Of course, this trail of shame leads right to the Republican party, Scooter Libby and Darth Cheney's office. We all know that the Rethugs never do anything unless it's profitable, including torture. "Homeland Security" has provided an economic boon to every half-baked sadistic mercenary, spy camera manufacturer, "non-lethal" weaponry company and any other security laden business or enterprise. It's a sadists dream. Why should torture be any different ?

The tactics being employed now by the CIA have been utilized for years. To the FBI's credit, information gleemed through legal means during LEGAL interrogations during the first WTC attack was extremely beneficial. CIA harsh techniques have led to multiple wild goose chases.

So if it doesn't work, why persist in torture ? Outside of the obvious, that Bush needs all the coerced confessions he can get his hands on in order to keep up his fallicy of a "Global War on Terror", torture is a very, very profitable business.

Please read on and learn that these very same "harsh" techniques have been used on American children for decades under the guise of "tough love". Please be warned, that these are young children in the following excerpts, all of it truly appalling.

For background info please note that "The Seed" was the precursor of our modern day "teen boot camps". "Straight Incorporated" picked up where "Seed" left off.

http://www.nospank.net/...

But The Seed had two powerful backers: Mel Sembler, who would go on to chair campaign finances for the Republican party in the 2000 presidential election and who, even back then, was a major campaign donor, and another Republican financier, Joseph Zappala.

Sembler and Zappala were smart enough to recognize that The Seed itself was no longer saleable. But, believing that it helped fight drugs and that any means necessary were OK so long as it did that, they simply copied the Seed, took a bunch of its staff (who were untrained former participants and parents who often didn't even have a high school degree) and opened a new program. It was called Straight Incorporated.

Sound familiar ? The ends justifies the means. Unfortunately, it never does.

Straight was a perfect product of the drug war--and a perfect vehicle to advance its aims. When Nancy Reagan came under fire for fussing around with White House China and spending money on designer dresses, Mel Sembler came to the rescue. He suggested that the First Lady make fighting teen drug use her cause--and he suggested a visit to Straight to inspire her.

She had no idea that many of the kids hadn't even taken the drugs they'd discussed--let alone been involved in the degrading stories they'd told. As in The Seed, if you didn't have a good enough story to tell, you'd never regain your freedom. Straight, in fact, would become notorious for holding adults against their will, even kidnapping them when they tried to flee. It would spend several million dollars settling civil suits related to such actions.

"War on Drugs" ? "War on Terror" ? Hmmmmmmmm..........

In the Seed, the kids had to wave their arms to get called on--at Straight, this process, which was known as "motivating" began to look like the teens were attempting to fly out of their seats. It was so violent that broken wrists, arms and noses occasionally resulted from it when participants, accidentally or otherwise, banged into their neighbors.

Straight also put kids on peanut-butter-only diets for weeks, kept them awake with no sleep whatsoever for days, forced them to spank each other and made them maintain various stress positions or exercise to the point of exhaustion. It constantly humiliated participants, famously gagging some with Kotex, calling girls "sluts" and boys "fags" and making those who had been sexually abused take responsibility for their "part" in seducing the pedophiles who had molested them.

Starting to get the picture ?

Straight also extensively used isolation and restraint. And Straight's restraint "procedure" was nothing like the medical euphemism suggests: what it involved was a teen being thrown violently to the floor by fellow participants and then sat upon by multiple people, sometimes someone would even restrict the victim's breathing by holding the mouth and nose closed. This, too, often lead to serious injuries--many of which went untreated so the program could avoid arousing suspicion from medical personnel. If someone did have to go the doctor, a Straight guard would accompany him or her to make sure the program wasn't blamed for the injury.

In addition, Straight was notorious for restricting access to the bathroom so severely that kids would often soil and wet themselves in its groups. People in restraint, of course, were not allowed bathroom breaks.

Geez, where have I heard of this before ?

In a series of interesting ironies, Mel Sembler currently heads the defense fund for Scooter Libby. Libby, of course, was the vice president's chief of staff and the vice president's office was critically involved in the development of the torture policy for treatment of terrorist suspects. So, in essence, the guy who popularized stress positions, food deprivation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and complete isolation for teenagers is defending the guy who wants to use such stuff on adult terror suspects.

But, where's the profit ?

Tuition would cost almost $40,000 annually.
 In Mexico, police video showed kids tied in outdoor dog cages. WWASP currently claims to be making hundreds of millions of dollars and holds 1000-2000 teenagers.

"through fear and tough treatment do not work...and there is some evidence that they may make the problem worse rather than simply not working...Such evidence as there is offers no reason to believe that group detention centers, boot camps, and other "get tough" programs do anything more than provide an opportunity for delinquent youth to amplify negative effects on each other."

You mean we already know these techniques don't work !

The most recent death, that of fourteen-year-old Martin Lee Anderson in a boot camp run by the Florida sheriff's department, exemplifies this exactly. Anderson had been made to run laps and do push-ups and other strenuous exercises, just minutes after he entered the program. On his last lap, he collapsed, complaining of shortness of breath.

This was interpreted as defiance, although, as a fellow participant put it, why would someone complete all but the last few feet of the last lap if he was non-compliant? But because of the ideology of these programs, any refusal to do anything is deliberate and must be punished. So Anderson was given what they called "hammer strikes" (punches), was kicked, and had "pressure points" applied to his head. These "pain compliance" techniques had been banned for all other juvenile programs in the state.

In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that the law does not allow the state to use force on children or mental patients--even on death row convicts before execution-- unless they are a threat to themselves or others.

So for an hour, Anderson was kicked and punched and a videotape of the incident shows absolutely no resistance from the boy. A nurse stands by, watching, once checking him with her stethoscope then allowing the beating to continue. When the nine guards and "drill instructors" believe the boy to be faking unconsciousness, they shove ammonia in face until they finally recognize that he isn't faking and take him to the hospital. By then, as it was for sixteen year old Aaron Bacon who died slowly and painfully over two weeks of an easily treatable ulcer that perforated, as it was for fourteen-year-old Gina Score who died of heat exhaustion following similar forced exercise, as it was for 60-pound 12-year-old Mikey Wiltsie who died when a 300 pound counselor sat on him to restrain him and didn't believe he couldn't breathe, by then it was too late.

The American soil Abu Ghraib ?

The reason the nurse just stood there, the reason the adults didn't believe the kids, the reason so many kids have died and been left with post-traumatic stress disorder is the basic ideology of tough love itself. The idea that hurting people helps them is pernicious. If hurting people helps them, then a nurse won't intervene in a beating--by intervening, she'd be harming! If hurting people helps them, complaints should be ignored, because if they are believed, stopping the pain interferes with "treatment!" If hurting people helps them, sadism is charitable and empathy is cruelty.

How easily this can corrupt us all.

http://www.nospank.net/...

"Another staff ripped my feet out from underneath me so I fell with all my weight right onto my chin. I immediately started gushing blood everywhere, but that didn't stop them. They still continued restraining me.

Among their complaints: poor living conditions, including no running water; beatings by staff; and being forced to lie in silence, face-down on the floor in a guarded room for hours at a time -- over a period of several months. There are also several claims -- besides Shannon's -- that kids tried to kill themselves while there. Indeed, according to numerous media reports, a seventeen-year-old Alabama girl, Valerie Ann Heron, bolted from a room at the compound in August 2001 and jumped off a 35-foot-high balcony to her death.

Choy was required to sit on a wooden platform in the cold for five hours as punishment for failing to finish a five-mile run. That's five hours of shivering and without bathroom breaks. Finally, in reckless desperation, he gave his keepers just the signal they were waiting for. They were poised for action. Two staff mambers restrained him in what District Attorney Jorgenson described as something like a full Nelson. They held him for about ten minutes, after which time they noticed he wasn't breathing.

Antwone, had been mistreated at the school, where he was shocked 79 times over 1 1/2 years.

"If I can't make a kid puke or piss in his pants on his first day, I'm not doing my job."     A youth trainer at a juvenile facility

A custodian gets background checked in a public school yet, a sadistic thug like this is allowed to work with troubled children ? I think every member of congress and the executive should be placed in these "camps" for a few weeks. Don't you ?

It is owned and operated by the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, a 19-year old organization that holds about 2,400 children and youth ranging from seven to 18 in facilities in the United States, Jamaica and Mexico.

Chris Goodwin of San Francisco said his son was forced to stay outside in his underpants for three nights at the Mexico facility, lying on his stomach with his chin on the ground. If he moved to try to brush off fire ants that roamed over him, he was threatened with a cattle prod, said Goodwin.

In OP, children lie on their faces on a tile floor in a special room for 50 minutes an hour until they have fulfilled their allocated punishment and expressed remorse. By 2003, the restraining room record for one student was 18 months.

In 2005, 23-year-old Layne Brown told a Missouri newspaper that during a nine-month stint at TB beginning in 1997, staff members made him defecate and urinate in a black garbage bag tied around his waist like a diaper, reported the Miami New Times on 22, June, 2006. They also, he says, dragged him across a cement floor face-down, scrubbed his genitals with a hard-bristle toilet brush and pepper-sprayed him.

Researchers say the coercion methods WWASP employs on both students and parents are based on Maoist re-education techniques used on American GIs in the Korean War. These became popular in 1970s North America in the form of large group awareness training.

Often, subjects play along in order to feign progress as an exit strategy.

The nine workers were accused of having sex with six girls who were 13 to 15 years old at the time.

IN MEMORIAM

Michelle Sutton, dead at age 15, Summit Quest
Kristen Chase, dead at age 16, Challenger
Paul Choy, dead at age 16, Rite of Passage
Aaron Bacon, dead at age 16, Northstar
Dawnne Takeuchi, dead at age 18, VisionQuest
Lorenzo Johnson, dead at age 17, Arizona Boys Ranch
Carlos Ruiz, dead at age 13, VisionQuest
Mario Cano, dead at age 16, VisionQuest
John Vincent Garrison, dead at age 18, VisionQuest
Bernard Reefer, dead, VisionQuest
Robert Zimmerman, dead, VisionQuest
Charles Lucas, dead, VisionQuest
James Lamb, dead, VisionQuest
Tammy Edmiston, dead, VisionQuest
Leon Anger, dead, VisionQuest
Latasha Bush, dead at 15, Daystar Residential Treatment Center
Charles Collins, Jr., dead at age 15, Crossroads for Youth
Jamie Young, dead at age 13, Ramsey Canyon
Randy Steele, dead at age 9, Laurel Ridge Psychiatric Hospital
John Avila, dead, Rocky Mountain Academy
Danny Lewis, dead at age 16, VisionQuest
Nicholas Contreras, dead at age 16, Arizona Boys Ranch
Edith Campos, dead at age 15, Desert Hills
Matt Toppi, dead at age 17, Robert Land Academy
Chirs Brown, dead at age 16, Robert Land Academy
Eric David Schibley, dead at age 17, VisionQuest
Robert Doyle Erwin, dead at age 15, VisionQuest
Lyle Foodroy, dead, VisionQuest
Gina Score, dead at age 14, State Training School (South Dakota)
Bryan Dale Alexander, dead at age 18, Texas Correctional Services
Michael Wiltsie, dead at age 12, Eckert Youth Alternatives
Tristan Sovern, dead at age 16, Charter Behavioral Health System
Robert Rollins, dead at age 12, Devereaux School
Andrew McClain, dead at age 11, Elmcrest Psychiatric Hospital
Anthony Haynes, dead at age 14, American Buffalo Soldiers Boot Camp
Ian August, dead at age 14, Skyline Journey
Charles "Chase" Moody, dead at age 17, The Brown School (CEDU affiliated)
Roberto Reyes, dead at age 15, Thayer Learning Center Boot Camp
Travis Parker, dead at age13, Appalachian Wilderness Camp
Christening "Mikie" Garcia, dead at age12, Star Ranch
Linda Harris, dead at age 14, Chad Youth Enhancement Center
Martin Lee Anderson, dead at age 14, Bay County Sheriff's boot camp, Florida
James White, dead at age17, SummitQuest,
Giovanni ''Joey'' Aletriz, dead at age16, SummitQuest

...and counting.

Call your representatives.