IN POST-MUBARAK EGYPT, WATERBOARDING IS BABY STUFF

PYRAMIDION

By Dr. Ashraf Ezzat

October 6, 2011

“There was much more to this unique Tahrir square phenomenon than just bread and butter, there were popular demands to restore a lost dignity.”

 The Egyptian Revolution and the epic story of Tahrir square

There are a few academic definitions of “Revolution”… but they all come down to one sentence

“Dramatic change in a relatively short period of time”

It could take some time to change the political system of a country; it could take some time to draft a new constitution, elect a new parliament, even a new president … but it will definitely take so many years to get rid of the culture of fear when you have been living for so long in a police state.

It is understandable that criminals usually need rehabilitation, but what is not conceivable is when you find a situation where police officers need to be rehabilitated and retrained to properly serve and protect the people according to a code of ethics that is universally agreed upon.

Torture, was the only department the regimes of the Arab dictators excelled at. 

When the clueless Mr. Bush launched his stupid crusade, better known as the war on terror, he used to send abducted suspects of the so called al-Qaeda over to Morocco, Egypt and Jordan for innovative techniques of questioning that made waterboarding looked benign.

The Egyptians revolted not against Mubarak per se, rather they protested against living in a police state that acted, not according to the order of law, but under the emergency law, where every suspect is guilty until proven otherwise. 

And in the meantime he is most likely to be humiliated like never before in his life and stripped of his dignity and pride. And if he was to get out of his imprisonment again, he will likely to walk out as a human wreck.

Of course there were social and economic grievances behind the Egyptian revolution, but there was much more to this unique Tahrir square phenomenon than just bread and butter; there were popular demands to restore a lost dignity.

The honeymoon between the Egyptian military and the protesters did not last long

The honeymoon between the Egyptian military and the protesters did not last long. Tahrir Square, which had been the scene of jubilant celebrations, soon turned into a battlefield, as the army moved to violently disperse activists, beating them with clubs and electric rods – even firing live ammunition ~ leading to many casualties.

Hundreds were dragged away to trucks and thrown in prison. Between January 28 and August 29, almost 12,000 civilians were tried in military tribunals, far more than Mubarak managed in 30 years of dictatorship. Torture by police and military personnel remains widespread with hundreds of cases involving beatings, electrocution, and sexual assault reported.

A video was released lately revealing army and police officers torturing citizens in Kurdi police station in the governorate of Dakahlia (lying north east of Cairo)

 .

The video showed three half naked citizens bound and blindfolded and the officers stepping on them with their shoes. The video then shows an officer form the Special Forces electrocuted the citizens behind on their ears with taser guns, making them scream while they were being interrogated.

The video showed some familiar officers who appeared during the Egyptian January 25 Revolution, from the army, police and the Special Forces.

It is worth mentioning that the two suspects, being tortured in the video, were caught red handed robbing and looting … but I don’t think this fact could make this whole mockery of human rights and legal procedures less reprehensible.  

The Egyptian police/military forces might as well have saved themselves the trouble and bombarded the two men at the crime scene by some drone attacks, as Obama did with this Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

But then again, the Awlaki case is no comparison to this Egyptian police misconduct, I mean the suspects were at least brought in for questioning. We have to give the Egyptian police credit for that

POLICE SEEK PORTABLE PAIN WEAPON

Try to convince me that people who even THINK of “cornea resistant” torture are human? Sorry, you lose every syllable of your argument. They aren’t; they are right up there with the demons of vaccination and big pharma genocide. And they are readying these weapons for use in America.

October 1, 2009

DARK GOVERNMENT

PORTABLE MICROWAVE PAIN INDUCING WEAPON

THE Pentagon’s efforts to develop a beam weapon that can deter an adversary by causing a burning sensation on their skin has taken a step forward with the development of a small, potentially hand-held, version. 

The beam can cover a person’s entire body, causing agonizing pain as it heats water and fat molecules beneath the skin’s surface.

The beam can hit someone up to a third of a mile away, and they are only relieved of the pain when they move out of the way.

The weapon causes immense pain to subjects but no lasting physical damage and was pulled from use against the Taliban in Afghanistan but US army chiefs have stayed silent about the reason for the U-turn.

The weapon, which is claimed to cause no permanent harm, could also end up being used by police to control civilians.

The idea of the weapon is to “create a heating sensation that repels individual adversaries”, according to the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) in Quantico, Virginia, which develops less-lethal weapons for the US military and coastguard.

Tests with a rifle-mounted infrared laser, carried out at a US air force lab near Dayton, Ohio, have determined a combination of laser pulse power and wavelength that causes an alarming, hot sensation on the skin, but which stops short of causing a burn, says JNLWD project engineer Wesley Burgei.

“We have established the minimum irradiance to cause a sensation and have characterized where thermal injury begins,” he says. “But the exact operating irradiance which balances a useful military effect with a conservative margin of safety has not been nailed down yet.”

That’s something that will have to be done before the weapon is deployed, as too powerful a laser beam could permanently blind someone if fired at their eyes. Weapons that do this are banned under the UN Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons.

Burgei says it is possible to create a beam that will affect the skin without damaging the cornea, and do so at a wavelength that does not penetrate to the retina “and would therefore be retina safe”.

Pentagon researchers say they can create a beam that will affect skin without damaging the cornea

The JNLWD says that tests at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s human effectiveness lab have established that the skin heating effect causes no permanent damage ~ suggesting it may have “military utility”. The tests also highlighted areas in need of improvement before troops can use it, says lab manager Semih Kumru ~ though what those features are has not been revealed.

The proposed system is rifle mounted, with a sight above it and a visible low-power laser beam that the soldier uses to aim the invisible infrared laser. The solid-state laser system is battery-powered, and could become hand-held “in the near future”, Burgei says.

The weapon, which has been evolving since 2005, is officially known at the Pentagon as the Thermal Laser System.

The US National Institute of Justice, which is also funding the weapon’s development in the hope that it may prove useful for the police, refers to it as the IR-Lesslethal device.

The Pentagon already has a large crowd control weapon called the Active Denial System that can heat whole groups of people, causing them to flee. It uses a flat-plate antenna mounted on a truck or aircraft to aim a 2-metre-wide microwave beam at the crowd.

Like all supposedly non-lethal weapons that could be used to control civilians, the Pentagon’s new portable weapon is raising concerns.

“I’d like to know why they want another advanced pain compliance weapon like this,” says Steve Wright, non-lethal weapons analyst at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. 

“Persuading by pain rather than brain ~ through conversation ~ has led to push-button torture in the past. If it leaves no mark on the skin how will anyone prove it’s been abused?”

ZIONIST VISIONS OF 1984

 
 Brother Nathanael nails it again.
  

UNSAFE NEW YORK

By Becky Akers

September 26, 2011

Recently by Becky Akers: Can the NYPD-CIA Borg save us From the FBI’s 'Terrorists'?

New York City was under siege this week. Decent folk cowered at home while two-bit thugs stalked our streets, guarding the self-important sociopaths invading Manhattan. 

Yep, the United Nations’ General Assembly met as always at this time of year, plotting to grab more power over the world and the NYPD milked that for all the overtime it could get.

Were you to stroll around the skyscrapers in midtown, you’d assume you’re in occupied territory. Cops ~ phalanxes of them ~ clog every intersection, and movable, metal barricades fence off whole streets, confining New York’s disarmed populace to sidewalks as though we pose some sort of threat. 

Recall that many of the dictators bloviating at the UN have hundreds or thousands of rapes and murders, a war or two, torture and often even genocide to their credit, not to mention the usual plunder and theft. Yet Our Rulers fret about protecting them from us.

And so cops bar traffic, both foot and vehicular, from whatever streets the sociopaths’ motorcades will curse. Because, yes, even the tinhorn tyrant from Dirtpooristan, where the annual per-capita income is $1.31, cruises town with his entourage lolling in limousines, plural. 

If you don’t live in densely populated Manhattan, you may not appreciate the havoc cops wreak when they close streets. New York’s traffic is the stuff of nightmares for good reason: street-space is as scarce as innovative bureaucrats. There are far more cars than inches of paved road, so taking even one artery out of commission snarls traffic for miles. 

Ditto for pedestrians. Manhattan is a walker’s paradise; you can live your entire life here and never own wheels because everything you need ~ and much that you don’t ~ lies within a few blocks of home. Even straphangers who ride the subways to work each morning still walk from their apartment to the station and, on the other end, from the terminal to the job. At any hour of the day, and often of the night, you’ll find at least a dozen pedestrians ambling along a single block, and many times that number during rush-hours.

But with the UN’s incursion, cops suddenly declare whole streets "frozen zones." They’ll block the intersection with their cars, forcing other drivers to a halt. Ditto for anyone caught at that moment on the sidewalk: we are forbidden to cross the street. It lies empty and clear until Their Highnesses have rolled past in regal isolation. 

"Frozen zones" can detain folks for 10 minutes or more. It’s bad enough for drivers, but it’s horrific on the sidewalks. Those metal barricades? They act like dams as people pile up. Perhaps you don’t want to cross the street: maybe you just want to head around the corner for a cup of coffee. You probably won’t be able to squeeze through the crush ~ and forget about backtracking: pedestrians are bunched by the scores behind you.

Meanwhile, the moments tick by as you’re once again late to the office or that appointment with your biggest client, or fetching your toddler from day-care. You might think both the cops and the sociopaths would want employees to reach work on time: after all, it’s our taxes that keep these leeches living high. 

But no. However pressing your business, you can jolly well wait until Dear Leader’s limos have glided by on their way to yet another soiree or more pontification on "peacekeeping."

Ah, yes: blue helmets, uniforms, guns and slaughtering anyone who disagrees. That’s a heck of a way to keep peace. I vote we call these hired killers who impose their commanders’ will on helpless civilians what we do other such scum: "soldiers." 

And how many casualties have these mercenaries racked up as they "peace-enforce[e]"? We’ll never know by asking the one-world government that pretends to care so very much about us all.

Prepare for a shock: though the UN maintains meticulous records of its troops’ deaths, "covering the period 1948 through 31 August 2011" and broken out just about any way imaginable ("Fatalities by year… by nationality and mission … by mission and appointment type … mission and incident type … mission, year and incident type ... year and appointment type …," etc, ad nauseam), it neither mentions nor seems at all concerned for the folks its "peace-enforcers" murder. 

Not a word or acknowledgement anywhere of the corpses littering the UN’s wake; indeed, we might be forgiven for thinking the "peacekeepers" only die and never kill. A tad callous, wouldn’t you say?

Even supposedly independent organizations concentrate solely on the "mortality rates" of the UN’s troops. Again, "peacekeeping’s" victims merit no consideration or even a passing reference.

And there’s an infuriating, heart-wrenching multitude of victims. For example, in July 2010, "a complaint was filed with the Dutch prosecutor's office … alleging that three Dutch soldiers, operating as UN peacekeepers, were complicit in the commission of war crimes and genocide during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre … which resulted in the death of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys."

Tragically, it’s unlikely that this or any lawsuit will succeed in punishing the UN’s troops for their crimes. Like all governments, the UN is above the law: "Relatives of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre have previously sought justice for the actions of Dutch peacekeeping forces, which they say led to the massacre. 

In March, the Hague Appeals Court … upheld … the UN's immunity from prosecution by rejecting claims … brought by relatives of victims of the massacre. … The court found that immunity is essential to the UN's ability to carry out its duties and that the Dutch acting as UN peacekeepers could not be held responsible ..." 

Which makes the chirpy insult on the UN’s homepage all the more offensive: "Welcome to the United Nations. It's your world."

Legions of the dead and caged New Yorkers argue otherwise. 

Becky Akers [send her mail] writes primarily about the American Revolution.

IN AMERICA THE RULE OF LAW IS VACATED

 BANK FRAUDSTERS, TORTURERS,

AND WAR CRIMINALS RUNNING FREE...

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research

Posted September 8, 2011

With bank fraudsters, torturers, and war criminals running free, the US Department of Justice (sic) has nothing better to do than to harass the famous Tennessee guitar manufacturer, Gibson http://rt.com/usa/news/gibson-guitar-raid-wood-489/, arrest organic food producers in California http://rt.com/usa/news/food-agents-year-milk/  and send 12 abusive FBI agents armed with assault rifles to bust down yet another wrong door of yet another innocent family, leaving parents, children, and grandmother traumatized.

http://rt.com/usa/news/fbi-family-adams-home/. 

What law did Gibson Guitar Corp break that caused federal agents to disrupt Gibson’s plants in Nashville and Memphis, seize guitars, cause layoffs, and cost the company $3 million from disrupted operations?

No US law was broken. The feds claim that Gibson broke a law that is on the books in India. 

India has not complained about Gibson or asked for the aid of the US government in enforcing its laws against Gibson. Instead, the feds have taken it upon themselves to both interpret and to enforce on US citizens the laws of India.

The feds claim that Gibson’s use of wood from India in its guitars is illegal, because the wood was not finished by Indian workers.

This must not be India’s interpretation of the law as India allowed the unfinished wood to be exported.

Perhaps the feds are trying to force more layoffs of US workers and their replacement by H-1B foreign workers. Gibson can solve its problem by firing its Tennessee work force and hiring Indian citizens on H-1B work visas. 

(ED: According to court documentation, Gibson’s was advised to move its operations to, of all places, MADAGASCAR!  @ 8:00. Not only that but this law carries over to ALL guitars no matter the age and these instruments can and are seized at customs if the musician tries to take it out of the country!)

In Venice, California, feds spent a year dressed up as hippies purchasing raw goat milk and yogurt from Rawesome Foods and then, decked out in hemp anklets and reeking of patchouli, raided with guns drawn ~ always with guns drawn ~ the organic food shop.

The owner’s crime is that he supplied the normal everyday foods that I grew up on to customers who requested them. For this heinous act, James C. Stewart faces a 13 count indictment and is held on $123,000 bail. 

How did raw milk become a “health threat?” Far more Americans have died from e-coli in fast food hamburgers and from salmonella in mass produced eggs and chicken. Like many of my generation, I was raised on raw milk. 

Mathis Dairy delivered it to the homes in Atlanta. Even decades later a person could purchase Mathis Dairy’s raw milk in Atlanta’s grocery stores. How did supplying an ordinary staple become a crime?

The FBI agents who broke down Gary Adams door in Bellevue, Pennsylvania, claim they were looking for a woman. Why does it take 12 heavily armed FBI agents to apprehend a woman? Are FBI agents that effete? If the feds can never get the address right, how do we know they have the name and gender right? 

I can remember when it only took one policeman to deliver a warrant and to arrest a person, and without gun drawn and without breaking down the door, tasering or shooting the object of arrest. 

It turns out that the FBI agents who broke into the Adams home not only were at the wrong address but also didn’t even have a search warrant had they been at the correct address. 

The practice of sending heavily armed teams into American homes has resulted in many senseless murders of US citizens.

The practice must be halted and SWAT teams disbanded.

SWAT teams have murdered far more innocents than they have dangerous criminals. Hostage situations are rare, and they are best handled without violence. 

Jose Guerena, a US Marine who served two tours in Bush’s Iraq War was murdered in his own home in front of his wife and two small children by a crazed SWAT team, again in the wrong place, who shot him 60 times. 

When his wife told him that there were men sneaking around the house, he picked up his rifle and walked to the kitchen to see what was going on and was gunned down. The hysterical SWAT team fired 71 shots at him without cause. Brave, tough, macho cops out defending the public and murdering war heroes.

http://rt.com/usa/news/swat-kills-american-hero/  

I have seen studies that show that police actually commit more acts of violence against the public than do criminals, which raises an interesting question: Are police a greater threat to the public than are criminals? On Yahoo I just searched “police brutality” and up came 4,840,000 results. 

Meanwhile, the real master criminals, such as Dick Cheney, who, if tried for his actions at Nuremberg, would most definitely have been executed as a war criminal, run free. Cheney is all over TV hawking his memoirs. On August 29, interviewed by Jamie Gangel on NBC’s Dateline, Cheney again proudly admitted that he authorized torture, secret prisons, and illegal wiretapping. These are crimes under US and international laws. 

Cheney claims breaking laws against torture is “the right thing to do” if “we had a high-value detainee and that was the only way we can get him to talk.” 

Three questions immediately come to mind that no member of the presstitute media ever asks. The first is, why does Cheney think the office of Vice President, President, or Attorney General has the power to “authorize” breaking a law? Our vaunted “rule of law” disappears if federal officials can authorize breaking laws. 

The second is what high-value detainees is Cheney talking about? Donald Rumsfeld declared the Guantanamo detainees to be “the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” 

 http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43817

 

But the vast majority had to be released when it turned out, after years of their lives were spent in a torture prison, that the vast majority of the detainees were hapless innocents who were sold to the stupid Americans by war lords as “terrorists” for bounties. 

To save face, the US government has held on to a few detainees, but hasn’t enough confidence in their alleged guilt to put them on trial in a court of law. 

The third is why does Cheney think that he knows better than the accumulated documented evidence that torture doesn’t produce truthful or useful information. If the person under torture is actually a terrorist, he knows that his tormentors don’t know the answers that they are looking for and so he or she can tell the torturers whatever serves the tortured victim’s purposes. If the person under torture is innocent, he has no idea what the answers are and seeks to discover what his torturer wants to hear so that he can tell him. 

As Glenn Greenwald makes clear, Dick Cheney, who presided “over policies that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead from wars of aggression, constructed a worldwide torture regime, and spied on Americans without the warrants required by law” is now being feted and enriched thanks to “the protective shield of immunity bestowed upon him by the current administration.” 

 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28970.htm 

 

Meanwhile Gibson Guitar faces prosecution because of the feds’ off-the-wall interpretation of a law in India, and the owner of Rawesome has a 13-count indictment for supplying customers with a food staple that was a part of the normal diet from colonial times until recently. 

In America we have the rule of law ~ only the law is not applied to banksters and members of the executive branch but, as Greenwald says, is only applied to “ordinary citizens and other nations’ (unfriendly) rulers.” 

A country this utterly corrupt

is certainly no “light unto the world.”

Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Paul Craig Roberts

FACIAL RECOGNITION MAY REVEAL MORE THAN YOU THINK

August 3, 2011

Dark Government

Researchers demonstrate ability to predict social security numbers from people’s faces; “When we share tagged photos of ourselves online, it becomes possible for others to link our face to our names in situations where we would normally expect anonymity,” one of the researchers said.

Brothersoft face recognition software sample window // Source: brothersoft.com

It is possible to identify strangers and gain their personal information ~ perhaps even their social security numbers ~ by using face recognition software and social media profiles, according to a new study by Carnegie Mellon University’s Alessandro Acquisti and his research team. The results of the study will be presented 4 August at Black Hat, a security conference in Las Vegas.

“A person’s face is the veritable link between her offline and online identities,” said Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at the Heinz College and a Carnegie Mellon CyLab researcher. “When we share tagged photos of ourselves online, it becomes possible for others to link our face to our names in situations where we would normally expect anonymity.”

A Carnegie Mellon University release reports that Acquisti said his research team, which included CMU postdoctoral fellows Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman, combined three technologies ~ an off-the-shelf face recognizer, cloud computing and publicly available information from social network sites ~ to identify individuals online and offline in the physical world.

Since these technologies are also accessible by end-users, the results foreshadow a future when we all may be recognizable on the street ~ not just by friends or government agencies using sophisticated devices, but by anyone with a smartphone and Internet connection.

The team ran three experiments and developed one mobile phone application.

In one experiment, Acquisti’s team identified individuals on a popular online dating site where members protect their privacy through pseudonyms.

In a second experiment, they identified students walking on campus ~ based on their profile photos on Facebook.

In a third experiment, the research team predicted personal interests and, in some cases, even the Social Security numbers of the students, beginning with only a photo of their faces.

The release notes that Carnegie Mellon researchers also built a smartphone application to demonstrate the ability of making the same sensitive inferences in real-time. In an example of “augmented reality,” the application uses offline and online data to overlay personal and private information over the target’s face on the device’s screen.

“The seamless merging of online and offline data that face recognition and social media make possible raises the issue of what privacy will mean in an augmented reality world,” Acquisti said.

Cloud computing will continue to improve performance times at cheaper prices, and online people-tagging and face recognition software will continue to provide more means of identification.

“Ultimately, all this access is going to force us to reconsider our notions of privacy,” Acquisti said.

“It may also affect how we interact with each other. Through natural evolution, human beings have evolved mechanisms to assign and manage trust in face-to-face interactions. Will we rely on our instincts or on our devices, when mobile phones can predict personal and sensitive information about a person?”

Via:HSNW

Read more: http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/#ixzz1U7BNWqoq