Torture – Page 11

“I Am My Child’s Mom”

Published on May 21, 200753 Comments

Or, ‘Raising Hell, The Dr Laura Way”.

It seems Dr Laura Schlessinger, scourge of the morally lax parent, may herself have raised a sociopath. Oh, how I love the smell of hung petards in the morning….

First a little backstory, for non-Usanians like me who may not be that familiar with ‘Dr Laura’, the bizarro-Oprah of talk radio. Dr Laura Schlessinger is a rightwing radio ‘therapist’, wannabe tv star and self-help book author, whose fans absolutely lap up her harsh strictures on sexuality, relationships and child-rearing.

Her show’s syndicated on Clear Channel radio US-wide; Clear Channel, part-owned by Mormon presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital (which has all kinds of interesting connections with some decidedly neofascist types) has a history of manufacturing and broadcasting far-right reactionary radio ‘personalities’.

So far, so usual for the US rightwing media machine and its creatures.- but Dr Laura is special. First off she’s a doctor, of sorts; even though it’s a Phd. in physiology not pychology it authenticates her very subjective advice as somehow quasi-medical and so iher personal emotional hangups’re adopted as sound principles by her rightwing supporters, some of whom are so loyal to her personally that they describe themselves as ‘Dr Laura’s Army’.

Dr Laura fits the Clear Channel mould perfectly; she’s a cruel homophobe and a hypocrite with a shady past (by her own stated standards) who preaches to others what she does not practice herself. She’s a vicious piece of work with it, as I’ve discovered the more I’ve read:

Even more shocking was her treatment of a Connecticut eighth-grader for an award-wining essay on free speech on the Internet. Attacking the girl by name, she maliciously asserted: “If she was my daughter, I’d probably put her up for adoption. . . .When she makes her marriage vows, and her husband has sex with someone else, let’s see if she thinks that this philosophy works. She also suggested that the girl be “sacrificed,” Inca style!

Someone who could treat a child that way should never be allowed near one in a therapeutic or a parental sense, IMHO. Who knows how many children’s lives she’s affected with her self-interested, twisted ideas? Well, one at least has been severely affected according to this report, and having found out what unpleasant child-rearing ideas his mother has it comes as no surprise – in fact it almost seems inevitable.

Dr. Laura son linked to lurid Web page
Site contained violent, sex-oriented images one official called ‘repulsive’
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 05/19/2007 12:15:45 AM MDT

The soldier son of talk radio relationship counselor Laura Schlessinger is under investigation for a graphic personal Web page that one Army official has called “repulsive.”

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

The site is credited to and includes many photographs of Deryk Schlessinger, the 21-year-old son of the talk radio personality known simply as Dr. Laura. Broadcast locally on 570 KNRS, “Family Values Talk Radio,” the former family counselor spends three hours daily taking calls and offering advice on morals, ethics and values. She broadcast a show from Fort Douglas, in Salt Lake City, last week.

[…]

“Yes . . . F—ING Yes!!!” said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. “I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.”

Dr. Laura’s publicity people and the US Army are now trying to suggest that this site was created by mysterious ‘enemies’ engaged in ‘information warfare’. Uh, huh, right, yeah, because Al-Qaeda or the Mahdi army have got nothing better to do than to fuck around creating fake MySpace pages about the batshit crazy sons of psychotic wingnut radio personalities.

After the Salt Lake City Tribune published this report ‘Dr Laura’s Army’ leapt to her defence in the papers’ pages, bombarding it with oddly similar emails, the overall tone of which was ‘don’t blame her for the decisions her child makes’. Bollocks to that, she doesn’t get off that easy – particularly since a major part of her schtick appears to be telling parents that they are indeed responsible for their child’s behaviour. Her catchphrase is even “I am my kid’s mom,”, FFS.

Dr Laura was once asked a very pertinent question a while back about the kind of behaviour her own son is apparently exhibiting , by CNN’s Larry King:

KING: And then how do you explain those where you had parents that drifted and the kid turned out terrific, and other places where the parents did all the things you said to do and he turns into a serial killer and everyone on the block is shocked?

SCHLESSINGER: When we take the fringe of the bell curve of exceptions and try to make them speak for the rule we’re not being fair. We’re taking extremes to try to get away from a truth that we know morally, intuitively we know what we need to do. I think human beings — I mean, from the time we’re born we have the ability to be selfish, we have the ability to be selfless. But I think small creatures are basically selfish, and we always have to strive against our selfishness every day in every way.

Shorter Dr Laura – “I don’t know what makes psychos. Ask me another”.

But she did know the answer all along.

Laura Schlessinger’s appearance in Utah last week included a visit with Army families at Fort Douglas. In an interview with The Tribune, she said, “We raised our son to be a warrior.”

Now see, there’s the problem right there. This is the kind of ‘warrior’ he became under Dr Laura’s tender care – at least according to what may admittedly beunreliable sources, ie someone who says they were at at school with Schlessinger Jr.:

I was in school with Derek in fourth and fifth grade. He was a sadistic bully then. He was a terribly unhappy kid who boasted about all the money his mom made and threatened, bullied, and beat up younger kids.If a teacher tried to discipline him or in any way thwart him he would threaten that his mom would get them fired and would sue them. I don’t know if she could but I know it scared a lot of teachers I don’t know a kid in school who was sorry to see him go when his mom put him in private school. We used to call him Malfoy because he reminded us of the character from Harry Potter. I wouldn’t be amazed by anything the guy is assused of, up to homicide. He is a nasty piece of work.
May 19th, 2007 at 19:09:49
From: KEN KORNFELD

Now, Schlessinger Jr. has been serving in special forces, and there might be those who’ll say PTSD! but that’s a copout. Special Forces are the soldiers who did this. This typifies what’s on young Deryk’s MySpace page:

In one of the stick drawings, a top-hatted man laughs as he rapes a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family. In another depiction, a man forces a boy to perform oral sex at knifepoint as the child’s mother pleads for her son’s life.

No doubt Dr Laura herself will be one of those who scream “PTSD!” too, supporting her little ‘warrior’ and his pyschotic tendencies to the end. But there’s no evading her responsibility: as she’s said herself –

SCHLESSINGER: …men are born of women, they are trained by women, they date marry that are trained by women, they marry women they are trained by women. A lot of what women get from men is their own doing, and that’s why I wrote this book because we primarily have the control in the relationships of the quality of the relationships.

How does that petard feel, Dr Laura? A little uncomfortable, perhaps?

Mormon Sins, Feels ‘Bad’.

Published on May 11, 2007

Does the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints condone torture and murder by government?

This is Deputy White House Counsel Timothy Flanagan. Remember those porcine, well-fed, well-groomed features. We’ll be seeing them again at The Hague if there is any justice in the world.

This devout Mormon helped write the memo that allowed US troops to torture civilians at Abu Ghraib and secret US prisons elsewhere. This is one of the men who declared habeas corpus dead, said the Geneva Conventions were quaint and outdated and who declared that there were no human rights any longer. and that anywhere in the world, whoever or wherever you are, the US can kidnap, jail and torture you on a whim.

This is what that ‘devout’ ratfuck bastard enabled. (Warning, graphic violence)

Now he says he feels bad about it. Aww, bloody diddums. From Harpers:

I had a heartfelt conversation with Flanagan and told him what I had heard from Iraqis: that these techniques had been used on men, women and children in Iraq. He feels bad about it; I know he does. But the fact is that he and Yoo and some of these other people from the best law schools and universities in this country were the ones who came up with the legal definitions that allowed for the abuse to happen.

Quite. I urge you to read the whole article – it lays bare the horrendous torture that’s been happening and exactly who is to blame, including Flanagan. This is a man who should spend eternity with his eyes taped open watching endless looped movies of his own wife and children being raped and tortured. With a soundtrack on headphones.

What, you think that’s harsh? Why? It’s just what he made it legal for his underlings to do to others’ families, including children and babies. Flanagan is a monster, like his other ‘devout’colleagues-in-law John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez; none of them got actual blood on their hands but they enabled a tide of blood, cruelty and filth in the hidden prisons of the US military and intelligence that will iflood the world with even more violence for decades to come.

So he says he feels bad now. What the hell does that mean? He has a vague sense of diquiet? Sincere repentance? Dismay at being caught? WTF? Saying he ‘feels bad’ is totally self-serving and meaningless. Are we supposed to show forgiveness and understanding to this psychopath now? Fuck that. He is a criminal against humanity.

What I really want to know now is whether the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints, AKA The Mormons, will denounce him. Flanagan was the Mormon Church’s blue-eyed boy in the White House; here he is speaking to a conference of LDS layers on religion and integrity in politics – from Meridian Magazine, ‘The Place Where Latter Day Saints Gather’ :

[..]

Timothy E. Flanagan

Timothy Flanagan has firsthand experience in Washington political circles, having worked as counsel in the Bush White House. He said,

“If you lined up people who have political influence against the wall, you would have a great many wonderful Jewish people. Do you know how many Latter-day Saints there would be? Only a few. There are roughly the same number of Jews in the U.S. as Latter-day Saints, but do we have the same political impact? I don’t think so.

[…]

I’m willing to admit that our system is far from perfect and we have a great many problems as money touches politics. It is an observed fact that many Latter-day Saints view giving to candidates as something they just don’t want to do. But we can build on a cornerstone of integrity. You bring to this process your principles and the world is hungry for those principles.”

Brother Flanagan emphasized that the mark of any political work should be quality.

“Too much of the effort that people put into political work is just shoddy. It is substandard. You will stand out if you put true quality into what you do.”

When they supported Brother Timothy Flanagan in pushing their agenda in in the GOP and the White House, was torture part of that quality, principled, Mormon agenda? If not, did the LDS know Flanagan was pro-torture? They certainly knew it when he published his memo.

But I don’t see any condemnation from his church then or now. In the same article one of the other elders Boyd Black, says:

“The Church attempts very hard to keep politically neutral. Silence by the Church should never be considered as endorsement.”

Well it damned well looks like endorsement to me. Sorry, but from what I can see, I’d say the LDS hierarchy, in sheltering and approving this monster of a hypocrite, is objectively pro-torture and murder.

The Only Real Freedom Is Inside Your Head *

Published on April 4, 2007

Boot, meet other foot.

Those of us old enough to recall disco and roll-on, cherry-flavoured lip gloss with a fond smile will also remember, if we were paying attention, the justified outrage of the western intelligentsia when the writings of imprisoned Russian dissidents Solzhenitzyn and Irina Ratushinskaya were published in the West. Their works were hailed on all sides as the triumph of human spirit over torturous repression.

But while I don’t doubt the sincere horror at what was revealed as having been going on behind the Iron Curtain that the commentators of the day displayed I also don’t doubt that many felt a secret relief that it was happening somewhere else, to someone else, safely away from sight.

If you’d told the Dacron-suited, muletted and sideburned disapprovalists of 30-odd years ago that one day there’d be US government-run gulags and torture chambers right in their faces, in their own backyards, they’d’ve been so disgusted and they’ve had you run out of town for even suggesting it. “That’s evil Commie stuff, we’re the Good Guys!”

But where’s their outrage now, when here we are with the first publication of a book of poetry written by Guantanamo Bay detainees?

[Courtesy Rippen Kitten]

From The Wasteland: The Death Poem by Jumah al-Dossari

“Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.“

A-Dossari wrote this poem in Guantanamo Bay where he was tortured by US agents and military.

Are You Tonkin To Me? : Part II, Turn About Is Fair Play

Published on March 30, 2007

I haven’t written about the British hostages been held in Iran at all as yet: the main reason for that is that while I have enormous sympathy on a personal level for the hostages, some of whom are from my home town, (and especially for the one woman hostage Fay Turney, having been a female member of the UK armed forces myself) nevertheless, on the strategic level I can only agree with Ronan Bennett in this morning’s Guardian:

Turney may have been “forced to wear the hijab”, as the Daily Mail noted with fury, but so far as we know she has not been forced into an orange jumpsuit. Her comrades have not been shackled, blindfolded, forced into excruciating physical contortions for long periods, or denied liquids and food. As far as we know they have not had the Bible spat on, torn up or urinated on in front of their faces. They have not had electrodes attached to their genitals or been set on by attack dogs.

They have not been hung from a forklift truck and photographed for the amusement of their captors. They have not been pictured naked and smeared in their own excrement. They have not been bundled into a CIA-chartered plane and secretly “rendered” to a basement prison in a country where torturers are experienced and free to do their worst.

As far as we know, Turney and her comrades are not being “worked hard”, the euphemism coined by one senior British army officer for the abuse of prisoners at Camp Bread Basket. And as far as we know all 15 are alive and well, which is more than can be said for Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist who, in 2003, was unfortunate enough to have been taken into custody by British troops in Basra. There has of course been a court martial and it exonerated the soldiers of Mousa’s murder. So we can only assume that his death – by beating – was self-inflicted; yet another instance of “asymmetrical warfare”, the description given by US authorities to the deaths of the Guantánamo detainees who hanged themselves last year.

And while the families of the captured marines and sailors must be in agonies of uncertainty, they have the comfort of knowing that the very highest in the land are doing everything they can to end their “unjustified detention”. They can count themselves especially lucky, for the very same highest of the land have rather different views on what justifies detention where foreign-born Muslims in Britain are concerned.

Quite.

As a nation we can hardly go around the world demanding that other countries observe the ‘rules of war’ when we have not done so ourselves.

Because of our actions, because of Iraq, Guantanamo and our continued support of the murderous regime of George Bush our diplomatic and political capital as a nation is virtually nil. We are hoist by our own petard. Pick a cliche – we are a busted flush, clapped out, disgraced, shamed, having our own faces rubbed in our mess…

It hasn’r helped either that our continuing bosom buddies and allies, the USA, recently kidnapped a number of Iranian public servants:

Another Shoe Drops

Published on March 20, 2007

Condi has a thing for Italian shoes, as is well known. she was buying Ferragamos on 5th Avenue as New Orleans drowned – and remember this 2005 picture and the way the US media salivated over those boots?

“Rice’s coat and boots speak of sex and power — such a volatile combination, and one that in political circles rarely leads to anything but scandal. When looking at the image of Rice in Wiesbaden, the mind searches for ways to put it all into context. It turns to fiction, to caricature. To shadowy daydreams. Dominatrix! It is as though sex and power can only co-exist in a fantasy. When a woman combines them in the real world, stubborn stereotypes have her power devolving into a form that is purely sexual.”

Condi had better stick to buying those Italian spike heels on the mainland US from now on, because according to the former Milan CIA Chief, now indicted in Italy, it seems that whole dominatrix thing was even truer than the slavering US media thought.

Around that time, strutting around in her Italian boots, Condi Rice was ordering the abduction and torture of an Italian resident. From today’s Der Spiegel :

CIA AGENT ON THE RUN‘I’ve Got Nothing to Lose’

By Georg Mascolo in Washington

Robert Lady, the former CIA chief in Milan, has gone into hiding. He is the subject of an extradition order from Italian authorities for the role he played in the kidnapping of radical Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan. Washington is seeking to derail the trial — perhaps because Condoleezza Rice may have given the operation the green light.

[My emphasis.]