June | 2005 | Ozfille's Blog

Yup this cartoon sums up the low sneaky nastiness of our PM and it will only get worse once the little sneak has control of both houses of parliament.

Our very own Gollum

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Interesting and rather chilling interviews

Posted in Uncategorized on June 27, 2005| 7 Comments »

They’ve only put up the transcript and audio link to these interesting interviews that Terry Lane had with two Americans, the weekend before last.

The National Interest

The first one was an interview with Matthew R. Simmons, Founder and Chairman of the world’s largest energy investment banking company, Simmons & Co. International. He was talking about the lies and misinformation concerning the remaining oil supplies while we are busy guzzling all the oil that is being extracted. He also talks about the scandalous under-pricing of oil that is encouraging the waste.

Publications:
Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy
Author: Matthew R Simmons
Publisher: Wiley (USA) ISBN: 0-471-73876-X
Papers presented by Matthew R. Simmons

The second interview with John Perkins just confirms what I always thought about the underhanded and sneaky activities throughout the third world of US corporate interests using economic chains to enslave third world countries so that they toe the American line, in the commercial, economic and political spheres.

Transcript of 2nd interview – Economic hitman

Read Full Post »

Interesting and rather chilling interviews

Posted in Uncategorized on June 27, 2005| 7 Comments »

They’ve only put up the transcript and audio link to these interesting interviews that Terry Lane had with two Americans, the weekend before last.

The National Interest

Publications:
Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy
Author: Matthew R Simmons
Publisher: Wiley (USA) ISBN: 0-471-73876-X
Papers presented by Matthew R. Simmons

Economic hitman
Sunday 19 June 2005

Topic
John Perkins used to roam the world as an consultant for a US engineering firm but he says his real mission was to be an economic hitman, enticing foreign nations into debt and bringing them in line with US commercial interests.
Program Transcript
Terry Lane: John Perkins once worked for the American company, Mayne, from 1971 to 1981. Now Mayne’s ostensible business was as a consulting engineering firm, planning vast infrastructure projects for developing nations, and according to John Perkins, Mayne’s real business was acting on behalf of the American politico-commercial—what he calls corporatocracy—to suck developing nations into taking on debts that they could never hope to repay, and in the process becoming vassals in the American empire.

Well John Perkins tells the story of his own part in this grand imperial process in a book called Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and when I talked with John Perkins from his home in the United States, about Confessions of an Economic Hitman, I asked him to explain the term.

John Perkins: Well Terry, I’d say we economic hitmen during the post World War II period have really managed to create the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done it primarily without the military through economics. There’s many different ways that we work, but probably the most typical is for us to identify a developing country that has resources that our corporations covet, like oil, for example. And then to arrange a very large loan to that country from a major lending organisation like the World Bank, or one of its sisters. However, most of that money never goes directly to that developing country. Instead it goes to big corporations, construction companies like the ones we hear a lot about these days, Halliburton and Bechtel, other companies that supply machinery such as General Electric for example. And very little of the money actually reaches the developing country itself.

These companies then build large infrastructure projects in the developing country like power plants, ports, industrial parks, that primarily serve only a very few, very rich families in that country, never really benefit the poor. However the whole country is left holding a huge debt, one it can’t possibly repay. So at some point, we economic hitmen go back and then we say, ‘Look, you owe us a lot of money and you can’t repay your debts, so sell your oil real cheaply to our oil company, or vote with us on the next critical United Nations vote, or send troops in support of ours to some place in the world like Iraq’. And in that way we’ve managed to build this empire, this global empire primarily without using the military.

Terry Lane: An economic hitman is a term which is in general use? It’s not just a term that you invented?

John Perkins: Well it’s a tongue-in-cheek term, I didn’t invent it. It’s a little bit like using the word ‘spy’, or ‘spook’, for a CIA agent; that’s never really their true title. They have titles like ‘Political Attaché’ at an Embassy, or something like that. My real title was Economist, and then Chief Economist, at a private consulting firm. Economic hitman is really a tongue-in-cheek term that we did use.

Terry Lane: And the private consulting firm that you worked for was a company called Mayne, and I understand from the way that you’ve described it, that its business was engineering big electricity generation and distribution infrastructure schemes?

John Perkins: Well, that was part of its business. We also built an industrial plant, pulp and paper plants, many things along those lines. But when working in the developing countries in the 1970s, a very major push was under way to develop the electrical systems and to hire First World companies to do this in the Third World, and so we did a great deal of that.

Terry Lane: And your job as an economist without any training as an economist, was, I understand, to produce fanciful predictions for economic growth in the country where you were working?

John Perkins: Well, yes. You really hit the nail on the head with that business about my credentials as an economist. I have a Bachelor of Science degree and four years of college in business school in the United States. I don’t think that really classifies me for the chief economist, but when I was recruited by the National Security Agency, which is one of the United States—it’s our largest spy organisation, and probably our most secretive one—they gave me a series of tests and identified me as potentially a good economic hitman. What economic hitmen do is strike deals, so my job was to go to these countries and strike deals and then bring the World Bank or a sister organisation in. I had several dozen very competent economists working for me; PhDs, MBAs. And then after I struck a deal, they would then be called upon to produce the forecast and the reports that would justify the deal. So my job was really a deal-maker.

Terry Lane: Now you say you were recruited by the National Security Agency, but how did they pass you over to a private firm, and perhaps you should explain why it was important in the scheme of things, that a person like you should be employed by a private company rather than by a government agency?

John Perkins: All right. Yes, in 1968 while I was a senior in college, they recruited me because through my marriage I had contacts with people in the highest level of the National Security Agency, that’s how I kind of got an in. And then they ran me through a series of tests, lie detector tests, personality tests, and identified me as a good economic hitman. Then I was sent into the Peace Corps for three years where I worked with indigenous people and other people in Latin America who it turns out, were opposing oil companies. So I was getting on-the-job training, you might say. Then I was brought back and hired by this private company, Mayne, and immediately contacted by a remarkable woman named Claudine, who’s described in detail in Confessions of an Economic Hitman, who then really was my mentor as an economic hitman; taught me the ropes of the game. And then, let’s see, what was the other aspect of your question Terry?

Terry Lane: Why was it important that economic hitmen be employed by private companies rather than by the CIA or the NSA?

John Perkins: Right. Well I think what we learned in the early ’50s and ’60s was that we were afraid to go to war with Russia, and our new big enemy, the Soviet Union, had nuclear weapons, and this specifically in Iran, a democratically-elected President named Mossadeq, very popular, held out to the world as the model for democracy, was putting the chains on the oil companies there, and saying, ‘Look, you’re going to have to give more of your money to the Iranian people’. So the British government and the United States government decided that Mossadeq, despite the fact that he was democratically elected, would have to go. Sent in a CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, and Kermit, with a few million dollars, organised a protest and managed to overthrow Mossadeq and replace him with the Shah of Iran. Extremely effective, and without risking war and didn’t cost very much.

But the problem was, he was a CIA agent, and had he been caught, the US government would have been implicated. So very shortly after that, the decision was made to use private corporations, consulting firms primarily, to do the same work. So you really couldn’t implicate the government, or at least there’d be many barriers between the process of doing that.

Terry Lane: John, you’re very frank that the thing that made you particularly well-suited for the position of economic hitman was a series of serious character flaws.

John Perkins: That’s certainly true, and I think most of us have some of those character flaws. I describe them in detail in the book, but the NSA discovered them when they ran me through these tests, and I think I could sum them up as the three big drugs of our culture: money, power and sex. And my specific cases, as I said there’s a lot of detail in the book I won’t go into that here, but the NSA identified these and when I was recruited into Charles T. Mayne, the consulting firm, this woman Claudine contacted me. She obviously knew my flaws, she told me all the dirty business aspects of the job that I would be expected to do, and it was very important that I understand before I take my first assignment in Indonesia, that I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. But at the same time, she was able to draw upon these character flaws to essentially seduce me into taking this job, which she did very effectively.

Terry Lane: She also said to you that once you were in, you were in for life.

John Perkins: Yes, she did, Terry.

Terry Lane: Did that sound like a threat at the time?

John Perkins: Well, yes, it sounded like a threat, but I think too there was a certain romantic quality to it, you know, I mean at that time, the double-A the secret agent, the 007 James Bond type of character was pretty popular, and there was something a little bit romantic about that whole thought, and I also always believed that I would be the exception, that at some point I would come clean and write a book exposing all of this. And of course, now many, many, many years later, I have.

Terry Lane: The wonderful James Bondian touch about Claudine was that when you went looking for her some years later, she had completely disappeared as though she had never existed.

John Perkins: Well yes, in fact it wasn’t even exactly some years, it was several months. After I was trained by her, I went off to Indonesia. First I went through Australia and down to a university in Canberra and learned all I could about Indonesia. You had a very great department down there that was studying Indonesian economy, and actually helping to run it. And then I went to Indonesia for three months and when I came back, Claudine had disappeared, and there was no trace of her. I looked high and low for her, I could find no trace of her whatsoever, and never have to this day, which is quite amazing when you think about it.

Terry Lane: John, one of the interesting things about your story is that all of the places that you went—Indonesia, Iran, Ecuador, Panama—in all of those places, you found locals who disturbed your view of the world, and gave you a different perspective on American operations in the world, tending to cast America more as the villain rather than the saviour.

John Perkins: Well yes, you know the fact I’d been in the Peace Corps for three years, and I lived with indigenous people in the Amazon and the Andes, and I really had a very strong interest in people, so when I went to these other countries, I made it a point, unlike most of the other people who I worked with, the other Americans and Europeans working in these countries who tended to hang out in their own enclaves, I made a point of getting out with the people; I enjoyed that, and I was younger than most everybody else too, in my business. And so I would make a point of trying to learn the language. I got pretty good at speaking Indonesian, for example, and so I found that when you do that, people embrace you, and that’s happened to me in those places. And so I ended up hanging out with people who became very honest with me, and expressed the viewpoint that most Americans don’t usually hear when they travel abroad, because we’re used to only talking to people who speak English, who often have been trained in our own universities and are part of our system at one level or another. I, on the other hand, mixed with people who had not gone through that process.

Terry Lane: It also gave you an insight into and a sympathy for the politicians in some of these countries. Now of course all the world knows about the assassination of Salvatore Allende, probably because it was spectacular in the way that it was done. But you’re convinced that the President of Ecuador and the President of Panama were also assassinated.

John Perkins: I have no doubt about it, and it was something that in fact I was fearful was going to happen because it never profiled. These men stood up to me and to the system, refused to play the game as we wanted them to play it, and it was especially embarrassing to the US in the case of Turrijos of Panama, because Turrijos had become a well-known figure. He was negotiating a new canal treaty with Carter, he was really standing up to the United States and insisting that they give back the canal, so the whole world was watching Turrijos, and when he wouldn’t come around, this was likely to set a bad precedent, not only for Panama but something that other leaders around the world might follow. And of course, I think probably most of the rest of the world also knows what happened to his successor, Noriega, who wasn’t nearly the integretist man that Turrijos was, but also stood up to the United States and as a result, we invaded his country in 1989 and killed several thousand people, wiped out a huge section of the city and brought him back as a prisoner where he still sits in a prison in the United States.

Terry Lane: And the important thing is of course, that he was succeeded by a family which had had power in Panama before Turrijos became President.

John Perkins: Part of the oligarchy, and they still rule to this day despite the fact Turrijos’ son, Martin, is President of Panama, but Martin is very, unfortunately, unlike his father, very closely tied in with this oligarchy.

Terry Lane: So the point that you make is that even though the treaty that was negotiated by Carter and Turrijos is still in force, in fact, de facto, the United States now has control of the Panama Canal Zone again.

John Perkins: Exactly. Yes, if you control the political machine of a country, it doesn’t really matter what the treaties say, does it.

Terry Lane: Well one of the interesting things you say John, that I hadn’t heard of, but perhaps is better known in the Northern Hemisphere than in the South, was that the Panamanians contemplated building another canal, a sea-level canal using Japanese money and technology, and that this was anathema to the United States.

John Perkins: Well yes, the current canal revolves around a lock system and the largest ships in the world can’t go through there, including US aircraft carriers. And so the idea was to build a sea-level canal that could take all ships. And the Japanese came in with a very strong proposal that they would finance it, and if they financed it of course they would want to build it. This was extremely disturbing to us in the United States that the Japanese would suddenly have such a strong influence on Panama and also that their construction companies would get perhaps the biggest construction job of the century. It was particularly disturbing to organisations like Bechtel, and some of our other engineering companies, and they wield a great deal of power in the United States.

Terry Lane: Now tell us a little bit more about Ecuador. It was in Ecuador where you served with the Peace Corps, and you obviously developed an affection for the country and for the indigenous people in Ecuador. What did the President of Ecuador do that he deserved to be assassinated?

John Perkins: Well, first of all, he was the first democratically elected President of Ecuador Jaime Roldos, after a long line of dictators who essentially were US puppets. And when Roldos ran for President, he ran on a very strong nationalistic ticket, opposing oil companies—I shouldn’t say opposing oil companies, but insisting that the oil companies pay a fair share of their revenues back to the Ecuadorian people—and other such nationalistic policies. When he was finally elected, he started implementing these, and so we immediately went to him and tried to convince him to change his mind, and of course not only were we offering him substantial rewards if he changed his mind, and came around to our way of thinking, but also we were reminding him of what had happened to Arbens in Guatemala, who the CIA overthrew, and Allende, as you mentioned in Chile, who was killed in the process, and a number of others. But Roldos wouldn’t come around. He introduced a Hydrocarbons Act, which was going to slap very heavy taxes on oil companies and, again, this would set a precedent that we didn’t want to see happening in that hemisphere or anywhere else for that matter.

Terry Lane: And he was killed by blowing up his helicopter.

John Perkins: Correct.

Terry Lane: And in the case of Turrijos, he was killed by blowing up his aeroplane.

John Perkins: That’s correct also. Just three months after Roldos.

Terry Lane: Now, John, even though you were working for Mayne, a private company, you had been recruited by the National Security Agency—how did the various agencies communicate with each other, the government agencies, the private companies, and so on—how did they keep track on what you were doing?

John Perkins: Well, you know, at the very highest levels of all these organisations, the people constantly are jumping back and forth, at least in the United States, we call it the Revolving Door Policy. So I mean for instance now you can look at a person like Condoleezza Rice who was very high up in the oil industry, and now is high up in government, or Cheney or Bush himself, or Rumsfeld or any of them, and this isn’t just true under Republican regimes, it’s also true under Democratic regimes. So at the highest level of our big corporations and our government and our banks, these are all the same people, so they’re actually sometimes just communicating with themselves, or their buddies, who they’ve known all their lives who are in this business. So at the highest level it’s done on that kind of what we’d call the Old Boy Network system. On the lower levels like the level where I was operating, it’s much less formal. I was told by Claudine what I needed to do to make things work, and I was well rewarded when I did what I was supposed to do, and as I explain in the book, my predecessor, or actually a man who I worked with in Indonesia, refused to go along with the system, and he was fired. He refused to come up with the phony forecasts, the high forecasts, and he was fired. And I replaced him, and it was very clear what I was supposed to do. So I didn’t have to communicate directly with my equivalent at the World Bank, I just had to produce the reports that would justify them giving out the big loans.

Terry Lane: I was surprised to read the other day that Dick Cheney, although vice-president of the United States of America, is still on the payroll at Halliburton.

John Perkins: That surprised you, huh?

Terry Lane: Well what amused me was the legal fiction that’s used that he is being paid ‘deferred remuneration’, as though somehow that safeguards his integrity.

John Perkins: Deferred remuneration—isn’t that an interesting one, yes.

Terry Lane: It’s a good one, that one. Now John, it was not the case that all of the countries where you operated were poor, because probably your most spectacular success, I think this is the way you would see it and write about it in the book, was in Saudi Arabia, and so tell us what you worked on in Saudi Arabia and the part played in it by goats.

John Perkins: Well, Saudi Arabia, that a great example. The idea was it didn’t have to be poor countries, we wanted to get countries into our empire, and we wanted to get money by which our big companies could develop projects in these countries. And so Saudi Arabia now in the early ’70s was part of OPEC, which imposed this embargo basically on oil. And here in the United States we had cars backed up at gas stations for miles, trying to get gas, and we were afraid there was going to be another Depression like the one of ’29. So the US Treasury Department came to me and other economic hitmen, and said, ‘Look, you know, we can’t allow OPEC to hold us up for ransom any more. You’ve got to come up with a system whereby this will never happen again.’ Well I was in Saudi Arabia and saw this herd of goats, wandering around the streets of Riyadh, the capital city. Here was the capital city of what perhaps was the wealthiest nation in the world at the time, per capita anyway, and there were these goats. And I asked my driver what they were doing, and he said, ‘Oh, they’re the garbage collectors. No self-respecting Saudi would pick up garbage.’ So people were just throwing garbage out the door and the goats were eating it.

At the same time, this country is now becoming very wealthy, some of the princes of Saudi Arabia are bringing guests there, and they’re bringing foreign contractors and they’re taking great pride in this country. So the goats became an embarrassment for them. And I realised that herein lay kind of solution, that Saudi Arabia wanted to modernise at least some of its people, it’s wealthiest people, and so this led us to work up this deal with the House of Saud, the Royal Family, whereby they would send most of the money they made from selling oil around the world, back to the United States to be invested in government securities here. Our Treasury Department would then use the interest, which ultimately amounted to trillions of dollars, to hire US companies to build, to modernise Saudi Arabia. One of the first things they did was get rid of the goats and replace them with a garbage collection system, of big, shiny trucks. And also we built desalinisation plants, power plants, ports, in fact we built huge whole cities, modern cities out of the desert.

The other aspects of this agreement were that the House of Saud would guarantee to keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us and we would guarantee to keep the House of Saud in power. And this whole system worked, and has worked very well up until these current times, except in the process of course, it’s angered a great many Muslims around the world, including Osama bin Laden, who deeply resent this act that their most sacred sites, Mecca and Medina, are now being surrounded by Westernised cities, petrochemical plants and McDonalds et cetera.

Terry Lane: You suggest in the book, John, that Saddam Hussein could have had the same deal if he’d been prepared to accept it.

John Perkins: There’s no question. After we were so successful in Saudi Arabia, we went in to Saddam Hussein and tried to convince him to do the same thing, and of course in the ’80s, the United States and the world community poured billions of dollars into Iraq. We lent them billions of dollars, we gave them aeroplanes, jet fighters, tanks, to fight the Iranians. At the same time, we economic hitmen were trying to bring Saddam around. But he wouldn’t buy. So our second line of defence are the jackals, the CIA-sanctioned assassins who we’d used with Roldos and Turrijos and Allende and others. But the jackals were unable to take out Saddam Hussein, his security was too good, he had too many look-alike doubles. And so the step of last resort is to send in the military, which of course we did in 1991, destroying his military. We did not want to take out Saddam himself, he was a powerful strong-man, he was a good deterrent against the Iranians, and so we kept him in power, but we figured that we’d sufficiently chastised him by destroying his military that now in the 1990s the economic hitmen could go in and bring him around.

However, once again, they failed, as did the jackals. And so finally the US military went in and took him out.

Terry Lane: And John, you finish the book on a sombre note. If the oil-producing states and Japan and China decide that they want their IOUs that the United States has undertaken, if they want their IOUs paid out in Euros, then the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

John Perkins: Well, that certainly is a possibility, and it’s another reason why we had to take out Saddam in the end, because he was threatening to do that. If OPEC should decide to go with the Euro, we’d be in deep trouble, because the United States is the single largest debtor nation in the world today. As long as the US dollar is sort of the standard world currency we’re okay, because we print dollars. But if the Euro, or some other currency became the standard world currency—and OPEC could make that happen—and our creditors decided to call in their debt, we’d be in very serious trouble.

Terry Lane: Now you say that when you first talked about writing the ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman, you were bribed in a subtle way to drop the project. How did that happen?

John Perkins: Well yes. Legally speaking it wasn’t a bribe but another large consulting firm, Stone and Webster of Boston, got wind of what I was doing and offered me a job as consultant, letting me know that I wouldn’t have to do much work for them at all, and I would be paid, it ended up, about half a million dollars, but the one condition was I mustn’t write any books about this business that we’re in. And so this is how these things are done, that legally speaking I was not bribed, I was hired as a consultant, and that’s legal. And so often, things are done this way, they’re not actual bribes, but in fact they’re incredible inducements.

Terry Lane: Why did you decide to stop taking the money and write the book?

John Perkins: Well it was 9/11. Gee, I was in the Amazon on 9/11 with the indigenous people who I’d now begun working with again to try to help them out of the trouble I’d gotten them into. But shortly after that, I went up to Ground Zero, and as I stood there looking down at it, that smouldering pit, I knew that I had to come clean. I knew that the American people had to know what we’re doing in the world. Most Americans believe that our foreign aid is altruistic. It isn’t for the most part. And they don’t understand how angry it’s making people at the way that we’re exploiting people around the world. And I realised as I stood there, at that pit at Ground Zero, that Americans need to understand what’s going on. And I really feel that if we understand it, or when we understand it, we’ll demand change. And it’s amazing, when people start really demanding change, we really get it, it happens. So I knew I had to write that book, and I had to do it for my daughter, who’s now 23 years old, and her brothers and sisters around the world.

Terry Lane: John, now that you’ve written the book, have there been any attempts made to discredit you?

John Perkins: I’m not aware of any serious attempts to discredit me, certainly there’s been a lot of discussion and debate around the book. It’s been on The New York Times bestseller list for I think about five months, and every other major bestseller list, and mainly what’s happened is the mainstream American press has ignored it, as have the politicians. Although it’s been on the bestseller list, newspapers like The New York Times haven’t even reviewed it or talked about it, and yet it’s reaching this huge public. It’s now been printed in 16, 17 languages. It’s getting tremendous reaction. It was the No.1 on Amazon and in Germany a couple of weeks ago, it may still be. It’s getting tremendous discussion around it, and the most common letter that I receive, email, people keep telling me, ‘I suspected this sort of thing was going on, but whenever I talked about it, I was accused of being crazy or paranoid, and so I stopped talking about it. Now I’ve read your book, I know I’m not crazy or paranoid. I’m not only going to talk about it but I’m going to do something about it.’

Terry Lane: One last question, John. In this week in which we are talking, Tony Blair has been in Washington trying to persuade George Bush to forgive the debts of African nations. Now that either means that Tony Blair is naive and doesn’t know what’s going on, or that he has some other scheme in mind. What do you think is the truth?

John Perkins: Well it’s pure speculation on my part Terry, I’m not involved in this business any more and I have no inside information, but I suspect it’s pretty darn good politics, for one thing. You know, Blair’s just won the election, he’s certainly one of the stumbling blocks has been that he was too close to Bush, and now he’s taking an opposite step. And anybody looking at this world, knows that Africa’s in terrible, terrible trouble. Ten thousand children die every single day in Africa, just in Africa, from hunger or hunger-related diseases. Ten thousand children. You know, that’s three times as many as died at 9/11. Terrible things are going on in Africa. It needs our help, and I’m grateful to Blair that he’s doing this, and I’m very ashamed of my own country for not stepping up the plate and doing a lot more to help the Africans. But it’s typical, because most of Africa doesn’t have a lot of resources to offer us of the kinds we’re looking for today, like the oil of the Middle East or Venezuela, or Ecuador, places like that. So we tend to ignore those parts of the world that don’t fit in with the realm of what we’re looking for in our empire, unfortunately.

Terry Lane: John, thank you very much for your time.

John Perkins: My pleasure Terry, keep up your good work of informing the public. This is what’s most important in the world today.

Terry Lane: John Perkins, talking about his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, New York Times bestseller, as Mr Perkins himself said, and it’s published by Berritt-Koehler in the United States, and is to be republished in paperback by Penguin.

Also the book that we referred to earlier when I was talking to Matthew Simmons is a book which has been published in the United States, but as far as we know is not yet available in Australia. It’s called Twilight in the Desert – The coming Saudi oil shock and the world economy.

Guests on this program:

John Perkins
a self-confessed economic hitman

Publications:
The Confessions of an economic hitman
Author: John Perkins
Publisher: Distributed in Australia by Woodslane ISBN 1-57675-301-8 (published by Berrett-Koehler)

Woodslane

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Protected: Harry Potter an Instrument of Torture?

Posted in Uncategorized on June 27, 2005|

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Harry Potter an Instrument of Torture?

Posted in Uncategorized on June 27, 2005| 2 Comments »

Is listening to Harry Potter a form of torture? Well it seems the authorities in Guantanamo Bay believe they can crack some of the prisoners in Camp X-Ray by forcing them to listen to readings of Harry Potter. I’m not a fan myself, but it can’t be that bad.

Novel ‘torture’ riles detainees
June 27, 2005

GUANTANAMO BAY: US military guards are taking extraordinary new measures to make terror suspect detainees confess at the controversial Camp X-Ray base in Cuba. Interrogrators at the base where Australian David Hicks is held are spending hours reading Harry Potter books to the inmates in an effort to crack them.

The bizarre punishment was revealed yesterday by US politicians who toured the prison compound and reported conditions there have improved. The politicians witnessed interrogations, inspected cells and ate the same lunch of chicken with orange sauce, rice and okra given to detainees. They watched interrogators grilling three individual terror suspects including one session where a female interrogator took the unusual approach to wear down a detainee – reading a Harry Potter book aloud for hours. The detainee turned his back and put his hands over his ears.

In another session, they quizzed a man who defence officials said was a Saudi national and admitted al-Qaeda member who was picked up in Afghanistan and knew nine of the September 11 hijackers. UN investigators have cited “persistent and credible” reports of “serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees”. But the politicians reported none of the interrogators touched detainees, backing White House claims they are well treated.

The last statement in the article beggars belief, but then this piece was from a Murdoch propaganda tabloid, but really … Of course the politicians didn’t witness any of the detainees being tortured or abused. It doesn’t mean that they haven’t been.

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