https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTepT11bpoo

original vid disappeared when we needed it most, and I refuse to let it become lost media

When political journalist Juan Luis González began working on El loco, his goal was to make an "X-ray of the new Argentine right" that today has Javier Milei as its leader. But when he began to investigate the economist, presidential candidate for the La Libertad Avanza party, González stumbled upon the "mystical secrets of Milei", which forced him to abruptly change the course of his book until it reached its final form. "Over the months, the interviews, the off-the-record meetings, following invoices, seals and paperwork, the work went from being a field job with almost academic overtones to a tragicomic thriller, halfway between the noir novels of Raymond Chandler and A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole," the journalist writes in the prologue. El loco, published by Planeta, is a public and private biography of one of the most striking characters in new Argentine politics. In this investigation, González exposes Milei’s best-kept secrets, such as the three times he claims to have seen the resurrection of Christ, the death of his "dog son" Conan —hidden for years—, the expensive clones of the dog that he had made in the United States, his talks with the dead animal through a medium and his telepathic sister, and the conversations with dead beings and with "number one", as he calls God, who entrusted him with "the mission" of being president. But, in addition to revealing the "mystical secrets" of the presidential candidate, the journalist came across "the forbidden plot of a movement that sells its positions, that established relations with soccer hooligans involved in murder cases, that filled its ranks with long-standing members within the State and with corruption convictions, that received technical, logistical and monetary help from the Peronism it claims to fight and that, moreover, began when one of the wealthiest people in the country decided to create and finance, to protect his own interests, a media phenomenon that later called itself Milei." In the prologue, which can be read in full below, the author leaves a question hanging: "What happens if in an unstable country an unstable leader appears? The answer will surprise you." This is how "El loco" begins.

El loco, by Juan Luis González, published by Planeta.

Javier Milei stopped listening. For fifty minutes he talked nonstop about his project to dollarize the Argentine economy and about how "nefarious" "the political caste" is, but now he is silent and stares blankly at a screen. Esteban Trebucq, the journalist who rose to fame for his baldness and his tough-guy pose, tries to get the interview back on track. He doesn't succeed. "There's Conan, it's Conan, that's Conan," the deputy repeats when he opens his mouth again. The production put up, without warning, an old photo of his English Mastiff, and he can't take his eyes off the television. The segment stalls and the "Pelado" tries out some question to get out of the moment, but it's no use. Milei is not seeing his pet, but rather his "true and greatest love", whom he considers his own son. He brought the dog back from a work trip, when he went to present a paper in Córdoba, at the end of 2004. Back then he was just a puppy, but the image they project on the A24 screen must be from ten years later. Conan is already old, has gray hair all over his face, calluses on his elbows, and in the photo he appears lying down with his jaw wide open, as if gasping for air. "How old is he?" asks the journalist, who at this point has resigned himself to playing along with his guest. The deputy thinks for a few seconds, and answers somewhat confused. "Ugh, I can't figure it out, he's a few years old," he says, and begins to repeat what he says every time he is asked about the animal: that he is the most important thing in his life, that when he was at "his worst moment" the dog was the only one who accompanied him, that he came to sacrifice his own food to take care of Conan's and that's why he ended up eating badly and came to weigh 120 kilos, that with him and only with him he spent a dozen Christmases and New Years, that one day his apartment caught fire and that he did not leave until he made sure that his "four-legged little son" was following him and that's why he almost died. And that for Conan he is willing to die. But there are many things about the dog, and especially about himself, that he does not say in that interview at the beginning of the year. They are his most guarded secrets. And it's not just the true age of the pet. Milei does not say, for example, that Conan is dead. That he died on a Sunday in October 2017 in his arms, in the apartment he had in Abasto, after fighting for a while against spinal cancer. Nor does he say that he went through that process with a parapsychologist and a telepath who read the dog's mind and "communicated" him with his owner. That is just the tip of the iceberg. After the death of the dog/son, his most faithful friend, the man changed completely. It was a blow that even the clones of the animal he had made in the United States —US$50,000 plus taxes—, and which he now presents as his "grandchildren," could not cushion. Karina, his sister, as indispensable to him as Conan, tried to help him. She studied to become a medium, and began to be herself who communicated the recently deceased Conan with his owner, an activity that to this day is central in the life of the younger Milei, who says she can talk to living and dead animals and that based on that she makes important decisions. But that was not enough. To those who wanted to listen, Milei began to tell increasingly striking stories: that Conan had not really died —"it was his physical disappearance"—, but that he had gone to sit next to "number 1" to protect him, and that thanks to that he had begun to have talks with God himself. "I saw the resurrection of Christ three times, but I can't tell it. They would say I'm crazy," he told a friend of those years, in a chat that this person still keeps. Until one day the unexpected happened. Something that would change Milei's life forever, but also Argentina's. It is that in one of his conversations with "number 1", He revealed the reason why they had so much contact. God, as he had done before with Moses, told him that he had a "mission" for him. He had to get into politics. And he told him something else: that he should not stop until he became President.

This book was born from a crisis. It starts from an idea that was not, that could not be. The book had begun wanting to be something else: an X-ray of the new right, a quest to understand who they are, what they think, how they move, how they are educated, how they organize themselves, what international connections they have, and what the leaders of this great Argentine family, which today has Javier Milei as its leader, want to do. The plan was to put together something similar to what Mundo PRO was —the work of Alejandro Belloti, Sergio Morresi and Gabriel Vommaro, in which they dissected the architecture and composition of that party— or Los Herederos de Alfonsín —by José Antonio Díaz and Alfredo Leuco, in which in 1987 they undertook a similar search but with the members of the radical youth— but of this new space, which had burst into politics in 2021 and ended up obtaining a surprising 17% of the votes in the Federal Capital. But that book fell by the wayside. Over the months, the interviews, the off-the-record meetings, following invoices, seals and paperwork, the work went from being a field job with almost academic overtones to a tragicomic thriller, halfway between the noir novels of Raymond Chandler and A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. The mystical secrets of Milei were the first but not the only revelation that forced the plans to change. The investigation came across the forbidden plot of a movement that sells its positions, that established relations with soccer hooligans involved in murder cases, that filled its ranks with long-standing members within the State and with corruption convictions, that let in neo-Nazis and apologists for the last dictatorship, that allowed itself to be financed by provincial governments, that received technical, logistical and monetary help from the Peronism it claims to fight, that threatened everyone who wanted to open their mouths, as happened to one of its own legislators who had to live for half a year with police protection, and that, mounted on the illusion of a "new politics" that gave hope to young people who had lost hope, hides the oldest way of making money and business in Argentina. And that, moreover, began when one of the wealthiest people in the country decided to create and finance, to protect his own interests, a media phenomenon that later called itself Milei. And the book, without meaning to, transformed into a question. What happens if in an Argentina corroded by more than a decade of economic and political crisis, battered by a pandemic that left 130,000 dead, exhausted by years of inflation and insecurity, angry at always living with a noose around its neck, someone begins to say that the fault for everything lies with those who run it and have run it? What if that incendiary speech, which is also burning other latitudes, catches on? /Infobae

While the US rushed to vilify Russia's latest UN Security Council Arria-Formula summit on Kiev's human rights violations, one might wonder as to why Ukrainian neo-Nazi torture sites have so much in common with CIA secret prisons, says Dutch journalist Sonja van den Ende.

"I participated in the UN Security Council Arria-Formula meeting on 6 May 2022", says Sonja van den Ende, an independent journalist from Rotterdam, Netherlands. "The goal of this meeting was to present to the United Nations (UN) members evidence about war crimes committed by the Ukrainian Army in cooperation with the Azov Battalion which was provided by us, journalists on the ground, in Donbass. The evidence was presented in the form of videos and oral testimonies, from residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, especially Mariupol, Volnovakha and Melitiopol".

However, the Western UN members, especially representatives from the US, the UK, Norway, Albania, and France, paid little if any attention to the Donbass people's stories, according to the Dutch journalist. Furthermore, they behaved in an arrogant way, she adds.

"They completely ignored us and didn’t ask any questions", she notes. "I personally made some remarks at the end of the meeting. I asked them if they want WWIII and why they don't listen to us, the journalists, who are working on the ground".

Following the meeting, Rodney Hunter, political coordinator at the US Mission to the United Nations, claimed that Russia "misused" the Security Council and the UN to "spew falsehoods". He even went so far as to dismiss Russia's report and testimonies of Donbass witnesses and foreign journalists as "disinformation, lies and false narrative".

The US is using human rights and international law selectively and only when it fits in its agenda, says van den Ende: Washington routinely turns a blind eye to the crimes committed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, while pointing the finger of blame at Russia. Still, it raises the question whether Washington has any moral authority to lambast Russia, given that "the US is the largest perpetrator, who is waging wars around the globe in many countries", notes the journalist.

She is also perplexed by the US administration's current attempts to instrumentalise the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague against Russia, given that Washington never recognised the jurisdiction of this legal body. Moreover, on 2 September 2020, then-President Donald Trump slapped sanctions on ICC officials over the court's investigation into alleged war crimes committed by the US in Afghanistan. (Later these sanctions were revoked by Joe Biden).

30 April 2022, 19:02 GMT

No matter how hard the West tries to depict Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis as patriots and heroes, the truth is continuing to find its way out. Following the liberation of Mariupol, residents talked to journalists, describing the Azov Battalion's hideous misdeeds, which went contrary to the Western press' narrative.

Der Spiegel was caught red-handed by another German outlet, Junge Welt, deleting a video featuring an evacuee from Mariupol’s Azovstal, Natalia Usmanova, who subjected the Ukrainian government and neo-Nazi Azov militants to harsh criticism. According to Der Spiegel, the video was removed "because of discrepancies in content that were subsequently discovered".

Van den Ende, who visited Mariupol twice, notes that a lot of gruesome stories concerning Ukrainian neo-Nazis were circulating in the city after it was taken under the control of militants from the notorious Azov, Dnipro, and Shakhtersk battalions in 2014. For several years, Ukrainian nationalists cracked down on supporters of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) in Mariupol.

"I got to know this in March [2022] and most likely other journalists who were in Mariupol also heard that there was a torture site [there] called 'Biblioteka' ('Library'), or as Western countries used to call those facilities during the US War on Terror, a 'black site'", says the Dutch journalist.

21 April 2022, 08:00 GMT

The "Library" secret torture prison appeared at Mariupol Airport in June 2014, being run by the Azov Battalion and "supervised" by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), according to Vasily Prozorov, a former SBU officer. People detained for links to the DPR or pro-Russian ideas were called "books". After being checked, the prisoners were kept in the refrigerators of the airport restaurant. According to the testimonies of former detainees, Ukrainian nationalists used different torture techniques, including waterboarding, asphyxiation, breaking fingers, etc.

"People involved in the anti-Ukrainian resistance, and the struggle against the Kiev authorities, were subjected to severe torture", Prozorov told Russian newspaper Izvestia in March 2022. "Two men were tortured to death in front of my eyes. In total, during my rotation (one month), about 200 people were processed through the 'Library'".

Van den Ende notes that torture techniques used at the Mariupol secret prison were strikingly similar to those used by the CIA at the agency's black sites across the world. The existence of the CIA's overseas torture sites was confirmed in a 2014 US Senate Intelligence report on the use of what was termed “enhanced interrogation practices” by the US intelligence agency. The Dutch journalist does not rule out that the Azov Battalion and other Ukrainian nationalist militants were specifically "trained" to torture their detainees. She notes that waterboarding – the CIA's most famous tool – was also widely used in the “Biblioteka”.

"The Azov Battalion is a cruel militia based on the Nazi ideology and despite the West is trying to deny it, you can see it clearly from their symbols, their outfit, their flag and their torch marches, which they perform every year, especially in commemoration of their idol Stephan Bandera, the Nazi leader of Ukraine in WWII!" she says.

9 May 2022, 16:50 GMT

Van den Ende bemoans the fact that just a few foreign correspondents are working in the Donbass conflict zone. The Western corporate press and Hollywood celebrities have never visited the region, she notes, citing American movie star Angelina Jolie's latest trip to the western Ukrainian city of Lvov. Apparently, Western leaders and their spin doctors know that their narrative contradicts the reality on the ground in Donbass, according to the journalist.

"They don’t want to visit the war-torn [Donbass] region and they prevent their journalists and celebrities from going there, because it’s not on their agenda and not in their interest. They don’t care about human suffering, they use it when it suits them", says the Dutch journalist. "The West knows very well that they support right-wing extremists [in Ukraine], as they supported jihadists in Syria. They use them as proxies, so they don't fight directly themselves. They use this tactic in all their wars, in their colour revolutions and regime changes, training these proxies and supporting them with money and weapons".

However, it seems that some forces within Western elites have started to realise that the US and NATO have gone too far by arming Ukraine and ramping up the conflict in Eastern Europe, according to van den Ende.

Thus, Pope Francis noted in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the "barking of NATO at Russia's door" may have forced Russia to start the special operation in Ukraine. Jeffrey Sachs, a former adviser to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), urged the US to negotiate with Russia and reconsider NATO's expansionist strategy in his April op-ed for CNN.

"If more intellectuals would stand up against their own regimes, some common sense would come back", the Dutch journalist suggests. "But I am afraid, common sense is completely gone with politicians in the West, they are following a war plan. They want war with Russia. Why? My guess is that their financial system is broken and they need a new system, like the 'Great Reset' and the 'Green New Deal', so they push their agenda of war, to distract the population from the real problems and the agenda they follow".

MIT Media Lab image by ckelly, CC BY 2.0. Modified by Jason Pramas.

The connection to Jeffrey Epstein is just one of many questionable relationships

Recently, two scholars announced their plans to cut ties with the MIT Media Lab over its longstanding relationship with Jeffrey Epstein—the New York financier who had been arrested on federal charges for the alleged sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York and committed (a suspiciously convenient) suicide in custody on Aug 10. Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT (which is “a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies at MIT,” according to its website) and an associate professor of the practice at the MIT Media Lab, and J. Nathan Matias, a Cornell University professor and visiting scholar at the lab, are certainly to be commended for having the courage of their convictions. Particularly Zuckerman, who is literally leaving his job over the Epstein affair.

The lab’s direct connection to such a highly placed, dangerous, previously convicted sex offender is certainly more than enough reason for staffers, affiliates, and grad students to consider resigning their posts. However, it must be said to those who stay on that there have always been plenty of other reasons to resign from the MIT Media Lab from the moment it opened its doors. Because “capitalism’s advanced R&D lab”—as a colleague of mine close to the current fray calls it—has never been picky about which donors it will accept funding from. And that presents a major dilemma for other people of good conscience who happen to be working there.

So, I decided it would be worth a quick spin through some of the misdeeds of a few of the most well-known Media Lab corporate donors. In hopes that other people connected to the highly problematic institution might also decide to announce an abrupt career change in the name of social justice. Better still, they could organize themselves into a movement to either reform where the lab gets its money—and on whose behalf it works—or simply break it up. And maybe spread its projects around to other, less compromised, institutions.

BP and ExxonMobil. Every energy company engaged in extracting oil, natural gas, and coal, processing it, and/or distributing it to be burned in internal combustion engines or power plants is hastening the extinction of the human race by inducing ever-worsening global warming. With knowledge aforethought. As evinced by the organized campaign of disinformation they have all led against climate science, according to the noted book and documentary Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University and Erik M. Conway of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. There is no way to take this money and still have clean hands. Whether it’s a thousand dollars or a million. MIT Media Lab leadership knows this and does it anyway.

Ford Motor Company. A company as old and as large as Ford has inevitably done a lot of reprehensible things. Two of the worst: a) producing carbon-burning, greenhouse gas-emitting vehicles for over a century (almost 400 million since 1903) and b) working with energy companies like the ones that became ExxonMobil to form the Global Climate Coalition—a key international lobby group that spearheaded the fight by major corporations against climate science to prevent environmental regulation that would negatively affect their bottom line, according to Oreskes and Conway. It is the fifth-largest vehicle manufacturing company in the world.

Hyundai Motor Company. The third-largest vehicle manufacturing company in the world. And therefore another corporate scofflaw even without looking at its miserable record of union busting. Continuing to flood the planet with millions more carbon-spewing, global warming exacerbating machines every year. Oh, and the Korean conglomerate also got caught “overstating” its vehicles’ mileage a few years back, according to US News and World Report.

Honeywell SPS. While the Safety and Productivity Solutions “strategic business unit” of Honeywell International Inc. is the one giving money to the MIT Media Lab, its parent corporation is a major defense contractor. And a particularly dangerous strain of that breed of sociopathic capitalist entity. According to the Don’t Bank on the Bomb website produced by the interfaith Dutch antiwar group PAX, “Honeywell is involved in US nuclear weapon facilities as well as producing key components for the US Minuteman III ICBM and the Trident II (D5) system, currently in use by the US and UK.” Because what could possibly go wrong with continuing to produce more nukes? 

Citigroup. One of the main American banks responsible for the 2008 global financial collapse thanks to heavy investment in derivatives based on subprime housing mortgages. Also, the recipient of one of the largest bailout packages from the federal government in US history. That was either as “little” as $45 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money (which it paid back), or as much as $500 billion—when all government assistance it received is included (much of which it didn’t have to pay back)… according to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by James Freeman, co-author of the critical Citigroup history Borrowed Time. Most of the tens of thousands of working families whose lives were ruined when their homes were seized for mortgage nonpayment by the banks which set them up to fail did not get a bailout.

GE. A company I have written a baker’s dozen pieces on, between the start of the GE Boston Deal in 2016 and this year (when said deal fell apart). Once a major employer in Massachusetts, GE not only destroyed the economies of several cities around the state by precipitously shutting down major plants—in part to cut costs by eliminating thousands of good unionized jobs—but also polluted the entire Housatonic River valley from northwest Mass to Long Island Sound, as I covered in parts one and seven of my GE Boston Deal: The Missing Manual series. Yet is still trying to avoid having to finish cleaning that toxic mess up. Furthermore, GE was heavily involved in causing the 2008 global financial collapse through its former “shadow bank” division GE Capital and was the recipient of a huge government bailout via $90 billion in cheap credit it definitely did not deserve, as I outlined in parts two and three of my series.

McKinsey & Company. A virtually unaccountable private consulting firm with its fingers in many multinational corporate pies—and a special emphasis on working with authoritarian governments. The New York Times has spent years exposing some of its more sordid activities, including running the $12.3 billion offshore hedge fund MIO Partners, identifying the social media accounts of three prominent online critics of the Saudi government (one of whom was subsequently arrested), and helping Boeing find some needed titanium by getting a Ukrainian oligarch to bribe eight Indian officials. Plus, it reported—close to home and perhaps worst of all—that the “[Commonwealth] of Massachusetts released new documents from 2013 that detailed McKinsey’s recommendations on how Purdue Pharma could ‘turbocharge’ sales of its widely abused opioid OxyContin. The state said McKinsey advised Purdue to sharply increase sales visits to targeted doctors and to consider mail orders as a way to bypass pharmacies that had been tightening oversight of opioid prescriptions.” The thousands of opiate deaths in the Bay State alone since that time are on the criminal consultancy’s head—along with Purdue, and other corrupt pharmaceutical companies.

GlaxoSmithKline, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG (Roche), Novartis, and Takeda. And speaking of pharmas, here are four that donate to the Media Lab. All of which make huge profits by converting largely publicly funded basic science research into privately owned drug formulas protected by patents and other exclusive rights granted to them by governments. Then repurposing older medications for different uses—for which they receive new patents. According to a Washington Post op-ed by Robin Feldman, the author of Drugs, Money, & Secret Handshakes, “…78 percent of the drugs associated with new patents were not new drugs coming on the market but existing ones. The cycle of innovation, reward, then competition is being distorted into a system of innovation, reward, then more reward.” Ultimately, big pharmas extend their monopolies over the most profitable drugs by using their dominant positions to keep cheaper generic versions produced by smaller pharmas from gaining a foothold for years after they’re finally allowed to enter the market. The amount of unnecessary misery created by such companies in countries like the US that lack a comprehensive national healthcare system able to keep drug prices low is, therefore, immense. On top of the more specific misery caused when Takeda’s diabetes drug Actos was found to cause bladder cancer, according to the New York Times. Or when Roche made serious bank by convincing government to stockpile the influenza drug Tamiflu and was later found to have been withholding vital clinical trial data showing it wasn’t very effective, according to the Guardian. Or when GlaxoSmithKline “agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay $3 billion in fines for promoting its best-selling antidepressants for unapproved uses and failing to report safety data about a top diabetes drug,” according to the New York Times. Or the ongoing scandal resulting from the FDA accusing Novartis of manipulating the “data used to support approval of the drug Zolgensma,” according to Stat. Which is supposed to be a treatment for the rare baby-killing genetic disorder spinal muscular atrophy and is the most expensive drug in the world at $2.1 million for a one-dose treatment, according to NPR.

Deloitte. Just a bunch of harmless accountants, right? Wrong. According to Canada’s National Observer, Deloitte is the largest of the “Big Four” audit firms that have “emerged as central players in the creation and abuse of offshore tax havens.” They also “become champions of the privatization of government services.” Giving a hearty assist to the consolidation of wealth by ever smaller numbers of corporations and individuals. Thus diminishing the governments that were once able to tax the rich and powerful and use the money to provide the very public services that have gradually been privatized—and concentrating more of the remaining public funds in those same private hands.

That’s just a sample of the dozens of MIT Media Lab “member companies.” Not all of them are as bad as the ones above. But few are above reproach. Check them out yourself at media.mit.edu/posts/member-companies/. And consider what kind of university would allow one of its major initiatives to run for decades with such little regard for social responsibility.

Full disclosure: Jason Pramas has interacted with Ethan Zuckerman professionally from time to time.

Apparent Horizon—recipient of 2018 and 2019 Association of Alternative Newsmedia Political Column Awards—is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s executive director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston_. Copyright 2019 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network._

Markdown tool not working on this website :(

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11548711

[2026-05-04] @jackhneel

So we can infer the "Professor" (funny story that) views his shameless attention-seeking as a form of divine cultivation. Drugs?

Evidence of Ukraine's torture – which has become nothing short of a new norm since the illegitimate 2014 coup – is continuing to pile up. Pavel, a member of the youth organization "Anti-Fascist Committee of Mariupol" tells Sputnik his story.

"Why? Because I had my own opinion!" says Pavel, when asked why he was detained by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) in September 2014 and held captive until November 2014.

"I did not accept that their Bandera [Stepan Bandera, a WW2-era Ukrainian Nazi collaborator – Sputnik] was almost higher than the Lord. This is downright wrong. And so many people died because of this plague!"

Pavel, then a small coffee shop owner, was 23 when Ukraine was subjugated to an ultra-nationalist junta that forcibly ousted then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014.

The young man immediately joined the "Anti-Fascist Committee of Mariupol", a local youth organization engaged in humanitarian work. On May 11, 2014, the Eastern Ukrainian city held a referendum on the future of the breakaway Donbass republics which Pavel helped organize in his district.

In June 2014, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion* seized Mariupol and launched political cleansing. Those suspected of any sympathies for Russia were arrested and detained at Ukraine's secret prison at the Mariupol Airport. It was called "The Library", while the detainees were mockingly referred to as "books" by Ukrainian nationalists. The SBU supervised the "black site."

Understanding that his freedom and life were at stake, Pavel planned to move to Donetsk and continue his activist work from there. However, in September 2014, he was betrayed by none other than his mother-in-law. She informed Azov militants that Pavel was a pro-Russian activist. The man recalled with bitterness how she deceived him into staying at home so that the neo-Nazi thugs could easily grab him.

"I went outside to smoke and saw a suspicious car driving," he said. "There was something that confused me. The only thing I managed to do was to go back into my apartment, and that's it. I was put face down on the floor; and then face down on the ground and then quickly thrown into the car. They put a bag on my head and took me to the airport."

13 July 2023, 11:00 GMT

While at the airport, Pavel was placed into a cooling chamber. It was unbearably cold there, especially given that the man wore only a T-shirt, shorts and slippers. He spent three days trying to warm himself by rolling up pieces of newspaper into balls and putting them under his T-shirt.

"I remember they took me out of the cooling chamber and forced me to take pills, which ones - I don’t know," Pavel said. "And injections were made in the arm, in the vein. And after that everything became cloudy in the eyes, there was a rumble. And they talked so slowly. And before that, I remember that they said that we were traitors and that our family, our families, who are for the Donetsk People's Republic, would face great sorrow for this."

But that was not all. They also forced their captives to drink enormous amounts of water at one time.

"I could drink at one time – under pressure of course – five liters, maybe two five-liter bottles. If you wanted to live, you had to drink."

One should bear in mind that the human kidneys can filter as little as 100 ml per hour. Drinking up to 10 liters of water at once could lead to acute renal failure and, eventually, death.

27 June 2023, 16:45 GMT

"[The l]imbs of some [detainees] were stretched; they were tied by their hands and legs and pulled in different directions, as if on a rack," Pavel recalled, adding that SBU agents and Ukrainian nationalists got pleasure from hurting their prisoners.

Ukrainians also entertained themselves by shooting over the heads of the captives at a shooting range.

"After charges were brought against us, we were taken to a shooting range," Pavel recalled. "We were set where targets were usually set. And we had to stand there. And they came to have fun, shooting in our direction. They shot a little above the head, but still one understood that he [could easily die]."

A month before the prison swap, the captives were taken somewhere to a landfill. The Dnepr Regimen was deployed there. It was headed at the time by Ukrainian nationalist Yuri Bereza, notorious for his vow to "burn down Crimea, with all of its residents if needed."

"I remember one mug there," Pavel said. "He wore a Balaklava and had an 'Albina' call sign. We were forced to shout their chants; those who did not shout were forced to dig graves as [nationalists] wanted to execute them."

Three months in the Ukrainian captivity left scars on Pavel's head, a fractured leg, and epileptic seizures.

He was swapped in November 2014 along with other 24 detainees. Presently, Pavel serves in the Russian Armed Forces in the DPR.

11 May 2022, 18:50 GMT

Pavel's story is not a standalone case. Lots of individuals returning from Ukrainian captivity shared terrible experiences in the Ukrainian torture chambers. Many more cannot tell their stories because they couldn't bear further torture and died.

"Since 2014, when the process of prisoner swaps began, we have always invited observers to be present at our swaps," Daria Morozova, commissioner for human rights in the Donetsk People's Republic, told Sputnik. "At the time it was a person from the OSCE, because the Red Cross did not immediately start traveling with us, unfortunately. And when the first swaps began, we were very horrified by the [health] condition of our women and men, who were brought [by the Ukrainians]."

This prompted the DPR commissioner to start taking all the former detainees to medical institutions, where they underwent appropriate examinations. After that DPR law enforcement agencies interviewed them, and initiated criminal cases against the Ukrainian side, per Morozova.

"From 2014 to the beginning of the special military operation, we have swapped over 1,300 people. Almost all of them were subjected to torture," the DPR commissioner for human rights stressed.

10 July 2023, 16:09 GMT

Currently, the situation has got worse, according to Morozova, referring to shocking instances of the Ukrainian military torturing, mutilating and killing Russian prisoners of war (POWs) which surfaced during the special military operation.

"Previously, it was largely concealed," she said. "That is, accordingly, in order to prove that illegal methods of interrogation or, in other words, torture techniques were used against a particular prisoner, we had to go through a very long and thorny path with the involvement of forensic experts, law enforcement agencies, and international organizations. Now without any hesitation Ukrainian fighters are posting all this [instances of torture] on the Internet."

Ukraine's abuse of human rights is gaining steam since the West failed to take measures over the past nine years, Morozova underscored. Despite Donbass activists and Russia presenting evidence of Ukraine's human rights violations to the United Nations and other international organizations, the response has so far been lax and improper, according to the commissioner.

The latest UN report placed emphasis on illegal detention and brutal interrogation of civilians by the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies. It's not the first report issued by the UN on the matter, Morozova noted, adding that more and more captives and their relatives are contacting international human rights groups over Ukraine's torture practices.

The commissioner noted that she had recently faced unwillingness of the members of the UN Security Council to listen to her as a speaker from Donbass. According to Morozova, the pro-Western group within the UNSC has taken the stance of seeing no evil and hearing no evil.

"[Nonetheless], our cooperation with international organizations continues. It is clear that as of yet there's been no the proper reaction, but, nevertheless, they cannot refuse to record [these instances of torture] either," the commissioner concluded.

*Azov Battalion is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11394445

The U.S. spy agency has significantly expanded its international antidrug work under President Trump and CIA Director Ratcliffe.

Two U.S. embassy officials died in an automobile accident in northern Mexico as they returned from the scene of a counternarcotic operation worked for the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a significantly expanded role in battling narcotics trafficking in the Western Hemisphere, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Since the latest release of the Epstein files, a media circus has ensued over the political and business figures connected to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The giddy fervour from some corners has been evident as people work their way through a huge number of files featuring the most powerful and elite people we know.

In a world where sexual violence is much more commonplace than we might like to admit, it is unsurprising that Epstein and his cabal of violent predators are the focus, and not the people they tortured and abused. Academic Harsha Walia had a stark and insightful summary of the situation:

Sexual violence, especially of children, is not an otherwise perverse symptom of elite rule or empire – it is literally at the CENTER of how violence and domination is structured around the world. We cannot keep treating sexual violence as a “private” issue, or as “divisive” to movements, or weaponize it to settle other political scores.

It is how power reverberates and is reproduced.

Sexual violence – especially against children – is not an aberration in our societies. It is not exclusively the preserve of the elite or powerful. It is a function at the very core of neoliberal racial capitalism. Epstein was a well-documented white supremacist and Zionist, and that is at the heart of how he and his fellow paedophiles operated.

So why is it that leftists have spent considerable time and energy since the latest release of the files defending prominent fellow leftists who allied themselves with Epstein?

Epstein files show the misogynist rot within the left

One of the most prominent leftist names mentioned in the files is that of the revered Noam Chomsky. His work has been crucial for leftists, but the academic has long known to have been friends with Epstein. Fellow academic Chris Knight has had pieces claiming to explain the reasons behind the friendship published in both CounterPunch and Novara Media.

The latter publication ran the story with the headline:

There Are Two Noam Chomskys. The One You Love, and the One That Was Friends With Jeffrey Epstein

Along with the tagline:

Not a straightforward guy.

The CounterPunch article and the one posted on Novara are similar versions of effectively the same piece.

In the version published a few days later on Novara, Knight admits:

Emails released last month by the US Department of Justice, however, now make it difficult to respect Chomsky’s views on anything at all.

How generous. By Knight’s own admission:

The emails even reveal that shortly before Epstein’s arrest and death, in July and August 2019, Chomsky was still intending to be interviewed for a documentary that Epstein was making. It seems Chomsky remained loyal to his cherished “friend” right until the end.

Chomsky was a loyal and steadfast friend of Epstein. Epstein was a known serial child rapist, child trafficker, and overseer of one of the most brutal and extensive grooming gangs in modern times. The details of such horrific crimes were an open secret even before the release of the files. Now that the files have been released, Chomsky’s wife has described their close friendship with the dead paedophile as part of “serious errors in judgement.”

Bizarre response

In both pieces, Knight muses on why Chomsky would have associated with Epstein. He makes it clear that Chomsky has a reputation for associating with people he should ostensibly have opposed – CIA directors, war hawks, and other reprehensible people. Knight maintains that:

Chomsky was at no point the perfectly principled radical intellectual admired by so many of his followers. If he had been, he would have resigned from MIT long ago. Yet, had he done so, he would never have come to know the US military establishment from the inside in a way that enabled him to become that establishment’s most knowledgeable and assured critic.

Who needs Chomsky to be perfect? Perfection is a far cry from a close personal friendship with a notorious paedophile and sex trafficker. Chomsky didn’t step down from MIT, or stop associating with rabid Zionists not as some kind of intellectual checkmate, but because he didn’t want to.

Society is far too willing to dismiss the experiences of those living at the sharp end of racial capitalism as ‘identity politics.’ But, we’re supposed to believe Chomsky needed to pal around with some of the most morally bankrupt people for research purposes? Please.

He knew exactly what he was doing. There is no duality or cognitive dissonance in Chomsky’s behaviour. He knew exactly what was doing, and he did it for decades. How could one of the most pre-eminent researchers not know the extent of Epstein’s crimes? Are we supposed to accept that he’s a genius researcher who can’t operate a simple Google search on the background of one of his best friends?

Business as usual

Knight’s passionate defence of Epstein is an obscene rehabilitation, a loving re-casting of Chomsky as somehow duped, tricked, or seduced. Knight concludes that:

It would be foolish to stop learning from his writings. It would be equally foolish to gloss over his mistakes. Instead of deciding whether to cancel or exalt him as an individual, I suggest we prioritise developing what he advocates, however hypocritically: a revolutionary politics for our times.

Since the latest release of the Epstein files, who exactly has demanded we “stop learning” from Chomsky? In fact, what is actually happening is that people are parsing through a release of files that deliberately exposes and intimidates victims and survivors of Epstein.

The choice is not whether to accept or reject Chomsky, whether to rehabilitate or castigate him. Instead, the choice facing us is a moral one: do we infantilise and clean up Chomsky’s actions, or do we accept that he repeatedly and knowingly chose to not only associate with, but, by all accounts, loved a renowned pedophile and sex trafficker?

It is no choice at all.

I was raped as a child. Like many others who have been sexually abused, every time rape is discussed in the media, there are many all too willing to degrade the horror of abuse and defend those around the abusers. As such, the many attempts at rehabilitation of those implicated alongside Epstein in any way, whether Chomsky or anyone else, feel like an attempt to defend the rape that so many of us have had to come to terms with.

Knight – or someone from his team – offered a version of his above articles to the Canary. We immediately recognised that to publish such a thing would not only violate all of our values, it would also denigrate the experiences of victims and survivors. Shame on CounterPunch and Novara for giving a platform to the reprehensible attempt to clean up Chomsky’s image or work.

Featured image via the Canary