Evidence Points to Routine Use of Torture by Ugandan Government

Denmark's Ambassador to Uganda was away when his wife looked out the window and saw a young man fall from the sky and land on her garden. She made a frantic call to her husband, Stig Barlyng, who immediately sped home to his residence in a posh suburb in Kampala. But by the time Barlyng arrived home, the guards from the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) headquarters next door had already overpowered Barlyng's guard and recaptured their escapee. "I went next door and I started yelling a bit, to put it mildly," recalls Barlyng, who is months away from wrapping up his ambassadorship. Barlyng had reason to be upset -- "the presence of torture in Uganda was handed to me on a silver platter," he says.

Though not picked up by any international media outlets when it occurred in early 2006, the 30-foot jump of Ronald Kasekende onto Barlyng's compound was reported in the country's independent daily. For six months, the newspaper reported, Kaskende, a university student and an alleged spy for the opposition, was "severely beaten and subject to other forms of torture" in hopes that he would release the names of his accomplices. Shortly after his escape attempt, exposed to diplomatic and press circles, Kasekende was officially charged with treason and detained in an actual prison. Today, he still lives in Kampala and is wary of speaking to the media. When asked how his experiences in an illegal detention center have affected him, he only had this to say: "I tell my friends the hardware is the same but the software is all messed up."

 

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'Dettol Man' died of cleaning obsession

A man died after becoming obsessed with cleaning his home and himself with Dettol.

Recluse Jacques Niemand, 42, used vast amounts of the disinfectant for keeping his home clean and washing himself, an inquest heard.

The inquest in Manchester was told that Jacques' over-exposure to the cleaning agent resulted in a fatal lack of oxygen getting into his system.

His sister Ruth Bain said she wouldn't go into the flat in Pine Court, Lapwing Lane, Didsbury, because it was 'stifling'.

And several police officers who went in the flat following his death later went off sick with aches and pains after being 'overpowered' by the smell of cleaning products.

After Jacques' death last July Mrs Bain found a suitcase crammed with around 100 bottles of Dettol.

Empty bottles were also littered around the flat, as well as several buckets containing the fluid.

Mrs Bain said her brother, who was known as 'The Dettol Man', had suffered from an obsessive cleaning disorder for years.

 

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Internet obsession or addiction

An Israel psychiatrist believes behaviors such as — craving your computer mouse as the first thing you do after awakening, or obsessively checking email in the middle of the night – is better described as an addiction rather than an obsession.

Experts estimate ten percent of all Internet surfers are afflicted with "Internet addiction disorder," a pathological condition that can lead to anxiety and severe depression.

Dr. Pinhas Dannon, a psychiatrist from Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine, recommends the disorder be grouped with other extreme addictive disorders such as gambling, sex addiction, and kleptomania.

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The symptoms of Internet addiction in both groups are vague and are often difficult to diagnose. Sufferers may experience loss of sleep, anxiety when not online, isolation from family and peer groups, loss of work, and periods of deep depression.

Treating Internet addiction can only be done effectively, believes Dr. Dannon, if the condition is treated like any other extreme and menacing addiction. For example, a clinician could use talk therapy or prescribe medication such as Serotonin blockers and Naltrexone, which are also effective against kleptomania and pathological gambling.

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An indictment of US torture

Only one interviewee, the former Pentagon lawyer Doug Feith, expresses some distrust of him ("the problem with moral authority is people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes") but even he cannot quite bear to show Sands the door.

Instead, Feith sets him straight - by describing at great length just how central a role he played in sidelining the Geneva Conventions after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Such loquacity is central to Sands's narrative. It was not skulking renegades who emboldened ordinary Americans to strip and leash their captives, to pin images of World Trade Centre victims to their bodies, to expose them to snarling dogs, and to half-drown them. It was suited attorneys, who still proudly proclaim their fidelity to US law.

Their objection was not to legality, but to the "quaint" terms used by human rights treaties - and they thought it perfectly legal to disregard past international interpretations of those treaties, unless and until a US court told them otherwise.

Sands's suggestion is that they still betrayed their calling. Even assuming that American rules were all that counted, they remained professionally obliged to flag up aspects of their advice that others might consider controversial - and by choosing to characterise preordained political goals as settled law, they crossed the line that separates the advocate from the accomplice.

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As Dick Cheney was instructing America that it should prepare to "work through... the dark side" and Fox television had begun broadcasting 24, a programme that celebrated righteous torture, the first practical proposals came from a Harvard professor and former civil rights champion, Alan Dershowitz.

The time had come, he argued, to consider thrusting needles under the fingernails of terrorist suspects. "Pain", he said, was "overrated". In the name of moral clarity, moral blindness had descended - and the shadowy course to Abu Ghraib was set.

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'Even some of the most hardcore conspiracy debunkers have had their beliefs shaken to the core by the former Defense Secretary's admission'

Rumsfeld On Tape: Terror Attack Could Restore Neo-Con Agenda
Former Defense Secretary's conversation with military analysts on political problems - "The Correction For That...Is An Attack"

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, May 16, 2008

 

Shocking excerpts of confidential recordings recently released under the Freedom of Information Act feature former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talking with top military analysts about how a flagging Neo-Con political agenda could be successfully restored with the aid of another terrorist attack on America.

The tape also includes a conversation where Rumsfeld and the military analysts agree on the possible necessity of installing a brutal dictator in Iraq to oversee U.S. interests.

The tapes were released as part of the investigation into the Pentagon's "message force multipliers" program in which top military analysts were hired to propagandize for the Iraq war in the corporate media.

In attendance at the valedictory luncheon Rumsfeld hosted on December 12, 2006 were David L. Grange, Donald W. Sheppard, James Marks, Rick Francona, Wayne Downing, and Robert H. Scales, Jr. among others.

The most extraordinary exchange takes place when Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong bemoans shrinking political support for Neo-Con war plans on Capitol Hill and suggests that sympathy for the Bush administration's agenda will only be achieved after a new terror attack.

Rumsfeld agrees that the psychological impact of 9/11 is wearing off and the "behavior pattern" of citizens in both the U.S. and Europe suggests that they are unconcerned about the threat of terror.

DELONG: Politically, what are the challenges because you're not going to have a lot of sympathetic ears up there until it [a terror attack] happens.

RUMSFELD: That's what I was just going to say. This President's pretty much a victim of success. We haven't had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack. And when that happens, then everyone gets energized for another [inaudible] and it's a shame we don't have the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats...the lethality, the carnage, that can be imposed on our society is so real and so present and so serious that you'd think we'd be able to understand it, but as a society, the longer you get away from 9/11, the less...the less...

Click here for the audio clip.

In another exchange, after assuring that comments are "off the record," Rumsfeld and one of the military analysts agree that Iraq could use a "Syngman Rhee" to take control of Iraq. Syngman Rhee was the ruthless authoritarian dictator of South Korea from after World War II through the Korean War to 1960. If the invasion of Iraq was about liberating the Iraqis from a tyrant in the form of Saddam Hussein why is Rumsfeld talking about installing an even more brutal dictator?

Click here for the audio clip. Newsvine has the recording in full.

Rumsfeld's admission that the correction for dwindling support of the Neo-Con imperial crusade is another terror attack is perhaps the most startling and blatant indication that 9/11 was an inside job.

How much more evidence do we need to confirm that the Neo-Con hierarchy in control of the U.S. government are instigating and exploiting terror in the pursuit of their own domestic and geopolitical agenda?

As Jerry Mazza writes today, "In the seven years since the day, exhaustive and still growing evidence proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the US government, spearheaded by the Bush administration, planned, orchestrated and executed the 9/11 false flag operation. As openly advocated by wide swaths of elites, from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), of which Rumsfeld has been a member, to the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski (in his The Grand Chessboard), only an attack "on the order of Pearl Harbor" would, in Brzezinski's words, cause the American people to support an "imperial mobilization," and a world war."

Placing the new evidence against previously revealed 9/11-related acts on the part of Rumsfeld, his guilt is overt and obvious. Recall that it was Rumsfeld who enthusiastically penned the "Go Massive" memo, gleefully declaring the Bush administration finally had the green light to kill: "Not only UBL (Usama bin Laden). Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

The longing for a new terror attack to corral the masses back behind the Neo-Con agenda is a shared fetish amongst Neo-Cons, policy wonks and academics alike.

In August last year Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky openly called for "another 9/11" that "would help America" restore a "community of outrage and national resolve".

Lt.-Col. Doug Delaney, chair of the war studies program at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, told the Toronto Star last July that "The key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago."

The same sentiment was also explicitly expressed in a 2005 GOP memo, which yearned for new attacks that would "validate" the President's war on terror and "restore his image as a leader of the American people."

Also in July 2007, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum suggested that a series of "unfortunate events," namely terrorist attacks, will occur within the next year and change American citizen's perception of the war.

And the month before that, the new chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party Dennis Milligan said that there needed to be more attacks on American soil for President Bush to regain popular approval.

Comments posted on the left-wing Huffington Post website in response to the Rumsfeld tape indicate that even some of the most hardcore conspiracy debunkers have had their beliefs shaken to the core by the former Defense Secretary's admission.

"I have been a very staunch opponent of conspiracy theories," writes one, "but to hear the man most responsible for stopping foreign threats to American lives musing that a successful attack on the USA is somehow a "cure" for us... it almost makes me want to make a tinfoil hat with the nuts I made fun of."