bump
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/us/more-federal-agencies-are-using-undercover-operations.html?_r=0More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover OperationsBy ERIC LICHTBLAU and WILLIAM M. ARKINNOV. 15, 2014
WASHINGTON — The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with
officers
from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare
recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret
out wrongdoing, records and interviews show....
| - - - -
NSA Data Mining - Prism Prison - Verizon - Snowden Whistleblower
http://lorinovsreport.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/gulag-inside-a-stasi-prison/Inside a Stasi Prison...
Hohenshonhausen
Prison was once one of the most dreaded of Stasi prisons in the Eastern
Bloc until it finally shut its doors in 1990. Between 1951 and 1989 thousands of prisoners were imprisoned in this horrible place built by the Communist regime.
Officially the place did not exist and it did not appear on maps of the time. Instead the area where the prison is located was simply left blank.
Stasi Wardens who ran this place of evil
constantly devised extreme techniques for interrogation
in order to extract from prisoners the information they wanted.
And the majority of prisoners had committed no crimes at all.
Their
only crime was rejecting the Communist State and its tyranny and
injustice! This place was a prison for political prisoners.
Prisoners were never told where they were and they were sealed off from the rest of the world.
They had no clue what was happening outside of the prison walls and
they were kept in strict isolation so that they came to know their lives
only existed due to the mercy of the cruel and inhumane Communist
State.
The prison was located in Berlin, East Germany. The
compoud was large and inside everything was very “sanitary” perhaps in
an effort by the Stasi to wash away their secret guilt.
Most locals in the area knew it was a Stasi prison but said nothing out of fear that they themselves might end up inside its walls. Ah yes, fear….the great comrade of regimes of tyranny.
This prison once housed some of the most noted political dissidents in East Germany who opposed the GDR government.
The mission of this prison was to “destabilize” inmates to the point that they felt absolutely powerless over anything.
And
the Stasi were very successful in doing just that! They sought to
break each prisoner down completely by ANY means. Interrogations
in this pit of evil were very very cruel and dark.
It was
not unusual for inmates to be interrogated for months both day and night
by trained tortures in the “finer” techniques of human evil and cruelty.
Torture was freqently employed.
One could sit in his cell and hear the sounds of the jackboots coming
down the hall and you’d know they were coming for you. This place
was a hell on earth! A living nightmare without end! Oh but
it was not alone for in the days when the Communists and Socialists
ruled Eastern Europe and Russia places like this were common!
Secret but of course!
Rubber padded rooms, various “medical”
equipment, and reliable instruments of torture filled this place and
others like it. Cold white walls were the decor and all else was
very bland. Tyrants love the bland. They absolutely hate
joyful colors or anything that reminds them of life being a joy!
Gray, white, bland, puke! That’s what tyrants like!
Foreboding guard towers dotted the high gray walls and this was a place
from which there was no escape outside of being a corpse inside a pine
box.
...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9ndfHhR7oFieldwork Doc Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen
Published on Sep 5, 2012
Short documentary on the process of doing anthropological fieldwork research among former
GDR political prisoners who now guide
tours in the former Stasi prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen in which they used to be imprisoned.
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2012/04/18/how-bush-and-cheney-used-a-stasi-school-for-torture/How Bush And Cheney Used A Stasi School For Torture Apr 18 2012 @ 12:18pm
...
And
so we are beginning to see glimmers of legal accountability from Europe
for the war crimes perpetrated by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
The EU long ago reported the existence of torture sites in Poland and Romania,
and one of the EU investigators of these war crimes was former
Solidarity member, Józef Pinior. He insists he saw something important:
Pinior
has always claimed that, during his investigations, he was told about a
document signed by Leszek Miller, Poland’s Prime Minister at the time
the
CIA prison was in operation, providing information regulating
the operations of the prison – in a military intelligence training base in Stare Kiejkuty in north eastern Poland – including information about how, if necessary, to deal with corpses inside the facility.
My italics (but this isn't the only formal recognition of deaths in the torture archipelago).
We
know, because even the Pentagon has confirmed, that several prisoners
held under the Bush-Cheney administration were tortured to death.
That those running the program knew that the techniques were brutal
enough to risk occasional deaths of the victims adds one extra layer of
criminality and evil to the process. The case in Poland appears to have
been slowed but not halted by the prosecutors, aware of where it might
lead. But one nugget will surely strike home in Poland, as told by
Adam
Krzykowski, a journalist for Polish public TV, and the first reporter
to provide proof of the landing in Poland of a specific rendition plane:Off the record,
Wojciech
Czuchnowski and I also obtained information about the location where
people suspected of terrorism and kidnapped by the CIA were detained, on
the premises of the so-called spy school in Stare Kiejkuty in the
Mazury region, about 20 km from the airport in Szymany, where planes
landed which were used by the CIA. We were also informed about the existence of another relevant building,
a two-storey villa — once named as “Marcus Wolf Villa” in honour of the founder of the East German intelligence service — which appeared to have been used as a back office, and may have included housing for the interrogators.
It
seems that both the villa and the presumed prison building were located
in a specific section of the grounds occupied by the spy school, which
was separate from the rest and even more heavily guarded.Isn't there something grotesquely appropriate in that
Bush and Cheney, in importing into the US the torture techniques of
totalitarian regimes, used one building named in honor of the founder of
the East German Stasi? They remain war criminals, and
the rule of law in America remains unenforced by the Obama administration on the core issue of torture.
..
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2012/04/17/guest-post-polish-journalist-discusses-the-ongoing-investigation-into-the-cias-torture-prison-in-poland/Guest Post: Polish Journalist Discusses the
Ongoing Investigation into the CIA’s Torture Prison in Poland 17.4.12
Since
November 2005, when the Washington Post first reported that the CIA had
held “high-value detainees” in its “war on terror” in secret prisons in
eastern Europe, and Human Rights Watch then revealed that
prisons were located in Poland and Romania,
concerned politicians and organizations have worked hard to expose the
truth about these prisons (and another that was later discovered in
Lithuania).
No one in a position of authority in these countries admitted that these prisons had existed,
but important work confirming their existence was done within the EU
and the Council of Europe, and of great significance, in June 2006 and
June 2007, were two Council of Europe reports (2007 PDF), and a European
Parliament report, in January 2007 (PDF). In the 2007 CoE report,
Swiss Senator Dick Marty concluded that, after two years’ research and
interviews with over 30 current and former members of the intelligence
services in the United States and Europe, stated that he had enough
“evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did
exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania.” Marty also identified both sites, and explained how
the flights were disguised using fake flight plans.
One of the MEPs who worked on the EU investigation was
Józef Pinior, a former member of the Solidarity movement,
who was an MEP from 2004 to 2009, and was first a member, and then the
Vice-Chair of the Subcommittee of Human Rights. Pinior has always
claimed that, during his investigations, he was told about a document
signed by Leszek Miller, Poland’s Prime Minister at the time the CIA
prison was in operation, providing information regulating the operations
of the prison – in a military intelligence training base in Stare
Kiejkuty in north eastern Poland – including information about how, if
necessary, to deal with corpses inside the facility.
...
Within Poland, Pinior was ridiculed for his statements at the time, although, as the years have passed,
it has become increasingly obvious that his detractors were desperate
to hide their knowledge of, or involvement in a project as shameful as
the torture prison that they allowed the CIA to operate on Polish soil, and sensible people now recognize the importance of the stand that he took.
...
We
had already obtained conclusive evidence to that effect a year ago —
the flight records from the airport’s control tower, which had vanished a
few years earlier under strange circumstances, as well as the hard disk
from one of the computers, which I had managed to get hold of, and from
which the data appeared to have been meticulously erased. I had handed
over that evidence to the prosecution, and the process of retrieving
information from the hard disk is still ongoing.
After
the prison was closed, the villa was renovated, which destroyed any
biological traces that might have given clues as to the persons who had
stayed there. A few months before his death,
Janusz
Kochanowski, the Civil Liberties Ombudsman who died in the Smoleńsk
presidential plane crash on April 10, 2010, confirmed this to me. ...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/9643392/Smolensk-plane-crash-explosives-remnants-found-on-aircraft.htmlSmolensk plane crash: 'explosives remnants found on aircraft' Prosecutors
in Poland have been forced to deny reports that traces of explosives
have been found on aircraft remnants from the Smolensk plane crash that
claimed the lives of the Polish president and 95 others in 2010.
...
By Matthew Day, Warsaw
3:33PM GMT 30 Oct 2012
Rzeczpospolita,
a leading Polish newspaper, said it has seen a report from Poland's
Central Forensic Laboratory and Central Bureau of Investigation saying
experts found traces of TNT and nitroglycerine on numerous bits of the wrecked Tupolev Tu-154 including 30 seats and sections of fuselage.
...
[ Collective = Corporation !!! ] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fwQv5h7Lq8&feature=player_detailpage#t=1644That Was the GDR - A History of the Other Germany 1 of 7 -
I Was a Citizen of the GDR | - - - - - -
Way back machine to 1989 - A generation of Romanians lived with a boot
on their necks with the Romanian secret police, called Siguranța
Statului.
Founded on August 30, 1948, with
help from the Soviet NKVD, the Securitate was abolished in December
1989, shortly after President Nicolae Ceaușescu was ousted and executed
With today's sigint how is today's NSA's security net any different then the Stasi?
.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsRQP7TifMERomanian Dictator Nicolae and Elena ceausescu executed. December 25, 1989 
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-02/news/mn-1906_1_secret-policeEx-Romanian Secret Police on Trial : East Bloc: They are among the 21 defendants accused of stealing and burning corpses of 40 protesters.
March 02, 1990
...
Official figures released at the hearing showed
94 people died in Timisoara during the pro-democracy demonstrations, 300 others were badly wounded and 23 simply disappeared.The
21 defendants--former Securitate officers, senior police officials and
two Bucharest cemetery supervisors--were led into the dock wearing
beige-and-brown striped uniforms, the dress of convicts. Their heads
were shaved
The most senior Securitate officer on trial is Gen.
Emil Macri, head of the security police's counterintelligence. He was
sent from Bucharest to Timisoara by Ceausescu to quell the pro-democracy
demonstrations, military prosecutor Mihai Radulescu said.
He said Macri's
first
orders on arriving in Timisoara were effectively to isolate the city of
320,000 from the rest of the world. All roads around the city were
blocked off, foreigners were barred and all telephone links were cut.The 21 face charges of complicity in genocide and assisting in genocide, and all face maximum terms of life imprisonment if found guilty by the three-man military tribunal.
Reports
that thousands of people had been killed by the Securitate in Timisoara
in mid-December spread around the country, triggering the revolution.
The initial figures were grossly exaggerated, but there were gasps in
court today as prosecutors described how
the bodies of 40
demonstrators had been disposed of. The corpses were reportedly stolen,
cremated and their ashes tipped down a drain....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escuNicolae Ceaușescu (Romanian pronunciation: [nikoˈla.e t͡ʃe̯a.uˈʃesku]; 26 January 1918[1] –
25 December 1989)
was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the
Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the
country's last Communist leader. He was also the country's head of state
from 1967 to 1989
...
Ceaușescu’s regime collapsed
after he ordered his security forces to fire on antigovernment
demonstrators in the city of Timișoara on 17 December 1989. The demonstrations spread to Bucharest and became known as
the Romanian Revolution, which was the only violent overthrow of a Communist government during the revolutions of 1989.
Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, fled the capital in a helicopter but were captured by the armed forces.
On
25 December the couple were hastily tried and convicted by a special
military tribunal on charges of mass murder in a two-hour court session.
Ceaușescu and his wife were then shot by a firing squadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecuritateThe Securitate was, in proportion to Romania's population, one of the largest secret police forces in the Eastern bloc.
The first budget of the Securitate in 1948 stipulated a number of 4,641
positions, of which 3,549 were filled by February 1949: 64% were
workers, 4% peasants, 28% clerks, 2% persons of unspecified origin, and
2% intellectuals.[citation needed]
By 1951, the Securitate's staff had increased fivefold, while in January 1956, the Securitate had 25,468 employees.[2]
Under the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Securitate employed some 11,000 agents and had a half-million informers for a country with a population of 22 million by 1985.
Under Ceaușescu, the Securitate was one of the most brutal secret police forces in the world, responsible for the
arrests, torture and deaths of thousands of people...
In the 1980s,
the
Securitate launched a massive campaign to stamp out dissent in Romania,
manipulating the country's population with vicious rumors (such as
supposed contacts with Western intelligence agencies), machinations,
frameups, public denunciations, encouraging conflict between segments of
the population, public humiliation of dissidents, toughened censorship
and the repression of even the smallest gestures of independence by
intellectuals. Often the term "intellectual" was used
by the Securitate to describe dissidents with higher education, such as
college and university students, writers, directors and scientists who
opposed the philosophy of the Communist party.
Assassinations were also used to silence dissent, such as the attempt to kill
high-ranking
defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, who received two death sentences from
Romania in 1978, and on whose head Ceauşescu decreed a bounty of two
million US dollars. Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Gaddafi each added one more million dollars to the reward.[5] In the 1980s,
Securitate officials allegedly hired Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa.[6]
Forced
entry into homes and offices and the planting of microphones was
another tactic the Securitate used to extract information from the
general population.
Telephone
conversations were routinely monitored, and all internal and
international fax and telex communications were intercepted.
After
coal miners' unions went on strike and several leaders died
prematurely, it was later discovered that Securitate doctors had
subjected them to five-minute chest X-rays in an attempt to have them
develop cancer.[7] After birth rates fell, Securitate agents were placed
in gynecological wards while regular pregnancy tests were made
mandatory for women of child-bearing age, with severe penalties for
anyone who was found to have terminated a pregnancy.[7]
The Securitate's presence was so ubiquitous that it was believed one out of four Romanians was an informer. In truth, the Securitate deployed
one agent or informer for every 43 Romanians, which was still large enough to make it all but impossible for dissidents to organize.
The regime deliberately fostered this sense of ubiquity, believing that
the fear of being watched was sufficient to bend the people to
Ceausescu's will.
For example, one shadow group
of dissidents limited itself to only three families; any more than that
would have attracted Securitate attention.[8] In truth,
the East German Stasi was even more ubiquitous than the Securitate;
counting informers, the Stasi had one spy for every 6.5 East Germanshttp://thevieweast.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/inside-ceausescus-romania-an-unquestionably-efficient-police-state/Inside Ceausescu’s Romania: An Unquestionably Efficient Police State
In
1989, when peaceful revolutions were sweeping across Eastern Europe,
the fall of communism in Romania was marked by a higher level of
violence and bloodshed than elsewhere in the region. This was due, at
least in part, to the repressive nature of the regime established by
Nicolae Ceausescu (1965-1989) and his loyal secret police, the
Securitate. Estimates suggest that the Securitate had a higher
proportion of representatives per population than anywhere else in the
communist block and that by the 1980s as many as one person in thirty
had been recruited as a Securitate informer.
In this article, guest author Nelson Duque considers the deadly combination of Ceausescu’s distinctive style of
dynastic socialism with the establishment of a
brutally efficient police state, which enabled him to maintain an
iron grip on power until the dying days of communist rule across Eastern Europe. Nelson briefly highlights the implications of some of
the
key policies enforced by Ceausescu and emphasises the key role of the
Securitate in successfully ensuring the lack of any significant
opposition, through the creation of a climate of fear and brutality.
Inside Ceausescu’s Romania:
An Unquestionably Efficent Police State.
By Nelson Duque.
...
Inside Ceausescu’s Police State 
Ceausescu’s Romania was a unique case in Socialist Eastern Europe.
From
1965, Ceausescu endeavoured to establish a dynastic form of Socialism;
heavily reliant on his own ‘cult of personality’ with power concentrated
in the hands of his close relatives including his wife Elena and their
son Nicu. Ben Fowkes sees this relationship between family and
state as detrimental to society, describing Ceausescu as ‘both incurably
Stalinist and fiercely repressive’ (Ben Fowkes, The rise and fall of
Communism in Eastern Europe, Macmillan: 1995).
Unsurprisingly,
the secret police were some of Ceausescu’s most loyal agents, carrying
out his will during the 23 years of his rule. During this time far reaching policies such as
widespread austerity measures, ‘systematisation’ and pro-natalism were all enforced by the Securitate. These policies illustrate prime examples of how the
Ceausescus’
directly interfered in and influenced the lives of ordinary Romanians
and of how the Stasi employed insidious and brutal tactics to ensure a
lack of opposition.
[ Oh the Stasi kept the East Germans "safe" from Democracy for decades: ] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StasiThe Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS),
commonly known as the Stasi (abbreviation German: Staatssicherheit, literally State Security), was
the official state security service of the German Democratic Republic or GDR, colloquially known as East Germany. The
Stasi was founded on 8 February 1950 It has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies to ever have existed.
. The Stasi was headquartered in East Berlin, with an extensive complex
in Berlin-Lichtenberg and several smaller facilities throughout the
city.
The
Stasi motto was "Schild und Schwert der Partei" (Shield and Sword of
the Party), that is the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED).One
of its main tasks was spying on the population, mainly through a vast
network of citizens turned informants, and fighting any opposition by
overt and covert measures including hidden psychological destruction of
dissidents (Zersetzung, literally meaning decomposition).
It also worked as an intelligence agency abroad,
the respective division Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung was responsible for
both espionage and for conducting covert operations in foreign
countries. Under its long-time head Markus Wolf it gained a reputation
as one of the most effective intelligence agencies of the Cold War.
Numerous Stasi officials were prosecuted for their crimes after 1990. After German reunification, the
surveillance files that the Stasi had maintained for millions of East Germans
were laid open, so that any citizen could inspect their personal file
on request; these files are now maintained by the Federal Commissioner
for the Stasi Archives.
...
Recovery of the Stasi filesDuring
the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, Stasi offices were overrun by enraged
citizens, but not before the Stasi destroyed a number of documents (approximately 5%)[63] consisting of, by one calculation,
1 billion sheets of paper.[1]
Storming the Stasi headquartersAs
the GDR began to fall, the Stasi did as well. They began to destroy the
extensive files that they had kept, both by hand and with the use of
shredders.When these activities became known, a protest erupted in front of the Stasi headquarters.[64]
In
the evening of 15 January 1990, a large crowd of people formed outside
the gates in order to stop the destruction of personal files. In their minds, this information should have been available to them and also have been used to
punish those who had taken part in Stasi actions.
The large group of protesters grew and grew until they were able to overcome the police and gain entry into the complex.
The
protesters became violent and destructive as they smashed doors and
windows, threw furniture, and trampled portraits of Erich Honecker,
leader of the GDR. Among the destructive public were officers working
for the West German government, as well as former Stasi collaborators
seeking to destroy documentshttp://www.stasimuseum.de/en/engeschichte.htm
On
the evening of January 15th in 1990 demonstrators took possession of
the headquarters of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) in
Berlin-Lichtenberg. The Berliner Bürgerkomitee (Berlin Committee of
Citizens) started here the closure and disorganisation of the MfS. One
week later the Zentrale Runde Tisch (The Central Round Table) decided
that a memorial place and research centre should be established in the
former House No. 1 in the Stasi-Headquarters
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/koehler-stasi.html Stasi - The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By JOHN O. KOEHLER
Westview Press
...
With extraordinary speed and political resolve, the divided nation was reunified a year later.
The
collapse of the despotic regime was total. It was a euphoric time for
Germans, but reunification also produced a new national dilemma. Nazi war crimes were still being tried in West Germany, forty-six years after World War II.
Suddenly
the German government was faced with demands that the communist
officials who had ordered, executed, and abetted crimes against their
own people—crimes that were as brutal as those perpetrated by their Nazi predecessors—also be prosecuted.
The
people of the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), the German
Democratic Republic, as the state had called itself for forty years,
were clamoring for instant revenge. Their wrath was directed
primarily against the country's communist rulers—the upper echelon of
the Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED), the Socialist Unity Party.
The tens of thousands of second-echelon party functionaries who had
enriched themselves at the expense of their cocitizens were also prime
targets for retribution.
Particularly
singled out were the former members of the Stasi, the East German
secret police, who previously had considered themselves the "shield and
sword" of the party. When the regime collapsed, the Stasi had 102,000
full-time officers and noncommissioned personnel on its rolls, including
11,000 members of the ministry's own special guards regiment. Between
1950 and 1989, a total of 274,000 persons served in the Stasi. The people's ire was running equally strong against the regular Stasi informers, the inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs).
By 1995, 174,000 had been identified as IMs, or 2.5 percent of the total population between the ages of 18 and 60. Researchers
were aghast when they found that about 10,000 IMs, or roughly 6 percent
of the total, had not yet reached the age of 18. Since many records were destroyed, the exact number of IMs probably will never be determined; but
500,000 was cited as a realistic figure. Former Colonel Rainer Wiegand, who served in the Stasi counterintelligence directorate, estimated that
the figure could go as high as 2 million, if occasional stool pigeons were included.
"The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people,"
according to Simon Wiesenthal of Vienna, Austria, who has been hunting
Nazi criminals for half a century. "The Gestapo had 40,000 officials
watching a country of 80 million, while
the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million." One might add that the Nazi terror lasted only twelve years, whereas
the
Stasi had four decades in which to perfect its machinery of oppression,
espionage, and international terrorism and subversion. To
ensure that the people would become and remain submissive, East German
communist leaders saturated their realm with more spies than had any
other totalitarian government in recent history.
The
Soviet Union's KGB employed about 480,000 full-time agents to oversee a
nation of 280 million, which means there was one agent per 5,830
citizens. Using Wiesenthal's figures for the Nazi Gestapo, there was one
officer for 2,000 people.
The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least
one spy watching every 66 citizens!
When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result
is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens.
It
would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi
informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. ...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-23/stasi-prison-exposes-terror-trauma-in-berlin-compound.htmlStasi Prison Exposes Terror, Trauma in Berlin Compound By Catherine Hickley Oct 23, 2013 4:00 PM
A corridor of cells inside the
Hohenschoenhausen prison of East Germany, where as many as
40,000 dissidents were kept captive by the secret police between 1945 and 1990. Former prisoners today give guided tours of the site
...
East
Germany’s communist-era secret police, known as the Stasi, produced a
heavy leather-bound volume embossed with gold in 1970 to mark its 20th
anniversary.
Packed with advice for interrogating dissidents, it
includes a chapter on how to prevent prison suicides. Black-and-white
photos warn of hidden razor blades and makeshift nooses.
The book is in a new exhibition at
Hohenschoenhausen prison in eastern Berlin, a place where 40,000
political captives were interrogated and tortured as Stasi agents wrung
confessions out of them and cooked up grounds for indictments.
...
The exhibition points out that
not a single Hohenschoenhausen interrogator has served time in jail.
...
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2010/10/phillip-lohoefener/House of Horror: Inside the Infamous Stasi PrisonBy Pete Brook
10.12.10
Welcome to your padded cell ....Feared
for the physical and psychological torture within, Hohenschönhausen
(commonly known as the Stasi Prison) was the operational hub for the
Ministry State Security, or Stasi, in communist East Germany, or GDR.The
prison helped coordinate the detention and interrogation of the GDR’s
political prisoners from 1951 to 1989. When the Berlin Wall came down,
it is estimated that more than 91,000 full-time Stasi employees and
189,000 unofficial collaborators were maintaining close, repressive
surveillance over the East German populace.
...
http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op-ed/allegations-of-sbu-horrors-recall-cruel-stasi-meth-112911.html...
In
the Stasi prison, it was routine to interrogate suspects at night, from
10 p.m. until dawn. Then the suspect would be sent back to the cell,
where they would stand all day. They used a
conveyer method for interrogation, when three or four investigators
questioned the victim without a break. Three or four days later, pretty
much anyone broke down and signed any confession or papers shoved in
front of them.
The SBU, of course, denies that
they are doing anything remotely similar to this. Volodymyr Rakytsky,
deputy head of the SBU, told the press that Cherneha’s accusations are
false.
“I would like to tell you that sometimes we talk with the
criminals, but what we do is offer them coffee. The conversation that
follows is absolutely lenient,” he said.
Vera Lengsfeld, an East German from Berlin who landed in Stasi prison for trying to organize a protest in 1988,
remembers vividly what the coffee-drinking tactic is like that the Stasi also used more than two decades ago.
The officer would invite you for a coffee and a chat after several days
of humiliation, beatings and pressure, when you’re so desperate that
you’re about to stop feeling like a human being. The interrogator made sure they knew your favorite drink.
When Lengsfeld entered his office, she found him drinking this beverage
– lemon tea – and for her the aroma was like a blow in the stomach.
The
officer used a respectful form of address when he spoke to her, which
was a vivid contrast to the usual address by the number that was
assigned to her on arrival. The number was a psychological blow in the
first days of imprisonment.
He didn’t offer her a drink
straight away. First, she was told that the investigator is on her side,
that he is just doing his job and that if she cooperates she will
receive certain privileges.
“This was just another form of psychological pressure,” she recalls. She was sentenced to six months in prison then. She was 37.
In modern Germany, those pressure tactics of the secret service have become a matter of study by the historians| - - - --
from drudge:
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/195899-feinstein-metadata-program-here-to-stayJanuary 19, 2014, 11:09 am
Feinstein: Metadata program here to staySenate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman
Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.) predicted Sunday that lawmakers who favored
shutting down the bulk collection of telephone metadata would not be
successful in their efforts as Congress weighs potential reforms to the nation’s controversial intelligence programs.
“I don’t believe so,” Feinstein said during an appearance on NBC's “Meet the Press.” “
The president has very clearly said that he wants to keep the capability… So I think we would agree with him. I know a dominant majority of the — everybody, virtually,
except two or three, on the Senate Intelligence Committee would agree with that.”
...
http://en.ria.ru/world/20130607/181547342.html
US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (R) meets with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (L) in America in 1942
WASHINGTON, June 6 (RIA Novosti) – A new book claiming the White House of wartime
US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was rife with Soviet spies and sympathizers has American conservatives waxing lyrical as liberals heap scorn on the work as unadulterated fantasy.
...
According to West,
a key Soviet sympathizer in the White House was Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s closest advisers. In an interview with
Soviet-born Israeli researcher Ariel Cohen of the conservative Heritage Foundation, she described Hopkins as “the greatest unsung villain that we’ve never heard of.”
West
accuses Hopkins, who she says was so close to Roosevelt that he was
often referred to as his “co-president”, of treachery including tipping
off the Soviet embassy in Washington that the FBI was listening in on
its diplomats’ conversations; and telling Soviet World War II Foreign
Minister Vyacheslav Molotov “how to talk to Roosevelt to persuade him to
do what Stalin wanted – invade northern France.”
| - - -
http://www.pbs.org/behindcloseddoors/in-depth/stalins-spies.htmlStalin’s Spies and Secret Police
Stalin, Molotov, L.M. Kaganovich, and other Communist officials from a German exhibitUnder Joseph Stalin and his supporters,
the
Soviet Union’s secret police and intelligence agencies that were first
formed during the Russian Civil War grew into vast networks, allowing
Stalin to control every aspect of life in the USSR.
These organizations reinforced Stalin’s grip on power and squashed anti-Soviet activities,
both at home and in the territories the USSR occupied. During World War
II, Stalin’s operatives uncovered Axis battle plans that helped Soviet
generals thwart Adolf Hitler and stole the secrets of the United States’
atomic bomb program, one of the greatest intelligence coups of the
twentieth century.
Stalin welcomed classified information from friends and foes alike.[ The enemy is within ]
FDR and Harry Hopkinshttp://www.aim.org/media-monitor/the-treachery-of-harry-hopkins/The Treachery Of Harry Hopkins Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid —
October 8, 1999 ...
But they have all overlooked the biggest news in the Andrew book?
New
evidence that proves that Harry Hopkins, the closest and most
influential adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War
II, was a Soviet agent.
Andrew had reported this in a
book he had written in 1990 based on information provided by Oleg
Gordievsky, a high-level KGB officer who had also been smuggled out of
the Soviet Union by British intelligence. Gordievsky reported that
Iskhak Ahkmerov, the KGB officer who controlled the illegal Soviet agents in the U.S. during the war, had said that
Hopkins was “the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States.”Hopkins
secret meetings with Ahkmerov were not known to anyone until Gordievsky
revealed them. They began before Hopkins made a trip to Moscow in July
1941, a month after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. His insistence
that aid be extended to Stalin with no strings attached justifies
Ahkmerov?s evaluation of his performance.
There is
evidence that Hopkins even went so far as to arrange for the shipment of
uranium to the Soviet Union to help them develop the atomic bomb.
...
| - - - - - -
from drudge:
http://www.cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/matt-vespa/nsa-official-we-are-now-police-state 'We Are Now a Police State' December 19, 2013 - 10:54 AM
Last year, high-ranking NSA official Bill Binney said, “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”
Now, Binney says that the U.S. has already become a full-blown police state.
Binney
told Washington’s Blog on Wednesday that: “The main use of the
collection from these [NSA spying] programs [is] for law enforcement.
[See the 2 slides below].” -
...
“This is a total corruption of the justice system not only in our country but around the world. The source of the info is at the bottom of each slide. This is a totalitarian process – means we are now in a police state.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/12/former-top-nsa-official-now-police-state.html32-year NSA Veteran Who Created Mass Surveillance System Says Government Use of Data Gathered Through Spying
“Is a Totalitarian Process”Bill Binney is the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information.
A 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency,
Binney was the senior technical director within the agency and managed
thousands of NSA employees.
...
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/12/27/interview-with-nsa-whistleblower-bill-binney-afraid-were-spreading-secret-government-around-world/Interview with NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney: Afraid We’re Spreading Secret Government Around WorldBy: Kevin Gosztola Friday December 27, 2013 3:05 pm
The FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency, and law enforcement, along with the NSA, are
collecting information on Americans and then using that information to arrest people.
“Parallel
construction” is then used to “fabricate evidence” that is substituted
with evidence that is subsequently collected legally and through mechanisms that have traditionally been an accepted part of criminal investigations.
In former senior NSA employee and whistleblower William Binney’s view, this is the “real problem.”
It is occurring without a warrant and they can bring this information into court. He calls it the
“planned program perjury policy right out of the Department of Justice.” “They’re lying to the courts,” Binney explains. The government knows that they are lying when they say here is the evidence used to arrest these people.
The information is also being shared with “foreign counterparts.”
They’re telling “foreign counterparts” this is the evidence used to
arrest people but the “counterparts” do not get to see the data because
it is from NSA collection.
Essentially, this is
the United States subverting not only its own justice system but justice systems around the world.
...
On
“60 Minutes,” NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander claimed “the 9/11
hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were in touch with an al
Qaeda safe house in Yemen. The NSA did not know their calls were coming
from California, as they would today.”
Binney said, based on
his experience, this would not be true. Every call has a unique number
to it that can tell someone where the call is coming from, like an area
code. A presidential review group released a
report recommending private companies store the data instead of having
the NSA collect it. Binney does not think the government or businesses
should have any of this data. It all should be destroyed. Binney said the government has tens of thousands of implants on the network, on routers, servers or actual computers. This can tell routers how to send material. They can put a code into a router so that when a particular number is seen
a copy of certain data is forwarded to the NSA.
“If
you control the routers, you can control how all the information in the
entire network flows,” Binney declared. This is true for servers and
Internet service providers as well. ......
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Topic: Death by Gun Control - Democide (Read 16050 times)