Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz

Posted by perihelions 23 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by shevy-java 22 hours ago

This kind of seems to be a combined strategy. I mean this is not old; many of us may still remember Abu Ghraib and so forth. We now have a somewhat comparable situation: build up of enemies. See ICE raids and videos manhunting people. There always are people susceptible to do so (e. g. inflict pain onto others). The strange thing is how some "democracies" do that. Where is the net difference to a dictatorship? This is also blurred. You have a similar problem in Israel - again, tons of examples that can be given, but it seems as if this is a combined strategy originating from the top (of command chains).

The article claims that the torture box ("confinement box") is the worst torture, but some 20 years ago we had the same with waterboarding. I see a repeat of older patterns here. I wonder what those who torture other people think.

Comment by Xmd5a 21 hours ago

Waterboarders follow a mind-breaking formation in a dedicated military base where they are desensitized to torture by subjugating themselves to it first!

Anyway I don't like the article's take. It seems to blame this on an institutional drift into sadism. I don't think it's the full story, there must be a strategy behind it.

Inducing trauma so that migrants don't ever think about coming back? Maybe coupled with Palantir machine learning insights to identify those who need/respond to this treatment?

>Well, if we did this to these Terrorists there, why not to these other Criminals here…

Simplistic. These guys are part of a hierarchy.

>"EVERYTHING WE SAY, they can see." The end result of mass surveillance is mass murder.

Well no it's meant for targeted murder.

>You should not oppose this simply because it is coming, at some point in the future, for you. You should oppose this because it is happening to anyone. But it is coming for you.

Is it coming or not?

Comment by IAmBroom 18 hours ago

Your last quote clearly says it is.

Comment by woleium 11 hours ago

Maybe this is just a predictable outcome to encouraging the belief that some people are subhuman.

Comment by IAmBroom 18 hours ago

> The article claims that the torture box ("confinement box") is the worst torture, but some 20 years ago we had the same with waterboarding.

I read an account of a fifteenth-century woman (IIRC) who had essentially been waterboarded, among other tortures. She testified that the waterboarding was by far the worst thing she endured, and would rather die than experience it again.

Comment by 0xedd 22 hours ago

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Comment by DyslexicAtheist 22 hours ago

> strange thing is how some "democracies" do that

the US is not a democracy.

Also, it is not a "repeat of old patterns" but continuation of things that have never been solved.

Comment by salviati 22 hours ago

> the US is not a democracy.

Since when? You probably think that it has been a democracy at some point. And I'm sure the US did use torture at the time you deemed it a democracy.

Hence I don't get your point.

Comment by DyslexicAtheist 22 hours ago

I never claimed it was a democracy, either today or in the past. I actually said the opposite.

Comment by cr125rider 21 hours ago

Is this a “technically it’s a presidential republic” sort of thing?

Comment by SAI_Peregrinus 18 hours ago

All republics are democracies. Not all democracies are republics. Some people seem to get confused about this and think that "democracy" means "direct democracy" only, and not any of the various sorts of indirect democracy.

Comment by phantasmish 18 hours ago

To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is something poli sci departments break their freshmen of every single year.

The colloquial, broad sense of “democracy” is also how political scientists employ the term in most contexts. That is: the people who study this for a living are entirely OK with that usage. If they didn’t use that sense of the word they’d need another one to mean the same thing, because it’s very useful.

Comment by DyslexicAtheist 17 hours ago

> To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is ...

it's not a democracy, when a large part of the population is barred from voting, and / or if your idea of a vote is giving power to legal persons more than to natural persons during the voting process.

but fine, let me rephrase, the US is not more a democracy than China, North Korea, Russia, or any other clown state that says "wE aRe dEmoCraCy". Having large swathes of your mostly illiterate and poverty-stricken population so badly brainwashed that they fly their flag in their personal LinkedIn Profile, or pride themselves as "patriots" with a red cap, does not make the country "democratic".

To put it even more bluntly: the way the US sees its population in Appalachia is how the rest of the world views the US.

On the upside it all makes great entertainment (see Sacha Baron Cohen's "Who is America" which first and foremost is a documentary and only secondly is Satire).

Comment by HuariHuari1 12 hours ago

I'll do you one better, it's always been a bureaucracy, but even moreso following the end of the 1960s, after the beginning of the "meritocracy" myth within academia. In reality, the incoming well educated migrants (usually European) in the mid 1950s were extremely nepotistic to their own groups, such as the Irish entering Wall street, and hiring only other Irish stockbrokers, or Italian small business owners in New York. They essentially replaced or married the old money and became a noveau riche that's still in the American status quo to this day. There is a new clique of sorts acting as a nepotistic noveau riche, mostly stemming from South or East Asia. Nepotism affects everyone and everywhere, but it's especially prevalent in the United States.

Also the great entertainment has been declining in quality, and it was always funded directly by the U.S. Government and Military to support their ideologies and agendas abroad. The Koreans are recently doing this to great success, and possibly China as well.

Comment by verzali 18 hours ago

Even the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?

Comment by salviati 22 hours ago

I see. I thought you meant "under Trump the US is not a democracy". Which I think is a pretty common opinion. But now I understand you meant "the US has never been a democracy".

Comment by tehwebguy 22 hours ago

ICE flavored Nuremberg when this is over.

Comment by belorn 21 hours ago

What is going to change, and after what event? United States use of torture has been well known, documented and made into multiple movies and TV for the last decades. Multiple different governments have not only shown zero interest to charge people over it, but they have also given the green light to continue it. No president nor any candidate has shown even the slightest interest, nor has there been any grassroots movement that gone out on the street to demand accountability.

Comment by IAmBroom 18 hours ago

That would require Axis-flavored tribunals over the US. And that isn't going to happen.

Comment by sentrysapper 16 hours ago

I've been calling them the N2 trials. The evidence this administration willingly shares makes one shudder to think what they are not sharing.

Comment by tastyface 15 hours ago

A thought that haunts me: a few hundred Venezuelan migrants were released from CECOT, but are there any deportees still stuck in there that we simply don’t know about? People without loved ones or a paper trail serving a hellish life sentence for a misdemeanor? If they exist, will anyone ever be able to get them out?

Comment by 17 hours ago

Comment by josefritzishere 17 hours ago

These people are not enemy combatants, or spies, or even foreign nationals. Uusually thery are immigrants in the process of getting citizenship. There is no argument for torturing these people. This is just psychotic cruelty.

Comment by HardwareLust 21 hours ago

Why is this flagged?

Comment by op00to 19 hours ago

Likely because it is not related to startups, technology, and so on. Probably not the best fit for HN.

Comment by Traubenfuchs 22 hours ago

>45% of voters would vote for Trump again, today.

Comment by 4gotunameagain 22 hours ago

What does the orange-utan has to do with this ?

The free rein of the CIA and associated atrocities have been the same under every US president.

Comment by acdha 22 hours ago

No, it hasn’t. The CIA didn’t do this under Clinton because it’s a war crime, and Cold War Republicans prided themselves on saying we were better than e.g. the Viet Cong. The Bush cadre broke the U.S. law written just a few years before by their own party[1] by adopting techniques American forces were trained could be used against them if they were captured, not things which were previously sanctioned.

Obama’s greatest moral failing was not having war crimes trials. There is a direct line between the Bush-era embrace of torture abroad and the mistreatment we’re now seeing domestically.

1. War Crimes Act of 1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Crimes_Act_of_1996

Comment by noja 22 hours ago

Which other president directed the rounding up of Americans and non-Americans to put them in a camp?

Comment by linschn 22 hours ago

- Roosevelt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

- van buren https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Cass

- Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans

- Bush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

And i must forget a lot of others, but I think you get the gist. "Great again" indeed.

Comment by drcongo 21 hours ago

Out of curiosity, do you know if these events get taught in history lessons in American schools? I'm by no means throwing shade here - I'm a Brit and our history lessons barely mentioned the unending list of atrocities Britain committed in the name of empire.

Comment by phantasmish 18 hours ago

A bit, but it varies some by state and most skip at least some things (do any cover labor struggles in the early 20th century?)

Ours stopped after (an extremely cursory coverage of) the ‘50s and ‘60 civil rights movement because there was no way to cover Vietnam and Nixon and such basically at all without greatly upsetting Republican parents. Anything newer than ~30 years (at the time) was treated as about as handsome-off as religion. Dunno if that’s changed.

Comment by salawat 19 hours ago

Yepper. Trail of Tears, German/Japanese internment are all primary education topics. Now interestingly, I don't think Bush has made it into the history books yet, but I don't have kids, so can't verify current day education materials.

What I find interesting is the bits we leave out. Like we touch on the Banana Republics, but the annex of Hawaii and how that was skulduggerously done is completely skimmed over.

Comment by IAmBroom 17 hours ago

> German/Japanese internment are all primary education topics.

There wasn't any German internment. White people got a pass.

Comment by dragonwriter 12 hours ago

> There wasn't any German internment

There was, in fact, but the proportion of German (and Italian, also) nationals and citizens of German (and Italian) descent interned was far lower compared to the population of such foreign nationals and citizens than was the case for Japanese nationals and citizens of Japanese descent.

> White people got a pass.

Relatively speaking, yes, but there still were internments, including of US citizens based on German and Italian descent. (But with more individualized review before internment or eviction from coastal areas than was true of citizens of Japanese descent.)

Comment by TrnsltLife 12 hours ago

Remind me what the German equivalent of Japan's attack Pearl Harbor was on US soil.

Comment by josefritzishere 17 hours ago

TDLR: Very little.

Comment by Traubenfuchs 18 hours ago

> What does the orange-utan has to do with this ?

Alligator Alcatraz is a Trump original.

> The free rein of the CIA and associated atrocities have been the same under every US president.

You are absolutely right, but not always is this kind of stuff that directly supported by the president.

Comment by 0xedd 22 hours ago

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Comment by churchill 22 hours ago

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Comment by conartist6 22 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by tux3 22 hours ago

They are humans. Humans can commit atrocities. Don't let anger bring you down into that mindset.

Comment by happytoexplain 21 hours ago

The longer we go with a non-functional justice system, the less feasible it is to stay calm about crimes (this cuts in all directions).

Comment by conartist6 22 hours ago

They clearly think of anyone they don't like as not human. I am only indulging in their crime. They do what evil people would do.

Comment by salviati 22 hours ago

Thinking that the word is divided into evil and non evil people is not very useful.

Comment by nirui 21 hours ago

The world has to modes: In one mode, we need people, as much as we can get, to make something bigger out of this world. In another mode, the world can no longer grow, so we divide, we conquer "the others" or be conquered.

The definition of the word "evil" changes depends on which mode we are in.

That's why Niccolò Machiavelli suggested that it is useful to be both loved and feared, it gives you the best chance when a challenge is facing you.

Comment by conartist6 22 hours ago

No, that's true, and I don't actually think that the world is divided into good and evil. Nor do I think anyone doing this really has anything to fear from the justice system.

But to the degree you can take a normal person and twist them into something horribly unfit for civil society, having them do torture is the way. It's the express lane to not seeing others as human, not even when they're in front of you, being tortured by you.

Comment by SirFatty 22 hours ago

Dividing things into useful/not useful isn't very useful.

Comment by Spooky23 22 hours ago

Don’t build them up. They are not monsters, just men. They are criminals who must be held accountable in the future.

Comment by Lapel2742 22 hours ago

> The people doing this should tried and executed

That won't happen. Lynndie England served 3 years and roams freely in the USA. The death penalty is wrong anyway.

> They aren't humans anymore

Congratulations. That is what the Nazis said about the Jews.

Human rights are indivisible. This is a cornerstone of western civilization.

Comment by fzeroracer 22 hours ago

The death penalty is wrong, but I think there's a point where when you have politicians wielding massive amounts of power being willfully capricious that the crime is on a wholly different scale. They should be held to a higher standard and I think that higher standard can and should include harsher penalties in cases of crimes against humanity.

The argument that human rights are indivisible is contradicted by your statement right after as western civilization turns inwards on itself and begins removing human rights.

Comment by conartist6 22 hours ago

Neither torture nor genocide is recognized anywhere as a human right. After WWII we held trials.

Comment by Lapel2742 22 hours ago

>Neither torture nor genocide is recognized anywhere as a human right. After WWII we held trials.

What do you want to tell me? Of course torture is not a human right. That doesn't change a bit that human rights apply to everyone. Even to the torturer. Sure, we should put him/her in prison for a long time but never does even the torturer loose his/her humanity. That is exactly what distinguishes us from the nazis/fascists.

Comment by conartist6 22 hours ago

Distinguishes us how? If you cannot lose your humanity through torture, can you lose it through mass murder? Or is humanity something you cannot ever take away from anyone? If so, the worst of the nazis still had it. Yet I do know that it can be taken away precisely because you can torture another person until they aren't themselves anymore. That is, in fact, the goal of torture.

Believing that the world is not divided into good and evil people also requires me to believe that people of the US have the same capacity for both good and evil as did the people of nazi Germany

Comment by Lapel2742 19 hours ago

> If so, the worst of the nazis still had it.

Yes, they do. This is what "indivisible" in this context means. Of course they should be imprisoned but they are still humans with their human rights.

I know that this is hard for some to understand but retribution has it's limits. It is counter productive anyway. Just look at the USA. It's at the top of countries when it comes to the incarceration rate. Even Chinas incarceration rate is only ~1/5th compared to the USA. Norway is at a rate of ~1/10 of that of the USA. The American way clearly does not work. They put an unbelievable number of people in prisons where human rights are not guaranteed and yet they would still be much, much safer elsewhere. Their prísons grow criminals instead of citizens.

If you say: Nazis do not have human rights than where do you stop? Child molesters like Donald Trump? If human rights are relative and open to interpretation, there are no human rights.

Comment by DyslexicAtheist 22 hours ago

if you say it out who you mean they'll call you a terrorist and lock you up, regardless if you're right. this is why this can't be solved peacefully or via "voting the right people". You essentially have a gulag that is somehow endorsed by all those who are voting either democrat or republican today. And to fix it would mean the current system is being taken down. But this remains unthinkable for most of the deeply propagandized general (US) public.

Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC 22 hours ago

This is how people lose credibility.

The articles wants to make you think the box is a 3d confinement reminiscent of the drawing.

From the description it sounds like it is a 4 square foot cage that the person stands in while cuffed.

Yes it’s bad.

No, it’s not like the box mentioned at the CIA Black site.

Comment by TSiege 22 hours ago

Just because they are not literally identical does mean they are unrelated. The author points this out and it sounds horrific.

> The four men interviewed by Amnesty International, as well as Florida-based organizations, told the organization about the ‘box’, described as a 2x2 foot cage-like structure located outside in the yard of “Alligator Alcatraz” where individuals are sent for punishment. Individuals are put in the ‘box’, their hands are shackled and their feet are attached to restraints on the ground. They are unable to sit down or move positions, and are forced to remain there for hours in the heat with hardly any water or protection from the sun, heat and insects. According to a man seeking safety, “People ended up in the ‘box’ just for asking the guards for anything. I saw a guy who was put in it for an entire day.”

> A "2x2 cage-like structure… [an] extremely small space that prevents sitting, lying or changing position" has dimensions startlingly reminiscent of those the Senate documented in the black sites. The major difference is that in Florida, the Small Box is exposed to the elements and constructed as a barred cage, whereas in Catseye, it was a closed structure inside the larger closed structure of the black site. And in Florida, the box is used as punishment. According to one of the Alligator Alcatraz survivors in the Amnesty report, people were put into the box simply for alerting the guards to someone's need for medication. "They were taken to 'the box' and punished for trying to help me," the person told Amnesty

Comment by op00to 22 hours ago

You get in the box and tell me it’s not torture. I’ll wait.

Comment by trymas 19 hours ago

Draw 2x2ft square on the ground and see how could you stand there, sit down, sleep, stretch your legs/arms. Imagine doing that for 24h.

I haven’t drawn this, but I think taller adult would always be touching at least two walls unless standing diagonally.

Comment by fzeroracer 22 hours ago

I think if you ever get to the point where you're argument hinges on 'well actually it's torture but it's not THAT BAD of torture' you should really step back and analyze if your post is really worth making or not.