Coca-Cola Series

For God, Country, and Coca-Cola by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

Pemberton may have first resorted to morphine to ease the pain of his own Civil War wounds, continuing its use throughout his periodic illnesses. Pemberton was an addict. “Morphinism,” as it was called then, was increasingly prevalent, particularly among physicians and pharmacists. Pemberton had a personal interest in coca as a cure for morphine addiction. In the late 1970s, Pemberton first read about this miraculous new substance.

Pemberton told a reporter in 1885 that “I am convinced from actual experiments that coca is the very best substitute for opium, with a person addicted to the opium habit that has ever discovered. It supplies the place of that drug, and the patient who will use it as a means of cure, may deliver himself from the pernicious habit without inconvenience or pain.”

Pemberton granted that cocaine, if misused, could be dangerous, but he same could be said for any effective medicine. “I wish it were in my power to substitute the Coca and compel all who are addicted to the use of opium, morphine, alcohol, tobacco, or other narcotic stimulants to live on the coca plant or any of its true preparations,” he said. “It is perfectly wonderful what coca does.”

Pemberton’s label for his new syrup: “Coca-Cola Syrup and Extract for Soda Water and other Carbonated Beverages. This Intellectual Beverage and Temperance Drink contains the valuable Tonic and Nerve Stimulant properties of the Coca plant and Cola nuts, and makes not only a delicious, exhilarating, refreshing and invigorating Beverage [dispenses from the soda water fountain or in other carbonated beverages], but a valuable Brain Tonic and a cure for all nervous affections – Sick, Head-Ache, Neuralgia, Hysteria, Melancholy, etc. The peculiar flavor of Coca-Cola delights every palate.”

Opium Series

Shock Doctrine Series

Rumsfeld approved a series of special interrogation practices for use in the War on Terror. The Intelligence Services Board, an advisory arm of the CIA, stated openly that “a careful reading of the Kubark manual is essential for anyone involved in interrogation.” These included the methods laid out in the CIA manuals: “use of isolation facility for up to 30 days,” “deprivation of light and auditory stimuli,” “the detainee may also have a hood placed over his head during transportation and questioning,” “removal of clothing” and using detainees’ individual phobias [such as fear of dogs] to induce stress.” According to the White House, torture was still banned – but now to qualify as torture, the pain inflicted had to be “equivalent to the intensity of the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure.” According to these new rules, the U.S. government was free to use the methods it had developed in the 1950s under layers of secrecy and deniability – only now it was out in the open, without fear of prosecution.

The thousands of prisoners rounded up in the raids were brought to CIA agents, U.S. soldiers and private contractors who conducted aggressive interrogations to find out whatever they could about the resistance. The Green Zone now became a magnet for a different breed of shock experts, those specializing in the darker arts of suppressing resistance movements. The private security companies padded their ranks with veterans of the dirty wars in Columbia, South Africa and Nepal. Blackwater and other private security firms hired more than seven hundred Chilean troops for Iraq deployment, some of whom had trained and served under Pinochet.

One of the highest-ranking shock specialists was the U.S. Commander James Steele, who arrived in Iraq in May 2003. Steele had been a key figure in Central America’s right-wing crusades, where he had served as chief U.S. advisor to several Salvadorian army battalions accused of being death squads. More recently he had been a vice president at Enron and had originally gone to Iraq as an energy consultant. When the resistance rose up, became Bremer’s chief security advisor. Steele was directed to bring to Iraq what was chillingly called “the Salvador Option.”

As resistance mounted, the occupation forces fought back with escalating shock tactics. These came late at night or very early in the morning, with soldiers bursting through doors, shining flashlights into darkened homes, shouting in English, men’s heads were forcibly bagged before they were thrown into army trucks and sped to prisons and holding camps. In the first three and half years of occupation, an estimated 61,500 Iraqis were captured and imprisoned by U.S. forces, usually with methods designed to “maximize capture shock.” Inside the prisons, more shocks followed: buckets of freezing water; snarling, teeth-baring German shepherds; punching and kicking; and sometimes the shock of electrical currents funning from live wires, incidents documented in the infamous Abu Ghraid photographs. Another Sergeant told of a prison on a military base called Tiger, near al Qaim, close to the Syrian border.

Congress approved the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Although the White House used the new bill to claim that it had renounced all use of torture, it left huge holes allowing CIA agents and contractors to continue to use Kubark-style sensory deprivation and overload, as well as other “creative” techniques including simulated drowning [‘water-boarding”].

Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006, Edited Excerpts

Philippine War, 1901: Newspaper reporters sought out returned veterans and from their accounts learned that American soldiers in the Philippines had resorted to all manner of torture. The most notorious was the “water cure,” in which sections of bamboo were forced down the throats of prisoners and then used to fill the prisoners’ stomachs with dirty water until they swelled in torment. Soldiers would jump on the prisoner’s stomach to force the water out, often repeating the process until the victim either informed or died.

Abu Ghraid: Google it.

Waterboarding Instructions:  Youtube it. 

Medieval Waterboarding – Tormento del Agua

Medieval Torture in Art

http://www.romeartlover.it/Torture.html

Coca-Cola Series

Sugar and tea were initially considered exotic luxuries available only to the wealthy nobility in Great Britain. In addition to their use as rare spices, they were supposedly potent medicines for almost any ailment. A German traveler who met Queen Elizabeth in Shakespearean times described her black teeth – “a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar.”

Poverty-stricken factory workers learned to grab a quick meal away from home, using hot sweetened tea as a pick-me-up. Teatime, a new British ritual, was gradually assimilated into all aspects of daily life.

This should sound all too familiar. Like tea and sugar, Coca-Cola started life primarily as a medicine, though not strictly for the upper crust. Like sweetened tea, Coke contained caffeine and sugar, along with a tiny amount of cocaine for fifteen years or so. A Coke break quickly became the American equivalent of the British teatime, while advertising stressed the role of the “pause that refreshes” as an aid to industry.

Coca-Cola Series

For God, Country, and Coca-Cola by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

In his 1998 publication, Liquid Candy, Jacobson observed, “Twenty years ago, boys consumed more than twice as much milk as soft drinks.” Today, those figures are reversed. Jacobson was particularly concerned about girls, who also consume twice as much soda as milk, and who build 92 percent of their bone mass by age 18. Americans drank an average of 576 twelve-ounce servings of soft drinks per year in 1997 – or 1.6 cans a day for every man, woman, and child.

For Coca-Cola CEO Doug Ivester, of course, that was cause for jubilation rather than concern. “Actually,” he observed in 1998, “our product is quite healthy. Fluid replenishment is a key to health. Coca-Cola does a great service because it encourages people to take in more and more liquids.” Indeed, a fifth of American toddlers on one or two drink soft drinks at an average of seven ounces a day.

By relying primarily on the instant energy of glucose, people forego vitamins, fiber, and other necessary nutrients. While it is possible to get those vital nutrients elsewhere, the more Coke you drink, the less room you find for healthy food in a typical 2,500-calorie daily “budget.” It is more likely that Coca-Cola fiends, particularly those who use it to wash down fatty junk foods, will ingest too many calories – one of the reasons that 12 percent of teenagers and 35 percent of adults in the United States are overweight. Worse, poor and black American children are three times more likely to become obese while suffering form malnutrition. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal ran a front-page series on the inner-city “deadly diet” of high-fat, salty, sugary food and drink sole in popular fast food outlets, which offer a refuge from the ghetto.

As for those who lump Coke with junk food and blame it for the poor nutrition of immigrants, inner-city blacks, and Third World people abandoning their traditional diet, the Coca-Cola executives reply that they advocate drinking the beverage only as part of a balanced diet. It isn’t their fault if people don’t eat well.