrested, assaulted by police, strip-searched, and left naked in a cell for six hours, is eminently justified.

In fact, I earnestly hope that there will be much more outrage, that it goes thermonuclear, and that its radiating consequences include not only criminal charges against the simians in uniform who violated Hope, but also a dramatic increase in public curiosity about the routine sadism, perversion, and abuse that typify America's prison-industrial complex.

It must be understood that what happened to Hope – who was arrested after suffering an assault and calling the police for help – is uncommon only in that the abuse she suffered was inflicted on an uncommonly telegenic and sympathetic victim. Fury over her experience in jail is coupled with outrage that this woman could begin the night as the victim of a private assault and end it as a victim of sexual molestation and battery under color of authority. And she was taken to jail on the flimsiest of pretexts, being arrested for resisting arrest – a tautological police tactic that is becoming increasingly common.

But what we have to remember is that Hope's evening from hell is not that unusual. In fact, her case isn't even unique for Ohio's Stark County jail system.

Last August, three teenage girls from Canton, Ohio filed suit against the Multi-County Juvenile Attention Center after a “scared straight” experience turned into a festival of sexual assault and humiliation.

In April of last year, the girls were charged with “criminal trespass on a public sidewalk” -- a charge as contrived as an arrest for resisting arrest – as a result of a fight that involved several other teenagers. The girls insist that they were innocent bystanders, a predictable claim that has the merit of being legally true: Rather than going to court, the girls agreed to perform 20 hours of “community service,” attend school dutifully, and take a 15-minute “walk-through” of the juvenile “Attention Center.”

According to the lawsuit, within minutes of their arrival at the juvenile jail, a “youth leader” -- that is, a guard – began to scream at them. When the girls reacted by giggling, a predictable adolescent reaction to tension, the tax-engorged cretin assaulted them, throwing them against the wall face-first while continuing to scream at them.

Led to the second floor of the facility, the girls were subjected to crude and denigrating sexual remarks. One guard – who should be fitted for a millstone (these are 13-year-old girls we're talking about) or at least beaten into jelly by the male relatives of his victims – made remarks about the girls' breasts. Another insinuated that one of the girls was a lesbian and displayed his unique charm by cracking a funny about that reliable comic staple, prison rape: “[The] other female inmates will love you because they love blondes.”

Female guards then took the girls individually into a room where each of them was forced to strip and undergo a body cavity examination – while the male guards prowled just outside the doorway making derisive remarks. The girls were then forced to put on filthy jail attire – including unlaundered intimate wear. About a half-hour later they were given 30 seconds to change their clothes under the threat of staying in the jail overnight.

The girls then fled. The guards went back to “work” until their shifts ended and they could go back to surfing the 'Net for child porn, or whatever it is that skeevy, mouth-breathing degenerates of this sort do when they're not on the clock.

When the parents complained to the court about the sexual violation and physical battery endured by their daughters, Court Administrator Richard DeHeer parried the complaint by replying...

... let's all say it together ...

... that the juvenile jail staff “acted within its protocol.”

This was essentially the same reaction Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson offered when the strip-search and sexual violation of Hope Steffey hit the local news.

First of all, insisted Swanson, his deputies acted in accordance with established policies – despite the fact that the Department's guidelines do not permit male deputies to be present when a female is being subjected to a strip search. Well, ah, y'see, what was done to Steffey wasn't a strip search, Swanson continued.

This leaves to the imagination of those unusually gifted in the art of conjuring euphemisms to devise a more suitable way of describing a procedure that involved tearing the clothes and undergarments from a terrified, resisting woman, leaving her, you know, naked and forcing her to swaddle herself in toilet paper to provide some scintilla of modesty, since she was still very much within eyeshot of the tonsured steroid junkies who had held her down and torn off her clothes.

Hope and her husband have likewise filed suit. And, like the lawsuit filed on behalf of the three teenage girls from Canton, Hope's complaint will never go to court. Some anodyne “reforms” will be promised, or a useless “administrative inquiry” will be undertaken; nobody who draws a tax-funded paycheck will be punished in any way; a tax-subsidized settlement will be reached, and business as usual will continue behind bars in Stark County.

And this means that, as surely as water will wet us, and as surely as fire will burn, other innocent people in Stark County will be abducted under color of authority, on the basis of entirely contrived charges, and suffer treatment similar to that received by Hope Steffey.

The real source of outrage here is that things could have been so much worse for Hope. Yes, she could have been forced to “ride the Taser,” had the arresting officer been interested in giving her a brief taste of electrocution torture. But in many jurisdictions, an arrestee who struggled as Hope did to preserve her personal dignity may have been confined in a bizarre retro-medievalist apparatus called a “restraint chair.”

Restraint chairs come in various styles, colors, and brand names, but the design and function are consistent: The device binds an inmate in such a way that he or she cannot move the arms, legs, or torso.

Purportedly created for the sole purpose of restraining violent and dangerous inmates to prevent them from injuring themselves or others, restraint chairs have been used for punishment, despite explicit warnings from manufacturers. The result has been a growing number of incidents in which prisoners – including non-violent offenders and arrestees yet to be convicted of any offense – have been abused, maimed, crippled, tortured, and killed.

Writing in the April 2000 issue of The Progressive* (obviously a left-leaning journal, but one of the few publications that takes the Bill of Rights seriously), Ann-Marie Cusac recites a list of restraint chair abuses that have been documented in lawsuits and official investigations:

*the devices have been used “for punishment of nonviolent behavior”; for instance, protesters arrested on disorderly conduct charges have been confined in the chair for passive resistance to orders from guards, or for demanding to speak to lawyers;

*children have been “strapped into the chairs for nonviolent behaviors”: Dan Corcoran, president of a Beaverton, Oregon firm that manufactures the chairs, reported under oath that his biggest clients included juvenile detention systems in Georgia and Florida;

*“nude inmates and detainees have been strapped into restraint chairs”;


*some prisoners have been confined to the chairs for as long as eight days;


*other prisoners have been “hooded, pepper-gassed, beaten, or threatened with electrocution” while shackled to the chairs – treatment we'd now associate with the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (that is, torture) used against foreign terrorist suspects.


*as of 2000, at least eleven people died while confined in restraint chairs, often from positional asphyxia, blood clots, or cardiac arrest. Several of those episodes involved inmates or arrestees with documented and treatable mental illness.

No, this isn't a scene from a movie: A prisoner in a Maine"Supermax" facility is bound naked to a restraint chair.

A little more than a decade ago, tax-feeding thugs in the employ of Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff's Office confined Richard Post, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, to a restraint chair. Post, who became a competitive wheelchair athlete after the 1985 car accident that crippled his legs, had been arrested for possessing a gram of marijuana.

While in the holding cell, Post tried to explain that he needed an internal catheter in order to urinate; this is an important medical necessity for a paraplegic, and one that could have been accommodated with little difficulty. But Post was in the custody of a department headed by Joe Arpaio, a waddling sack of corrupt ego who uses the calculated abuse of detainees to cultivate an image as “America's toughest sheriff.” The chair-moisteners employed by Arpaio weren't interested in helping Post, so the desperate man started to rattle his cage and flush the toilet in protest.

That was not dangerous behavior, however annoying it might have been. Yet several of Arpaio's heroes seized the helpless paraplegic and confined him in a restraint chair, cinching down the straps with such force that they broke his neck. Already deprived of his legs, Post lost the use of his hands. He sued the County – one of many to do so as a result of criminal abuse or the death of a loved one at the hands of Arpaio's trained simians -- and received an $800,000 settlement.

In 1999, the Sacramento Sheriff's Department paid out $755,000 to dismiss a class-action suit over the use of restraint chairs as punishment. Among the plaintiffs in the suit was Katherine Martin, a 106-pound woman with a heart condition who was confined to a chair for eight and a half hours after allegedly touching a guard. The restraints were pulled so tight that skin was permanently abraded from Katherine's back and shoulders, and she suffered lasting nerve damage. As is often the case when detainees are confined in the chair for long periods, Katherine was denied access to a bathroom and spent hours sitting in her own waste.

The charge against Katherine that led to this treatment was “suspicion of public drunkenness.”

Ronald Motz, another plaintiff in the Sacramento lawsuit, was also arrested for public drunkenness. A videotaped record shows Motz pleading for a chance to call his attorney, only to be told by a guard that “the phone doesn't work.” After a gap in the tape, Motz is shown being strapped down in a chair with a spit mask around his face.

“I just want to call my attorney,” he protests.

“You don't get to call an attorney,” snaps a guard, who informs him that he was “going to be released in about five hours. Now you're not.”

“What did I do wrong – ask for my attorney?” Motz asks plaintively.

“You weren't following directions,” the guard replies.

The Sacramento video record also shows the March 1999 detention of a woman named Gena Domogio, who was strapped in a chair after being thrown to the floor by several guards who knelt on her back and wrapped her face in a towel. As she is bound into the chair she can be heard protesting that she had a thyroid problem and couldn't breathe. Kimberly Bird, another Sacramento detainee, was taken to the hospital after being rendered unconscious in the chair. The video record shows her pleading, “I'm going to die. Don't let me die.”

As a result of lawsuits in Phoenix, Sacramento, Utah, and elsewhere, the use of restraint chairs has tapered off somewhat in recent years, at least domestically. Oh, they're still in use, of course: The Sacramento Sheriff's Department, for instance, faces another potential lawsuit over using the chair as a punish-and-torture mechanism. But the lawsuits of a decade ago apparently caused at least some agencies to lose some of their enthusiasm for the device.

A burgeoning overseas market: An insurgent or terrorist suspect is held in a restraint chair by US military forces.

While markets for the device have been hard to find in Europe and in most of the English-speaking world, Corcoran (who was deposed in the Sacramento lawsuit) was able to unload large part of his inventory in such havens of liberty and human dignity as the United Arab Emirates. Since “interrogating prisoners” is one of the advertised functions of the chairs, Corcoran probably found a good customer in the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security.

Of course, the experiences of Hope Steffey and the three anonymous teenage girls from Canton demonstrate that no hardware is needed to terrorize and traumatize people who shouldn't be behind bars to begin with – people who are completely innocent or charged with non-violent offenses. And it's a certainty that somewhere, today, in this “free” country's prison population, the largest in the world – seven million people either behind bars, in prison, or on parole -- we could find plentiful examples of entirely harmless people who are being denigrated, abused, terrorized, and tortured in ways that would make Hope Steffey's experience look playful.

A brief postscript....

Several of my friends are employed as prison guards, or deputy sheriffs in charge of jail inmates. I attend church with one, correspond with others, receive regular friendly visits from a third, and respect all of them. The problem, obviously, is not that everyone who works for the prison-industrial complex is a depraved, sadistic lout; the problem is that the Regime -- through the idiotic fraud called the "war on drugs" and the criminalization of vices and behaviors that should not be crimes -- has created a prison population several times larger than it should be, and devised perverse profit incentives for economically depressed communities to go into the business of incarceration. If we build them -- prisons -- "they" will come, both inmates and guards, in such numbers that we will inevitably see an increase in the population of genuinely depraved "detention officers" and administrators.

*The Progressive is published in Madison, Wisconsin; the magazine that once employed me is published in Appleton, a couple of hours north of that city. On a few occasions I ran into reporters from that journal and found that -- our ideological disagreements notwithstanding -- we shared many of the same concerns about the emerging Homeland Security State.

A reminder: My book Liberty in Eclipse: The War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State is now available.

Dum spiro, pugno!

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.