Tag: torture

25 Years Ago, 9/11 Triggered a US Crusade of Torture

A quarter-century has passed since the terrorist attack that killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. During the first seven years after that mass atrocity, Pentagon spending doubled. The aftermath of 9/11 was also a huge boost for “the intelligence community.” Despite – and because of – their failure to prevent the carnage on that day, the CIA and the National Security Agency as well as 14 smaller spy agencies boomed with enormous jolts of funds.

Along the way, some line items paid for torture that persisted during the George W. Bush presidency under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The most publicized location was Guantánamo on the island of Cuba. There, “the U.S. opened the offshore detention facility in an attempt to evade the rule of law,” the London-based organization Freedom From Torture reports. “In the name of the U.S.’s ‘War on Terror,’ people deemed by the U.S. to be ‘enemy combatants’ were detained at the facility. Many were tortured and denied basic human rights and due process… Since the first detainees arrived in 2002, Guantánamo Bay has imprisoned 780 men and boys from 48 countries… Yet only 16 detainees have ever been convicted of a crime – just 2 percent.”

Despite public pressure, Bush vetoed a version of the Intelligence Authorization Act in March 2008 that would have required CIA interrogators to adhere to Army Field Manual regulations. As soon as Barack Obama became president, he issued an executive order rescinding the free hand for the CIA director on interrogations that Bush had reaffirmed in a July 2007 order. Obama’s directive removed the CIA’s detention power and required the agency to follow Army Field Manual rules.

Yet five and a half years went by before President Obama acknowledged, in his notable words, “We tortured some folks.” He told a news conference: “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line.”

The acknowledgement came four months before the long-awaited release of a report in December 2014 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. While heavily redacted, it was a political indictment of torture. “CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values,” wrote the committee’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Among the report’s conclusions:

  • “The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.”
  • “The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”
  • “The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.”
  • “Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Months later, the New England Journal of Medicine summed up aspects of the Senate committee’s findings: “Medical professionals, primarily private contractors, filled four basic roles at the black sites: clearing terrorist suspects as ‘medically fit’ for torture; monitoring torture to prevent death and treat injuries; developing novel torture methods; and actually torturing prisoners. All these actions were taken only after CIA and U.S. Department of Justice attorneys assured the medical professionals that they had immunity from prosecution and would not be held legally responsible for violating U.S. and international law against torture as long as they used the techniques approved in legal memos (since withdrawn) written to justify their actions. Lawyers agreed to provide immunity assurances that specific torture techniques were legal ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods only if the physicians assured them that they would be present to prevent permanent harm to prisoners. The CIA opened more than a dozen black sites around the world after 9/11, in which at least 117 prisoners were held; 39 of these prisoners were subjected to one or more torture techniques.”

At least hundreds more “suspected terrorists” who’d been captured by the U.S. were turned over to ruthless governments. “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan,” former CIA officer Bob Baer said. “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.”

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Inside Israel’s Torture Camps: Abuse, Secrecy and Impunity

After October 7, 2023, Israel expanded and reorganized a system of military detention facilities used for people detained in the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Palestinians passed through facilities under the direct control of the Israel Defense Forces, brought there for registration, interrogation and decisions about further incarceration. But what was officially intended as a temporary stage quickly turned into prolonged detention; the Israeli military itself later acknowledged that, because of the unprecedented number of detainees and overcrowding in regular prisons, many remained in military camps far longer than anticipated.

Behind the barbed wire, accounts of abuse quickly piled up. Released detainees described routine blindfolding, shackling, beatings, dog attacks, starvation, sleep deprivation, denial of medical care and sexual violence. These abuses were independently documented by Amnesty International, the UN human rights office and later UN special mechanisms. In May 2024, the Israeli military conceded that Sde Teiman and Anatot are military lockups where Palestinians are held indefinitely without trial or charges under the “Unlawful Combatants” law. Two years later, the system is still operating.

Geopolitics Prime has assembled a comprehensive picture of this system, drawing on survivor testimonies, legal documents, internal military correspondence and findings from human rights organizations and UN mechanisms.

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The Gloves Are Off: ICE, Electric Shock Weapons and Secret Police

“Electric shock has long been a common method of inflicting torture or other forms of ill-treatment worldwide. While electric shocks are sometimes inflicted using makeshift equipment—for instance, car batteries, mains wires or cattle prods—a wide variety of electric shock devices are specifically designed for and marketed to law enforcement.”—Amnesty International

This is what comes of giving a lawless agency unlimited funds to build detention centers, terrorize communities, and act as a secret police force.

Anything goes.

Masked raids. Unmarked vehicles. Warrantless arrests. Racial profiling. Sweeping surveillance. Detention camps. Excessive force. Citizens dragged off the streets. Protesters targeted. Congressional oversight obstructed. Government agents operating behind masks while refusing to identify themselves or explain the authority under which they act.

Now add electric shock gloves to the arsenal.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to spend as much as $20 million to equip its agents with thousands of gloves capable of delivering painful electric shocks through direct contact with a person’s skin.

The devices are called G.L.O.V.E.s—Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters—and the government has dressed them up in the predictably sanitized language of the police state as “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”

Don’t be fooled by the benign-sounding euphemisms.

These are pain-compliance weapons.

ICE agents wearing the gloves will be able to touch a person’s exposed skin and deliver an electric shock intended to compel obedience.

White House border czar Tom Homan has been remarkably candid about the purpose: “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not.”

There is that word again: compliance.

It has become one of the most dangerous words in the vocabulary of the American police state.

Increasingly, government agents are being taught—and the public conditioned to accept—that refusal to immediately comply with a government agent’s command is sufficient justification for force.

Question an officer. Hesitate. Pull away. Protest. Demand to know why you are being detained. Refuse to surrender your phone. Attempt to record an arrest. Insist on your constitutional rights. Fail to obey quickly enough.

The government’s answer is increasingly the same: comply or die—comply or suffer the consequences.

Now those consequences may come through the touch of a gloved hand.

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Trans Leader in ‘764’ Satanic Cult That Grooms Children for Sexual Abuse, Torture, Terrorism and Blood Rituals Sentenced to 77 Years in Prison

A transgender member of a violent satanic death cult network was sentenced to 77 years in federal prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to sexually exploiting and terrorizing underage girls around the world and grooming them into mutilating themselves and torturing animals to death.

Kyle William Spitze, 27, pleaded guilty in late 2024 to producing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), possessing and accessing with the intent to view CSAM and helping distribute animal torture videos, but he wasn’t sentenced until Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Varlan. The judge sentenced him to the entirety of what the prosecution had sought.

Spitze is a leader of the “HarmNation” group, which is part of the “764” satanic accelerationist cult-like online network.

The decentralized network of mostly teen boys and young men grooms its minor victims into producing child sex abuse material of themselves, mutilating their bodies, abusing or killing animals and, in some cases, committing suicide and/or killing others. They often target victims on online gaming platforms popular with children, such as Minecraft and Roblox.

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The Bomb in Monaco and a Torture Room Near Kyiv

They took her trainers. That is the detail that survives, once the rest is stripped away – the belongings removed from the corpse, the shoes pulled from her feet, the shallow hole in woods sixty kilometers west of Kyiv. Anastasiia Berezovska had been shot in the back of the head, then shot again as she lay on the ground, four rounds in all. She was thirty-nine. Six days earlier she had walked out of a stairwell in Monaco having left a backpack in the lobby of an apartment building, and the backpack had torn three people apart. The distance between those two moments – the placing of the bomb and the emptying of a pistol into the woman who placed it – is the whole of this story, and almost everything inside it has been arranged so that the distance cannot be measured.

The device was packed with buckshot and bolts, a charge built for a confined space and for flesh. Monaco’s Minister of State, Christophe Mirmand, said it contained bolts and pellets – a thing made, in plain terms, for the maximum killing of its target. It was detonated by remote control at the moment Vadym Iermolaiev and his family returned from dinner at a seaside restaurant on the evening of 29 June. The man survived with burns and shrapnel. His partner’s legs were amputated in hospital. Their thirteen-year-old son was hurt less badly. The figure who left the bag was seen on the building’s cameras and then seen fleeing on foot toward the French commune of Beausoleil, a few metres and one border away. It was the first attack of its kind in the principality’s history, and the chief prosecutor, Stéphane Thibault, moved quickly to rule out terrorism. A targeted killing, then, in the one place in Europe designed to guarantee that the origins of a wealthy man’s fortune are never examined too closely.

The person who placed it had prepared to disappear. Berezovska disguised herself as a man and fled in a car with German registration plates, across the French border, then into Italy. She had been living in Frankfurt, where German police would later search her apartment and prepare to hand what they found to the Monegasque authorities. On 1 July, the day after the bombing, she crossed into Ukraine and caught a bus to her home town of Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv. The state border service would afterwards insist she entered lawfully, through a regular crossing point, with no database alert – including from Interpol – flagging her as wanted. That is technically true and quietly damning: Interpol did not issue its Red Notice until 4 July, three days after she was already home. The one suspect in an atrocity on European soil walked back into Ukraine unimpeded, and by the time the world’s police apparatus formally wanted her, she was already among the people who would kill her. Her body was recovered on 6 July.

The two men arrested for her murder had both been sending her money — cryptocurrency and transfers into her bank accounts, which is how, the Security Service of Ukraine says, they were identified at all. One of them, Vladyslav Reut, thirty-three, appeared in a Kyiv court on 10 July and described how it was done. His accomplice, a former Kyiv-region police officer named Vitalii Zhykovych, took her at gunpoint to a forest near the village of Yuriv. “Zhykovych fired the first shot at her in the back of the head. She fell down. He came up and fired another shot. I was standing a few meters away at that moment.” Reut said he was then made to dig the hole, while Zhykovych stripped the body of its possessions and took the dead woman’s trainers. He told the judge he would insist on a polygraph to prove his innocence. Zhykovych, through his lawyer, denies the allegations.

Reut is not a criminal picked off the street. He studied law at Kyiv’s national university and served in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, the GUR, in unit A2772 – a training center for special-operations forces. That was established not by Moscow’s propagandists but by the investigative journalists of Radio Liberty’s Schemy project, and reported by Luke Harding in the Guardian from Kyiv. So the plain shape of it is this: a serving officer of a state intelligence service financed and helped carry out the execution of the only witness to a bombing in a European city. This is not the allegation of Ukraine’s enemies. It is the account produced by Ukraine’s own security service, in its own statement, within days of the killing.

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US and Ecuadorian militaries burn homes and torture workers in “Operation Total Extermination”

The US-Ecuadorian joint military operation launched March 3, ostensibly against drug cartels, has turned Ecuador into a proving ground for unleashing military violence upon every country in the hemisphere in furtherance of US hegemony.

Neither the Pentagon nor the Ecuadorian Ministry of Defense, which has dubbed the onslaught “Operation Total Extermination,” have reported casualty figures.

Subsequent reports, however, have made clear that the Pentagon and Ecuadorian forces are following a scorched-earth policy aimed not at cartels but civilians, akin to that employed by the military dictatorships in Central and South America over the last century.

Last Friday, the Ecuadorian Armed Forces boasted on social media that “Ecuador and the US destroyed” the training grounds and a vacation home of the Border Commands—a drug trafficking group formed by former Colombian FARC-EP guerrilla fighters along the Colombian-Ecuadorian border.

The announcement included aerial videos showing military helicopters bombing rural properties and rustic homes in the northeast town of Santa Rosa, Sucumbíos Province. “During the subsequent search, weapons and other evidence linked to illegal activities were found,” the publication claims.

The US Southern Command, the branch of the US armed forces that oversees forces in Latin America, issued an accompanying statement indicating the US and Ecuador had launched “lethal kinetic operations against Designated Terrorist Organizations.”

Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesman, added: “At the request of Ecuador, the Department of War executed targeted action to advance our shared objective of dismantling narco-terrorist networks.”

The following day, Saturday, President Daniel Noboa shook hands with Donald Trump at the “Shield of the Americas Summit” in Miami, where the fascist American president announced a “brand new military coalition” against drug cartels. “The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries,” he declared.

To capture drug traffickers, Trump might have simply called for the arrest of Noboa himself, whose billionaire family’s Noboa Trading Co. has been caught shipping cocaine to the Balkans in crates with bananas sold under the Bonita label.

Instead, in real time, the true character of this coalition was shown in Sucumbíos, where local news reporters were informing Saturday that the US and Ecuadorian militaries had bombed the homes of peasants and small farmers and tortured agricultural workers who deny any illegal activities.

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Prosecutor Investigating U.S. Boat Strikes and Claims of Torture Was Murdered in Ecuador

Alexandra Bravo, the prosecutor assigned to investigate U.S. strikes on three Ecuadorian boats and the 36 survivors’ subsequent accounts of torture and kidnapping, was shot dead in the coastal city of Manta last month. According to police, on June 14 a hitman aboard a black motorcycle opened fire on Bravo as she and her sister were leaving a café at about 11 a.m. Bravo’s sister, who jumped to protect her, was also killed in the attack.

Upon arriving at the crime scene, officers say they found five 9mm shell casings and Bravo’s injured driver, but no sign of the police detail that had been assigned to protect her. The Police Directorate, which operates entirely under the executive branch, has launched a probe to determine if there’d been an internal security breach.

Bravo is the 26th member of Ecuador’s justice system to be assassinated since 2020 and the second individual investigating state crimes murdered that week. Besides her usual caseload of homicide and organized crime, Bravo had been working the Fiorella, Negra Francisca, and Don Maca cases—a series of drone attacks on civilian fishing ships exposed by Drop Site in April. Two of the boat’s crews returned home and reported being abducted, blindfolded, and starved for eight days by American gunmen in U.S. military uniforms aboard a U.S.-flagged patrol ship, before being abandoned in El Salvador. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances endorsed the calls for an investigation, demanding that the U.S. provide information on the whereabouts of the eight still-missing men and any involvement in the matter by April 27. To date, the United States has not responded.

Under Ecuador’s right-wing president Daniel Noboa—a Miami-born billionaire often characterized as a “U.S.-backed dictator”—the country has become a central testing ground for Operation Southern Spear, Washington’s extrajudicial bombing campaign purporting to target “narco-terrorists,” which has killed 221 people to date. There is no evidence that many of the victims, including those in Bravo’s investigation, had engaged in drug trafficking.

“I can’t make any assertion regarding it being a political assassination, but evidently, when a prosecutor is killed it’s because of the investigation they’re conducting,” Fernando Bastias, a renowned human rights attorney with Ecuador’s CDH and member of the Geneva-based World Organization Against Torture, told Drop Site, “That’s something we’ve learned from our experience in Ecuador.”

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Federal Judge Makes Unprecedented Move In Maduro Torture Case

Well, here’s something that doesn’t happen too often.  

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles in Miami awarded $314 million in damages to three U.S. citizens who were imprisoned and tortured by Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela before being freed in a 2023 prisoner swap.

The three men were Jerrel Kenemore, a Texas computer scientist who’d moved to neighboring Colombia to be with a woman he met. He was kidnapped by paramilitaries in 2022 while visiting a grocery store near the Venezuela-Colombia border and held for over 600 days before being charged with “espionage” and “counterintelligence activities.” He claims he was beaten, held in harsh conditions, and degraded constantly. 

Edgar Jose Marval was detained for just over 120 days, but allegedly suffered the most abuse. He was beaten repeatedly until his back was broken, had his genitals electrocuted, and was tortured psychologically with made-up threats to his children. Jason Saad, the third hostage, was detained for 560 days and was subjected to similar treatment, but we don’t have quite as many details on him.   

If you’ll remember, Joe Biden handed Alex Saab — Maduro’s bagman — over in exchange for these Americans. While I’m glad they did make it back to the United States safely, I’d like to remind everyone that Donald Trump brought every single remaining U.S. hostage back home from Venezuela about a year ago, with the help of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and made no concessions to Maduro. As a matter of fact, six months later, he scooped him up and put him in jail. But I digress. 

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Photo of bound Palestinian detainee corroborates Israeli torture reports, say rights groups

An Israeli soldier’s photo of a Palestinian man from Gaza stripped to his underwear, blindfolded and bound face-down to an iron rod corroborates extensive reporting on Israeli torture of Palestinians in detention and itself may constitute a war crime, rights groups have said.

The image was shared on a now-deleted personal social media account, with the Hebrew-language caption “good morning”. It was brought to wider public attention by a Palestinian writer and activist who goes by Tamer.

“Both abusive treatment of detainees and the public sharing of humiliating or degrading images of them can constitute war crimes,” said Oneg Ben Dror from the prisoner and detainees department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI).

The photo “confirms what thousands of testimonies from Palestinian detainees have exposed, and what we and other organisations have been reporting for nearly three years now,” she added. “Israeli detention facilities are torture camps for Palestinians.”

Israel’s military confirmed the authenticity of the photo. “The incident does not align with IDF values and regulations,” a spokesperson said, adding that an inquiry was under way.

Holding and photographing the man semi-naked also broke international law, said Sari Bashi, the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “There is no security justification for holding a detainee in his underwear,” she said. “Forced nudity followed by capturing and sharing sexualised images on social media is a form of sexual violence and also a war crime.”

After the photo was widely shared on social media at least two mothers claimed the bound man as their son, highlighting the painful limbo of Palestinian families searching for loved ones missing since their detention by Israeli forces, Bashi added.

“This is not the first time Israeli soldiers have published humiliating photos of Palestinian detainees while depriving families of information or access to them. It has become a grotesque and unlawful way for families to get information about their loved ones.”

Rana Abu Nasser is sure the photo shows her son Osama, who was seized with his one-year-old son in March, near the shifting “yellow line” that marks the boundary of Israeli military control in Gaza. “I know the details of his body,” she told Reuters. “He has swelling in his foot and scars on his leg – the same swelling on his left leg I saw in the picture.”

Joudeh al-Ghoul wept the first time she saw the photo, instantly sure it was her son Amin, missing since his arrest in November 2023, when he was trying to travel from southern Gaza to the north. “It’s him, his hair and chin. He is ​my son. A mother’s heart can recognise her son. ​I hugged the mobile phone and started crying,” she said. “He is my son, my soul, my life.”

The Israeli military declined to comment on whether the detainee had been identified or given medical support, and whether his family in Gaza had been notified.

For seven months at the start of the war the Israeli military refused to provide basic information about the status of people detained in Gaza, in effect implementing a policy of forced disappearance.

From May 2024 Israel provided an email address for enquires about Palestinians from Gaza, but that provided only a partial, limited improvement. Israeli authorities had denied holding hundreds of missing Palestinians whose arrest was confirmed by witness testimony, the rights group HaMoked said this year.

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Venezuelan Activists: Helicoide Torture Complex Still Active Despite Regime Claims of ‘Shutdown’

The Venezuelan non-governmental human rights organization Justice, Encounter, and Forgiveness (JEP) said this week that the Venezuelan socialist regime’s largest and most infamous torture complex, the Helicoide (“The Helix”), remains operational despite the regime’s claims.

The Helicoide is a structure in southern Caracas’s San Agustín parish built in the 1950s during the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, originally conceived as the world’s first drive-thru shopping mall. The plans never materialized following Pérez Jiménez’s downfall in 1958 and the building remained unfinished.

The Venezuelan socialist regime turned the facility into what has been largely described as the largest torture center in Latin America. Following the arrest of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces on January 3, “acting President” Delcy Rodriguez announced that the Helicoide would be shut down and “transformed” into a “cultural center” for local residents of San Agustín.

On Tuesday, over three months since the “shutdown” announcement, JEP explained that the Helicoide remains operational and at least 25 political prisoners are still unjustly detained in the complex.

“We understand that international statements are based on prior institutional commitments and information, but the reality of human rights demands that we compare these announcements with the actual situation of the people affected,” the statement read in part.

“Behind every statistic are families who are still waiting for answers today; therefore, it is not possible to consider a facility closed as long as there are citizens deprived of their liberty inside,” the statement continued.

JEP called upon the international community and organizations to continue monitoring the situation — calling all relevant authorities for transparency regarding the actual status of the Helicoide and the 25 political prisoners still detained at the center.

Hours after JEP published its statement, the organization further denounced that “unusual movements” were reported at the Helicoide, including reports about possible transfers of political prisoners at the complex to other unspecified locations.

“These events raise serious questions and reinforce the perception that last-minute decisions are being made to respond to pressure and international scrutiny, rather than to genuinely correct the reported violations,” JEP’s statement read.

“In the face of this situation, we reiterate that the 25 people deprived of liberty for political reasons who remain in the Helicoide must be released immediately,” the statement continued. “Their transfer to another detention center does not constitute a solution nor represent progress in human rights matters. What is required is their full and unconditional release.”

Following Maduro’s capture, the Venezuelan regime began releasing hundreds of political prisoners unjustly detained across several Venezuelan prisons — including former police officers that spent over 23 years imprisoned.

Although hundreds of political prisoners have been released in the first months of 2026, the Venezuelan non-government organization Foro Penal detailed on Wednesday that the Venezuelan socialist regime still holds at least 404 political prisoners as of Monday, June 1 — including at least one child aged between 14 and 17 years old.

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