text:
TORTURE, TRYING TO DEFEND THE INDEFENSIBLE; Torture Cheerleaders Back In the News
10 Torture Myths Debunked
The so-called "debate" about whether torture helped to keep us safe is reemerging, as the former chief of CIA clandestine operations Jose Rodriguez is about to publish a book claiming that the use of "enhanced interrogation" practices including water-boarding saved lives.
"We made some al-Qaeda terrorists with American blood on their hands uncomfortable for a few days," Rodriguez said in an interview with CBS News' "60 Minutes" that will air on Sunday, April 29. "I am very secure in what we did and am very confident that what we did saved American lives."
Torture is also back in the news because Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats are producing a report stating that torture isn't effective in producing information.
We will quote the top American military and intelligence interrogation experts to debunk the following 10 common myths about torture:
1. Torture is a partisan issue
2. Waterboarding isn't torture
3. Torture increases our national security
4. Torture is necessary to break hardened terrorists
5. Torture is necessary in a "ticking time bomb" situation
6. The "enhanced" interrogation techniques were aimed at producing actionable intelligence
7. Torture helped to get Bin Laden
8. Torture provided valuable details regarding 9/11
9. Only bad guys were tortured
10. America doesn't torture any more
Myth # 1: Torture Is a Partisan Issue
George Washington – the father of our country before there were any parties – was against torture. Torture is not leftwing or rightwing … it is simply un-American.
And both Democrats and Republicans approved torture. As we noted in 2009:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy told the New York Times:
The temptation to abuse powers in a crisis is bipartisan and the [proposed truth] commission's review should include the role of Democrats in Congress in approving the Bush policies.
As I have previously written, Nancy Pelosi was secretly briefed on torture many, many years ago, and yet did nothing to stop those unlawful programs. Indeed, she egged the torturers on. Pelosi was also secretly tipped off about warrantless spying on Americans.
And Pelosi hid from the 9/11 Commission and the American people the fact that the interrogations of 9/11 suspects were videotaped, and that the alleged "confessions" of those held at Gitmo were wholly unreliable. She could have stopped the whole farce cold — but chose to go along with it.
Leading democrats Harman, Rockefeller and others in Congress were also war criminals, accessories after the fact, and co-conspirators.
And as shown below, many conservative military and intelligence officers oppose torture.
Myth # 2: Waterboarding Isn't Torture
Yes, waterboarding is torture:
- President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Malcolm Nance (an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence), Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples (the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency) and many other interrogation experts and high-level politicians say that waterboarding is torture
- The United States has always considered waterboarding to be a crime of torture, including when the Japanese did it in WWII (and see this)
- Everyone claiming waterboarding is not torture has changed their tune as soon as they were exposed to even a small dose of it themselves. See this, this and this
(In addition, a lot more than waterboarding was used on detainees. See this, this and this.)
Myth # 3: Torture Increases Our National Security
Torture apologists say that torture is a necessary evil for protecting our national security. In fact, torture reduces our national security:
- The head of all U.S. intelligence said:
"The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world," [Director of National Intelligence Dennis] Blair said in the statement. "The damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."
- One of the top military interrogators said that torture by Americans of innocent Iraqis is the main reason that foreign fighters started fighting against Americans in Iraq in the first place (and see this).
- Former counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke says that America's indefinite detention without trial and abuse of prisoners is a leading Al Qaeda recruiting tool
- A former FBI interrogator — who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects — says categorically that torture actually turns people into terrorists
- A 30-year veteran of CIA's operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks, says:
Torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.
- A former US Air Force interrogator said that torture just creates more terrorists
- A former U.S. interrogator and counterintelligence agent, and Afghanistan veteran said, "Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It's used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo."
- The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously stated:
"The administration's policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies … strengthened the hand of our enemies."
- Two professors of political science have demonstrated that torture increases, rather than decreases, terrorism
- General Petraeus said that torture hurts our national security
- The reporter who broke Iran-Contra and other stories says that torture actually helped Al Qaeda, by giving false leads to the U.S. which diverted its military, intelligence and economic resources into wild goose chases
- Raw Story says that torture might have resulted in false terror alerts
- Hundreds of other experts have said the same things
Myth # 4: Torture Is Necessary to Break Hardened Terrorists
We've repeatedly noted that virtually all of the top interrogation experts – both conservatives and liberals (except for those trying to escape war crimes prosecution) – say that torture doesn't work:
- Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1says:
"Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."
- The C.I.A.'s 1963 interrogation manual stated:
Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex 'admissions' that take still longer to disprove.
- According to the Washington Post, the CIA's top spy – Michael Sulick, head of the CIA's National Clandestine Service – said that the spy agency has seen no fall-off in intelligence since waterboarding was banned by the Obama administration. "I don't think we've suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint."
- The CIA's own Inspector General wrote that waterboarding was not "efficacious" in producing information
- A 30-year veteran of CIA's operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks (Milton Bearden) says(as quoted by senior CIA agent and Presidential briefer Ray McGovern):
It is irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible story that would convince critics at home and abroad that this torture has served some useful purpose. *** The old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn't work ….
- A former high-level CIA officer (Philip Giraldi) states:
Many governments that have routinely tortured to obtain information have abandoned the practice when they discovered that other approaches actually worked better for extracting information. Israel prohibited torturing Palestinian terrorist suspects in 1999. Even the German Gestapo stopped torturing French resistance captives when it determined that treating prisoners well actually produced more and better intelligence.
- Another former high-level CIA official (Bob Baer) says:
And torture — I just don't think it really works … you don't get the truth. What happens when you torture people is, they figure out what you want to hear and they tell you.
- Michael Scheuer, formerly a senior CIA official in the Counter-Terrorism Center, says:
"I personally think that any information gotten through extreme methods of torture would probably be pretty useless because it would be someone telling you what you wanted to hear."
- A retired C.I.A. officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002 (Glenn L. Carle) says:
[Coercive techniques] didn't provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information…Everyone was deeply concerned and most felt it was un-American and did not work."
- A former top Air Force interrogator who led the team that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has conducted hundreds of interrogations of high ranking Al Qaida members and supervising more than one thousand, and wrote a book called How to Break a Terrorist writes:
As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse. But that's only the past.Somewhere in the world there are other young Muslims who have joined Al Qaida because we tortured and abused prisoners. These men will certainly carry out future attacks against Americans, either in Iraq, Afghanistan, or possibly even here. And that's not to mention numerous other Muslims who support Al Qaida, either financially or in other ways, because they are outraged that the United States tortured and abused Muslim prisoners. In addition, torture and abuse has made us less safe because detainees are less likely to cooperate during interrogations if they don't trust us. I know from having conducted hundreds of interrogations of high ranking Al Qaida members and supervising more than one thousand, that when a captured Al Qaida member sees us live up to our stated principles they are more willing to negotiate and cooperate with us. When we torture or abuse them, it hardens their resolve and reaffirms why they picked up arms.
He also says:
[Torture is] extremely ineffective, and it's counter-productive to what we're trying to accomplish.When we torture somebody, it hardens their resolve … The information that you get is unreliable. … And even if you do get reliable information, you're able to stop a terrorist attack, al Qaeda's then going to use the fact that we torture people to recruit new members.
And he repeats:
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
He saidlast week:
They don't want to talk about the long term consequences that cost the lives of Americans…. The way the U.S. treated its prisoners "was al-Qaeda's number-one recruiting tool and brought in thousands of foreign fighters who killed American soldiers.
- The FBI interrogators who actually interviewed some of the 9/11 suspects say torture didn't work
- Another FBI interrogator of 9/11 suspects said:
I was in the middle of this, and it's not true that these [aggressive] techniques were effective
- A third former FBI interrogator — who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects — says categorically that torture does not help collect intelligence. On the other hand he says that torture actually turns people into terrorists
- A declassified FBI e-mail dated May 10, 2004, regarding interrogation at Guantanamo states "[we] explained to [the Department of Defense], FBI has been successful for many years obtaining confessions via non-confrontational interviewing techniques." (see also this)
- The FBI warned military interrogators in 2003 that enhanced interrogation techniques are "of questionable effectiveness" and cited a "lack of evidence of [enhanced techniques'] success.
- "When long-time FBI director Mueller was asked whether any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through "enhanced techniques", he responded "I don't believe that has been the case."
- The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously found that torture doesn't work, stating:
The administration's policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.
- The military agency which actually provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects warned the Pentagon in 2002 that those techniques would produce "unreliable information."
- General Petraeus says that torture is unnecessary
- Retired 4-star General Barry McCaffrey – who Schwarzkopf called he hero of Desert Storm – agrees
- The number 2 terrorism expert for the State Department says torture doesn't work, and just creates more terrorists.
- Former Navy Judge Advocate General Admiral John Hutson says:
Fundamentally, those kinds of techniques are ineffective. If the goal is to gain actionable intelligence, and it is, and if that's important, and it is, then we have to use the techniques that are most effective. Torture is the technique of choice of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough.
He also says:
Another objection is that torture doesn't work. All the literature and experts say that if we really want usable information, we should go exactly the opposite way and try to gain the trust and confidence of the prisoners.
- Army Colonel Stuart Herrington – a military intelligence specialist who interrogated generals under the command of Saddam Hussein and evaluated US detention operations at Guantánamo – notesthat the process of obtaining information is hampered, not helped, by practices such as "slapping someone in the face and stripping them naked". Herrington and other former US military interrogators say:
We know from experience that it is very difficult to elicit information from a detainee who has been abused. The abuse often only strengthens their resolve and makes it that much harder for an interrogator to find a way to elicit useful information.
- Major General Thomas Romig, former Army JAG, said:
If you torture somebody, they'll tell you anything. I don't know anybody that is good at interrogation, has done it a lot, that will say that that's an effective means of getting information. … So I don't think it's effective.
- Brigadier General David R. Irvine, retired Army Reserve strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner interrogation and military law for 18 years with the Sixth Army Intelligence School, says torture doesn't work
- Former counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke says that America's indefinite detention without trial and abuse of prisoners is a leading Al Qaeda recruiting tool.
- A former U.S. interrogator and counterintelligence agent, and Afghanistan veteransaid,
Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It's used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo.
- The first head of the Department of Homeland Security – Tom Ridge – says we were wrong to torture.The former British intelligence chairman says that waterboarding didn't stop terror plots.
- A spokesman for the National Security Council (Tommy Vietor) says:
The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003.
- The Marines weren't keen on torture, either
- As Vanity Fair reports:
In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts…Here, they say, far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading "information" that boosted the administration's argument for invading Iraq.
- Neuroscientists have found that torture physically and chemically interferes with the prisoner's ability to tell the truth
- An Army psychologist – Major Paul Burney, Army's Behavior Science Consulting Team psychologist – said (page 78 & 83):
was stressed to me time and time again that psychological investigations have proven that harsh interrogations do not work. At best it will get you information that a prisoner thinks you want to hear to make the interrogation stop, but that information is strongly likely to be false.*** Interrogation techniques that rely on physical or adverse consequences are likely to garner inaccurate information and create an increased level of resistance…There is no evidence that the level of fear or discomfort evoked by a given technique has any consistent correlation to the volume or quality of information obtained.
- An expert on resisting torture – Terrence Russell, JPRA's manager for research and development and a SERE specialist – said (page 209):
History has shown us that physical pressures are not effective for compelling an individual to give information or to do something' and are not effective for gaining accurate, actionable intelligence.
Indeed, it has been known for hundreds of years that torture doesn't work:
- In the ancient Far East, torture was used as a way to intimidate the population into obedience (rather than a method for gaining information)
- As a former CIA analyst notes:
During the Inquisition there were many confessed witches, and many others were named by those tortured as other witches. Unsurprisingly, when these new claimed witches were tortured, they also confessed. Confirmation of some statement made under torture, when that confirmation is extracted by another case of torture, is invalid information and cannot be trusted.
- Top American World War 2 interrogators got more information using chess or Ping-Pong instead of torture than those who use torture are getting today
- The head of Britain's wartime interrogation center in London said:
"Violence is taboo. Not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information."
- The national security adviser to Vice President George H.W. Bush (Donald P. Gregg) wrote:
During wartime service with the CIA in Vietnam from 1970 to 1972, I was in charge of intelligence operations in the 10 provinces surrounding Saigon. One of my tasks was to prevent rocket attacks on Saigon's port.Keeping Saigon safe required human intelligence, most often from captured prisoners. I had a running debate about how North Vietnamese prisoners should be treated with the South Vietnamese colonel who conducted interrogations. This colonel routinely tortured prisoners, producing a flood of information, much of it totally false. I argued for better treatment and pressed for key prisoners to be turned over to the CIA, where humane interrogation methods were the rule – and more accurate intelligence was the result. The colonel finally relented and turned over a battered prisoner to me, saying, "This man knows a lot, but he will not talk to me." We treated the prisoner's wounds, reunited him with his family, and allowed him to make his first visit to Saigon. Surprised by the city's affluence, he said he would tell us anything we asked. The result was a flood of actionable intelligence that allowed us to disrupt planned operations, including rocket attacks against Saigon. Admittedly, it would be hard to make a story from nearly 40 years ago into a definitive case study. But there is a useful reminder here. The key to successful interrogation is for the interrogator – even as he controls the situation – to recognize a prisoner's humanity, to understand his culture, background and language. Torture makes this impossible. There's a sad twist here. Cheney forgets that the Bush administration followed this approach with some success. A high-value prisoner subjected to patient interrogation by an Arabic-speaking FBI agent yielded highly useful information, including the final word on Iraq's weapons programs. His name was Saddam Hussein.
- Top interrogators got information from a high-level Al Qaeda suspects through building rapport, even if they hated the person they were interrogating by treating them as human
Senator John McCain explains, based upon his own years of torture:
I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence but often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. Often, information provided to stop the torture is deliberately misleading.
Myth # 5: Torture Is Necessary In a "Ticking Time Bomb" Situation
According to the experts, torture is unnecessary even to prevent "ticking time bombs" from exploding (see this, this and this).
Indeed, a top expert says that torture would fail in a real 'ticking time-bomb' situation
Myth # 6: The "Enhanced" Techniques Were At Least Aimed at Producing Actionable Intelligence
The torture techniques used were Communist techniques specifically designed to produce false confessions:
As I notedin 2009:
Senator Levin, in commenting on the Senate Armed Services Committee report on torture declassified today, drops the following bombshell:
With last week's release of the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, it is now widely known that Bush administration officials distorted Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape "SERE" training – a legitimate program used by the military to train our troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations – by authorizing abusive techniques from SERE for use in detainee interrogations. Those decisions conveyed the message that abusive treatment was appropriate for detainees in U.S. custody. They were also an affront to the values articulated by General Petraeus. In SERE training, U.S. troops are briefly exposed, in a highly controlled setting, to abusive interrogation techniques used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions. The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. Until recently, the Navy SERE school also used waterboarding. The purpose of the SERE program is to provide U.S. troops who might be captured a taste of the treatment they might face so that they might have a better chance of surviving captivity and resisting abusive and coercive interrogations.
Senator Levin then documents that SERE techniques were deployed as part of an official policy on detainees, and that SERE instructors helped to implement the interrogation programs. The senior Army SERE psychologist warned in 2002 against using SERE training techniques during interrogations in an email to personnel at Guantanamo Bay, because:
[T]he use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects… When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, it is more common for them to resist harder… If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. This will increase the amount of information they tell the interrogator, but it does not mean the information is accurate. In fact, it usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain… Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low. The likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the level of resistance in a detainee is very high… (p. 53).
I also pointed out:
McClatchy fills in some of the details:
Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration… For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there." It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document… When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued."Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . . A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq. "While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." "I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist." Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.
Writing about this today, Paul Krugman says:
Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link. There's a word for this: it's evil.
The Washington Post reported the same year:
Despite what you've seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War. So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a "ticking time bomb" scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: "Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.
I wrote last month:
One of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.
Truth Out reported yesterday:
Jessen's notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a "master" SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD). Kearns and his boss, Roger Aldrich, the head of the Air Force Intelligence's Special Survial Training Program (SSTP), based out of Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, hired Jessen in May 1989. Kearns, who was head of operations at SSTP and trained thousands of service members, said Jessen was brought into the program due to an increase in the number of new SERE courses being taught and "the fact that it required psychological expertise on hand in a full-time basis." Jessen, then the chief of Psychology Service at the US Air Force Survival School, immediately started to work directly with Kearns on "a new course for special mission units (SMUs), which had as its goal individual resistance to terrorist exploitation." The course, known as SV-91, was developed for the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) branch of the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, which acted as the Executive Agent Action Office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jessen's notes formed the basis for one part of SV-91, "Psychological Aspects of Detention." *** Kearns was one of only two officers within DoD qualified to teach all three SERE-related courses within SSTP on a worldwide basis, according to a copy of a 1989 letter written Aldrich, who nominated him officer of the year.
The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered – not just 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar," he said. "What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen's instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to 'reverse-engineer' a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press." *** Jessen wrote that cooperation is the "end goal" of the detainer, who wants the detainee "to see that [the detainer] has 'total' control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.)." *** Kearns said, based on what he has read in declassified government documents and news reports about the role SERE played in the Bush administration's torture program, Jessen clearly "reverse-engineered" his lesson plan and used resistance methods to abuse "war on terror" detainees.
So we have the two main Air Force insiders concerning the genesis of the torture program confirming – with original notes – that the whole purpose of the torture program was to extract false confessions.
Myth # 7: Torture Helped to Get Bin Laden
CIA director Leon Panetta said that torture did not help get Bin Laden. We noted in May:
White House deputy national security advisor John Brennann says that waterboarding did not lead to the death of Bin Laden.
Former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld – who had a big hand in the torture program – agrees:
"The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding."
As does Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein:
Nothing has been found to indicate this came out of Guantanamo. And people were questioned, but there were no positive answers as to the identity of this number one courier.
[Asked whether she considers the Bin Laden killing any kind of "vindication" of torture, Feinstein replied] Absolutely not. I do not. I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted, and in my view, nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used.
[Senator] Lindsey Graham – a vocal proponent of waterboarding– said:
This idea we caught bin Laden because of waterboarding I think is a misstatement. This whole concept of how we caught bin Laden is a lot of work over time by different people and putting the puzzle together. I do not believe this is a time to celebrate waterboarding, I believe this is a time to celebrate hard work.
[T]he New York Times notes:
Glenn L. Carle, a retired C.I.A. officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002, said in a phone interview Tuesday, that coercive techniques "didn't provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information." He said that while some of his colleagues defended the measures, "everyone was deeply concerned and most felt it was un-American and did not work."
"The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003," said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council. "It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound, and reach a judgment that Bin Laden was likely to be living there."
And Huffington Post reports:
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, produced a 263-page report in 2009 on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody in the years following 9/11. He too dismissed the idea that the interrogation techniques used at that time were efficacious. "If they had any information under the Bush administration that could have led to bin Laden it would have been terribly neglectful for them not to use it," Levin noted in an interview on the "Bill Press Show." The confirmation of the courier's significance appears to have come in 2004, from an al Qaeda operative who was not waterboarded: Hassan Ghul.
Dan Froomkin noted that torture actually delayed by years more effective intelligence-gathering methods which would have resulted in finding Bin Laden:
Defenders of the Bush administration's interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago. But that sequence of events — even if true — doesn't demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly. "I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden," said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006. It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier — information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, "they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us," Alexander told The Huffington Post. "We know that they didn't give us everything, because they didn't provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information," he said. In a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment. "Had we handled some of these sources from the beginning, I would like to think that there's a good chance that we would have gotten this information or other information," said Steven Kleinman, a longtime military intelligence officer who has extensively researched, practiced and taught interrogation techniques. "By making a detainee less likely to provide information, and making the information he does provide harder to evaluate, they hindered what we needed to accomplish," said Glenn L. Carle, a retired CIA officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002. *** For Alexander, Kleinman and others, the key takeaway is not just that the torture didn't work, but that it was actually counterproductive. "The question is: What else did KSM have?" Alexander asked. And he's pretty sure he knows the answer: KSM knew the courier's real name, "or he knew who else knew his real name, or he knew how to find him — and he didn't give any of that information," Alexander said. Alexander's book, "Kill or Capture," chronicles how the non-coercive interrogation of a dedicated al Qaeda member led to Zarqawi's capture. "I'm 100 percent confident that a good interrogator would have gotten additional leads" from KSM, Alexander said.
This new scenario hardly supports a defense of torture on the grounds that it's appropriate in "ticking time bomb" scenarios, Alexander said. "Show me an interrogator who says that eight years is a good result."
The ACLU noted Wednesday:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's torture proves McCain's point. Proponents claim his torture led to the identity of Osama bin Laden's courier…. The contention is astonishing because the apparent proof that torture worked is that Mohammed "repeatedly misled [his] interrogators about the courier's identity," and that these lies somehow showed that Mohammed was protecting important information. This false logic is as disturbing as it is dangerous, and it exemplifies the self-fulfilling nature of the torturer's claims. In the end, not even Leon Panetta, the former director of the CIA, believes that torture was responsible for the location of bin Laden.
As we noted last May:
Cheney and Rumsfeld were never very interested in capturing Bin Laden. Their focus was elsewhere. So their revisionist statements about the usefulness of torture for intelligence purposes must be taken with a grain of salt. In reality, their torture program was crafted to justify the Iraq war, not to catch Bin Laden (and see this.)
Myth # 8: Torture Provided Valuable Details of 9/11
Only those who have actually read the 9/11 Commission Report would know that most of the Commission's information about 9/11 came from suspects who were tortured. Specifically, most of the 9/11 Commission Report was based on 3rd hand reports of what people said while being tortured.
But wasn't the information at least accurate? We don't know.
But remember that communist torture techniques specifically crafted to produce false confessions were used. Remember also:
- The FBI interrogators who actually interviewed some of the 9/11 suspects say torture didn't work
- Another FBI interrogator of 9/11 suspects said:
I was in the middle of this, and it's not true that these [aggressive] techniques were effective
- One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ
- 9/11 Mastermind: "During … My Interrogation I Gave A Lot Of False Information In Order To Satisfy What I Believed The Interrogators Wished To Hear"
- The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) – who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry – recently said: "The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened"
- Under torture, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi claimed there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al-Qaida and WMD
Myth # 9: Only Bad Guys Were Tortured
Torture apologists pretend that only the baddest of the bad were tortured. But the truth is different.
As I noted in 2009:
One of the main excuses used to justify torture is that the people being tortured were bloodthirsty terrorists, who would do far worse to us if we didn't stop them. Is that true? Judge for yourself:
- The number two man at the State Department under Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, says that many of those being held at Guantanamo Bay were innocent, and that top Bush administration officials knew that they were innocent. Moreover, he said:
"This philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals–in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot."
(see this and this). Indeed, Wilkerson signed a declaration under penalty of perjury stating that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld covered up the fact that hundreds of innocent men were sent to Guantanamo because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for the war in Iraq and the broader war on terror.
- Many others also state that those tortured were mainly innocent farmers, villagers, or those against whom neighbors held a grudge. Indeed, people received a nice cash reward from the U.S. government for turning people in as "suspected terrorists" (and see this movie)
- The commander of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Janis Karpinski, estimates that 90% of detainees in the prison were innocent
This has been confirmed by the recent release of U.S. military files. As the Guardian reported yesterday:
The US military dossiers, obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian, reveal how … many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment. The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence. Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim. Anyone who was affiliated with Pakistan's national intelligence service, or that had been held as a prisoner in a Taliban jail, or that wore a certain type of watch, was considered a terrorist: US authorities listed the main Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), as a terrorist organisation alongside groups such as al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence. Interrogators were told to regard links to any of these as an indication of terrorist or insurgent activity. *** A number of British nationals and residents were held for years even though US authorities knew they were not Taliban or al-Qaida members. One Briton … was rendered to Guantánamo simply because he had been held in a Taliban prison and was thought to have knowledge of their interrogation techniques. *** Another 17-page file, titled "GTMO matrix of threat indicators for enemy combatants", advises interrogators to look out for signs of terrorist activity ranging from links to a number of mosques around the world, including two in London, to ownership of a particular model of Casio watch. "The Casio was known to be given to the students at al-Qaida bombmaking training courses in Afghanistan," it states. Others were held because they led religious services or drove cabs in certain geographic regions, or because they were Al Jazeera reporters: One man was transferred to the facility "because he was a mullah, who led prayers at Manu mosque in Kandahar province, Afghanistan … which placed him in a position to have special knowledge of the Taliban".
Another prisoner was shipped to the base "because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khowst and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver". The files also reveal that an al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years, partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network. His dossier states that one of the reasons was "to provide information on … the al-Jazeera news network's training programme, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the network's acquisition of a video of UBL [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview with UBL".
In addition:
Myth # 10: America Doesn't Torture Any More
We noted last November that Congress is considering repealing the ban on torture:
The same Senate which today passed a bill allowing indefinite detention of American citizens on American soil for suspicion of being terrorists is now considering a bill to repeal the prohibitions against torture:
The ACLU and over 30 other organizations sent a letter to the Senate asking them to oppose an effort in Congress that threatens to revive the use of torture and other inhumane interrogation techniques. If passed, an amendment introduced by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) to the Defense Authorization bill would roll back torture prevention measures that Congress overwhelmingly approved in the 2005 McCain Anti-Torture Amendment, as well as a 2009 Executive Order on ensuring lawful interrogations. It would also require the administration to create a secret list of approved interrogation techniques in a classified annex to the existing interrogation field manual.
In a related development, republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann renewed her attack on the prohibition of waterboarding and other forms of torture ….
We reported the same month:
Mother Jones notes today that Congress has explicitly authorized rendition, allowing American Citizens on U.S. soil to be sent to other countries which do torture:
A defense spending bill that passed both houses of Congress overwhelmingly and is set to be signed by President Barack Obama as early as this week could make it easier for the government to transfer American terrorist suspects to foreign regimes and security forces. The National Defense Authorization Act (PDF) contains a section that says the president has the power to transfer suspected members and supporters of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or "associated" groups "to the custody or control of the person's country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity." That means if the president determines you're a member or supporter of Al Qaeda or "associated forces," he could order you to be handed over to the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Yemenis ("any other foreign country"), any of their respective security forces, or even the United Nations ("any other foreign entity"). (You can read the relevant section of the law in the document viewer at the end of this article; look for the highlighted annotations.)
[Daphne Eviatar, a lawyer with Human Rights First] adds that there are "a whole lot of scenarios" where the government might want to transfer a suspected terrorist—even a US citizen—to foreign custody. For example, the administration might not want to go through the political mess of determining whether to send a suspect to Gitmo, try him in a military commission, or use the civilian system. The administration might also want to avoid the mandatory habeas corpus review that would come if the US held the suspect itself. In such a case, transferring the suspect to a foreign security force might present an appealing option.
You can read the detention and transfer provisions of the NDAA here …
But even in the absence of such legislation, torture has been continuing:
As I noted in 2009, in a post entitled "Can Nobel Prize Winner Obama At LEAST Stop the Torture?": You may assume that things have changed after President Obama was sworn in. However, the Obama Department of Justice is trying to protect torture memo writer John Yoo.
As constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley notes:
The president literally has gotten onto a plane this evening to go to Norway to accept the Nobel Prize, while his Justice Department is effectively gutting a major part of Nuremberg. The Obama administration is arguing not only that they shouldn't be prosecuted, but it's now saying that you shouldn't even be able to sue them civilly …. It's an international disgrace.
Well, it may be a disgrace, but at least torture isn't continuing under the Obama administration, right?
In fact, many reporters have said that the Bagram prison facility in Afghanistan is worse than Guantanamo ever was.
Moreover, abuse is apparently still occurring there. As Spiegel wrote on September 21, 2009, in an article entitled "Prisoner Abuse Continues at Bagram Prison in Afghanistan":
US President Barack Obama has spoken out against CIA prisoner abuse and wants to close Guantanamo. But he tolerates the existence of Bagram military prison in Afghanistan, where more than 600 people are being held without charge. The facility makes Guantanamo look like a "nice hotel," in the words of one military prosecutor… Bagram is "the forgotten second Guantanamo," says American military law expert Eugene Fidell, a professor at Yale Law School. "But apparently there is a continuing need for this sort of place even under the Obama administration. "From the beginning, "Bagram was worse than Guantanamo," says New York-based attorney Tina Foster, who has argued several cases on behalf of detainee rights in US courts. "Bagram has always been a torture chamber." And what does Obama say? Nothing. He never so much as mentions Bagram in any of his speeches. When discussing America's mistreatment of detainees, he only refers to Guantanamo.
Obama still never mentions Bagram.
Spiegel continues:
From the beginning, Bagram was notorious for the brutal forms of torture employed there. Former inmates report incidents of sleep deprivation, beatings and various forms of sexual humiliation [and rape with sticks]… At least two men died during imprisonment. One of them, a 22-year-old taxi driver named Dilawar, was suspended by his hands from the ceiling for four days, during which US military personnel repeatedly beat his legs. Dilawar died on Dec. 10, 2002. In the autopsy report, a military doctor wrote that the tissue on his legs had basically been "pulpified." As it happens, his interrogators had already known — and later testified — that there was no evidence against Dilawar… However attorney Tina Foster feels that the new initiative is just a cosmetic measure. "There is absolutely no difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration's position with respect to Bagram detainees' rights," she says during an interview with SPIEGEL in her office in the New York borough of Queens.
And see this.
Moreover, Obama is still apparently allowing "rendition flights" – where prisoners are flown to countries which freely torture – to continue. This itself violates the Geneva Convention and the War Crimes Act of 1996. Specifically, to the extent that the U.S. is sending prisoners to other countries for the express purpose of being tortured are true, violation of the war crimes act by the highest officials of our country would be probable. For who else but Obama, Gates and other top officials would have the ability to authorize such flights? How could such a program be undertaken without their knowledge? And how could such a program be anything but the intentional "ordering" of torture, or at least "knowing about it" and "failing to take steps to stop it"?
Finally, Jeremy Scahill – the reporter who broke most of the stories on Blackwater – says that some forms of torture at Guantanamo have continued under Obama, and may even have gotten worse. For example, Scahill points out that:
The Center for Constitutional Rights released a report titled "Conditions of Confinement at Guantánamo: Still In Violation of the Law," which found that abuses continued. In fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were reporting "a ramping up in abuse" since Obama was elected.
As Marjorie Cohen – professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, past president of the National Lawyers Guild – writes at the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy:
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is facing court-martial for leaking military reports and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico brig in Virginia. Each night, he is forced to strip naked and sleep in a gown made of coarse material. He has been made to stand naked in the morning as other inmates walked by and looked. As journalist Lance Tapley documents in his chapter on torture in the supermax prisons in The United States and Torture, solitary confinement can lead to hallucinations and suicide; it is considered to be torture. Manning's forced nudity amounts to humiliating and degrading treatment, in violation of U.S. and international law. Nevertheless, President Barack Obama defended Manning's treatment, saying, "I've actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures . . . are appropriate. They assured me they are." Obama's deference is reminiscent of President George W. Bush, who asked "the most senior legal officers in the U.S. government" to review the interrogation techniques. "They assured me they did not constitute torture," Bush said.
After State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley criticized Manning's conditions of confinement, the White House forced him to resign. Crowley had said the restrictions were "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid." It appears that Washington is more intent on sending a message to would-be whistleblowers than on upholding the laws that prohibit torture and abuse.
Torture is commonplace in countries strongly allied with the United States. Vice President Omar Suleiman, Egypt's intelligence chief, was the lynchpin for Egyptian torture when the CIA sent prisoners to Egypt in its extraordinary rendition program. A former CIA agent observed, "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. 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."
In her chapter in The United States and Torture, New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer cites Egypt as the most common destination for suspects rendered by the United States.
Comment on Global Research Articles on our Facebook page


text:
Jesper Kyd, Cris Velasco and Sascha Dikiciyan Return To Pandora with Explosive Original Music Score
Los Angeles, June 27, 2012 – Award-winning composers Jesper Kyd, Cris Velasco and Sascha Dikiciyan have created the genre-bending musical score for the highly anticipated Role-Playing-Shooter video game Borderlands™ 2 from Gearbox Software and 2K Games. Borderlands 2 is the sequel to the multi-million selling cooperative shooter-looter that combined intense first-person mayhem with role-playing gameplay.
Composers Velasco/Dikiciyan and Kyd were assigned the task of creating a colorful and dynamic music score for Borderlands 2's adrenaline-fuelled combat and diverse atmospheric environments. To accompany players' loot-hunting adventures in the cell-shaded, eclectic world of Pandora, the soundtrack fuses multiple music styles and cutting-edge sonic palettes which exude the multi-faceted personality and thrilling co-op action of Borderlands 2.
Borderlands 2 features all-new characters; skills; imaginative, diverse new environments with unique missions and enemies, and more exciting and fun weapons, equipment and loot than ever before. All of these features come together in a story that takes players to the world of Pandora to take down the notorious Handsome Jack and his corrupt Hyperion Corporation as a solo campaign or with up to four cooperative players.
Borderlands 2 will be available on the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system and Windows-based PC in North America on September 18, 2012 and internationally on September 21, 2012. For more information on Borderlands 2, please visit www.borderlands2.com.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Our collection of women's casual shoes includes Drew's ingenious Plus Fitting System®, which features
two removable insoles for the perfect fit. The line of casual shoes from Drew Shoe includes a style for any use
– from on-the-job durability to leisurely weekend strolls. From the fashionably chic look of the Angie, to the
gorgeous woven design of the Navajo II, Drew Shoe has exactly the casual shoe you need to complete your look
and still have the peace-of-mind that your feet are being pampered and protected. With a pair of women's casual
shoes from Drew Shoe, you will never again be limited in your activities.
To start shopping for
women's casual shoes, click on the items above. You can place your order online or shop at a
retailer near you. If you can't find the women's casual
shoes you're looking for or if you have any questions about our selection of casual shoes, feel free to
contact us. Our friendly and knowledgeable customer service
representatives are happy to assist you.


text:
MSRP: Contour $4.99 and Rectangle $3.99
Do you have a heavy wetter or looking for a nap or night time diaper solution? Don't buy cloth diapers that are too thick to wash clean or never dry completely! You need to increase the absorbency of your favorite cloth diapers the easy way. Tiny Tush Contour Diaper Doublers do all that plus more! Our doublers have 3 layers of thirsty, super-soft 100% organic cotton fabric that is milled specially for Tiny Tush -- they increase the absorbency to your cloth diapers without adding unnecessary bulk. You will love having all this softness against your baby's delicate skin.
The Contour Diaper Doublers work fabulously with all cloth diapers because of the contour shape. Simply lay one on top of your favorite cloth diaper or use alone inside of a diaper cover. When using inside of the diaper cover as an absorbent pad, use one diaper doubler with newborn or an infant and two for older children. You may want to add the third diaper doubler for naps or night time. Tiny Tush Diaper Doublers are flexible enough to use however you need to!
Add a bit of flare to an everyday task with fun colors; natural, green, yellow, orange, and blue. The colored diaper doubler has one side natural color and the other side is the fun color.
Nighttime and Heavy Wetters
Diaper doublers increase the absorbency of a cloth diaper through the center, the wet zone, where most of the absorbency will be needed. Three layers of material allows for more absorbency without being bulky. You will be impressed with the absorbency of this thirsty, trim diaper doubler. Keep your baby dry and still comfortable.
Multiple Uses
It's helpful to have a few doublers around to add absorbency to fitted or any other diaper. For a newborn, a doubler can give plenty of absorbency alone in a diaper cover. Our customers also love cotton diaper doublers as pocket diaper inserts. Either contour or rectangular diaper doublers can be used to stuff pocket diapers. For a really heavy wetter or a toddler, 2-3 doublers can fit inside of most pockets without being too bulky.
Soft Organic Cotton
Tiny Tush diaper doublers are made with exceptional quality organic cotton milled in the USA or with an organic cotton and hemp blend. You will love having all this softness against your baby's skin.
You choose the shape that fits your diapers and works best for your baby. Many customers find that the contour shape, thinner in the center between the legs like an hourglass, gives a trimmer fit. Rectangular diaper doublers are approximately 5" x 12". Contour diaper doublers are 7.25" x 14.5" with the narrow center about 5.25" across.
Diaper Doublers can be washed with cloth diapers and dried in the dryer or hung to dry.
*Prime your Diaper Doubler and other new cloth diapering items prior to first use. See the Care and Use page for more details and tips.


text:
Will Smith is back.
After a three-year hiatus from the big screen – in which he helped successfully launched the showbiz careers Jaden and Willow, his children with wife Jada Pinkett Smith – the most reliable star of summer blockbuster fare of the past 15 years is ready to take the multiplex by storm. Smith's strategically staging his comeback with newly time-traveling, three-dimensional "Men In Black 3," reprising his role as alien-opposing Agent J opposite co-stars Tommy Lee Jones and a Jones-channeling Josh Brolin as the present and past versions of Agent K, respectively. Here's what he has to say on his comeback. technology and the kids today.
On the enduring appeal of the "Men In Black" concept:
"The idea of a secret government organization that polices and monitors alien activity on and off planet earth – that's so unique! You don't say that this movie is just like 'Men in Black,' or like, 'Oh, yeah, that's like…' There's NOTHING that's like 'Men in Black,' whereas you can look at a lot of other movies and compare them to things. 'Men in Black' is a very distinct, very unique thing because it's difficult to have a fantasy comedy that works on that level. They tend to feel not smart, or there's something in the DNA when you try to splice those two things that sort of dissipates. So for me, I was excited by the degree of difficulty – and I haven't worked in three years, so I wanted to put on some shoes that I knew fit."
On shaking up the formula for the third outing:
"We're all 10 years older from the second movie, and different things are important to us in our lives and we're growing. We want to have the same kind of dumb that the first two movies had, the same kind of silly, because there's an appreciation of the silly that the comedy delivers. But it was really important for us also to have some meat to chew on and be able to create something. 'Toy Story 3' did a really great job of advancing it, but then also creating the underlying depth. So if you're going into the third part of something, we felt like it was really important to deliver more emotionally.
On finding that familiar Agent J-Agent K dynamic with Brolin in the black suit instead of Jones:
"That's all Josh Brolin. As actors, when you're in a scene it's like a tennis match: You're going back and forth. Me and Martin [Lawrence] have very different chemistry than me and Tommy Lee Jones. And what you do as an actor is that you try to find the lanes and you develop the chemistry. So I was expecting to make an adjustment from Tommy Lee Jones to Josh Brolin, but Josh studied Tommy so thoroughly that it was almost identical, like just the way that the interactions were in the scene. You make a move, watch the way the other guy goes. It was absolutely stunning. It's crazy because you don't even really notice how good his acting is, because it's so good you're just watching Tommy Lee Jones. You don't realize, 'No. That's Josh Brolin.' People thought that Tommy did the voice for the Josh Brolin character. That's how thoroughly Josh is delivering it."
On making his first 3D film:
"My first concern with being in 3D was my ears, because I could see these things pretty much taking over the whole of the screen! When I first saw it and they were cool, I was like, 'All right – we didn't have me looking like satellite dishes.' But with special effects now you can see anything. There's no limitations with special effects. Probably the last five or six years there's absolutely no limitation of what you can see onscreen anymore. It's funny because the same thing happened with the music business when the music business went to digital, when you could do anything, record any number of tracks. As soon as it exploded it has a weird opposite effect where it gets worse for a while, which is really strange. It's like as soon as you get all the tools to do anything, all of a sudden now the movies aren't as good...I think what [director] Barry [Sonnenfeld] did is that he found the balance of not throwing things at the audience. The 3D is the screen and back. He went for depth, which makes it more pleasing to the eye."
On the breakout role he'll always be remembered for:
"What's crazy for me is that the 'Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' is the biggest thing that I've ever done. When I go around, I'm the freshest prince everywhere around the world. It's just amazing how that television show was really a sort of a stroke of luck. What it does is, because of the amount of outlets for the show, a 9-year-old kid in Moscow watching 'The Fresh Prince' thinks that it's brand new. So when I show up it's as if it's brand new. 'The Fresh Prince' has been a huge gift for me in that sense…Jaden can't figure out how people thought that it was okay for me to wear the clothes that I was wearing. That's his thing. He's like, 'Dude. That shouldn't be on TV.' Willow more gets it. With the kids in the house it's really great for me, because they help me stay aware. They help me stay current and follow trends and things like that. The idea of even something as simple as Instagram is an entirely new outlet. It's like the fans are consuming entertainment differently and if you miss on that you turn into a dinosaur really quickly."
On hearing the footsteps of the young and hungry competition…at home:
"Jaden is probably the one of my kids who looks at me like I'm meat. He's looking across the dinner table at me like, 'I'm coming for you. You just have no idea.' So it was very important for me, having been away [from films] that long for me to come back in a way that I was comfortable and to come back with a project that was kid-friendly. That was something that Eddie Murphy said to me a few years ago: 'Man, if you're lucky enough to be in this business, every 20 years you have to go back and get the kids. Go get the kids every 20 years.' I was looking at 'Dr. Doolittle' and 'The Klumps' and everything, the idea of maturing, and then you go back and drop something [young]. What's great for me is that that target audience is in my house."
On whether time travel holds any personal allure for him
"The thing that I've learned in my extensive study of time travel is that if you change one thing, you change everything. So I am absolutely ecstatic about where my life is right now and so I wouldn't mess with anything. Everything that I've experienced, everything that has gone right or wrong in my mind, has turned out to be all right. I feel like that's the nature of energy: that I get to decide if it was right or wrong, good or bad. My life as I sit here today is absolutely perfect, so I'm not messing with nothing."
Will Smith: Keeping Things Fresh for the Kids With "MIB3"
First movie in three years aims for kids and parents who made the first one a hit
Will Smith is back.


text:
Mark Millar, the creative force behind "Kick-Ass," does love to talk about his work. And occasionally he say things that appear to be factual and of interest.
Most recently Millar was gushing about "Kick-Ass 2: Balls to the Wall," which in May was slated for release in 2012, after the print version runs in the magazine Clint.
"[I]t's gangs going all over New York filming atrocities on their cell phones and putting them on the internet, trying to outdo each other, all at the behest of Red Mist," Millar told Empire. "My idea for Red Mist was to introduce a supervillain that made Heath Ledger's Joker look like Cesar Romero's Joker. He's basically Charles Manson as a supervillain."
U.S. & World
We're big fans of Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who played Red Mist in the original film, but he felt a bit miscast as a super villain. That said, the actor is apparently psyched about the chance to play a full-blown sociopath.
"Chris said to me he hates the fact that people always call him McLovin'. So my aim was to give him a new name for people to call him. And the villain calls himself The Motherf-----. Chris is The Motherf-----, the worst of all supervillains."
But fear not, fans of Dave Lizewski (a.k.a. Kick-Ass): He'll still be the star of the show.
"[W]e continue the story of Dave. ... He forms a gang and what you've got then is all the heroes versus all the villains in a big gangfight."
"Kick-Ass" was great, it's disappointing box-office numbers be damned, and we'll happily wait for the sequel. No matter how much Millar talks about it.


text:
You think we are experiencing a bubble? Sure we are - but in China, everything is bigger – much bigger.
I've just returned from China and made a couple of illuminating visits.
First to Innovation Works. The brain-child of Kai-Fu Lee, Innovation Works is an incubator, Beijing style.
Lee, having been with Apple and Silicon Graphics in the US, Microsoft China and then Google China, Kai-Fu knows a thing or two about identifying, attracting and nurturing talent.
He tells me that they have 120,000 graduates on their database on which to call to help staff the dozens of companies being incubated in his Beijing offices, a few blocks from Beijing University.
Innovation Works houses 400 young people working away at building a wide range of companies. About 30 of these are directly employed by Innovation Works and are called the 'platform team'. These folks (average age I guess about 27/28) are business, finance and marketing graduates whose job it is to attend to the formation, funding, administrating, recruiting for the start-up companies and helping them with their 'go to market' plans.
In fact, they do everything other than build the product itself.
This was how incubators were meant to work during the 'first bubble' of the late 90's and 2000.
The difference – as we all know - is that now the cost of building a product and getting it market tested is a fraction of what it once was AND in China it is a fraction of what it costs in the US or Europe.
Not only is working space extraordinarily cheap but engineers and graduates generally earn 1/5th of their US/Euro counterparts – AND are apparently of high quality and in plentiful supply.
The effect of this is that the $200,000 which Innovation Works invests in these start-ups takes them a very long way indeed. So far that a typical Series A, Kai-Fu tells me, commands a $50m post money Series A.
Yes, that's $50m! I checked twice. Not $15m but $50m.
Given the number of $1bn+ funds which have been raised recently in China [Sequoia etc etc], it is not surprising that VCs aren't much interested in placing a couple of million in a number of start-ups.
During my visit, Chris Evdemon, who runs the incubator, was just finalizing the judging for next crop of start-ups to join the line – following what I understood was a Seedcamp type application and review process.
It was difficult to get a good picture of what all these start-ups were working on and how their evolution may impact on world markets but my impression was that the vast majority (approx 90%) were aimed at the Chinese market – in ecommerce, mobile apps, social, Android development platforms and games.
The latter category being the most likely to be reaching global markets any time soon.
I expect that retaining star talent and building large, meaningful companies will become challenging as it becomes ever easier for talent to get their own backing and the skills required to build serious global businesses go beyond engineering and towards marketing, finance and management.
My second visit was to a relative veteran of the Chinese ecommerce world – Diane Wang, founder and CEO of DH Gate.
DH Gate is a B2B marketplace matching (with a number of important added value elements) SME buyers worldwide to Manufacturers in China.
DHgate.com was founded in early 2004. Before founding DHgate, Diane was one of the founders of Joyo.com, where she successfully led the company through the Internet boom, downturn and revival. After a year of its establishment, Joyo became the top B2C brand in China. Diane was also the Country Marketing Director of Cisco Systems. From 1993 to 1999, Diane was the Marketing Service Manager and Head of Business Development Department for Microsoft (China).
Thus far in her career, Diane has received "Outstanding Woman of China" and "Outstanding Woman of Beijing" awards—two of the highest forms of recognition given to professional women in China.
TAG was fortunate in investing a small amount in DH Gate's $6m Series B round in 2007. At the time its gross monthly trading volume was around $1m. Today its at least 15X that and employs over 700 people.
Its interesting that the Chinese Government, as part of its recently published 5 year plan, has included information technology as a fundamental part of their strategy for stimulating internal demand and as a driver of growth. The focus on infra-structure development is truly astounding and with it will inevitably come very rapid growth.
Driven by ongoing urbanization, improving broadband infrastructure, and an influx of affordable smart devices and applications, China's mass market consumers are starting to take up applications in Internet entertainment, e- commerce, digital content, and mobile Internet.
With an expected 750m netizens by 2015 and the Chinese telecom operators competing to take up broadband speed, and promote 3G wireless data with attractive tariff plans, subsidized smart phones and tablets for consumers the future looks bright for the Chinese technology sector.
[ref Jeffreys Asia Equity Research, April 2011]
Comparing China's adoption of the web to the rest of the world is instructive.
Almost one quarter of everyone on the planet connected to the web is resident in China.
They have twice the web population of the US and 9 times that of the UK- today.
That said, the market to foreign web services is pretty inaccessible (unlike luxury goods)– as Google and others are finding. Local companies are adept at replicating, improving and adapting to their market.


text:
Chanhassen, Mn — Snap Fitness, a franchisor of small 24-hour fitness clubs, is taking its members online with their own Web pages and some new offerings made possible by partnerships with three companies.
"The 24-hour fitness category is becoming more competitive and mature, and in the long run, it will be the innovative concepts that thrive," says Peter Taunton, founder and CEO of Snap Fitness.
The partnerships with Bioceutica, Health Solutions Ltd. and HyperStrike give club members access to a package of customizable, Web-based health and wellness planning tools that supplement the traditional, in-club workout experience, Taunton says.
"Our facilities are staffed 20 to 30 hours a week, so we feel that it's important to give our franchisees tools that are readily available to them and help members meet their fitness and nutritional needs," he says.
Last month, the company launched www.mysnapfitness.com on which members can activate their personal Web page. On this page, they can then access features that allow them to learn their true "health age," build a personal wellness plan, and talk confidentially to health and wellness coaches by phone to prioritize and achieve their health goals. Another option allows members to create customized workouts that can be tracked daily and supported with video tutorials using 3D animation. Members also can track their monthly club attendance for employer or insurance-plan reimbursement. In addition, members can now take a nutritional assessment and tailor meal plans to fit their weight loss goals. This option also allows them to order supplements customized to their unique biochemistry.
The supplement package costs members $69.95 per month, but Snap corporate splits the cost of the other services with franchisees so members can use them for free. Taunton says that franchisees have not increased membership fees to pay for the new services. Instead, the franchisees see the personal Web pages and the partnerships as ways to serve members better, which should translate into higher retention.
Within three weeks of the Web portal and partnerships beginning on Jan. 1, 10,000 of Snap's 200,000 members had activated their pages, Taunton says.
"Strategically, these services provide a competitive advantage, create new revenue and member retention opportunities for our franchisees, and — most importantly — give our members more ways to set and reach their fitness goals," he says.
In the next 12 months, Snap members will be able to scan their unique ID cards on each piece of equipment, log their workouts, and view their workout frequency, intensity and results on their own portals, he says. Each facility will also eventually include a kiosk on which members can access their Web page.
Taunton is seeking other partnerships with national vendors to offer discounts to his members.
"There's a lot of players who would be interested in providing discounts to health-minded people out there," Taunton says. He's just waiting for the right opportunities, he says.


text:
Create an Account - Increase your productivity, customize your experience, and engage in information you care about.
Thank you for attending the inaugural Puppy Paws and Santa Claws event at Holford Recreation Center on Dec. 8, 2019. We look forward to another year of this fun event. For more information, call 972-205-2772 or email Holford Recreation Center.
Holford Recreation Center


text:
When the international community pays more in ransom to terrorists than it devotes to "military training" or "development" the inevitable result is a corrupt and empowered Mali army exacting revenge on poor farmers in the North, stealing their livestock and throwing them in jail on spurious "terrorism" charges. These people will rot under torture in filthy, overcrowded prisons without food, sanitation, or health care until they die, like Mohamed Ag Hassan, forgotten and ignored by all, even the "aid" agencies.
What becomes of their wives, children, and the rest of their families, robbed of their menfolk and livelihood, dispossessed of their homes? They become refugees..


text:
The LastPass app provides access to all of your stored data and the core functionality of the password manager, but some features are more limited due to the nature of the platform.
Tips for Using LastPass in Windows 8:
- Launch the app and login to automatically sync your stored data.
- The first folder in your vault will be displayed by default, but you can use semantic zoom (click the button in the lower-right corner) to view all folders or scroll horizontally through all folders and stored sites.
- Right-click (or swipe up) on the lower part of the vault to access the app bar, with options for adding a site, adding a note, refreshing sites, or logging off.
- Right-click (or drag down) a site name in the vault to access the edit, delete, and copy username & password functions.
- Left-click or tap a site name to launch the login within the LastPass app, where LastPass can fill your usernames and passwords.
- If you have more than one matching login for a site, click or tap the LastPass icon to select another entry.
- In the LastPass embedded browser, the icon is always visible in the top-right corner, where options are available to open the vault, fill forms as you shop, use the Save All Entered Data function, and fill matching logins.
- The app is integrated into search, which means you can start typing in the LastPass vault to intiate search or open the Charms menu to enter a keyword to quickly find matching login information.
- From the Charms menu you can click or tap "settings" to set a time limit for "autologoff after idle".
Known Limitations of the App:
- YubiKey and Google Authenticator are the only multifactor authentication methods currently supported.
- There is no generate secure password option – we anticipate adding this with the next release.
- Fill form profiles cannot be added, edited, or deleted.
- LastPass cannot hook into Internet Explorer unless you're in IE desktop, so copy-paste from the LastPass vault to the browser or elsewhere is the only workaround (bookmarklets aren't an option either).
- Global LastPass account settings aren't accessible in the app, so you'll need to use the desktop version to manage your account.
More Improvements to Come!
This is the first release for Windows 8, so let us know what you think in the comments below!
[Update] Users must be running Windows 8 RTM to see the LastPass app in the Windows Store and run it on their computer. If you're running the Release Preview or Consumer Preview versions, you'll need to upgrade to the official version of Windows 8, through MSDN or at time of general release on October 26, to use LastPass on Windows 8.
[Update 10/26] An update is currently pending release by Microsoft with some awesome improvements. Keep an eye on the blog to know when it's published!


text:
SamirA wrote:We just need some basic furn and maybe broken versions for the Ayleid, like a bed, desk, cupboard, drawers, closet, table, chair. We also need a larger chest. After that all we really need for them are the weapons and armor. Everything left should be objects that are sturdy like stone/metal things. Maybe there could be a few disintegrating tapestries or something, but basically all cloth items should be dust by now.
Infragris wrote:Stroti's Ayleid resources for Oblivion might be interesting as inspiration (we probably can't port them as they are based on Oblivion stuff)
- Ayleid Furniture
- Ayleid Clutter
- Ayleid Chest and Display
I don't actually like all of these things, but it's a start. For Ayleid furniture I would suggest the moddeler look into alternative furniture types (that perform the same function): having the same types of bookcases and beds as the common, Dunmer and Dwemer furniture sets makes dungeons feel a bit like a reskin. Things like low tables and benches, chairs you're supposed to kneel on. Maybe base them in more oriental or antique Roman/Grecian types of furniture, rather than vanilla types.
Other suggestions for Ayleid clutter:
- Ayleid instruments: little knives, scissors, chopsticks, not much bigger than a lockpick. Indicative of the Ayleid pastime of recreational torture, though this should be implied more than outright stated. Elegant and sumptuously decorated items. They could double as lockpicks and probes.
- Lower class pottery: very pale, greyish pottery, mostly broken, with crude patterns in darker clay on the outside that imitate the vine-like iron motifs of Ayleid decoration. One of the big mistakes Oblivion made with the Ayleid was that their ruins seemed lifeless and without purpose, not indicative of a living culture. Indicating that there was a lower class that did not have access to fine ironwork might rectify this a little.


text:
1970 Plymouth Superbird - Blue Angel
After A 220-Plus Mph Flight, Matt Tolbert's Pro Mod Superbird Is Back
There was never any doubt why Chrysler placed the Dodge Daytona and Plymouth Superbird on the market in the musclecar era. They had just one purpose-to fly around the superspeedways of the stock car circuit. While a rare few were racing in drag competition at that time, no serious straight-line effort was made until 1999, when "Cowboy" Matt Tolbert debuted his carbon-fiber replica in IHRA's Pro Modified division. The founder of Global Electric Services, a contracting firm in Austin, Texas, he decided that if he was going to move up to IHRA Pro Mod from the Texas Quick 8 Association, he would do so with one of the most purebred race cars to ever come out of Detroit, Plymouth's 1970 Superbird.
"This car had been banned by NASCAR in 1972," he remarks, "so I thought it should go to bad car heaven-IHRA Pro Mod!"
A top category in drag racing, Pro Modified is full of radical machinery, and performances average in the 6.30 range at 220 mph, plenty fast in anyone's book. Matt's original "Texas Bad Bird" competed during the 1999 season without much luck, but it turned a lot of heads as one of the few Mopars in the class. In the offseason, some changes were made and the team took the car out to a new track near San Antonio for testing. It was there on a best-ever 6.53/223-plus mph lap that the 'bird took flight.
"To be honest, we weren't sure what happened," says Matt. "Somebody watching said that when I pulled the parachutes, they got sucked up underneath the car by vacuum. Whatever it was, I knew I was headed off the end of the track, so I just tucked in and waited for the impact."
The car ended up nose first in a top-end sand trap. Quality chassis construction by Gerold Mueller at Pro Comp Engineering kept the driver from harm, but the one-off, carbon-fiber front end was destroyed and there was dirt everywhere.
"It was in my helmet, in my mouth, and in every little nook and cranny in the car," he recalls. "It was a real mess!"
With IHRA's Winter Nationals only a few weeks away, the team began an exhaustive and expensive rebuilding project to get the car ready for the 2000 season. While a myriad of small details prevented the car's return at Darlington, they were ready three weeks later at the Holley Nationals in Rockingham, North Carolina.
As mentioned, Gerold Mueller of Austin constructed the 115-inch wheelbase chassis using 2516 chrome-moly pipe, and he went through the car again to ensure it was straight. Back onto the chassis went front suspension parts from Strange Engineering, Santuff rear shocks, and Pro Comp rear suspension hardware. Mark Williams and Strange supplied the new carbon-fiber brakes, and Stroud was the source for the parachute. Mueller also did all the tinwork in the car, some of which is in carbon-fiber as well.
Inside is mounted a single seat, a Lenco shifter, and a brace of Autometer gauges complete with a high-tech tachometer. Grant supplied the steering wheel while Simpson belts ensure that Matt will again stay put should the 'bird decide again to no longer be grounded.
Meanwhile, yet another front end was created from virgin carbon-fiber, using the stock Superbird mold the team had made to build the first Texas Bad Bird. Unlike some other body designs, a Superbird body isn't readily available. At the time of the car's construction, Matt had bit the bullet and bought a worn-out original '70 Superbird, took it apart, and created hand-laminated master molds for the body. Though not smaller than the original, the finished car is definitely lower to the ground. This time, a bubble was worked into the hood's center to help shroud the blower, and front wheel scoops ala the originals were added to the fenders. The body itself is chopped four inches and uses a flat deck-type spoiler in addition to the original high wing. Onto the one-off fiber panels went a great coat of Spiess-Hecker Petty Blue paint, applied by Kenny's Custom Colors. Von Otto of Waco did the airbrush work. With driver, the race-ready car weighs 2700 pounds.
While many Pro Mod racers use nitrous oxide, Tolbert decided early on that the Bad Bird needed the baddest powerplant available. That meant a blower combination, which had only been made legal in the division for a Hemi engine in 1999. For this, he turned to Rick Paradis of Gardena, Californina, who built the combination around a 526-cid Fontana Automotive design. This uses an Arias cast-aluminum 426-type block with a set of Fontana aftermarket heads. Arias also supplied the pistons, while Federal Mogul fuel racer Keith Stark reworked the crank. In the center, a Crane cam opens and shuts the valves and a Barnes oiling system keeps everything moving smoothly. Hedman headers route the methanol exhaust out into the atmosphere.
A 14-71 Kobelco blower (required by the rules to stay at 24-percent overdrive) now tops off the package, feeding fuel into Paradis' custom intake via an Enderle injector and pump setup. NGK plugs light the combustion chamber mixtures with help from an MSD Super Mag 44 (that's the hot one). Though it hasn't been on a dyno, the combination is estimated to be making around 2,000 horspower.
A three-speed Lenco, which is coupled to a Crower two-disk clutch and Trick Titanium bellhousing, is mounted behind the engine. That in turn feeds power to the big Hoosier slicks through a Mark William rear end with a 4.30 gear. Monocoque wheels are on all four corners. With literally hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the program since it began, not to mention time, the car and Matt are again ready to do battle in the division.
For Chrysler campaigners in Pro Mod, there is an additional incentive to do well. This is the Mopar Performance Parts Pro Modified Shootout, held at IHRA's season finale at Shreveport, Louisiana, which pays a total purse of $50,000. Any competitor who qualifies for that program using a Mopar body/Mopar engine combination will automatically receive double payment for their winnings!.
|Matt 'Cowboy' Tolbert
|Carbon fiber
|Pro Comp Engineering
|Engine Builder:
|Rick Paradis
|Oil Pan:
|Dan Olsen
|MSD Super Mag 44 magneto
|Mark Williams 10"
|Kenny's Custom Colors
|2700 with driver
|Best Performance:
|6.53 / 223 mph


text:
Using Millions of residential IPs will never get you blocked
The World's most advanced solution for data harvesting, now offers residential IPs! Our Residential IPs are based on a P2P Network, which enables our clients the freedom to harvest the web by harnessing a pool of over 2 Million unblocked IPs.
Our inbuilt IP rotation API is tailor made for high scope & high-performance Enterprise level activities. This unique approach enables you to send unlimited parallel requests through millions of 100% verified working IPs; this means that you will never get blocked again.


text:
A.W.O.L. STRIP – the three-day party in Las Vegas
Our friends at A.W.O.L. (Another Way of Life) have their next party weekend planned this weekend in Las Vegas – A.W.O.L. STRIP, presented by Adconion Direct. A.W.O.L. throws incredible parties all over the world, and the Vegas bash should be one to remember. The Cosmopolitan is the host hotel, and the party venues include Marquee nightclub, TAO Beach, TAO nightclub, Lavo Nightclub and Drai's Afterhours. Tickets are available for the three-day party package at their website and you can follow the leadup and the festivities on Facebook and Twitter.
As you can see from the photos above and the video below, the gang at A.W.O.L. knows how to party, and you know how we feel about Las Vegas. It's the ultimate party spot regardless of your particular ideas of a good time, but this lets you enjoy it on another level.
Related Posts
Posted in: Lifestyle
Tags: AWOL, Drai's Afterhours, Las Vegas, Marquee nightclub, TAO Beach


text:
A couple of weeks after Billy Gonzales left Illinois for the SEC, Tim Beckman has found a positional replacement.
The Illini confirmed Wednesday that Mike Bellamy has been promoted from a support-staff role to wide receivers coach. Bellamy had spent the 2012 season as the Illini's assistant director of player personnel and relations.
"Mike Bellamy will be a terrific addition to the Fighting Illini football staff," said Beckman in a statement. "I've had a chance to observe Mike over the past year, and the job he did coordinating campus recruiting visits, maintaining communications with our former players and engaging with the current team was outstanding.
"He has a tremendous amount of knowledge about the wide receiver position, and as a former Fighting Illini player, an immense amount of pride and passion for the institution. I have no doubt Mike will be a great wide receivers coach and member of our coaching staff."
Bellamy's only previous coaching experience at the collegiate level came at Clark-Atlanta University in 2011. Prior to that, he was a coach at the high school level for three years.
The release added that Bellamy, who was a first-team All-Big Ten receiver in the late eighties, "built a successful business in the beauty industry in the Atlanta area" with his wife following a seven-year career in professional football that ended in 1996.


text:
We Sell Digital Manuals You Can Print At Home!
View manuals on a multitude of devices including computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
You can print out just the pages you need or the entire manual. Lose the paper manual? Just print a new one!
Trying to fix something specific? All our manuals are searchable! Find a specific keyword in seconds.
Feel safe purchasing from us. We've made thousands of farmer's lives easier by using digital manual.
So Buy A Digital Manual Today!