Israel's Barbaric Solitary Confinement

Stephen Lendman

An earlier article explained its harmful effects, accessed through this link.

Social psychologist Hans Toch coined the term "isolation panic" to describe symptoms he observed in men he interviewed, including panic, rage, a sense of total loss of control, emotional breakdown, regressive behavior, and self-mutiliation. He distinguished between difficult but tolerable incarceration and intolerable long-term isolation, how America and Israel treat thousands, subjecting them to barbaric torture. If sustained long enough, it destroys the human spirit, psyche, mind and body.

Over time, it causes:

severe anxiety;
panic attacks;
lethargy;
insomnia;
nightmares;
dizziness;
irrational anger, at time uncontrollable;
confusion;
social withdrawal;
memory and appetite loss;
delusions and hallucinations;
mutilations;
profound despair and hopelessness;
suicidal thoughts;
paranoia; and
for many, a totally dysfunctional state and inability ever to live normally outside of confinement.


Obama’s reign of terror in Afghanistan

James Cogan
WSWS

[An Afghanistan man tries to identify the bodies of civilian victims killed when US NATO troops opened fire on a civilian bus at a local hospital in Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, April 12, 2010. The US NATO troops opened fire on the civilian bus early Monday in a southern Afghan city, killing four people and wounding 18, the local governor's spokesman said. Photo: AP/Allauddin Khan (The We!)]

2010 was the bloodiest year of the now nine-year conflict in Afghanistan and the tribal border regions of Pakistan. Under the command of General David Petraeus, a massively expanded US and NATO force is waging a campaign of extermination against various ethnic Pashtun and Taliban-linked insurgent movements that have not accepted the foreign invasion of their country.

Still justified with threadbare rhetoric about fighting terrorism, the occupation is in fact a neo-colonial and criminal enterprise. Its motive is to crush resistance and transform Afghanistan into a US client state in the oil and gas-rich Central Asian region. It is part of a geo-political struggle for dominance over territory and lucrative resources, both in Afghanistan itself and in surrounding states, against US rivals such as China, Russia and Iran.

Obama had made the so-called “Af-Pak War” a cornerstone of his administration’s foreign policy. Since he took office in January 2009, American troop numbers in Afghanistan have been doubled to close to 100,000. Thousands of additional troops have also been sent by various NATO states, pushing the overall US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to more than 150,000. By contrast, the Soviet force that occupied the country in the 1980s never exceeded 110,000.

The escalation of the war led to unprecedented violence and brutality in 2010. Thousands of US marines were sent into major offensives against Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan. In areas of Kandahar province, entire villages were razed to the ground, ostensibly to remove insurgent booby-traps. Kandahar itself, a city of 500,000, was turned into a maze of concrete blast walls and checkpoints. Residents are subjected to constant intimidation, searches and biometric eye scans.

Supplementing the offensives, there was a major intensification in US air strikes. In October, over 1,000 missions were flown, compared with 640 the year before. Every several days, ISAF is issuing a new press release hailing the slaughter from the air of another group of alleged insurgents.

Special forces death squads, tasked with assassinating or detaining alleged insurgents, have increased their operations by 600 percent under Obama. The US military claimed that between mid-September and mid-December alone, such squads carried out 1,785 raids, killed or captured 880 “insurgent leaders”, killed a further 384 rank-and-file fighters and captured another 2,361 alleged insurgents.


Electromagnetic Frequency Mind Control Weapons

Stephen Lendman

Directed energy weapons include lasers, high power microwave, and millimeter wave ones among others. A relevant December 2007 Department of Defense (DOD) report called them a "transformational game changer in military operations, able to augment and improve operational capabilities in many areas," for both lethal and non-lethal purposes.

Access the full text through this link.

Among other applications, EMF weapons/devices are used for harassment, surveillance and mind control. Agencies like the Pentagon, CIA and NSA use them to monitor people, manipulate their minds, harm, and at times kill them. The Navy Times called them the "most feared and controversial weapon(s) of (the) modern age."

Human experiments in America go back decades, an earlier article addressed MK-ULTRA (and others), accessed through this link.

Begun in 1953, it was the code name for a secret CIA mind control program to perfect a truth drug. It followed earlier WW II hypnosis, primitive drugs research, and the US Navy's Project Chatter, identifying and testing drugs on both animal and human subjects. These and other experiments aimed to control human behavior through psychedelic and halluncinogenic drugs, electroshock, radiation, graphology, paramilitary techniques, and various psychological/sociological/anthropological methods, among others.

They comprised a vast open-field of mind experimentation, using anything that might work, legal or not on willing and unwitting subjects. For example, Dr. Ross Adey worked on the CIA's Pandora Project, using microwaves to send signals to human brains. Cataloguing the results, he showed how they affected emotional and pathological states. He also learned that human brains could be controlled remotely through extremely low frequency modulated microwave beams, able to cause psychological and physical harm.


Networks of Empire and Realignments of World Power

James Petras
The James Petras Website

Imperial states build networks which link economic, military and political activities into a coherent mutually reinforcing system. This task is largely performed by the various institutions of the imperial state.

Thus imperial action is not always directly economic, as military action in one country or region is necessary to open or protect economic zones. Nor are all military actions decided by economic interests if the leading sector of the imperial state is decidedly militarist.

Moreover, the sequence of imperial action may vary according to the particular conditions necessary for empire building. Thus state aid may buy collaborators; military intervention may secure client regimes followed later by private investors. In other circumstances, the entry of private corporations may precede state intervention.

In either private or state economic and/or military led penetration, in furtherance of empire-building, the strategic purpose is to exploit the special economic and geopolitical features of the targeted country to create empire-centered networks. In the post Euro-centric colonial world, the privileged position of the US in its empire-centered policies, treaties, trade and military agreements is disguised and justified by an ideological gloss, which varies with time and circumstances. In the war to break-up Yugoslavia and establish client regimes, as in Kosovo, imperial ideology utilized humanitarian rhetoric. In the genocidal wars in the Middle East, anti-terrorism and anti-Islamic ideology is central. Against China, democratic and human rights rhetoric predominates. In Latin America, receding imperial power relies on democratic and anti-authoritarian rhetoric aimed at the democratically elected Chavez government.

The effectiveness of imperial ideology is in direct relation to the capacity of empire to promote viable and dynamic development alternatives to their targeted countries. By that criteria imperial ideology has had little persuasive power among target populations. The Islamic phobic and anti-terrorist rhetoric has made no impact on the people of the Middle East and alienated the Islamic world. Latin America’s lucrative trade relations with the Chavist government and the decline of the US economy has undermined Washington’s ideological campaign to isolate Venezuela.The US human rights campaign against China has been totally ignored throughout the EU, Africa, Latin America, Oceana and by the 500 biggest US MNC (and even by the US Treasury busy selling treasury bonds to China to finance the ballooning US budget deficit).

The weakening influence of imperial propaganda and the declining economic leverage of Washington, means that the US imperial networks built over the past half century are being eroded or at least subject to centrifugal forces. Former fully integrated networks in Asia are now merely military bases as the economies secure greater autonomy and orient toward China and beyond. In other words the imperial networks are now being transformed into limited operations’ outposts, rather than centers for imperial economic plunder.


Running Cover for Israel -The US Congress's Pet Pariah

Franklin Lamb

This week marks the second anniversary of among the most savage criminal slaughters of human life in long memory. The 522 hour indiscriminate carnage, "Cast Lead" that killed 1,417 Palestinians, mostly civilians, 352 of them children, injuring for life more than 5,300 , indicts Israel as well as those countries that continue to supply it weapons, diplomatic cover and to enforce Israel’s illegal siege on sealed Gaza.

The US administration, as revealed in a State Department cable posted by Wikileaks, has been working overtime with Israel to parry further The U.S.condemnation of Israeli crimes documented in the Richard Goldstone and Richard Falk Reports, among others. These investigations established massive violations of human rights and international law, war crimes, and possible crimes against humanity while refuting claims by Israel that it acted according to the limited international right of self-defense. Goldstone, Falk and others have demonstrated that it was both the victims of Cast Lead and the Mavi Marmara who alone possessed the right of self defense in light of Israel’s agressions, not Israel.

As Professor Falk instructs us, Israeli actions in both cases:

"Are certainly acts of aggression under the UN Charter, and an act of war by reference to customary international law. Whenever force is used in situations other than in situation where a proper claim of self-defense is made, the undertaking is unlawful, and if as here, it is an instance of flagrant non-defensive force, the attacker is engaged in criminal conduct and both the offending state and the perpetrators acting on behalf of the should be held responsible, and to the extent international crimes took place, held accountable."

Rather than hold Israel to the "single universal human rights standard that applies to every country", as Hilary Clinton crowed on Human Rights Day during an appearance before the Brookings Institution, the Obama administration claims others have 'rushed to judgment’ and it has refused to condemn Israel’s May 31, 2010 murder of an American citizen on the Mavi Marmara humanitarian aid boat, 19 year old Furkan Dogan.


Health topic page on womens health Womens health our team of physicians Womens health breast cancer lumps heart disease Womens health information covers breast Cancer heart pregnancy womens cosmetic concerns Sexual health and mature women related conditions Facts on womens health female anatomy Womens general health and wellness The female reproductive system female hormones Diseases more common in women The mature woman post menopause Womens health dedicated to the best healthcare
buy viagra online