Is New Mormon Bishop A Former CIA Torturer?

As a newly appointed ecclesiastical leader in Spokane, Washington, Bruce Jessen would have the opportunity to baptize new converts. He would also be expected to interview them regularly to evaluate their understanding of the church’s teachings and their fidelity to its precepts. Given Jessen’s background, the possibility exists that he might use the baptismal font as a theater for "enhanced interrogation" of those who give him unsatisfactory answers. 

Before becoming a Mormon Bishop – a position from which he may already have resigned – Bruce Jessen was a torturer in the employ of the CIA. Beginning in December 2001, he helped reverse-engineer the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training in order to develop torture protocols used to "break" and "exploit" detainees. 

Beginning in 2002, Jessen – working with a fellow military psychologist named James Mitchell – trained interrogators in the use of those techniques. Jessen also supervised, and performed, the torture ritual called "waterboarding," a form of controlled suffocation through simulated drowning that was treated as a capital war crime when used by Japanese interrogators against U.S. and allied POWs during World War II. 

The approach devised and taught by Jessen was "based on coercive methods used by the Chinese Communist dictatorship to elicit false confessions from U.S. POWs during the Korean War," explains a 2009 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The objective was not to obtain sound intelligence, but rather to destroy the detainee’s will. 

This is very useful to interrogators ordered to provide "intelligence" that will ratify the desires of the ruling elite. One splendid example of this was the torture-wrought "confession" offered by Ib al-Shaykh al-Libi, who claimed to have information linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. Al-Libi (who later died of "suicide" in a Libyan jail during that brief period when Khadafy was an "ally") actually knew nothing of the sort, but was understandably eager to give his interrogators what they sought in exchange for an end to the torture.

Ethiopian-born British citizen Binyam Mohamed, who was abducted by U.S. officials and imprisoned at a CIA "black site" in Morocco, was also ministered to by interrogators instructed in Jessen’s doctrine, led by a sadist called "Marwan." After being freed following several years in the bowels of the American-run torture archipelago, Mohamed described how Jessen’s disciples broke him:

"`Strip him,’ shouted Marwan. They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor’s scalpel. I was naked. I tried to put on a brave face. But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they’d electrocute me, maybe castrate me. They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut, maybe an inch. At first I just screamed…. I was just shocked…. Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn’t want to scream because I knew it was coming."

Marwan, angered by the resolution displayed by the captive, ordered the fiend with the scalpel to "go ahead with the plan."

"One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts," Mohamed recounts. "He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming."

This procedure was carried out dozens of times. One of Mohamed’s captors taunted him, suggesting that he should be emasculated since "I would only breed terrorists."

The "scalpel treatment" was inflicted on Mohamed on a monthly basis, reports Stephen Grey in his book Ghost Plane. "It was carefully controlled, so the wounds would not be too deep and would not leave permanent marks. In the end, [Mohamed] told his guards: `I will sign anything, confess to anything.’"

To use Jessen’s terminology, Binyam Mohamed had been successfully "exploited." For months his interrogators had demanded information about an American citizen named Jose Padilla, someone whom Mohamed had never met and whose name he had never heard. After months of being hung by his wrists, beaten with a leather strap, and having his skin flayed by experts, Mohamed finally provided the CIA’s surrogates with the "evidence" the Bush administration demanded. 

Padilla, a former gang-banger with no operational connections to al-Qaeda, was labeled an "unlawful enemy combatant" – the first U.S. citizen thus designated – and confined to a military brig without legal recourse for roughly four years. During that time, Padilla received the full Jessen Treatment – sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, death threats, prolonged isolation in a medieval-quality cell.

 As noted in a lawsuit filed on Padilla’s behalf, the purpose of this regimen was "to destroy Mr. Padilla's ordinary emotional and cognitive functioning in order to extract from him potentially self-incriminating information."

Despite the Bush administration’s insistence – buttressed by the "testimony" extorted from Mohamed – that Padilla was involved in a "dirty bomb" plot, he was never charged with that offense. In a Soviet-grade federal trial, Padilla was eventually convicted of conspiring to "support" terrorism abroad. The key evidence in that trial consisted of transcripts of innocuous conversations in which government "experts" claimed to find "coded language" regarding terrorist activities. 

After Mohamed had signed a document implicating Padilla, he was sent to Guantanamo. During his flight on a CIA-chartered rendition plane, he was attended by an operative he described as "a white female with glasses." When she removed Mohamed’s shirt, the CIA officer was horrified to see that most of his upper body was covered with scars carved out by the agency’s scalpel-wielding subcontractors.

"When she saw the injuries I had, she gasped," Mohamed later recalled. "She said, my God, look at that. Then all her mates looked at what she was pointing at, and I could see the shock and horror on their faces."

The chief opposition to the torture program devised by Jessen and Mitchell came from their former colleagues in the military – including some who had been involved with them in teaching SERE courses in the 1980s. They were understandably concerned that the practice of torture would inspire retaliation against captured U.S. servicemen and incite future acts of terrorism against the U.S. With institutional support for their program collapsing, and public revulsion on the rise, Jessen and Mitchell requested from the CIA – and received – an "indemnity promise" guaranteeing them at least $5 million to pay any legal fees arising from criminal prosecution or a civil lawsuit.

They needn’t have worried. None of the U.S. officials responsible for institutionalizing torture has ever been prosecuted or punished in any way. That treatment is reserved for critics of the torture program. This includes former CIA counter-terrorism operative John Kiriakou, who recently entered a guilty plea on a single charge of revealing the identity of an intelligence operative. 

His supposed offense – for which he was originally charged under the 1917 Espionage Act, which provides for the death penalty – was to speak critically of the torture program and identify one of the officials involved in it.

Kiriakou, who is one of six officials being prosecuted by the Obama administration for "leaking" information about the government’s crimes, accepted a plea bargain because he has five children. That fact, to use Jessen’s terminology, made him "exploitable." Accordingly, while the architect of the torture program was given an opportunity to hold forth from a pulpit, a whistleblower will spend at least two and a half years in prison.

America's Brutal Prison System

This programme shows that abuses like those documented in Abu Ghraib are commonplace in the USA’s overcrowded and understaffed prisons. Prisoners are shackled and hooded for their own protection; pepper spray is used as an alternative to physical force, but in sufficient quantities to cause second-degree burns; beatings are frequent and sometimes fatal. The programme suggests that the cause is not a few bad apples, but a pervasive culture of dehumanization and brutality.

Keep Torture Alive With US Military Around The World

Judge Napolitano What If?

Water Boarding Is Torture Video

"I want to find out if it's torture," Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture.

With a Chicago Fire Department paramedic on hand, Mancow was placed on a 7-foot long table, his legs were elevated, and his feet were tied up.

Turns out the stunt wasn't so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke,"Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture." "I wanted to prove it wasn't torture," Mancow said. "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face...I got voted to do this but I really thought 'I'm going to laugh this off.'

" Last year, Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens endured the same experiment -- and came to a similar conclusion. The conservative writer said he found the treatment terrifying, and was haunted by it for months afterward. "Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture," Hitchens concluded in the article.

These right wingers actually believe the crap they say. Why would the US prosecute the Japanese back in WWII over their use of it on our people? Why would it take Bush and Cheney to get the OLC to write bogus memos to get around the legalities of torture? I'm against torture, but I can't do anything about stupidity. He couldn't last ten seconds. I say, bring it on and if you're stupid enough to declare that waterboarding is not torture, go for it. I just hope you don't have a heart attack.

Amnesity International Wants George Bush Arrested

'Amnesty International called on Canadian authorities Wednesday to arrest and prosecute George W. Bush, saying the former U.S. president authorized “torture” when he directed the U.S.-led war on terror.

Bush is expected to attend an economic summit in Surrey in Canada’s westernmost British Columbia province on October 20. The London-based group charged that Bush has legal responsibility for a series of human rights violations in a memorandum submitted last month to Canada’s attorney general but only now released to the media. “Canada is required by its international obligations to arrest and prosecute former president Bush given his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture,” Amnesty’s Susan Lee said in a statement.

“As the U.S. authorities have, so far, failed to bring former president Bush to justice, the international community must step in. A failure by Canada to take action during his visit would violate the UN Convention Against Torture and demonstrate contempt for fundamental human rights,” Lee said.'

Innocent German Tortured 5 Years By Americans

An innocent European, who was sold to U.S. military by a citizen spy, spent nearly five years in Guantanamo Bay prison without charges exposes the brutality of torture. With the DHS anti-terror apparatus now turned inward, do American citizens face the same treatment?

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Martin Luther King Jr. wisely proclaimed “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turkish citizen, describes in the video below his chilling story of torture under United States custody.

Kurnaz was rounded up in Pakistan at the height of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 when locals sold him to the U.S. military for $3000, the bounty paid to citizen spies for “terror suspects.” With the Department of Homeland Security ramping up its own citizen spy program, can we expect the same treatment in America?

Working for a peaceful NGO, Kurnaz was detained on his way to return home to Germany. Over the next five years he was repeatedly tortured by the United States with no charges ever filed. According to Amnesty USA, “his 2006 release was prompted by a personal plea by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to President George W. Bush even though official documents show that U.S. and German authorities had determined in 2002 that he was innocent.”

Murat’s story echoes that of other released Guantanamo detainees, and verifies that events that took place in Abu Ghraib were definitely not an isolated case. How many more cases of criminal torture must Americans hear before they demand an end to these actions done in their name? If this was done to even one innocent person, like Murat, it is a catastrophe to justice, freedom, and basic moral conscience. These are war crimes by every definition.

When American officials excoriate other nations for being brutal regimes, it rings more hollow than ever after listening to Murat’s testimony. America is becoming history’s most evil empire by engaging in such wicked brutality. This is the shameful reputation that Americans must now wear when they travel abroad. No longer is America a shining example of liberty and morality. The U.S. government is increasingly a criminal organization, and its citizens in their apathy seem like willing accomplices.

Americans and Brits, with their endless distractions, may not realize it, but this stunningly evil injustice machine is coming home to roost. You see, Murat was turned in by a citizen spy for financial compensation. America is now acting on similar anonymous tips to corral potential dissidents; and the U.K already pays its citizens to monitor CCTV for crimes.

Kashmir's Mass Graves

'Once known for its extraordinary beauty, the valley of Kashmir now hosts the biggest, bloodiest and also the most obscure military occupation in the world. With more than 80,000 people dead in an anti-India insurgency backed by Pakistan, the killings fields of Kashmir dwarf those of Palestine and Tibet.

In addition to the everyday regime of arbitrary arrests, curfews, raids, and checkpoints enforced by nearly 700,000 Indian soldiers, the valley’s 4 million Muslims are exposed to extra-judicial execution, rape and torture, with such barbaric variations as live electric wires inserted into penises.'

Why then does the immense human suffering of Kashmir occupy such an imperceptible place in our moral imagination? After all, the Kashmiris demanding release from the degradations of military rule couldn’t be louder and clearer. India has contained the insurgency provoked in 1989 by its rigged elections and massacres of protestors. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators that fill the streets of Kashmir’s cities today are overwhelmingly young, many in their teens, and armed with nothing more lethal than stones.

Yet the Indian state seems determined to strangle their voices as it did of the old one.
Already this summer, soldiers have shot dead more than 50 protestors, most of them teenagers.

Over 2700 unmarked graves have been identified by the 11-member police team of the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) in four districts of north Kashmir. Despite claims of the local police that the graves contained dead bodies of "unidentified militants", the report points out that 574 bodies have been identified as disappeared locals - 17 of these have already been exhumed and shifted to family or village grave sites.

#Rumsfeld Faces Torture Charges, IN US, From US Contractors

NOTE: Perhaps as a bit of karma, Rumsfeld will be forced to eat Aspartame during any "enhanced interrogation techniques"