http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/20 ... newsletter
Ah yes! Republican family values which includes torturing children!Behind Liz Cheney's group, a weird legacy of torture
Financing Cheney's pro-torture front is Melvin Sembler, who once enabled "enhanced interrogation" of American teens
By Joe Conason
U.S. ambassador to Italy Melvin Sembler, financier
behind Liz Cheney's Keeping America Safe organization.
The arrest of an Army sergeant (and Iraq veteran) who allegedly waterboarded his 4-year-old daughter for failing to recite the alphabet is sickening. Yet it may be the kind of news we must come to expect if, as a society, the United States determines that torture is an acceptable method of securing information and inducing obedience. Physical abuse of children is nothing new, of course, in certain right-wing quarters, as Max Blumenthal reminded us by exposing the pedagogical sadism of Focus on the Family in Republican Gomorrah.
For a sergeant who tortures his child, however, the relevant model probably comes from somewhere high in the chain of command. At the center of todayâ??s propaganda promoting the torture state are former Vice President Dick Cheney, his family and many of his friends, working through an organization called Keeping America Safe that is run by his daughter Liz Cheney. The financier behind that outfit is one Melvin Sembler, a curious character whose résumé indicates that he is all too familiar with the "enhanced interrogation" of children.
Sembler is best known as a Florida shopping center magnate and Republican fundraiser whose success in amassing funds for the Bush family won him two ambassadorial appointments. Such patronage is a sordid aspect of national politics, but seems trivial when compared with the truly dark side of Semblerâ??s biography. Long before he achieved prominence in national politics, he was the driving force in the "boot camp" movement that popularized the use of psychological and physical abuse of "troubled" children and teenagers.
His own creation was a federally funded outfit known as Straight, Inc., which eventually fell apart amid multiple lawsuits and accusations of torture by teenagers abused in its secretive facilities.
The best reporting on Straightâ??s frightening history in recent years has appeared in Reason, the libertarian magazine, under the byline of Maia Szalavitz. Some of the techniques that eventually brought Semblerâ??s organization to the attention of law enforcement authorities will be eerily familiar to anyone who remembers what happened at Abu Ghraib: humiliating punishments, broken bones, starvation, sleep deprivation, stress positions, verbal assaults, eight-hour sessions of questioning, and so on.
According to Szalavitz, "Straightâ??s national clinical director ... admitted to authorities in 1982 that he had kept teenagers awake for 72-hour periods, put them on peanut butter-only diets, and forced them to crawl through each otherâ??s legs to be hit in a 'spanking machine' ... Straight ultimately paid out millions of dollars in dozens of lawsuits related to abuse and even kidnapping and false imprisonment of adults."
Eventually Straight crumbled amid those multimillion-dollar settlements, newspaper exposés and government probes, thanks to the activism of Richard Bradbury, a young man whose experience resembles the stories of innocent Iraqis who were caught up in the torture machine over there.
Again according to Szalavitz, Bradbury "was forcibly enrolled in the program in 1983, when he was 17. His sister had had a drug problem, and Straight demanded that he be screened for one as well. After an eight-hour interrogation in a tiny room, Bradbury, who was not an addict, was nonetheless held. He later described beatings and continuous verbal assaults, which for him centered on sexual abuse heâ??d suffered as a young boy. Staffers and other participants called him a 'faggot,' told him he'd led his abusers on, and forced him to admit 'his part' in the abuse."
Of course Sembler, like his pal Cheney, will never admit that anything went wrong with his grisly enterprise. When last heard from, as ambassador to Italy, he still listed his affiliation with Straight on his official State Department profile as a matter of personal pride. Just another exemplar of Cheney family values.
And it just keeps on getting better!
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/ ... newsletter
And no, it's not just one Republican scum-bag inspired by the bush administration to torture his own 4 year old daughter.
Did a soldier waterboard his daughter?
An Army sergeant allegedly used the torture technique to make his daughter learn the alphabet
By Mark Benjamin
WASHINGTON -- In an obvious reference to waterboarding al-Qaida suspects, former Vice President Dick Cheney was asked in October 2006 whether â??a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" Cheney responded like Cheney: "Well, it's a no-brainer for me.â?
Joshua Tabor, an Army sergeant in Washington state who served in Iraq, also apparently bought into that "ends-justifies-the-means" argument for waterboarding. Though for Tabor, the ends was allegedly getting his 4-year-old daughter to recite the alphabet.
Police in Yelm, Wash., arrested Tabor, 27, on Jan. 31 after allegedly waterboarding his daughter for failing to say her ABCs. "Daddy was upset because she wouldn't say her letters," according to the police report.
The Bush administration authorized waterboarding and various techniques to exploit phobias. In true Cheney fashion, Tabor employed both simultaneously -- his daughter was apparently terrified of the water. "His purpose was to punish her by putting her in the water because he knows she is afraid of it and he wanted her to cooperate," police said Tabor told them. Police told reporters that Tabor sat her on the edge of the bathroom sink and dunked her head when she failed to recite the alphabet.
As if Tabor was channeling Cheney, he explained to police that after her dunk in the water, "She said her letters after that."
Well, then. There you go. Itâ??s just a dunk in the water, after all.
The police apparently had to coax the terrified girl out of the bathroom. She was covered with bruises.
Perhaps youâ??re thinking, "Well, thatâ??s not quite fair. You people are blaming the torture of a 4-year-old girl on the former vice president. Cheney was trying to save lives."
Smart people who have actually studied the history of torture, like Darius Rejali, author of "Torture and Democracy," point out that when institutionalizing torture, government officials almost always rationalize torture on national security grounds. Despite the lack of evidence, they always insist that it "worked" because theyâ??d look really, really bad if it didnâ??t.
And when institutionalizing torture, officials pretty much always try to put limits on just who can be tortured and exactly how. Both limits always fail as the torturers exceed those bounds and the brutality metastasizes throughout the national security establishment -- and beyond.
If the Bush administration had not authorized waterboarding, do you really think Tabor would have come up with that one on his own?
There is a boarding school in Massachusetts that uses electric shocks on children.
Brainwashing Children, Child Mind Control, School of Shock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCWuPxtI ... o_response
Shocking Children!!! School of Shock, Judge Rotenberg, Psychology, Mind Control Report
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js2hNr2a ... re=related
I know I have posted these links before in another topic but I feel it's related to the above articles.
It was back in the 1980s when the boarding schools were established, back during the Reagan Administration.
It appears that every time the Republicans are in power children get tortured in this country.
I hope or Democratic administration can do something to get this boarding school shut down.
Also, I think the entire Republican party should have criminal charges of treason brought against them and if found guilty in a court of law they should all get the firing squad!
I'm fat and sassy! I love to sing & dance & stomp my feet & really rock your world!
