The Ambassadors

Why all the pretend horror at US secret prisons and government-sponsored human trafficking? Lets face it, this is nothing new - it's not as though this kind of thing isn't happening to children in the USA every day, and you don't hear too many bleeding-heart wusssy liberals complaining. Why, it's character building! You might even grow up to be a US ambassador, or a one-star general, or Halliburton operative...

From Dissident Voice, via Jesus' General:

“You wouldn’t believe the terrible things that were done to me,” says Alexia Parks’ niece in An American Gulag. [1] But she continues: “I know now it was for my own good.” Thus ends Parks’ account of her struggle to help her niece after she was enrolled in several behavior modification schools. The similarity to the end of 1984 is striking: a previously headstrong individual returns from months of torture as merely a shell of their former self, having learned to love their tormentors. The difference is that Parks’ story is true.

Usual definitions of torture include the use of practices such as solitary confinement, non-medical application of psychiatric drugs, unprovoked beatings, starvation, and verbal abuse as means to change a person’s behavior. Many Americans are reluctant to support the use of these techniques even on criminals, much less teenagers with behavioral problems. Unfortunately, this is exactly what is being done on a large-scale basis as “tough-love” programs have become a booming industry. These programs come in several varieties, including boot camps, “therapeutic” boarding schools or academies, and wilderness programs. At the cost of several thousand dollars per month (up to $40,000/year), these schools supposedly provide a climate where troubled teens can continue their regular education while receiving treatments designed to improve their behavior.

In the philosophy of these schools, reform involves two goals: to break kids down through strict discipline and routine, then to build them back up through self-examination and therapy of various sorts. Usually, only the former is accomplished. So successful is the breaking down process that former inmates of these institutions often suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, even years after being freed. Ex-students call themselves, with good cause, “survivors”.

The Victims

A reasonable estimate is that at any given time, several thousand American teenagers are enrolled in such a program. Sometimes these teens are incorrigible delinquents, who commit petty crimes, do drugs, and make life miserable for their parents. Parents send them to “tough love” programs out of worry that the kid is jail-bound. But just as often, parents enroll their kids in these programs because of more banal worries -- that their kid has had premarital sex, experimented with alcohol and pot, or merely because the teen is defiant and talks back. One of the common factors is that teens sent to these programs seem to suffer disproportionately from ADD, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse problems.

I posted earlier about the US ambassador to Azerbaijan's recall for being involved in human trafficking. Interestingly enough, he's not the only Bush appointed ambasaasdor with a record in abusing human rights:

Ambassador de Sade By John Gorenfeld, AlterNet. Posted November 8, 2005.

Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy -- despite his past as the founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic.

Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts, we've done worse than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian. Unlike the FEMA chief, who had real responsibilities, Sembler sometimes found himself a fifth wheel around his own embassy. As the Washington Monthly has reported, the scandal that claimed Scooter Libby's job last month may have sprung from secret Rome meetings between neocons, an Iran-Contra figure and an Italian intelligence boss who later pushed phony WMD documents -- all behind Sembler's back.

Mel Sembler, former US Ambassador to Italy.

But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993. Just one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now a travel agent in Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams show this year about overcoming beatings, rape by a counselor, forced hunger, and the confinement to a janitor's closet in "humble pants" -- which contained weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood. During this "timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat blood at her overseers. "I refused to let them take my mind," she says of the program. The abuse took years to overcome.

Read Whole Story

These are the people Bush chose for his government. There was no dissembling, they were clearly crooks and liars. Like Negroponte and his death-squad background, these people's records were clear as day for anyone who cared to look. The American public just couldn't be bothered, and nor could the media just like they can't be bothered now. Someone's child is being raped while I'm eating my cereal? Feh. Pass the sugar, what's on Fox?

Just why are they so bloody squeamish? Why are so many Americans loth to even discuss torture, acting as though it's just an embarassing social slip-up , not what it actually is, the basic negation of the humanity of anyone other than yourself?

Damn Americans, this is your country, these are your people, you put them there to do the things they're doing, you take them away. If you don't, you deserve everything you've got coming.

The Greek public greeted Condi Rice today with rocks and teargas. When will you start doing the same?

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Posted 4:43 PM by Republic of Palau

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