Indefinite Detainment, Indefinite Wars
At that point, I was mostly being used for Human Resources scams so the recruiter could still collect a paycheck in the name she purchased for me when I was three (I get the feeling that birth certificate purchase was more for her than me). My work became primarily peripheral. I traveled often and I no longer had firsthand knowledge of everything going on at Yale or in the East Coast counterintelligence scene, but they would still drag me back in when I was needed, and I could still see the results of their actions, even from across the country and then across the world.
In the moments I had to myself, I focused on trying to get my personal chains off. I was tired of battling with the world to remove theirs. I went back to attempting to find where I was stolen from. I hadn’t had any luck as a child, but now I was an adult, so I thought that would give me more of an advantage. This time, I went with the U.S. hospital listed on my forged birth certificate. It was all I really had to go on. So, I called that hospital to request my medical records. The recruiter had told me I had been born there and then spent most of the first year of my life in that hospital with a series of medical conditions, including meningitis.
When I spoke to someone in that hospital’s records department, they promised me they kept all records from the year I was born and they could get mine together with no problem. The woman told me to call back the next day to find out the fee (it was per page, so she needed to discover the number the pages first). I waited two days because, if the recruiter had been honest, there would have been a lot of pages for them to go through. When I called back, I reached the same woman I had spoken to the first time. She had uncertainty in her voice and was being coached by an older woman in the background. She told me that there had been a small file fire she was previously unaware of and it had only affected the box with my medical records. The hospital had no record of me. I thanked her and hung up.
I assumed the recruiter had gotten to her. It wasn’t until decades later that I found out that’s how U.S. hospitals deal with adopted children when they call asking about their birth records. If the hospital cannot find the records, they assume the person was adopted by parents who chose to keep it a secret, and thus many of them will give the “file fire” story. The system is set up in a way that children, both adopted and abducted, are blocked and lied to about their origins. I wasn’t the only one caught in the net. And, for once, the recruiter probably had nothing to do with the subterfuge. The entire system is set up to bury its youngest and most vulnerable victims.
While staying in New Haven, there were many times that I would find myself drugged and approaching the exterior of the JFK airport, often with the recruiter by my side saying things like, “Oh, wow! That architecture is so futuristic, we must be in a dream!” Of course, I was supposed to agree with her at that point, “Oh, yes, I must be dreaming.” I did it out of habit. Once in a while, I was drugged enough to actually believe it, but often I was just trying to appease her and her seemingly psychopathic insanity while I tried to find an exit in a country with no exit. In those days, the exit - albeit a temporary one - was often a plane. Via that airport, she sent me all over the country and the globe.
In my continuing - and often drugged - nonvoluntary service to the State and the recruiter, still trapped in the situation with no hope for escape or regaining my identity, I would visit prisons, foreign and domestic. The prisons were of varying levels of what an honest person might call legality. I was there to engage with political prisoners as part of the recruitment process. I walked through many prison doors, aware of what I was doing, and saw horrific human rights violations while there. This is a prison I walked through without them having prior notice, and without them cleaning up the worst of the mess first:
My security access allowed me entry to the prisons, and thus most doors in those areas, so when I was stumbling around on the wrong floor of a government building, trying to reach a pool, and I saw a door with a security guard at the back of an abandoned pool changing room, I decided to use that access to take a shortcut. I'd done it many times before. I liked exploring. I liked getting away from people and only hearing the echo of my feet in vacant halls. This would not be that.
The guard asked me if I was sure I wanted to enter. I said yes. He didn't look convinced but he let me in. Inside the door was an elderly man, standing right by it as if he'd been standing there for decades, and there's no doubt in my mind that he probably had been, other than to rest and eat. That room was an old locker room. To the right were showers (mostly broken, according to the man). In the center were benches. In the front was a row of sinks.
I went through a doorway near the sinks and entered what was a kitchen area. There stood several elderly women. They were sorting through food waste that had been pumped in from above via what appeared to be a cafeteria food waste chute. They treated me like a guest and offered me a clean-looking piece of bread that had been torn or bitten before it reached there. I knew the offer was in kindness, and I accepted the thing, despite being a bit of a germaphobe due to fragile health from having been thrown into so many medical research studies as a child. Even sharing a glass of water with a relatively healthy friend would often result in months of pain and struggling with swelling, hives, and an overactive immune response.
Down the hall, past the kitchen, were the cells. They were dark and dirty. I didn't invade the space too much to see. I just strained to look down the hall. An adult male, a generation younger than the elderly in the kitchen, was in the midst of a sustained emotional breakdown. His girlfriend/wife was not in a better place emotionally.
After someone took the piece of bread back from me, realizing I wasn’t actually going to eat it, I sat down on a bench in the first room to wait to be released. My unexpected visit caused the guard to call around internally to make sure I actually had authorization, and it took a while to get an answer, so he left me locked inside for the wait. The girlfriend of the man having a breakdown sat down next to me and began to aggressively mother me. She insisted I wash my hands in one of the sinks, and she stood over me like a mother would, scrubbing them for me. Then, she got out a comb and began to attempt to untangle my hair...an unpleasant experience due to the knots (my hair is brush-worthy - not intended for combs), her persistence, the amount of time she spent (it was eternal), and the physical proximity. I felt uncomfortably smothered.
When I finally escaped her, with a little assistance from the elderly man by the door, he explained to me that she and her boyfriend were the children of the people in that prison. That they were born there, and raised there. But, when she had her own baby, with the expectation that she could also raise a family, the prison guards took the baby away. I was the smallest person to have walked back in through that door. She thought I was her child.
Of all the prisoners I met, her sorrow impacted me the most. If I could have saved her, I probably would have brought her home with me and never let go.
The prisoners I met tended to leave me with a lasting impression. Something about those moments highlighted their lives to me in ways that few other people in my life ever could.
Another time, in another prison, I would meet an American who left me hating life, and another time… well, let’s start with that one and skip the American for now.
I was drugged to hell for the journey there and can’t even remember what country in the Americas we were visiting (I did know at the time, to be fair) but I know that rumor of the particular underground prison made it to the surface and into a newspaper at least once. It was situated beneath a government building in a city and wasn’t a secret, although it was infamous. The prison itself was approximately six sub-levels deep. I was with the recruiter for that one. She, as was usually the case, didn’t enter the prison. She would often send me in and wait outside. Usually, I was there to make contact with various political prisoners. This time, I was there as a favor and in a different capacity.
They were having issues with the plumbing, especially in the lower sub-levels. They were also having issues getting plumbers to enter the facility, either because the plumbers refused or because the government didn’t want anyone to see what was going on in the bottom floors. I was given an Ecstasy pill and sent to the bottom floor. Approximately six levels down. What I saw when I got down there was disturbing. No amount of drugs could have made it a good experience, although they did make it less nauseating.
There was a pipe visibly dripping water down one of the walls, but that wasn’t the main problem. The problem was the drainage, or the lack of it. A guard said something about the drain pipes not working right because of how deep we were. Then he left me with a shovel and a wheelbarrow in the shower room. The water and excrement were deep enough to cover a person’s shoes. The political prisoners who were never going to see the light of day and who had clearly been tortured, were crazed, depressed, and moved more like animals than people. They had also been using the bottom of the shower stalls as toilets.
I started shoveling. I hate the feeling of being drugged, but as far as that moment goes, I am incredibly grateful that I was on something. That wheelbarrow was filled several times and carted away before the shower room looked like a shower room again. The entire time I worked, I could hear the scurrying of one particularly insane political prisoner as he moved in one of the halls to my right. I tried to talk to him at one point, but we didn’t speak the same language and it’s unlikely that he would have been comprehensible even if we had.
Eventually, I finished and a guard led me up to what was probably the second or third subfloor. There, I waited to be released. It would be several more hours. While sitting there, I observed the people around me, most of whom had zero interest in me and didn’t speak English, anyway. They were depressed and irritable but not visibly deranged like the people below. Then, someone who was probably around age seventeen or so sat down next to me. He started speaking in English. We talked about everything in those hours. He had been born there, a lot like me, but they had never set him free. He seemed less depressed than everyone else, although still pale. It turned out there was a reason for his uplifted mood.
He was part of a prison work program that allowed him to go to the surface sometimes. There, above ground, his job was to join protests and movements to initiate violence and give the police an excuse to round up the protesters. He liked his work. It allowed him to meet people and see the sun. Any illusions I ever had about Intelligence work paying well (if you’re not into thievery or blackmail) were killed long before that. Hopefully, now, I’ve killed those hopes for everyone else, too. It’s not Hollywood. That kid was paid in sunlight.
By the time I got back to the surface, my skin had flared up in every way imaginable. I went to a dermatologist and got a year-long prescription for antibiotics. I didn’t feel clean even after that.
As for the American prisoner I would meet, that was in yet another prison and earlier on. I don’t know what country that was in either, I never knew, and I don’t think I’ll be able to find it in newspapers. I did try to locate it again later by researching the military uniform I saw there, but there are a ridiculous number of countries with those small-bill green hats and matching green uniforms.
The recruiter was there for that one and I was let in through a door it the front of the building and past a secured gate, while she waited outside. I’m fairly certain I was doing her job for her that day. From there, I went upstairs and was granted access to a hallway. I had a list of people I needed to speak to and a pile of papers with me, including a carbon-copy receipt book. I wandered lost for a bit. While the hall was locked on both sides, the prisoners were free to move between the rooms. It seemed more like a converted building rather than originally being a prison. It may have been a school, factory, or office building first. A room on the right was quite large. There were mattresses and clothes, including on a makeshift clothesline, strewn everywhere. I was sticking to the edge by the door, attempting to give everyone’s things respect and space.
That’s when I met the only person on that floor who spoke a high level of English. After the fourth or fifth person I had attempted to speak to, they had sent me him. He was a black man, possibly American, but not the American I mentioned previously who would leave me traumatized. He walked me across the large room and we looked out the back window as we spoke. Through the window, we could see the disused courtyard behind the building. We talked for a couple of minutes and then he took the list from me and we went through it, finding each person on it. Most of their languages sounded European to me. I think one woman was Scandinavian. They each wrote lists of things they needed and I gave them each a receipt to acknowledge that the lists had been received. Most of the items were basic toiletries. They all seemed aware of their situation and were trying to make the best of it.
Eventually, there was only one name remaining on my list. They told me I could find him downstairs. I went to the far end of the hall and a guard let me into that stairwell. The ground floor level was controlled chaos. The cells there were essentially a line of cages. They were large enough to stand in but made of wire fencing, very narrow, and there must have been fifteen in a row, at least. When I entered to walk along the cells, it seemed like every single person in them was yelling and actively throwing ripped-up toilet paper against the fencing. I asked one where the person on my list was, using his name. They pointed to the end of the cells. At the very end, on the right, sat the American who would force survivor’s guilt onto me. He wasn’t yelling. He wasn’t throwing toilet paper. He was sitting on the floor of his cell, apparently meditating.
I handed him the giant stack of legal documents I had for him. No one else had required a stack quite that thick. He signed the receipt and started going through the papers energetically. He was convinced that he had a legal case and that the papers would set him free. I don’t think he understood how few rights political prisoners actually have or exactly what indefinite detainment means, especially when you’ve been accused of spying in a third country.
He insisted I call someone for him. I said I would try. I did try. The recruiter intercepted me on the way to a payphone (not that I would have had enough change for that international call) and I forgot the number within the hour. His hope and expectations, which I could not realistically meet, ate at me for…well, they left a permanent impression. I’ve been in countless similar situations, and yet here I am highlighting him. His hope is what killed me. No one else I met ever had that level of delusional hope. Even as I write this book, I have zero hope that writing it will change a thing. It’s simply an act of throwing something at a wall because if I don’t, I won’t be able to walk away saying, “At least I tried.”
I continued to drag through life, absolutely exhausted and never knowing when I would be forced into a dangerous assignment with no warning or proper read-in, or at least not one I could remember once the drugs began to wear off. I tried to carve out a small chunk of life for myself. I sought additional employment that actually paid me and I got a tiny studio apartment for myself.
Frequently, the requirements for the paycheck my exploiter was collecting at my expense would get in the way of my personal mediocre part-time work to pay my bills. I would sometimes lose everything because, first, I would have to meet the obligations of the job that paid her, often in locations far across the country or the world. They were a long trip from where I had established myself and my routine. I would miss part-time $8-an-hour work and not be able to pay my $250 a-month studio apartment rent because I was halfway around the globe on a ticket that probably cost someone $1000.
My trips were generally related to research, relocations, or recruitment. On one occasion, I was sent to the Bahamas, high out of my mind. As I took boat after boat, looking out on the seemingly never-ending blue water, I felt like I would never find my way home. The scene in front of me, despite being beautiful, amplified my feelings of loneliness and being lost in the vast expanse of this world. Eventually, I got onto one last boat, a small motorboat with supplies, and headed to a U.S. research island to deliver everything in the boat to a scientist who was there. I remember reaching the shore and seeing his face. With the level of drugs in my system and as immediately disturbing as his personality was, I’m both grateful and terrified that I don’t remember the rest.
Another time, and not on my own, my sometimes-cohort was sent into foreign territory for a reason I cannot figure out to this day. The combination of drugging and not everyone being read in was a catastrophe waiting to happen. And it did happen. We ended up in a street fight and extraction became a nightmare that didn’t occur until a week after the promised time.
Back on U.S. soil, I began to find ways to earn an income on the side that could withstand what I was going through. It wasn't enough to be comfortable but at least I wasn't starving. One of the first places I learned about sporadic entrepreneurship was on the road going between summer festivals. I managed to support myself through a summer of travel. I figured it was a good start. Even that was cut short when the U.S. government came calling, once again. I was needed in Phoenix. The bane of my life sent a car full of bounty hunters to collect me and make sure I got there on time for them.
By the time we arrived in Phoenix, I was so tired of the antics of the drug-addled bounty hunters that I happily let them steal my bag of belongings and hand me over to a nicely dressed military officer who led me inside, with him apologizing the entire way for having taken me away from my summer festivities. He informed me that a woman they were holding in that facility had refused to allow them to do any more testing on her until she saw me and that I was safe. I was so accustomed to being dropped into random scenarios to play a role or perform a task that I didn't even blink. I just nodded and went along, an ideal hostage as always.
We reached the hall with the correct observation room, and I looked through the glass. Inside of it was medical equipment including a large machine, but more prominent in my view was the woman on the gurney. Her hair was long and unbrushed to the point of matting. She was hunched over, hysterical, and clearly in agony. I was walked into the room. There, I took her hand in mine. She spoke Spanish and I didn't comprehend a word, but I stood there for several minutes, just holding this tortured woman's hand. She pleaded, but I couldn't understand what she was saying. Eventually, and too soon, I was led away.
They shipped me back east. I never did make it to the festival I had been on my way to. Once released from further obligations in Connecticut, I found someone with a kind ear and spoke to him about what I had witnessed in that locked facility. I wanted to help the woman escape, but we both concluded that we would end up dead, in jail, or in a mental ward for our attempts. The weight of the society that brought about that stark reality began to feel like a pressure, consistently heavy on my chest.
Later on, when putting together the pieces and realizing that the only woman who would face further torture just to see me was probably my own mother – and that I had left her there alone to die in agony because the world would have fought me if I tried to save her – that changed me.
It would eventually change my perception of humanity from deserving hope to something else entirely.
As I’ve said before, they had to use political prisoners and prisoners of war because no one else would sign the paperwork allowing themselves to become weapons research test subjects. That said, domestic and ordinary prisoners are often coerced into becoming medical test subjects within the U.S. prison system, primarily for commercial pharmaceutical research, but not exclusively. It has been a persistent issue for more than half a century.
There is a problem with the psychology behind research that requires testing on unwanted or unvalued populations, and that psychology impacts the quality of the pharmaceuticals produced. When a drug or other treatment is produced via unethical means, care for the patient and concern about side effects is reduced. This lack of care results in the formulation of a product that will not just do harm to the unwanted and exploited group, but will also do harm to the end user, who will pay a purchase price for that harm.
While the world slept, I was coerced into recruitment,
preparation, provocation, and exploitation of war
and people for biological, chemical, and nuclear
warfare research.
Knowledge goes nowhere in a world that turns away in fear.
I bore it alone.
I wept for the world.
The world never wept for me.
Image Source: New York Times (100)
“The New York Times
No Regrets for a Love of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weatherman
Published: Sept. 11, 2001
‘Everything was absolutely ideal on the day we bombed the Pentagon.’”
Text Source: New York Times
Yes, it was an inside job. That’s what happens when you let the people who hate you and profit from you run your Intelligence services.
Image Source: California Law Review via University of California (99)
“Prisoner subjects continue to be used in medical experiments. For instance, between 2006 and 2008, a drug company called Hythian contracted… to enroll criminal defendants in an experimental drug addiction treatment program. As part of this program, state judges ‘divert’ drug court participants… into an experimental treatment program called Prometa…The program involves thirty days of treatment with three different drugs, none of which has been approved for use in addiction treatment by the Food and Drug Administration. At least one Collin County, Texas, participant in the Prometa program died; the court recorded the death as a suicide.”
Text Source: California Law Review via University of California
I have to admit that by the time the 2001 attempt at demolishing the Twin Towers was made, with enough success to be plastered on the news for days on end, I didn’t actually care, despite my having been there to observe the planting of the explosives for the earlier 1993 bombing. I felt nothing. Name one part of humanity that had not already failed me and everyone around me by that point.
Although, I will note that September 11th morning, before the towers went down, one of the articles that was published in that day’s newspaper was a nod to the Weather Underground Organization. That was the article that mentioned the recruiter’s involvement in putting a bomb in the Pentagon. While the public may believe every lie and alternative lie told to them, those who did the actual work still got a tilt of the hat in acknowledgment, and as always, in the New York Times.
Somewhere in New York that morning, was a person looking up from that article right in time to see the Twin Towers explosion. Somewhere near the Pentagon, the same was happening, but with a different view over the top of the newspaper.