A wave of new computer attacks makes it necessary to try to restart my computer to update my security system. I never know whether I will be able to get back to this site or continue writing. I will always try to do so. January 23, 2008 at 5:31 P.M.
My essay on "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" was vandalized overnight at my MSN group. I have made corrections this morning. January 29, 2008 at 12:47 P.M. I am blocking:
http://view.atdmt/IWC/iview/msnnkquz00500...
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001300x250...
Telephone calls received from: 410-774-8018 at 10:43 A.M. on January 29, 2008. (See "What is it like to be tortured?")
Writing is a daily struggle against hackers, viruses, and other obstacles to self-expression, producing alterations, defacements, and destruction of my written work. The illegality -- even criminality -- of N.J. government efforts to suppress speech is not a concern for the authorities in that jurisdiction. The same men and women, I believe, who are entrusted with enforcing the Constitution are complicit in the violation of its most cherished provisions, such as the First Amendment. This is to desecrate the graves of the men and women who have fought to preserve our Constitutional liberties. People in N.J. government presume to judge and comment on my "ethics," even as they lack any sense of ethical obligation or legality themselves. If they did possess even minimal decency, they could not engage in these censorship efforts.
"The editor of a newspaper who said he was detained by the police in September sued the Police Department on Wednesday, saying that his rights were violated when officers demanded that he hand over photogrpahs of a crime scene and handcuffed him to a bench when he refused."
"... A police official who came to the scene asked the photographer about his immigration status, violating a state directive that prevents local law enforcement officers from asking the immigration status of witnesses to crimes. In a statement released on Wednesday, the police director Garry F. McCarthy, said that in response to the photographer's allegations, the department had started a 'more comprehensive training program' and had disciplined the police official, Deputy Chief Samuel A. DeMaio."
This still looks like a good faith mistake from a police official. On the other hand, a judge asking such questions or senior officials should be held to a higher standard and disciplined or removed for violating them. The concern arising from this incident is the chilling effect on First Amendment rights. Intimidation of journalists resulting from such police tactics is not unforeseeable.
"The journalists were taken to a police station, according to the lawsuit. When Mr. Lima asked that the camera be returned, he was told he would have to give the police all the copies of the photos taken at the crime scene, according to the suit. He refused, and a police officer handcuffed him to a bench for about half an hour" -- this photographer is a person who committed no crime -- "but did not charge him, Mr. Lima says in the lawsuit."
Notice the resolution of the incident:
"He said he was released only after he accepted the advice of a Municipal Council member for the area, Augusto Amador, who told him to give the police the photos."
Kareem Fahim, "Newark Editor Sues Police, Charging Rights Violation," in The New York Times, January 24, 2008, at p. B7.
If police do not want an incident covered or are subjects of unflattering coverage, they simply seize the journalist, imprison him or her, and confiscate his or her camera. Much the same is true in many societies today. This sort of understandable response by police officials to possible gentle criticisms of corpses in the streets of their cities are prohibited under the American Constitution. This prohibition of censorship is (evidently) unknown to an elected official in New Jersey, who is no doubt a lawyer specializing in Constitutional issues.
Keep an eye on the spacing of paragraphs in this essay and notice the "errors" that will be inserted in the text, routinely, as part of a continuing effort to induce collapse, through frustrations, together with the suppression of so-called "radical" speech. Defenses of the U.S. Constitution are now called "radical speech." Power is always offended by anyone's independence in thought and deed. (One new "error" inserted and corrected.) Quite a few people in N.J. law and politics are driven by a frightening will to power that can only be described as hideous and haunting when it is experienced "up close and personal."
We no longer live in a society that is concerned to protect individual freedom and social equity. The failure to recognize the violations of autonomy and privacy that are part of increased security measures that are simply taken for granted is shocking, also inexplicable. What happened to this country?
9/11 is no answer to these complaints. The horrors that I describe long predate that terrible Tuesday. Government gets my DNA if I commit a minor traffic infraction. My earnings, bank accounts, credit card purchases, movie viewing and library choices are monitored by government, without judicial supervision, under new legislation. Much the same occurred prior to the collapse of the Twin Towers, often illegally. Post-9/11, these horrors have reached a new level of Orwellian ominousness.
Judges have always known this sort of government overreaching takes place, even as they disregard or pretend not to know of it. Internet visits are monitored for millions of people. In N.J., for example, psychobabblers spouting drivel are secretly authorized to gather information to be used against individuals -- in violation of Constitutional guarantees and their own professional oaths -- information usually accompanied by analyses worthy of dim-witted adolescents (that is, analyses typical of lawyers and persons untrained in the "healing arts"), that are accepted as authoritative and unchallenged by judges.
What happened to rights to confrontation and cross-examination, or even notice? Victims of such government information-gathering or tortures are not afforded an opportunity to respond to accusations of which they are unaware and expert analyses whose imbecility the victims are not permitted to reveal through cross-examination. For such therapists and their judicial bedmates to speak to me of "ethics" is to enter the realm of the surreal.
Americans were shocked after Watergate to learn that their governments lie. Today, people would be astonished to discover an American or any government that tells the truth. I am particularly saddened and angry to discover sadism and pleasure in cruelty among persons who call themselves "Jews." How is this possible less than one hundred years after the grotesque experiments in the death camps by Mengele and his medical "colleagues"? How is it possible that you, DEBORAH T. PORITZ, and you, TERRY TUCHIN, are co-conspirators to the violation of human beings' fundamental rights through subjection of persons to "experimental methods" of control, to secret and unsought "experiments," including hypnosis, that are really only means of extracting information from victims who are often permanently damaged? How can you use the Constitution as toilet paper? Is your only answer to remove or supply an extra letter from a word in this essay? Or to alter the spacing of my paragraphs? (A new "error" was inserted and corrected in this paragraph over the weekend. February 4, 2008 at 10:35 A.M.)
Victims learning of experiments to which they were subjected under false pretenses or without consent -- even as recently as 1998 or later -- called them "evil, compared them to 'Nazi experiments,' and said they were 'reminiscent of abuses from the psych wards of the gaslight era.' If a person is going through enormous suffering already, and then a doctor induces physical [or psychological] suffering on top of that, isn't that abuse of power?' ..." Robert Whitaker, "The Nuremberg Code Doesn't Apply Here," in Mad in America (Cambridge: Perseus, 2002), p. 246.
Even worse are tortures and experiments imposed on victims (without their consent) by physicians that are used to extract damaging information from victims to be used against them in legal proceedings. Physicians who then lie or cover-up what they have done with the assistance of lawyers and judges long after their victims are involved in legal proceedings of any kind. (See "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.") These actions are taken in disregard for the prohibition of all such conduct that "shocks the conscience" -- in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court in Mapp v. Ohio -- so that evidence procured by such barbaric means is unacceptable, even in criminal cases, and certainly never in civil proceedings. New Jersey says: "We don't care about the U.S. Supreme Court or the Constitution."
The events of the Second World War still hover at the edge of memory, as a Jewish state -- whose survival is a moral necessity for humanity -- sacrifices its ethical uniqueness to pursue policies guaranteed to result in more innocent civilian casualties. Those of us who love Israel and hope for its continued flourishing are puzzled by this horrifying state of affairs. Who would have predicted this atrocity in 1945? Who would have imagined that the children of death camp survivors would be responsible for the sufferings of the Palestinian people: wire fences, shooting of children, a militarized zone? How many crimes by ALL nations are excused by the concern for "security"? Stalin's Soviet Union was "secure." Is that Gulag-like society a model that we wish to emulate in the United States or Israel? Has it already arrived in New Jersey?
The response to these well-documented accusations (see the articles in the "general" and "psychology" sections at Critique) from N.J. intellectuals and legal professionals is apathy. There are lengthy and non-comprehending discussions in elite publications of the latest cinematic blockbusters and summers spent on the beaches of Long Island as global suffering reaches a colossal scale. The self-indulgence and alienation of America's intelligentsia and the focus of many of its privileged members on ephemera is mortifying. The indifference to dehumanization and objectification baffles me as political candidates berate each other over personality issues and p.c. nonsense. The distance between the United States and the rest of the world increases. The need for the cooperation of other countries to prevent future terrorist incidents against Americans also increases, even as that cooperation becomes less likely, every day.
Government always justifies crimes by warnings concerning a "few bad apples." The government tree is rotten and all apples are bad when Constitutional guarantees are discarded in the interest of so-called expediency. Torture becomes a governmental routine for men and women who quickly see their crimes as "unpleasant, but necessary." These are the offenders who usually, secretly, delight in their cruelties. The goal is control -- control of opinions and speech, of the lives of others. All of the following can be said of New Jersey and its victims as well as of Iraq:
"In subjecting randomly selected Iraquis to abuse, American forces are following a well-trodden path, but the type of torture that has been practiced has some distinctive features. Unlike the Russians or the French, who inflicted extremes of physical pain as well, US forces in Iraq appear to be relying on techniques that focus on the application of intense psychological pressure. ... disorientation, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation. [Frustration?] These are all forms of abuse" -- specialties of persons like Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli -- "that would damage any human being, but leading Iraqui males around on dog leashes and covering their heads with women's underwear look like techniques designed specifically in order to attack the prisoner's identity and values. The result is that an indelible image of American depravity has been imprinted on the entire Islamic world."
John Gray, "Power and Vainglory," in Mark Danner, ed., Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004), pp. 49-50. (See "What is it like to be tortured?" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
I am suggesting that when similar tactics are used, secretly, against citizens whose opinions are considered "dangerous" or who are made targets for the solicitation of grievances in civil ethics proceedings -- tactics used either before or long after such proceedings are terminated -- something has gone seriously wrong with the legal system. It should not be necessary for me to argue that it is wrong or inappropriate to obstruct my communicative efforts in a free society -- to destroy my image-posting feature, to delete letters or insert other "errors" in my words and sentences, to force me to make corrections thirty, forty, or fifty times because you don't like what I say. Such tactics make you (not me) a criminal, transforming you into the most rotten of the rotten apples. Where is the outrage on the part of the press or legal profession? Why are people so intimidated? Is the power of the N.J. mafia and political machine so overwhelming? Members of the press and legal profession are in the same political parties determining opportunities for advancement and complicit in these crimes, which have led one state to fiscal catastrophe -- $32 BILLION in debt, 200 + convictions of political operatives and made members of the organization, THEFT OF $100 MILLION OR MORE from local hospitals, the use of ferocious dogs and other documented tortures, corroborated allegations of murder in county jails, widespread corruption among judges indulging in child molestation and porn distribution, corrupt elected officials, tainted New Jersey Supreme Court decisions and lawyers neglecting their obligations to the poor and powerless in a desperate as well as greedy effort to steal money from insurance companies and tax payers. The spectacle can only produce increasing disgust in obervers all over the world. Ethics? Do you speak to me of ethics? (New "errors" were inserted by hackers, overnight, in this text.)
Mark Danner rightly concludes that the "Abu Ghraib photographs and the terrible story that they tell have done great damage to what was left of Americans' moral power in the world, and this is [the] power to inspire hope rather than hatred among Muslims." (p. 42.) New Jersey's residents and perhaps persons living in other parts of the country are increasingly trapped in a Guantanamo-like archipelago, where civil liberties flicker in and out of existence for undisclosed reasons.
My experience of torture and forced encounters with inhuman sadists enjoying secretly inflicting wounds on victims is something no one expects to live through within America's borders. These horrors are routine aspects of the lives of millions of incarcerated men and women in the United States. Each time that you see an "error" inserted in these texts or alterations in the spacing of these paragraphs, allow these thoughts and warnings to drift back into your consciousness, think of these "errors" inserted in my work as wounds inflicted not only on me, but also on the American Constitution.
Today, I happen to be the victim; tomorrow, it will be you or your child, or your favorite writer and newspaper. Adlai Stevenson, a Democrat, recognized that "carelessness about security is dangerous." However, Stevenson went on to say that: "carelessness about our freedom is also dangerous." Security as what?
