Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz | Hacker News Reader

Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz

forever-wars.com

83 pointsperihelions58 comments

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

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

> strange thing is how some "democracies" do that

the US is not a democracy.

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

> the US is not a democracy.

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

Hence I don't get your point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?

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

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

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

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

Simplistic. These guys are part of a hierarchy.

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

Well no it's meant for targeted murder.

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

Is it coming or not?

Your last quote clearly says it is.

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

Looks like sadism is the strategy in operation.

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

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

ICE flavored Nuremberg when this is over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> German/Japanese internment are all primary education topics.

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

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

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

> There wasn't any German internment

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

> White people got a pass.

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

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

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

TDLR: Very little.

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

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

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

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

Alligator Alcatraz is a Trump original.

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

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

Why is this flagged?

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

This is how people lose credibility.

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

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

Yes it’s bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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