ICE Tortures People

There's no need to ask why MAGA would put up with this shit. They voted for the guy who told them he'd make "those people" suffer.

Just remember:

The boot you're licking

will eventually stomp your ass too.

ICE given permission to force-feed Cuban hunger striker with gastric tube

Exclusive: court orders seen by Guardian show agency given approval to fit Texas detainee with tube without his consent

Federal immigration officials quietly received permission from a judge in recent weeks to force-feed a detained Cuban hunger striker inside a Texas detention center, including with the use of a rare, nonconsensual surgical procedure, court records reveal.

The man is likely the 19th hunger striker in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention where the agency has had an application approved to conduct “involuntary medical procedures” since January 2025. The rising number of cases under the second Trump administration has alarmed advocates amid wide-ranging accusations of mistreatment inside facilities nationwide.

Court orders from the southern district of Texas federal court seen by the Guardian suggest ICE followed through with force-feeding via a nasal tube on the Cuban man in August, since agency officials successfully requested this week that the court order be extended. He is currently detained at the Montgomery ICE processing center, a privately-run detention facility near Houston.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of ICE, said on Thursday evening the man had “resumed eating and drinking again” and was not being force-fed. The DHS did not answer whether the man had broken his hunger strike this week after the latest court order, or how many times he had been force-fed prior.

The new order had given ICE permission to operate on him to fit a surgical feeding tube without his consent.

The Guardian is not naming the man because efforts to contact him have been unsuccessful. Like in all force-feeding cases, the majority of his court records are sealed, concealing many details from the public.

The secretive practice of force-feeding inside detention centers has been widely condemned by human rights organizations as torture. Involuntary medical procedures in response to hunger strikes in detention are often painful and traumatizing.

During a prolonged hunger strike, ICE will request permission from a federal judge to conduct force-feeding, forced hydration and other measures.

Typically, after a judge approves the request, detention center guards hold down a hunger striker while medical staff forcibly insert a tube through the person’s nose and down their throat, and pump nutritional liquid into their stomach.

But in this latest case in Texas, ICE also received permission to force-feed the Cuban hunger striker through a “percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy” tube insertion. This is a surgery in which medical staff make an incision in a person’s abdomen, insert a tube that remains in place indefinitely until it is surgically removed again and pump liquid directly into the stomach. This procedure has not been previously identified in other force-feeding cases reviewed by the Guardian.

“The cruelty of the extreme tactics at ICE’s disposal to end lawful protest, including forcibly cutting into a protester’s body to insert a tube in their stomach, underscores the horrors happening outside our view in ICE detention centers,” said Savannah Kumar, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas. “ICE’s brutal use of involuntary medical procedures on hunger strikers demonstrates how degrading conditions have gotten in these hidden places, which is often exactly what hunger strikers are protesting in the first place.”

Last month, the Guardian published a series of stories about the extent of ICE’s force-feeding practices under the second Trump administration, with the agency getting the green light to perform involuntary medical procedures in 18 hunger strike cases – and the latest being the 19th.

“The high number of verified court orders since January 2025 raises serious concern,” said Eunice Cho, an immigrant and civil rights attorney who has extensively documented forced treatment on hunger strikers in ICE detention.

Cho added that the high number “suggests several possibilities, none of which are positive”, including that conditions are so bad that more people are hunger striking in protest, and that officials “are more frequently failing to attempt to resolve the issue in a less confrontational and dangerous manner, instead resorting to forced medical intervention”.

The Cuban man was arrested by ICE on 22 July and was declared a hunger striker three days later, court records show. The Montgomery facilityholding him is run by the private prison company GEO Group.

A GEO Group spokesperson referred all questions to ICE. The US attorney’s office in the southern district of Texas, which is representing ICE in the latest court proceedings, did not respond to a request for comment.

An ICE official and a doctor at the facility requested permission to force-feed the Cuban hunger striker in August, filings show.

On 19 August, federal judge Andrew Hanen gave permission for ICE to force-feed the hunger striker. And on 1 September, ICE requested the judge extend his order.

This Wednesday, Hanen extended the order, which is set to expire in mid-September. It includes the option for ICE touse the surgical tube insertion.

Like in many cases reviewed by the Guardian, the Cuban hunger striker does not have any current legal representation.

“The fact that this person lacks legal representation in a process where the government seeks to subject him to an invasive, involuntary medical procedure performed without consent is a tragedy, and a clear failure of our justice system,” Cho said. “The secretive nature of these cases, and the opacity of the legal process by which the government brings these motions, should concern us all.”

According to a DHS spokesperson, the Cuban hunger striker entered the US unlawfully in 1980 and was ordered deported in 2004. The DHS claims he was previously convicted of “aggravated assault with a weapon, aggravated battery, drug possession, and carrying a concealed firearm”. The spokesperson added that he “received due process and will remain in ICE custody until removed from the United States”.

The DHS also said facilities distribute proper food, hygiene, phone and other basic services, and that “during hunger strikes, ICE continues to provide three meals a day, delivered to the detained alien’s room”.

The Trump administration had previously refused to acknowledge the force-feeding of hunger strikers in ICE detention, until later into the Guardian’s investigation confirming the practice.

The Cruelty Is The Point

As soon as you've convinced yourself that extraordinary - usually "extra legal" - measures are justified, then those measures become the point of the exercise.

We did some really stupid things in the early years of this century when we decided that waterboarding "suspected terrorists" was something we just had to do because what if there really was an existential threat, and blah blah blah?

I won't go into the details, other than to affirm what's already well-known. ie: You don't get any reliable information from your victims - they just tell you what they think you want to hear. So you end up with torture for the sake of torture.

Enter MAGA.

You can read Adam Serwer's piece in The Atlantic (from Oct 3rd, 2018), but it's behind a paywall. So here's Hawk with a YouTube reading:

We are MAGA

Cruelty

Immiseration

&

Death

On Chickens And Roosting

Ari Melber's The Beat on MSNBC, via Crooks & Liars:



Ari Melber covered a topic that would be getting national attention, were it not for the frenetic 24/7 news cycle coming out of the Trump administration.

Just after Mike Pompeo stepped down from CIA, Trump declared that he was promoting Gina Haspel to run the CIA, touting her as a great choice. Well, many Americans have a different opinion. Both Democrats and Republicans have reservations leading back to Haspel's past history as the person who had oversight over a CIA "black site" in Thailand. While an open investigation into torture was underway, evidence was destroyed. Haspel claims to not have given the order for tapes to be destroyed, though.

Ari Melber discussed this in an extensive segment on his nightly show, The Beat, on Tuesday night. It was hard hitting, deep dive into what Haspel's confirmation could mean for our country, as well as how we would be viewed by the world.
Olbermann, Special Comment, 11-05-2007:



(paraphrasing) Torture causes people to plead, and to break, and to provide the most authentic-sounding fiction - it does not cause them to tell us the truth.

Gina Haspel is implicated in the effort to cover up the crimes of the CIA. It's not unreasonable to think she's looking to complete that project, and if she's willing to go that far, there's nothing to keep me from thinking she'd be willing to let 45* use the CIA against American citizens on American soil.

I hope she's just intending to polish up the CIA's image and to protect its standing in the federal power structure. But she's compromised, which can be a very bad thing in itself, and could easily mean she'll be further compromised, feeling the need to do more bad things as she tries to compensate for all those other bad things - and on and on and on.

That's the kind of geometric expansion of shit that happens when we refuse to hold government accountable because we've become comfortably numb and we only really care about "our team" winning.

Connecting Dots

When we stop caring for each other, it's not long before we stop caring about each other.

From truthout:

There is more at stake here than manufactured ignorance and an unconscionable flight from the truth. There is also a dangerous escape from justice, morality and the most basic principles central to a democratic society. The celebration of brutality, spectacles of violence and the affirmation of torture suggests that in a market-driven society with its unchecked individualism, sheer Darwinism and refusal to think about social costs or, for that matter, any notion of the public good, the addiction to cruelty, violence and torture becomes less difficult and almost too easy. In the age of disposability and despicable gaps in wealth, income and power, modern terror becomes normalized and points to the onslaught of a mode of totalitarianism that is more than an ephemeral moment in history. Violence is no longer marginal to American life; it is the foundation that now drives it.

Skeptical Poe

Pardons

I spent a lot of time in the 70s feeling more than a little worried and frustrated because  Ford issued a blanket pardon for Tricky Dick Nixon.

And now that Obama might be doing the same for The Shrubster and his VP (Snidely Whips-n-Chainsey) et al, it struck me as an ah-fuck-not-this-shit-again kinda moment.

But Ol' Doc Maddow has some purty decent 'splainin' goin' on.  This is the only good clip I can find that's also easy to embed here in my little blog:



Find more at Rachel's show archives at MSNBC.com.

Charlie Gets It

It starts with what seems like an unrelated event in Georgia, but Charlie knows there's no such thing as unrelated event.

Mr Charles Pierce at Esquire:

Somewhere in itself, and not very far from the surface, either, this country has gone mad with fear and rage. As a result, it is finding sustenance in the acts of official violence, and doing so in more different ways than the republic has seen since we had lynching, union busting, and Red Scares at the same time, back when the 19th century was turning into the 20th. Anyone who can't see the political and sociological tissue connecting the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the revelations of a decade's worth of CIA brutality, and the execution of Robert Holsey isn't looking hard enough. In the country's untrammelled fear and rage, it is exercising the only function of self-government it can recall as its mad brain turns to red fire -- to encourage the exercise of the state's power to wound and kill all the right people. In this madness, race and class are mere diagnostic categories. In this madness, the politics of right and left, of Republicans and Democrats, of conservatives and liberals, of red and blue, are pathetically inadequate to assess the situation. In this madness, the choices are not made within the easy and obvious contexts . This is a choice between barbarism and not, between savagery and not. This is a choice between the national soul and the national Id. This is a choice of whether to take inchoate and weaponized vengeance against the living representations of the monsters in our paranoid dreams. That's the last vestige of self-government that we have allowed ourselves. The right to demand that the institutions of government kill what we fear. By any means necessary, as someone once said. 

About That Torture Thing

Our politicians and Press Poodles and everybody else showing off a talent for farting thru their mouths have all been telling us for quite a while that they don't want those rotten terrorists at Gitmo to be brought into this country because they'll stink up the joint - or some such nonsense.

Here's the thing.  I think we know now why we can't just close Gitmo and bring 'em here - it's because we tortured them.  If we put these guys into the regular channels of either our civilian justice system or the military justice system, we lose 'em.

Nothing we have against them can be used in court now because we fucking tortured them.

We completely lost our shit after 9/11. We went more than a little looney, and we did all these really lousy things to people.  

BTW - not to put us on the couch too much here, but we made the transition from Andy Hardy to Vlad The Impaler in one big fuckin' hurry; fast enough to make me think maybe we weren't really making this huge change so much as we were just kinda coming out of the closet(?).

So anyway, when we began to understand just how fucked up it was that we were doing all this really bad shit, we went into the standard CYA mode that happens every god dammed time we allow too few people to hold too much power, and let 'em do their thing without any way to keep an eye on 'em.

And the kicker - we knew it was wrong.  All of us.  We knew it.  It's wrong to torture people. And it was wrong to change the law in order to help us pretend we were still the good guys just trying to protect our sweet innocent little ol' American selves.  We knew it was wrong and we did it anyway.

Can we stop pretending now?

Leave It To Charlie

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

Today, with the release of the executive summary of the congressional investigation into the American torture program, we have lost forever the right to moral leadership that we claimed at Nuremberg, and at the tribunals that investigated the actions of the Japanese in the Pacific. Those proceedings were based in two fundamental beliefs: a) that there are some activities that are beyond the law, even in wartime, and b) that the people responsible for those activities, even the worst of them, deserve a fair trial, and a trial that is open to the world, not only because the world needed to see the savagery of which humans are capable, but also because the trial would demonstrate to the world that there is a better way to resolve the issues raised by the native savagery of which people and nations are capable than the masturbatory exercise of blind vengeance. Justice Robert Jackson, in his eloquent summation for the prosecution in the trial of the Nazi warlords, saw all of this with coruscating clarity.

Dunno about losing it "forever".  I guess we can only hope the republic lasts long enough to get some of it back.

Whoa - George

In the next post down from here, I go all I-Told-Ya-So, but here's a bit of a pre-quel to it that's kinda interesting (in a feel-a-little-embarrassed-for-him-but-not-really-the-prick-should-be-in-fucking-prison kinda way).  Anybody else notice this guy's really lost his game?



Le Shrub was always about as sharp as a bagful 'o wet yarn, but he knew how to deflect and pivot a shitload better'n that.  Dang.

Squandered

What His Shrub-i-ness said back then was bullshit.




Some knew it was bullshit back then - and they said so out loud - and they were either ignored or fucked over because they said it out loud.

Olbermann knew how to put it in terms of having to deal with our shit before we get to move on to anything else.




And he said it a lot.



(Search YouTube = Olbermann Torture)


"But they would not listen. 
They're not listening still.
Perhaps they never will."

More From Chris Hayes

My new Bro-mance continues:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Not That Anybody Noticed

It seems like we're so stuck in "Yay Us" mode, that we can't even acknowledge reality.

And sometimes it's like we don't have the confidence (or maybe the courage?) we need to cut thru the politics to get at the truth.

If I can't trust The Red Team or The Blue Team not to make it about nothing but politics, how are we supposed to hold people in the Junior Bush Administration accountable for the horrors of this last decade?  And how do we demand that Obama's Admin stop whatever they're doing to continue those horrors - making it even harder to put an end to it all?

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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I dunno - but i think refusing to acknowledge the reality of how fucked up we let ourselves get is actually what keeps us stuck in "Yay Us" mode.  And it appears we'll be there for a while longer.

Chickens Come Home To Roost

Gee - it's just like 1970 again.  The cops are not your friends...

(hat tip = The Agonist)

From care2 make a difference:

Sometime between the time he was arrested on March 27, 2009 around 2:00 p.m., and March 31 at 1:23 p.m. when he was pronounced dead, Christie had been sprayed with ten blasts of pepper spray, also known as OC (Oleo-resin Capsicum), which is a derivative of cayenne pepper.

  ...and the world is a ghetto.

Go And Sin No More

As always, the question is: what are they not telling us?

Over 100 detainees died during U.S. interrogations, dozens due directly to interrogation abuse. Gen. Barry McCaffrey said: "We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A." Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the official investigation into detainee abuse, wrote: "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

I think Obama may have made the right call by allowing a whitewash - as shitty as that seems, and as thoroughly depressing as it is.  The Bushies knew how to play it.  They made sure practically everybody shared the guilt - not just the bosses and the party apparatchiks, but the career bureaucrats as well.  Obama couldn't just go after a few at the top because that'd look too politically motivated.  And if he tried to let the thing go wherever it needed to go, then he'd have to spend every waking moment riding herd on it.  Once you start that kind of thing, it quickly turns into a witch hunt, and then the careerists and the cynical manipulators are about the only ones who really benefit.  Obama had to be thinking the costs of that level of disruption outweigh the benefits.

I'm hoping big time that Obama's working behind the scenes (thru the IG Offices maybe?) to root out the bad guys and cut 'em loose.  Unfortunately, I think once somebody gets around to writing The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire, this episode will be cited as a signal event.

The Maverick Abides

This does not absolve John McCain for having become such a complete dick over the last dozen years or so, but I still hafta throw him a bone for trying to get back to his old self.

“The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—the nickname of the al-Qaida courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden—as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaida, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaida. In fact, the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed produced false and misleading information.”

Here's a decent piece by Joe Conason at Truthdig