MICHAEL JACKSON ~ AN UNEXPECTED MUSICAL INTERLUDE

It's been stated that Michael Jackson was a serious drug addict. The details that have been related are quite horrific and it sounds like he consumed the contents of entire pharmacies.

OK...but at age 50, the man was healthy enough to be preparing for a series of 50 live shows in a venue that can hold up to 23,000.

Have you ever danced all night? Have you ever danced all night fifty nights in front of thousands of people? Have you ever danced at Michael Jackson's level?

Video of rehearsals shot just before he died indicate that Jackson could still move well. No one who was anything less than a superbly conditioned athlete could have pulled off the series of performances he was about to embark on.

That's not to say that Jackson was not an athlete with a drug problem, but is it possible that the severity of his drug problem might have been exaggerated just a tad? How many serious drug abusers do you know who at the age of 50 could set out on a program like this?

The reasons I ask...

Have you ever seen the prison version of the music video for his song "They don't really care about us"

I confess I never have until recently. The way it portrayed the world it could have been a promo for Alex Jones' Prison Planet web site!

Clearly, before he died, Jackson had made a definite shift from pure entertainment to entertainment with a strong social statement component ~ and his commentary was not flattering to the powers that be.

It must be a great relief to those who don't want the pot stirred that Jackson accidentally, coincidentally, and conveniently died because of his ghastly addiction to drugs right before he was primed to to explode again on the word scene.

Funny how life works out, isn't it?

This is musical power and power in music. Possibly Michael's most significant musical contribution in his career. Sing along with Michael and the prisoners!

They Don't Really Care About Us

Skin head, dead head
Everybody gone bad
Situation, aggravation
Everybody allegation
In the suite, on the news
Everybody dog food
Bang bang, shot dead
Everybody's gone mad

All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us
All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us

Beat me, hate me
You can never break me
Will me, thrill me
You can never kill me
Jew me, sue me
Everybody do me
Kick me, kike me
Don't you black or white me

All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us
All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us

Tell me what has become of my life
I have a wife and two children who love me
I am the victim of police brutality, now
I'm tired of bein' the victim of hate
You're rapin' me of my pride
Oh, for God's sake
I look to heaven to fulfill its prophecy...
Set me free

Skin head, dead head
Everybody gone bad
trepidation, speculation
Everybody allegation
In the suite, on the news
Everybody dog food
black man, black male
Throw your brother in jail

All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us
All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us

Tell me what has become of my rights
Am I invisible because you ignore me?
Your proclamation promised me free liberty, now
I'm tired of bein' the victim of shame
They're throwing me in a class with a bad name
I can't believe this is the land from which I came
You know I do really hate to say it
The government don't wanna see
But if Roosevelt was livin'
He wouldn't let this be, no, no

Skin head, dead head
Everybody gone bad
Situation, speculation
Everybody litigation
Beat me, bash me
You can never trash me
Hit me, kick me
You can never get me

All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us
All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us

Some things in life they just don't wanna see
But if Martin Luther was livin'
He wouldn't let this be

Skin head, dead head
Everybody gone bad
Situation, segregation
Everybody allegation
In the suite, on the news
Everybody dog food
Kick me, strike me
Don't you wrong or right me

All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us
All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us

All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us
All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us

All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us
All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us

Thank you to Natalie of Deviant Art for the beautiful renditions of Michael.

BEYOND DISGUST #15 ~ ORGAN DONATION AND THEFT IN CONTEMPORARY JEWISH FOLKFLOR

By Gilad Atzmon
Aug 30th, 2009
PALESTINIAN MOTHERS

Donation According to Larry David

In his highly acclaimed TV satire ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, LA screen writer and comedian Larry David engages courageously with subjects to do with American Jewish identity. In his fifth season (2005) David tackles the subject of organ donation (1).

Performing an American eccentric and egotistical Jew David is confronted with a serious dilemma. His best friend Richard Lewis (another Jewish comedian) happens to suffer an acute kidney failure. His survival is dependent on an urgent kidney donation and as one may expect Larry David is the perfect donor.

David, who comes across as the ultimate selfish persona in American popular culture is obviously reluctant to donate his Kidney. He procrastinates, finds excuses and plays games. He even tries to make friends with a wealthy Orthodox Jew who is in a position to ‘sort things out’ as far as kidneys are concerned. He does it all just to avoid donating his own kidney to his best and closest friend.

As the plot develops, David has hired a Private Detective to discover who his real parents are, David learns from this private detective that he is actually an adopted child. Once meeting with his genetic parents David also finds out that he is not exactly a Jew. He is actually a proper Christian of Scottish descent. David is very excited about his new ethnic identity and faith.

Instantly, without giving it too much of a thought, he becomes an empathetic person. His egotistic attitude disappears without leaving any traces. He suddenly cares about others. He evolves into a sympathetic boring compassionate ordinary human being. It doesn’t take more than a few scenes before we see David attending Sunday service with his new ‘parents’ in their local Church.

It is there where he learns from the priest that ‘to give’ is actually ‘to receive’. David doesn’t waste a second. He understands it all. He instantly leaves the Church and takes the first plane to LA where he rushes to the Hospital with one thing in his mind; giving his kidney to his best friend Richard Lewis. In the hospital while in his final preparation for the transplant operation the nurse is overwhelmed by David’s devotion kindness and conviction.

Throughout this transition into Christianity, the Larry David that we meet is very different to the selfish Larry David we knew. However, David’s heavenly inspired humanist metamorphosis doesn’t last long. On his way to the theatre, as he is lying on the trolley already under some heavy anesthetic, the private detective is seen rushing towards David along the hospital corridor. “Larry I made a mistake” he shouts, “you are not an adopted child.”

In spite of the anesthetic, the penny drops instantly. David realizes that he is a Jew. His Christian compassionate conviction fades immediately. His reaction is rather simultaneous: he is a Jew after all and Jews do not give their organs to others, not even to their best and closest friends.

David, who is now heavily anesthetized tries to resist, he wants to run away and never to give his kidney but under the influence of heavy narcotics he happens to be too weak. Dragged into the theater he happens to be a victim of his own temporary non-Jewish kindness.

The immediate message posed by Larry David in the above episode is clear. Being a Jew is merely a state of mind. It is neither biological nor genetic. The transformation between (Christian) compassion and (Jewish) narcissism is rather cultural. It is almost a matter of choice.

However, one thing is clear as far as Larry David is concerned: once transforming back into a Jew, ‘giving’ is simply out of the question. The Jew, as far as David is concerned, does not like to share, donate or give.

Harvesting Human Organs

In the last few weeks we have been following some interesting developments to do with Israeli organ theft and Jewish organ trafficking. Back in July Kidney trafficker Levy Izhak Rosenbaum from Brooklyn was arrested in New Jersey. The Federal complaint suggested that he was involved in the illegal sale of kidneys for 10 years(2).

A US Attorney explained: "His business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000." Also in July another group of 30 Israelis were arrested in Romania, this time it was for human Egg trafficking. They were suspected of recruiting Romanian women aged between 18 and 30 and paying them around $300 for their eggs”.

They would then resale the eggs for 40 times that amount to women Earlier this week Alison Weir published a shocking yet comprehensive and detailed review of Israeli human organ trafficking and theft. Weir brings to light some staggering cases of organ theft. She starts with an alleged case of a heart being pulled out of a living person without the consent of the family (2).

She also brings to light continuous reports of organs being robbed from Palestinian’s bodies (3)

The increasing attention to Israeli organ theft was fuelled a week ago by Swedish veteran journalist Donald Bostrom’s publication of an exposé of Israeli alleged organ harvesting in Sweden’s biggest paper Aftonbladet. Palestinians, he says, “harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the country’s organ reserve”

From Venice to Tel Aviv

One may ask why it is that organ trafficking has become a ‘Jewish thing’. How is it that the Jewish state and Jewish people are so involved in such a repugnant and non ethical trade.

One answer is probably obvious: it is a good business and there is hardly any competition, not many people are willing to make a living out of the trafficking or the theft of livers and kidneys. Without being a Marxist, I may try to offer a materialist interpretation of the above.

As it happens, some people out there are willing to pay a lot of money to stay amongst the living. At the same time some others are ready to give their body parts just to put bread on their tables.

Naturally those two distinct groups of people (the selfish wealthiest and the penniless) have very little in common except biological similarity. They never meet and hardly mix. A broker is needed. A merchant that doesn’t belong to any class whatsoever, a person that is not part of the economic chain of production, a person that is ethically detached, a person that is foreign to humanity as well as humanism.

As we learn above the perfect candidates have been found. And they are not alone, their Jewish state is there to facilitate it all. It is there to provide the necessary means in terms of technology and knowledge. The Jewish broker can deal with the rich, he can easily handle the poor, he can do it all as long as there is some money to be made: once a merchant always a merchant whether it is Venice, Tel Aviv, Bucharest, New Jersey or Brooklyn.

But it goes further. As we learn from Larry David’s kidney episode, once rediscovering he is a Jew, his willingness to donate his organ fades into total refusal.

David’s behavior is supported by some devastating statistics. Apparently, Israel is the world's leading procurer of vital organs from other countries, at least for its size. “Just 3.5% of Israelis are registered organ donors.

Israel’s donor rate is one-fifth that of Europe so they acquire vital organs from other cultures. The Israeli government helps by paying up to $80,000 each to those visiting other countries to purchase an organ. Brokers openly advertise their services on Israeli radio stations and in newspapers.” (4)

Kvod Hamet

Judaism may throw some light over the abnormal situation. In principle, Judaic law poses strong objections to any interference with the body after death. Out of respect to the dead (kvod hamet), Judaism requires an immediate burial of the complete body.

However, this humanist and respectful approach applies to Jewish dead only. Things get slightly more complicated because Judaism also encourages organ donation in order to save a ‘Jewish life’ (pikuach nefesh).

The solution of what seems as an opposing dualism is far from being too complicated. While Judaism leads its followers towards reluctance to donate their organs it approves or even encourages the usage of other people’s organs.

Bearing in mind Israel is a prosperous state in terms of medical science, it is just natural that the Jewish state would harbor all those shady practices to do with organ trafficking and theft.

More interestingly, in spite of much of Israel regarding itself as a secular society, when it comes to organ donation it seems as if the Jews prefer to follow God collectively. Larry David’s reluctance to donate his kidney once realizing that he is a Jew by origin is there to emphasize that unique Jewish ‘choose and pick’ attitude towards their religious code.

Secular Jews are becoming orthodox when it is convenient.

Israeli Folklore

Back in the 1980’s Israel’s all time leading cabaret act, namely ‘Ha- Gashash Ha-chiver’ elaborated on the subject of organ donation by means of a satire. In their comedy act, an Ashkenazi transplant master insisted to plant a goose’s liver in an (Jewish) Iraqi boy’s body just to gain some publicity.

The Sephardi father was rather devastated, he was concerned that the donated liver would come from an Ashkenazi person or even a goy. Needless to say he wasn’t too happy with the goose either. As time goes by, it seems as if the Jews as a collective have passed that stage.

As much as some Jews may be very ‘picky’ in regard to what they put in their mouth (kosher diet) or even very concerned with the racial identity of those whom their kids mix with, they seem to be far less concerned with the origin of the organs that are planted in their bodies. They are concerned with one thing, staying amongst the living regardless of any ethical concern.

The current organ theft scandal proves once again that as far as Israel is concerned, loving yourself as much as you hate your neighbor, is the manifestation of contemporary Jewish philosophy.

At the end of the day, it shouldn’t take us by a complete surprise. This is what you would expect from a people who live on other people’s land and eat other people’s grapes and figs.

NOTES:

(1) Season 5 episodes 2,5 and 10 Synopsis can be found here: http://www.tvsquad.com/2005/12/05/curb-your-enthusiasm-the-end/

(2) In December 1968 a man named Avraham Sadegat (the New York Times seems to give his name as A Savgat) died two days after a stroke, even though his family had been told he was “doing well.”

After initially refusing to release his body, the Israeli hospital where he was being treated finally turned the man’s body over to his family. They discovered that his upper body was wrapped in bandages; an odd situation, they felt, for someone who had suffered a stroke.

When they removed the bandages, they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages, and the heart was missing. During this time, the headline-making Israeli heart transplant had occurred.

After their initial shock, the man’s wife and brother began to put the two events together and demanded answers.

The hospital at first denied that Sadegat’s heart had been used in the headline-making transplant, but the family raised a media storm and eventually applied to three cabinet ministers.

Finally, weeks later and after the family had signed a document promising not to sue, the hospital admitted that Sadagat’s heart had been used.

(3) “"There are indications that for one reason or another, organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half. There were just too many reports by credible people for there to be nothing happening.

If someone is shot in the head and comes home in a plastic bag without internal organs, what will people assume?”

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 1990, Page 21,
The Intifada: Autopsies and Executions

http://www.jweekly.com/

http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/08/30/gilad-atzmon-organ-donation-and-theft-in-contemporary-jewish-folklore/

(4) http://www.geocities.com/organdonate/organsellingorgantheft.html

WASHINGTON POST WEIGHS IN ON THE WONDERS OF TORTURE

EXTRA!
Read all about it in the Washington Post:
Torture worked;
Cheney and torture practitioners vindicated;
morale at CIA harmed.

By Ray McGovern,

August 31, 2009

It seems coverage of the Bush administration’s "war on terror" has been put back on track by the editors of the Washington Post and their "sources," who appear determined to highlight the supposed successes of waterboarding and other forms of torture.

In the last few days the Post has markedly increased its effort to "catapult the propaganda" (to borrow a phrase from former president George W. Bush). When the wind is still, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels can be heard cheering from the grave.

Frankly, I was wondering when this return to form would happen at the Post. I was surprised to see Post journalists recently losing their grip, so to speak, and falling into the practice of reporting real facts ~ like the sickening revelations in the long-suppressed CIA inspector general’s report [.pdf] on torture.

Apparently they have now been reminded of the biases of the newspaper’s top brass, forever justifying the hard-nosed "realism" of the Bush administration as it approved brutal and perverse methods for stripping the "bad guys" of their clothes, their dignity, their sense of self ~ all to protect America.

Hooded, threatened with a cocked gun and an electric drill, deprived of sleep for long periods, beaten, kept naked or dressed in dirty diapers, forced into painful stress positions, locked in tiny boxes, and subjected to the near-drowning of waterboarding, the terrorism suspects were supposed to be terrorized into what the CIA psychologists called "learned helplessness."

And to read the Washington Post’s account, it all worked, transforming alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed from a "truculent enemy" into what the CIA considered its "preeminent source" on al-Qaeda.

This I find very interesting since al-Qaeda was originally a CIA creation in Afghanistan to fight the Russians.

The Post made the story of this transformation ~ "How a Detainee Became an Asset: Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding" ~ its lead story Saturday. To drive home the central point, the Post declared that "this reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques."


But the story contained some weird contradictions that might have given pause to a less credulous ~ or less biased ~ newspaper. For example, the Post’s two unnamed sources who told the tale of Mohammed’s transformation depicted him as anything but a broken man suffering from "learned helplessness," terrified of more torture. Instead, Mohammed, known as KSM, is described as holding forth like a professor in a lecture hall, pontificating about Greek philosophy and criticizing his American students for their shortcomings. "In one instance, he scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture," the Post wrote.

So, instead of a cowering figure induced to talk out of fear that he might be subjected to a 184th session of waterboarding, Mohammed appears to be a boastful narcissist who views himself as a historic figure ~ exactly the sort of interrogation subject who would be susceptible to flattery and other successful, nonviolent strategies favored by experienced FBI interrogators.

If the "learned helplessness" had worked ~ and was the reason Mohammed was talking ~ would he really have risked scolding an American interrogator, like an angry teacher chastising an inattentive schoolboy?

However, that is not a question the Post asks or its editors apparently want the readers to think much about. The story is written as if the Post writers Peter Finn, Joby Warrick, and Julie Tate are seeking expiation for their sins of writing fact-and-document-based stories in recent days.

Post writers Peter Finn, Joby Warrick, and Julie Tate, were appallingly light on tortures and ommitted a great deal of material in the following piece CIA INSTRUCTIONS FOR BREAKING THE WILL OF A DETAINEE.


Back to the Steno Pool

The Post management, it seems, is determined to return to its past practice of acting as stenographers for the CIA’s PR machine. On Sunday, the Post had its steno pad out again, taking dictation about how torture investigations were harming CIA morale. The story, titled "Ex-Intelligence Officials Cite Low Spirits at CIA: IG Report’s Release, Looming Investigation Into Detainee Interrogations Blamed" by Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick, filled nearly half of page two.

The CIA is the only agency of the U.S. government that elicits the Post’s hand-wringing concern about its morale and "spirits." It’s as if CIA officers were fragile Southern belles at risk of being overcome by "the vapors" if a harsh word is uttered in the parlor.

It’s hard to recall any similar concern expressed by the Post over poor morale at other government offices, say, the Environmental Protection Agency when president George W. Bush was ignoring evidence of global warming or the Justice Department when attorney general Alberto Gonzales was firing prosecutors for not going after Democrats.

But the delicate "spirits" of the CIA work force are something that the Post never ceases to worry about. So Pincus and Warrick ran to some "ex-CIA officials" to gauge the morale damage that the torture disclosures had caused.

It turns out that many of these "ex-CIA officials," cited in the Post article, are folks with the most to lose if Attorney General Eric Holder starts unraveling the sordid tale of torture, assassination, kidnapping, you name it over which they had purview and in which they were involved.

"Buzzy" presented as a low level official, is in this up to the eyeballs with the likes of Blackwater and other Iraqi criminals.

The Post article was accompanied by a photo of A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who laments that "morale at the agency is down to minus 50." To their credit, I suppose, Pincus and Warrick do note that Krongard was the "third-ranking CIA official at the time of the use of harsh practices," but there is no specific statement that Krongard and other worriers about CIA morale just might have some huge self-interest in discouraging investigations.

Post readers are not alerted, for instance, to Krongard’s history as the official who gave Blackwater, the ex-CIA-official-dominated firm sometimes called Assassination, Inc., its initial contract, nor that he joined Blackwater’s Board of Directors after retiring from the CIA. Nor that with the help of his brother, the State Department’s inspector general, he helped block congressional inquiries into alleged Blackwater illegalities.

Instead, the Post treats Krongard as a reliable source and the Obama administration’s release of torture-related documents as a policy blunder.

"One former senior official said President Obama was warned in December that release of the Justice Department memos sanctioning harsh interrogation methods would create an uproar that could not be contained," the Post reported, quoting the official as saying:

"They [the White House] thought that it would be a two-day story; they were wrong."

"Warning" the president of the United States! Who’s running this country, anyway?

Loving the Inquisition

In Saturday’s front-page story, the Post was even more obvious about which side it was taking on the issue of torture and the efficacy of using brutal methods to extract information.

Warming the cockles of Dick Cheney’s heart, the Washington Post was "confirming" that waterboarding and sleep deprivation worked ~ just as we were told by Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, on May 13 at a hearing on detainee interrogation that included an implicit tip of the hat to all manner of infamous torture past:

"The vice president [Cheney] is suggesting that there was good information obtained, and I’d like the committee to get that information. Let’s have both sides of the story here. I mean, one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work."

Five hundred years takes us proudly back to the Spanish Inquisition when the cardinals at least had no problem calling a spade a spade. Their term for waterboarding was tortura del agua. No euphemism like "enhanced interrogation technique," or EIT, for short.


As for Cheney’s earlier claim that two CIA documents would prove that the EITs were effective ~ the two were released this week, and they prove nothing of the kind. Together with others, they do indicate that detainees like KSM provided important intelligence on al-Qaeda and its plans. But they fail to support the contention that it was the use of harsh techniques (as opposed to traditional interrogation methods) that yielded the information.

The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, who has been covering all this like a blanket, notes that the two documents actually suggest that non-abusive interrogation techniques were primarily responsible for eliciting the most important information cited in the two documents.

In short, Cheney is no closer to proving that “torture works,” than he was before the release of those two documents to which he gave so much fanfare. Indeed, given how the two fizzled out, he is now farther away from making that case, except in the eyes of senior editors at the Washington Post and other outlets of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).

Water and Sleep

For years now, the FCM has largely succeeded in trivializing "water torture." So who’s afraid of a little water? Don’t those Muslims know how to hold their breath, like we do at Rehoboth? And besides, we waterboarded our own troops in training, without adverse effect. Are Americans so dumbed down that they cannot see the difference between a U.S. military training exercise, during which a simple gesture will stop the torture, and the real thing?

WHY DOES THIS ARTICLE, LIKE SO MANY OTHERS STILL GIVE READERS THE IMPRESSION THAT ARABS WERE BEHIND 911? MOSSAD IS AN ARABIAN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION? GOS
I THOUGHT IT WAS ISRAELI!

And how well did torture work on KSM? If one examines the record more carefully, it turns out that the alleged 9/11 mastermind was uncooperative and deceptive during the torture. When U.S. authorities finally let KSM be interviewed by the Red Cross, he said this (which was shoehorned onto page six of the Post, presumably to provide the article some semblance of "balance"):

"During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive.

"I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time."

Ask FBI investigators and others sent on wild goose chases to check out such "information"; in candid moments they will corroborate what KSM has to say on that key point.


Getting What You Want

It boggles the mind what information one can extract by torture. A U.S. Army interrogator with long experience in conducting interrogations and in training others in traditional Army techniques recently told me this:

"Give me no restrictions, and allow me to use non-traditional techniques, and I promise you I can get a detainee to confess to having launched, solo, not one but two successful suicide bombings!"

The FCM’s dismissive attitude toward waterboarding goes in spades for sleep deprivation. One hears things like: We’ve all gone without sleep ~ preparing for exams, for example. We know what it’s like, and it’s no big deal. And, anyway, these are bad guys.

Not so fast. It’s difficult to say that sleep deprivation is worse than waterboarding, but it is just as torturous. Much can be learned from Darius Rejali, a scholar who is one of the world’s leading thinkers and writers on torture and its consequences. The paragraphs that follow are drawn largely from his book, Torture and Democracy.

Israeli terrorist and later prime minister Menachem Begin describing the sleep deprivation inflicted on him when he was a prisoner of the KGB as a young man, observed that anyone subjected to this condition knows that "not even hunger or thirst are comparable to it."

Experts now agree that sleep deprivation is a basic, and potentially dangerous, physiological-need state, similar to hunger or thirst and as basic to survival. Sleep-deprived people are highly suggestible (a condition not unlike drunkenness or hypnosis), making sleep deprivation ideal for inducing false confessions.

Rejali gives a 15th-century Italian lawyer "credit" for introducing this technique into the Inquisition’s tool kit. But Inquisitional interrogators soon became aware of the unreliable character of information acquired through sleep deprivation, and the preferred technique became the rack.

The Gestapo used sleep deprivation among other Verschäfte Vernehmungen ~ sharpened interrogation techniques. Against whom? You guessed it; against Terroristen.

Sleep deprivation also was in the quiver of British interrogators in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and is still included in current Israeli procedures. And after 9/11, the CIA and the military were authorized to take the technique out of mothballs and apply it in interrogations ~ with terrific results, if you believe page one of the Washington Post.

For additional context, it may be worth citing what Rejali says about the experience of using sleep deprivation in the U.S.

"American courts finally barred sleep deprivation for domestic policing during World War II. In 1941 Tennessee police subjected one suspect to sleep deprivation and interrogation for thirty-six hours until he confessed he had killed his wife….

"In 1944, the Supreme Court not only tossed out the confession as unacceptable in any democratic society, but drew a link between sleep deprivation and ‘the practices of certain foreign nations dedicated to … physical or mental torture.’"

Political Correctness


Khalid Sheik Mohammed was captured as the writers of the 9/11 Commission were preparing their report. If we think he was the mastermind behind the attacks, then ask him why he did it, was their understandable request. The answer was quite telling.

Mohammed had attended North Carolina A&T in Greensboro; thus, initial speculation regarding his motive centered on the supposition that he had suffered some gross indignity accounting for his hatred for America. Not so. Rather, as the 9/11 Commission reported on page 147:

"By his own account, KSM’s animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel."

Yesterday’s Washington Post article offers a revisionist view. It seems Mohammed’s initial response was found to be politically incorrect by implicating "U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel." Perhaps after a few more sessions of waterboarding or a few more days of sleep deprivation he came up with a more acceptable explanation of his motivation. Or perhaps the Post has been selective in picking and choosing among the various things that came out of reports from his interrogation.

In any event, without so much as a word as to why his story has changed, the Post now would have us believe that the following is the real reason:

"’KSM’s limited and negative experience in the United States ~ which included a brief jail stay because of unpaid bills ~ almost certainly helped propel him on his path to becoming a terrorist,’ according to the [CIA] intelligence summary. ‘He stated that his contact with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country.’"

A telling revision, indeed.

But let’s also look for a moment at "debauched and racist" on its own merits. Could the hated Khalid Sheik Mohammed be speaking some truth here? If he and other Middle Eastern Muslims looked and dressed more like us, would it be so easy to demonize them ~ and to torture them?

Would the Washington Post’s editors be so supportive if representatives of a more favored ethnic or religious group were stripped naked before members of the opposite sex, put in diapers, immobilized with shackles in stress positions for long periods, denied sleep, and made to soil themselves?

In my view, racism is very much at play here.

And "debauched?" Just read the CIA inspector general report and decide for yourself.

And please: don’t stop with a "Tsk, tsk; those interrogators were certainly debauched." We ` all of us let it happen. We ~ all of us ~ need to ensure that our country does not descend again into such depravity.


The only way to do that is to hold ALL the rotten apples accountable, from the top to the bottom of the proverbial barrel.

This article appeared first at ConsortiumNews.com.
Read more by Ray McGovern

* Closing In on the Torturers ~ August 26th, 2009

WHY THEY HAD TO DEMOLISH IRAQ FROM TOP TO BOTTOM

"The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation.

To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked."

The US War against Iraq

The Destruction of a Civilization

By James Petras

August 21, 2009

"Information Clearing House"

The US seven-year war and occupation of Iraq is driven by several major political forces and informed by a variety of imperial interests. However these interests do not in themselves explain the depth and scope of the sustained, massive and continuing destruction of an entire society and its reduction to a permanent state of war. The range of political forces contributing to the making of the war and the subsequent US occupation include the following (in order of importance):

The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional Jewish supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department.

These committed Zionists 'insiders' were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO).

They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel's agenda, which, in this case, was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime.

If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the 'Liberal' President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several 'client regimes'.

Top Zionist policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their 'expertise' in interrogation techniques, repression of civilian resistance and counter-insurgency.

Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the intra-Iraqi religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The Israeli 'model' of colonial war and occupation ~ the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 ~ and the practice of 'total destruction' using sectarian, ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli military supervision.

The second powerful political force behind the Iraq War were civilian militarists (like Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney) who sought to extend US imperial reach in the Persian Gulf and strengthen its geo-political position by eliminating a strong, secular, nationalist backer of Arab anti-imperialist insurgency in the Middle East.

The civilian militarists sought to extend the American military base encirclement of Russia and secure control over Iraqi oil reserves as a pressure point against China.

The civilian militarists were less moved by Vice President Cheney's past ties with the oil industry and more interested in his role as CEO of Halliburton's giant military base contractor subsidiary Kellogg-Brown and Root, which was consolidating the US Empire through worldwide military base expansion. Major US oil companies, who feared losing out to European and Asian competitors, were already eager to deal with Saddam Hussein, and some of the Bush's supporters in the oil industry had already engaged in illegal trading with the embargoed Iraqi regime. The oil industry was not inclined to promote regional instability with a war.

The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation was designed to establish a long-term colonial military presence in the form of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained contingent of colonial military advisors and combat units.

The brutal colonial occupation of an independent secular state with a strong nationalist history and an advanced infrastructure with a sophisticated military and police apparatus, extensive public services and wide-spread literacy naturally led to the growth of a wide array of militant and armed anti-occupation movements.

In response, US colonial officials, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agencies devised a 'divide and rule' strategy (the so-called 'El Salvador solution' associated with the former 'hot-spot' Ambassador and US Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte) fomenting armed sectarian-based conflicts and promoting inter-religious assassinations to debilitate any effort at a united nationalist anti-imperialist movement.

The dismantling of the secular civilian bureaucracy and military was designed by the Zionists in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel's power in the region and to encourage the rise of militant Islamic groups, which had been repressed by the deposed Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Israel had mastered this strategy earlier: It originally sponsored and financed sectarian Islamic militant groups, like Hamas, as an alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization and set the stage for sectarian fighting among the Palestinians.

The result of US colonial policies were to fund and multiply a wide range of internal conflicts as mullahs, tribal leaders, political gangsters, warlords, expatriates and death squads proliferated. The 'war of all against all' served the interests of the US occupation forces. Iraq became a pool of armed, unemployed young men, from which to recruit a new mercenary army.

The 'civil war' and 'ethnic conflict' provided a pretext for the US and its Iraqi puppets to discharge hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and functionaries from the previous regime (especially if they were from Sunni, mixed or secular families) and to undermine the basis for civilian employment.

Under the cover of generalized 'war against terror', US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads spread terror within Iraqi civil society, targeting anyone suspected of criticizing the puppet government ~ especially among the educated and professional classes, precisely the Iraqis most capable of re-constructing an independent secular republic.

The Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the success of the Iraq war ~ by success they meant the total dismemberment of the country ~ as the first 'domino' in a series of war to 're-colonize' the Middle East ~ in their words: "to re-draw the map")

They disguised their imperial ideology with a thin veneer of rhetoric about 'promoting democracies' in the Middle East ~ excluding, of course, the un-democratic policies of their 'homeland' Israel over its subjugated Palestinians.

Conflating Israeli regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests, the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic Party first backed President Bush and later President Obama in their escalation of the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan. They unanimously supported Israel's savage bombing campaign against Lebanon, the land and air assault and massacre of thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza, the bombing of Syrian facilities and the big push from Israel for a pre-emptive, full-scale military attack against Iran.

The US advocates of sequential and multiple simultaneous wars in the Middle East and South Asia believe that they could only unleash the full strength of their mass destructive power after they had secured total control of their first victim, Iraq. They were confident that Iraqi resistance would collapse rapidly after 13 years of brutal starvation sanctions imposed on the republic by the US and United Nations.

In order to consolidate imperial control, American policy-makers decided to permanently silence all independent Iraqi civilian dissidents. They turned to the financing of Shia clerics and Sunni tribal assassins, and contracting scores of thousands of private mercenaries among the Kurdish Peshmerga warlords to carry out selective assassinations of leaders of civil society movements.

The US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial puppet army composed almost entirely of Shia gunmen, and excluded experienced Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or Christian backgrounds.

A little known result of this build up of American-trained and financed death squads and its puppet 'Iraqi' army, was the virtual destruction of the ancient Iraqi Christian population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, bishops and intellectuals, academics and scientists assassinated or driven into exile.

The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic development of the secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation was no accident.

The result of the US policies were to eliminate most secular democratic anti-imperialist leaders and movements and to present their murderous net-work of 'ethno-religious' collaborators as their uncontested 'partners' in sustaining the long-term US colonial presence in Iraq.

With their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching platform for its strategic pursuit of the other 'dominoes' ~ Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics.

The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion.

This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia region. Washington's policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance.

The 'divide and rule' tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought.

Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation.

To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets.

This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off.

Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.

The Destruction of a Modern Arab Civilization

Independent, secular Iraq had the most advanced scientific-cultural order in the Arab world, despite the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein's police state. There was a system of national health care, universal public education and generous welfare services, combined with unprecedented levels of gender equality. This marked the advanced nature of Iraqi civilization in the late 20th century.

Separation of church and state and strict protection of religious minorities ~ Christians, Assyrians and others ~ contrasts sharply with what has resulted from the US occupation and its destruction of the Iraqi civil and governmental structures.

The harsh dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein thus presided over a highly developed modern civilization in which advanced scientific work went hand in hand with a strong nationalist and anti-imperialist identity. This resulted especially in the Iraqi people and regime's expressions of solidarity for the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli rule and occupation.

A mere 'regime change' could not extirpate this deeply embedded and advanced secular republican culture in Iraq. The US war planners and their Israeli advisers were well aware that colonial occupation would increase Iraqi nationalist consciousness unless the secular nation was destroyed and hence, the imperial imperative to uproot and destroy the carriers of nationalist consciousness by physically eliminating the educated, the talented, the scientific, indeed the most secular elements of Iraqi society.

Retrogression became the principal instrument for the US to impose its colonial puppets, with their primitive, 'pre-national' loyalties, in power in a culturally purged Baghdad stripped of its most sophisticated and nationalistic social strata.

According to the Al-Ahram Studies Center in Cairo, more that 310 Iraqi scientists were eliminated during the first 18 months of the US occupation ~ a figure that the Iraqi education ministry did not dispute.

Another report listed the killings of more than 340 intellectuals and scientists between 2005 and 2007. Bombings of institutes of higher education had pushed enrollment down to 30% of the pre-invasion figures. In one bombing in January 2007, at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University 70 students were killed with hundreds wounded. These figures compelled the UNESCO to warn that Iraq's university system was on the brink of collapse.

The numbers of prominent Iraqi scientists and professionals who have fled the country have approached 20,000. Of the 6,700 Iraqi university professors who fled since 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported than only 150 had returned by October 2008. Despite the US claims of improved security, the situation in 2008 saw numerous assassinations, including the only practicing neurosurgeon in Iraq's second largest city of Basra, whose body was dumped on the city streets.

The raw data on the Iraqi academics, scientists and professionals assassinated by the US and allied occupation forces and the militias and shadowy forces they control is drawn from a list published by the Pakistan Daily News (www.daily.pk) on November 26, 2008. This list makes for very uncomfortable reading into the reality of systematic elimination of intellectuals in Iraq under the meat-grinder of US occupation.

Assassinations

The physical elimination of an individual by assassination is an extreme form of terrorism, which has far-reaching effects rippling throughout the community from which the individual comes ~ in this case the world of Iraqi intellectuals, academics, professionals and creative leaders in the arts and sciences. For each Iraqi intellectual murdered, thousands of educated Iraqis fled the country or abandoned their work for safer, less vulnerable activity.

Baghdad was considered the 'Paris' of the Arab world, in terms of culture and art, science and education. In the 1970's and 80's, its universities were the envy of the Arab world. The US 'shock and awe' campaign that rained down on Baghdad evoked emotions akin to an aerial bombardment of the Louvre, the Sorbonne and the greatest libraries of Europe.

Baghdad University was one of the most prestigious and productive universities in the Arab world. Many of its academics possessed doctoral degrees and engaged in post-doctoral studies abroad at prestigious institutions. It taught and graduated many of the top professionals and scientists in the Middle East.

Even under the deadly grip of the US/UN-imposed economic sanctions that starved Iraq during the 13 years before the March 2003 invasion, thousands of graduate students and young professionals came to Iraq for post-graduate training. Young physicians from throughout the Arab world received advanced medical training in its institutions.

Many of its academics presented scientific papers at major international conferences and published in prestigious journals. Most important, Baghdad University trained and maintained a highly respected scientific secular culture free of sectarian discrimination ~ with academics from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.

This world has been forever shattered: Under US occupation, up to November 2008, eighty-three academics and researchers teaching at Baghdad University had been murdered and several thousand of their colleagues, students and family members were forced to flee.

The Selection of Assassinated Academics by Discipline

The November 2008 article published by the Pakistan Daily News lists the names of a total of 154 top Baghdad-based academics, renowned in their fields, who were murdered. Altogether, a total of 281 well-known intellectuals teaching at the top universities in Iraq fell victim to the 'death squads' under US occupation.

Prior to the US occupation, Baghdad University possessed the premier research and teaching medical faculty in the entire Middle East attracting hundreds of young doctors for advanced training. That program has been devastated during the rise of the US-death squad regime, with few prospects of recovery.

Of those murdered, 25% (21) were the most senior professors and lecturers in the medical faculty of Baghdad University, the highest percentage of any faculty. The second highest percentage of butchered faculty were the professors and researchers from Baghdad University's renowned engineering faculty (12), followed by the top academics in the humanities (10), physical and social sciences (8 senior academics each), education (5). The remaining top academics murdered at Baghdad University spread out among the agronomy, business, physical education, communications and religious studies faculties.

At three other Baghdad universities, 53 senior academics were slaughtered, including 10 in the social sciences, 7 in the faculty of law, 6 each in medicine and the humanities, 9 in the physical sciences and 5 in engineering. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's August 20, 2002 pre-invasion joke, "So one has to assume these scientists have not been playing 'tiddlywinks' (a child's game)" ~ justifying the bloody purge of Iraq's scientists in physics and chemistry. An ominous signal of the academic bloodletting that followed the invasion.

Similar bloody purges of academics occurred in all the provincial universities: 127 senior academics and scientists were assassinated at the various well-regarded universities in Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and elsewhere. The provincial universities with the highest number of murdered senior faculty members were in cities where the US and British military and their Kurdish mercenary allies were most active: Basra (35), Mosul (35), Diyala (15) and Al-Anbar (11).

The Iraqi military and allied death squads carried out most of the killing of academics in the cities under US or 'allied' control. The systematic murder of academics was a nation-wide, cross-disciplinary drive to destroy the cultural and educational foundations of a modern Arab civilization.

The death squads carrying out most of these assassinations were primitive, pre-modern, ethno-religious groups 'set loose' or instrumentalized by US military strategists to wipe out any politically conscious intellectuals and nationalist scientists who might pursue an agenda for re-building a modern, secular society and independent, unified republic.

In its panic to prevent the US invasion, the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate provided a list,which identified over 500 key Iraqi scientists to the UN on December 7, 2002. There is little doubt that this list became a core element in the US military's hit list for eliminating Iraq's scientific elite.

In his notorious pre-invasion speech to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell cited a list of over 3,500 Iraqi scientists and technicians who would have to be 'contained' to prevent their expertise from being used by other countries. The US had even created a 'budget' of hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from the Iraqi 'Oil for Food' money held by the United Nations to set up 'civilian re-education' programs to re-train Iraqi scientists and engineers.

These highly touted programs were never seriously implemented. Cheaper ways of containing what one American policy expert termed Iraq's 'excess scientists, engineers and technicians' in a Carnegie Endowment Paper (RANSAC Policy Update April 2004) became clear. The US had decided to adopt and expand the Israeli Mossad's covert operation of assassinating selected key Iraqi scientists on an industrial scale.

The US 'Surge' and 'Peak Assassination' Campaigns: 2006-2007

The high tide of terror against academics coincides with the renewal of the US military offensive in Baghdad and in the provinces. Of the total number of assassinations of Baghdad-based academics for which a date is recorded ~ 110 known intellectuals slaughtered, almost 80% (87) occurred in 2006 and 2007.

A similar pattern is found in the provinces with 77% of a total of 84 scholars murdered outside of capital during the same period. The pattern is clear: the murder rate of academics grows as the occupying US forces organize a mercenary Iraqi military and police force and provide money for the training and recruitment of rival Shia and Sunni tribesmen and militia as a means of decreasing American casualties and of purging potential dissident critics of the occupation.

The terror campaign against academics intensified in mid-2005 and reached its peak in 2006-2007, leading to the mass flight of tens of thousands of Iraqi scholars, scientists, professionals and their families overseas. Entire university medical school faculties have become refugees in Syria and elsewhere. Those who could not afford to abandon elderly parents or relatives and remained in Iraq have taken extraordinary measures to hide their identities.

Some have chosen to collaborate with the US occupation forces or the puppet regime in the hope of being protected or allowed to immigrate with their families to the US or Europe, although the Europeans, especially the British are disinclined to accept Iraqi scholars.

After 2008, there has been a sharp decline in the murder of academics ~ with only 4 assassinated that year. This reflects the massive flight of Iraqi intellectuals living abroad or in hiding rather than any change of policy on the part of the US and its mercenary puppets.

As a result, Iraq's research facilities have been decimated. The lives of those remaining support staff, including technicians, librarians and students have been devastated with few prospects for future employment.

The US war and occupation of Iraq, as Presidents Bush and Obama have declared, is a 'success' ~ an independent nation of 23 million citizens has been occupied by force, a puppet regime is ensconced, colonial mercenary troops obey American officers and the oil fields have been put up for sale.

All of Iraq's nationalist laws protecting its patrimony, its cultural treasures and national resources, have been annulled. The occupiers have imposed a 'constitution' favoring the US Empire. Israel and its Zionist flunkies in the Administrations of both Bush and Obama celebrate the demise of a modern adversary and the conversion of Iraq into a cultural-political desert.

In line with an alleged agreement made by the US State Department and Pentagon officials to influential collectors from the American Council for Cultural Policy in January 2003, the looted treasures of ancient Mesopotamia have 'found' their way into the collections of the elite in London, New York and elsewhere. The collectors can now anticipate the pillage of Iran.

LET THIS SERVE AS A WARNING TO IRAN

The US invasion, occupation and destruction of a modern, scientific-cultural civilization, such as existed in Iraq, is a prelude of what the people of Iran can expect if and when a US-Israeli military attack occurs.

The imperial threat to the cultural-scientific foundations of the Iranian nation has been totally absent from the narrative among the affluent Iranian student protesters and their US-funded NGO's during their post-election 'Lipstick Revolution' protests.

They should bear in mind that in 2004 educated, sophisticated Iraqis in Baghdad consoled themselves with a fatally misplaced optimism that 'at least we are not like Afghanistan'. The same elite are now in squalid refugee camps in Syria and Jordan and their country more closely resembles Afghanistan than anywhere else in the Middle East.

The chilling promise of President Bush in April 2003 to transform Iraq in the image of'our newly liberated Afghanistan' has been fulfilled. And reports that the US Administration advisers had reviewed the Israeli Mossad policy of selective assassination of Iranian scientists should cause the pro-Western liberal intellectuals of Teheran to seriously ponder the lesson of the murderous campaign that has virtually eliminated Iraqi scientists and academics during 2006-2007.

Conclusion

What do the United States, Britain and Israel gain from establishing a retrograde client regime, based on medieval ethno-clerical socio-political structures in Iraq?

First and foremost, Iraq has become an outpost for empire.

Secondly, it is a weak and backward regime incapable of challenging Israeli economic and military dominance in the region and unwilling to question the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian Arabs from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

Thirdly, the destruction of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent state means increasing reliance on Western and Chinese multinational corporations and their technical infrastructure ~ facilitating imperial economic penetration and exploitation.