Radley Balko writes:

In October, Jagels told the Bakersfield Californian that after 26 years in office, he won’t be running for reelection in 2010. Good riddance to him. [...] If history dispenses justice more honorably than Ed Jagels ever did, the boyish-looking D.A. will be most remembered for his role ruining countless lives in perhaps the most shameful of the Reagan-era “tough on crime” debacles: the coast-to-coast sex abuse panic of the 1980s. [...]

Relying on suggestive police and social worker interrogations of children, Jagels’ office put 26 people behind bars on felony child sex abuse charges in the 1980s and ‘90s. Of those 26 convictions, 25 have since been overturned.

The details were lurid, and bore striking similarity to the fantastical stories that were springing from similar cases all over the country, from Florida to Massachusetts to Washington State. Parents were accused of having sex with their own children, of forcing young siblings to have sex with each other, of inviting neighbors over for adult-child orgies. When the national panic began to include stories of cult activity and Satan worship, Jagels’ and the Kern County Sheriff’s Department managed to locate that sordid activity in Bakersfield, too. Now children began telling investigators they had been forced to drink blood; they were hung from ceilings naked and beaten; infants were sodomized, murdered, and cannibalized. There was never any physical evidence to back the accusations. The photos the children alleged the accused to have taken during the acts never surfaced. The bodies of the murdered babies were never found. In one case a child alleged to have been murdered was found alive and healthy, living with her parents.

Many of Jagels’ victims are profiled in the moving 2008 documentary Witch Hunt. They aren’t limited to the people he put in prison. Particularly wrenching are the interviews with children who made the false accusations. They’re now adults, and have carried unfathomable guilt and remorse. Some of these children put their parents in prison for a decade or more. In one scene, a man who falsely accused his neighbor of molesting him as a child breaks down in tears as he explains how due to fear and guilt, he’s never been able to bathe his own son. [...]

Perhaps the most troubling thing about Ed Jagels’ career is that not only have the legal and political systems in California never sanctioned him for his monstrous behavior, he’s been regularly rewarded for it. He has served as both president and director of the powerful California District Attorneys Association (CDAA), and on a number of blue ribbon panels charged with advising state officials on crime policy. Upon Jagels’ retirement announcement, Scott Thorpe, the current head of the CDAA, told the Associated Press that Jagels is a “prosecutor’s prosecutor,” a remarkable and revealing statement of that organization’s commitment to justice. Jagels is also listed as a crime policy advisor to Meg Whitman, a leading candidate for the California GOP’s 2010 gubernatorial nomination.

Reason: Kern County’s Monstrous D.A.

(Thanks OVO)

I’m simply not comfortable with paying someone to be waterboarded, even if it is “for charity” and even if it is Sean Hannity.

Anyone else thinking of Videodrome?

With each new revelation on U.S. torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo (and who, knows, probably elsewhere), I am reminded of the chilling story of Alyssa Peterson, who I have written about numerous times in the past three years but now with especially sad relevance. Appalled when ordered to take part in interrogations that, no doubt, involved what we would call torture, she refused, then killed herself a few days later, in September 2003.

Of course, we now know from the torture memos and the U.S. Senate committee probe and various new press reports, that the “Gitmo-izing” of Iraq was happening just at the time Alyssa got swept up in it.

Alyssa Peterson was one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq. A cover-up, naturally, followed.

Huffington Post: U.S. Soldier Killed Herself — After Refusing to Take Part in Torture

(via OVO)

Top Bush administration officials gave the CIA approval to use waterboarding, a controversial interrogation technique, as early as 2002, a Senate intelligence report shows.

On July 17, 2002, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who later became secretary of state, said the CIA could proceed with “alternative interrogation methods,” including waterboarding, when questioning suspected al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah.

The decision was contingent on the Justice Department’s determining the method’s legality. A week later, Attorney General John Ashcroft had determined the “proposed interrogation techniques were lawful,” the report said. [...]

In a meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet, Ashcroft, Rice and their legal counsels, “the principals reaffirmed that the CIA program was lawful and reflected administration policy,” the report said.

CNN: Senate report: Rice, Cheney OK’d CIA use of waterboarding

(via OVO)

A follow-up to this post day before yesterday about the troubled teen industry.

The Cult That Spawned the Tough Love Teen Industry

Mount Bachelor, the school mentioned previously, was a CEDU school prior to being purchased by Aspen. CEDU is a first generation offspring of Synanon, the original abuse-as-therapy cult.

For Their Own Good

A Business Built on the Troubles of Teenagers

A web site for abuse survivors

Mount Bachelor Academy regularly uses intensely humiliating tactics as treatment. For instance, in required seminars that the school calls Lifesteps, students say staff members of the residential program have instructed girls, some of whom say they have been victims of rape or sexual abuse, to dress in provocative clothing — fishnet stockings, high heels and miniskirts — and perform lap dances for male students as therapy. [...]

But because the programs are privately run, what happens within their walls is largely a mystery. No one knows whether the programs succeed or fail. [...]

Mount Bachelor’s executive director, Bitz, says her school uses widely accepted psychological treatments to help children overcome their problems. “We also use a psychodrama-treatment approach designed to do one or both of two things,” said Bitz in her statement, “get a student to embrace qualities of their character (such as beauty or courage) about which they have doubt or assist them in recognizing qualities that are unproductive (such as selfishness or conceit) about which they have little insight.” [...]

“They told me I was dirty and I had to put mud on myself for being raped,” she said in reference to another Lifesteps session. “They basically blamed me for getting raped.”

Bitz dismissed Jane’s story and called it “very suspect” in an interview with the Bend Bulletin, which also spoke with Jane. “We know that some current students have made a conscious decision to lie about our school, hoping that it will be closed as a result, and that they would then be sent back home,” Bitz told TIME. [...]

Synanon began as a drug-rehabilitation program before morphing into a controversial cult and is credited with putting forth the idea that confrontation and boot-camp-style breakdown tactics could cure teen misbehavior and addiction. Synanon’s confrontational techniques influenced est and LifeSpring, which began selling weekend seminars designed to prompt emotional breakthroughs in participants.

Time: An Oregon School for Troubled Teens Is Under Scrutiny

Interesting article on a number of levels:

1) The potential Synanon-inspired abuse of kids right here in Oregon.

2) The implications of the court case for students and school districts.

3) Problems with private schools in general.

4) Problems with public schools, education, and therapy in general.

There’s a follow-up form the author of the article at HuffPo.

(via Metafilter thanks to Trevor Blake)

Obviously, this will be too general: people stay for lots of reasons. I knew someone once who had a bad heroin habit, and while getting involved with a guy who beat her up if she tried to leave the house would not be my preferred method of detoxing, it worked for her. (She was still clean the last time I heard.) But generalizations might be better than nothing. I will also refer to abusers as ‘he’, and to their victims as ’she’; this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases.

In some cases, understanding why someone stays is easy. A lot of women are afraid that their abuser would try to harm them if they leave. And with good reason: about a third of female homicide victims were killed by a spouse, lover, or ex-lover; and that’s not counting the women who are “merely” beaten, stalked, and so forth. Staying in a case like this, at least until you had figured out how to leave safely and cover your tracks, is not mysterious or perplexing.

Moreover, while I think the assumption that battered women stay because they are just dumb, or have staggeringly bad judgment, is wrong and insulting, there are a whole lot of battered women, and it would be very surprising if none of them stayed for such reasons. We asked women who came to our shelter when the abuse had started; one woman told me that her husband had thrown her from a moving car on their first date, at which point I wondered silently why on earth there had been a second date, let alone a subsequent marriage. But in my experience such women were a vanishingly small minority.

Obsidian Wings: Why Do They Stay?

(via Appropedia)