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How two psychologists teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings.
By Noa Yachot
The CIA used the music of an Irish boyband called Westlife to torture Suleiman Abdullah in Afghanistan.
His interrogators would intersperse a syrupy song called "My Love" with heavy metal, played on repeat at ear-splitting volume. They told Suleiman, a newly wed fisherman from Tanzania, that they were playing the love song especially for him. Suleiman had married his wife Magida only two weeks before the CIA and Kenyan agents abducted him in Somalia, where he had settled while fishing and trading around the Swahili Coast. He would never see Magida again.
The music pounded constantly as part of a scheme to assault prisoners' senses. It stopped only when a CD skipped or needed changing. When that happened, prisoners would call to one another in a desperate attempt to find out who was being held alongside them. A putrid smell that reminded Suleiman of rotting seaweed permeated the prison. His cell was pitch black; he couldn't see a thing. The U.S. government refers to the prison as "COBALT." Suleiman calls it "The Darkness."
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For more than a month, Suleiman endured an incessant barrage of torture techniques designed to psychologically destroy him. His torturers repeatedly doused him with ice-cold water. They beat him and slammed him into walls. They hung him from a metal rod, his toes barely touching the floor. They chained him in other painful stress positions for days at a time. They starved him, deprived him of sleep, and stuffed him inside small boxes. With the torture came terrifying interrogation sessions in which he was grilled about what he was doing in Somalia and the names of people, all but one of whom he'd never heard of.
After four or five weeks of this relentless pain and suffering, Suleiman's torturers assessed him as psychologically broken and incapable of resisting them. Suleiman could take no more. He decided to end his life by consuming painkillers he had stockpiled. But as he began to take the pills, guards stormed into his cell to stop him. He was then shackled, hooded, and driven a short distance to another CIA prison close by — a prison Suleiman came to know as the "Salt Pit." Although Suleiman's torture would continue for many years more, the very worst of it was over.
A year and two months later, the CIA handed Suleiman over to the U.S. military, which imprisoned him at Bagram, also in Afghanistan. Finally, in 2008, after more than five years in U.S. custody, with no charges ever leveled against him, he was sent home with a document confirming he posed no threat to the United States. His family had heard nothing of him since his disappearance, and they had presumed him dead.
But even once home in his native Zanzibar, Suleiman felt far from free. Constant flashbacks transported him back to his torture at the hands of his CIA captors. After years of near-starvation he was unable to eat normally. He suffered splitting headaches and pain throughout his body from the torture. Prolonged isolation left him unaccustomed to human interaction. Despite repeated attempts, he couldn't find Magida. Unable to sleep due to the torment of his memories and the physical pain, he found limited solace playing with his family's rabbits in the middle of the night.
"I was afraid of so many things," he says in the halting English he acquired in prison. "Everyone thought I'm crazy."
Suleiman, a reggae-loving fisherman who had once been known as "Travolta" for his prowess on the dance floor, had become a shell of himself.
case updates and developments
Damage by Design
Suleiman's trauma is not just a consequence of his ordeal in American prisons. It was the CIA's goal, through a program designed and executed by two psychologists the agency contracted to run its torture operations, to break his mind. Integral to the program was the idea that once a detainee had been psychologically destroyed through torture, he would become compliant and cooperate with interrogators' demands. The theory behind the goal had never been scientifically tested because such trials would violate human experimentation bans established after Nazi experiments and atrocities during World War II. Yet that theory would drive an experiment in some of the worst systematic brutality ever inflicted on detainees in modern American history. Today, three of the many victims and survivors of that experiment are seeking justice through a lawsuit against the men who designed and implemented that program for the CIA.
James Mitchell, left, and Bruce Jessen, right. Photos: VICE News; Wikimedia/Michael Kearns
Mitchell and Jessen were two former U.S. military psychologists contracted by the CIA to design, develop, and run the agency's detention, rendition, and interrogation operations. As psychologists in the U.S. military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program, the two men had devoted their careers to training U.S. troops to resist abusive treatment in case of capture by governments that violate the Geneva Conventions. SERE teaches resistance by subjecting students to carefully controlled versions of harsh techniques used by China, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union, often to extract false confessions from captives for propaganda purposes. During training, psychologists like Mitchell and Jessen are on hand to monitor trainees' psychological well-being and to ensure that SERE instructors don't go too far.
But Mitchell and Jessen intensified and manipulated SERE techniques so they bore little relation to those used on SERE recruits. Whereas SERE training was intended to help strengthen the resolve of American recruits, Mitchell and Jessen's techniques were designed to achieve the exact opposite result: to break detainees and turn their minds into putty in interrogators' hands.
The foundation of Mitchell and Jessen's experiment in torture began taking shape shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Six days later, President Bush signed an order authorizing the CIA to capture and detain members of al-Qaida. At the time, the agency had little or no recent experience in detention or interrogation – exposure of its participation in torture in the 1960s and 1980s put an official end to those practices. As the agency scrambled to put together the detention component, it also began to explore coercive ways of interrogating detainees, and its prior disavowals of torture began to disintegrate. By November 2001, before it had any detainees in its custody, CIA attorneys had begun drafting opinions on when it would be legally permissible to circumvent the international prohibition on torture.
It was against this backdrop — of an agency with little to no experience in detention and interrogation, presuming the necessity of torture and preemptively seeking cover for illegality — that Mitchell and Jessen entered the scene.
Neither psychologist had ever conducted a real-world interrogation. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirms this in its landmark report on the CIA detention and interrogation program, the executive summary of which was released at the end of last year. "Neither psychologist had experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa'ida, a background in terrorism, or any relevant regional, cultural, or linguistic expertise," the Senate report notes.
But the CIA was casting around for guidance, and despite this obvious lack in credentials, in December 2001 the agency commissioned Mitchell and Jessen to review the so-called Manchester Manual, a document discovered in Britain that the CIA thought instructed al-Qaida operatives on how to resist interrogation.
Mitchell and Jessen's review of the Manchester Manual claimed that members of al-Qaida had been trained to resist interrogation and proposed ways to defeat that resistance. Titled "Recognizing and Developing Countermeasures to Al-Qa'ida Resistance to Interrogation Techniques: A Resistance Training Perspective," the still-classified report laid out the nascent theoretical underpinning for Mitchell and Jessen's torture program: inducing "learned helplessness" in human beings.
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Mitchell and Jessen were interested in applying the psychological concept of "learned helplessness" to interrogation. Psychologist Martin Seligman pioneered studies on the phenomenon in experiments he conducted on dogs in the 1960s. Seligman used the term "learned helplessness" to describe the state of utter passivity prompted by a series of negative events that leads subjects to believe there is nothing they can do to escape their suffering. Seligman conducted his experiments by administering electric shocks to different groups of dogs. When given the chance to avoid their pain, the dogs in his experiment that had been able to escape the shocks did so quickly. Those that couldn't stop the pain didn't even try to avoid it, even when given the opportunity. They believed they had no ability to control their fates. They had learned helplessness.
Mitchell and Jessen posited that this theory could be applied to interrogation — that harsh measures could be used to break any resistance of al-Qaida captives by inducing a state of learned helplessness. Torture would "shape compliance" with interrogation, Mitchell and Jessen theorized. Once detainees were abused to the point of learned helplessness, resistance would crumble, and the detainees would divulge information that they might otherwise withhold.
No legitimate science backs up this assumption. Research on inducing a sustained state of learned helplessness in humans through abuse, or on the role of learned helplessness in eliciting truthful information, does not exist for the simple reason that it can't be legally or ethically conducted. In the words of psychologist Dr. Steven Reisner, an anti-torture advocate and ethics advisor for Physicians for Human Rights:
Inducing a state of learned helplessness in humans, I think without doubt, would constitute torture — cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Which is the reason why we can't do such experiments, because just envisioning, just actually setting up such an experiment, is a violation of human dignity and a violation of the prohibitions against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
But torture was a key component of Mitchell and Jessen's plan from the outset. And even under the Bush administration's skewed reinterpretation of the term, the intentional infliction of physical or psychological pain or suffering severe enough to cause a prolonged mental condition, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, violates the prohibition on torture.
The CIA program violated not only international and U.S. prohibitions on torture — it also violated the well-established ban on non-consensual human experimentation. The Nuremberg Code, in place since 1947, was the basis for the prosecution and convictions of World War II Nazi doctors. It forbids any research on human subjects without their informed consent. Numerous other treaties and ethics codes include similar bans, recognizing that any experimentation, however benign, on human subjects without their consent or on prisoners, is inherently cruel, inhuman, or degrading.
Mitchell and Jessen, however, were undeterred by law, ethics, or the lessons of history. The torture program they designed and implemented at the behest of the CIA by its very design required ongoing experimentation on its human subjects. They did not know how the detainees would react to the torture techniques they devised, or if the detainees would even survive them. They did not know whether and how much torture would be needed to induce learned helplessness in a particular detainee, or whether once a detainee's mind was broken, he would produce truthful information. They had, after all, adapted the torture techniques from those used by authoritarian regimes to extract false confessions.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney. Photo: Flickr/The U.S. National Archives
The CIA knew it needed legal cover to torture — to "work," as Dick Cheney characterized it, "the dark side." By early 2002, the CIA, the Justice Department, and the National Security Council were debating whether the legal and humanitarian protections of the Geneva Conventions would apply to captives suspected to be members of al-Qaida or the Taliban. After weeks of debate, and over objections from the State Department, President George W. Bush ultimately issued the final word on the matter. In a February 2002 memo, he stated that al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions.
With the decision to set aside one of the most important rights instruments in international law, the U.S. government officially broke ground for the CIA's torture experiment.
Launching the Experiment
In late March 2002, a joint CIA-Pakistani operation led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian national born in Saudi Arabia, who, at the time, the CIA thought to be a senior-level al-Qaida operative who possessed detailed knowledge of the organization's plans. (This assessment "significantly overstated" his role and the information he possessed according to the Senate report.) Mitchell and Jessen now had an opportunity to turn their torture theories into practice. After the CIA rendered Abu Zubaydah to a black site in Thailand, the two psychologists personally conducted and evaluated his interrogation. As the CIA's first captive, they considered him a guinea pig for their experiment and would come to trumpet his torture as an unmitigated "success" and a "template" for the program's future implementation.
With Abu Zubaydah's capture, the debate within the CIA and the Bush administration about the prohibition on torture intensified. Initially, the FBI questioned Abu Zubaydah while he was hospitalized in Pakistan for severe injuries sustained during his capture. As has been extensively reported, the FBI agents used non-coercive, "rapport-building" techniques in their interrogations. Abu Zubaydah cooperated, quickly yielding significant intelligence. The CIA would later misrepresent the source of this intelligence, claiming that it was extracted through torture.
But the CIA had also dispatched an interrogation team, including James Mitchell. In contrast with the FBI's approach, Mitchell and the CIA recommended that once Abu Zubaydah was released from the hospital that his interrogation begin by keeping him awake, in an all-white and constantly lit room, and for his cell to be bombarded by constant loud noise. What they called the "conditioning" phase, we know from the Senate report, was meant to lay the groundwork for learned helplessness:
[D]eliberate manipulation of the environment is intended to cause psychological disorientation, reduced psychological wherewithal for the interrogation, and the deliberate establishment of psychological dependence upon the interrogator, and an increased sense of learned helplessness.
These and other "conditioning" techniques — including forced nudity, solitary confinement, extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation, and various forms of sensory deprivation — would be formally incorporated into the program. They were designed to instill fear, apprehension, and dread, and to render detainees who were resistant to interrogation more vulnerable to what Mitchell and Jessen considered the harsher techniques to follow.
According to the Senate report and to Ali Soufan, one of the FBI agents who interrogated Abu Zubaydah, Abu Zubaydah quickly shut down when the CIA intervened to introduce its "new interrogation program" on April 13, 2002. A conflict between the two agencies quickly mounted. An anecdote illustrates the agencies' different approaches: At one point Abu Zubaydah was kept naked by the CIA, and then he was offered a towel to cover himself when questioned by the FBI.
In late April 2002, deeming Abu Zubaydah "uncooperative," CIA headquarters considered three different interrogation strategies for use on him. It selected James Mitchell's plan, the most coercive of the three, officially choosing an uncharted experiment on human beings as its preferred approach.
The FBI team would soon pull out of the interrogation in protest. "We don't do that," Soufan later quoted his boss, then FBI Director Robert Mueller, as saying.
By July, Mitchell and Jessen were lobbying the Department of Justice to approve even more coercive torture methods, which they and the CIA euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation techniques," for use on Abu Zubaydah. The CIA falsely represented that these techniques were the same as those used in SERE trainings, but the differences rendered the comparison absurd. In addition to the strict safeguards imposed on SERE methods, recruits participated in the program voluntarily and they knew it would end. They were able to use "safe words" to indicate when a mock interrogation had become too stressful. Whereas SERE required that "maximum effort will be made to ensure that students do not develop a sense of 'learned helplessness'" during training, removing that red line in the torture of detainees was integral to success as Mitchell and Jessen defined it.
To secure Justice Department approval to use the torture methods devised by Mitchell and Jessen, the CIA claimed falsely that Abu Zubaydah was continuing to withhold information about future attacks on the United States. (Interrogators later determined that he did not possess such information.) This indicated, they maintained, that he had not been sufficiently broken psychologically and that harsher techniques were necessary.
After extensive debate, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo's position, that the techniques wouldn't violate the prohibition on torture, was enshrined in the infamous "torture memos" of August 1, 2002. In one of those memos, signed by then Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, Yoo rewrote the legal definition of torture to allow the torture program to proceed. Torture, according to that memo, "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Yoo also advised that for mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, "it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years." Another memo released that day approved the use of 10 of Mitchell and Jessen's techniques, including the waterboard, which the psychologists had insisted was necessary to make Abu Zubaydah compliant. (This despite the fact that, as the Senate report notes, "they had no experience with the waterboard.")
On August 4, 2002, Mitchell and Jessen, who at this point were paid $1,800 per day by the CIA, began personally administering the torture techniques approved in the memos. Over the course of three weeks, they repeatedly slammed Abu Zubaydah into walls, forced him into coffin-like boxes for hours at a time, beat and waterboarded him, and more. During one session on the waterboard, he "became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth," according to the Senate report. His wounds, which hadn't yet healed from his surgery, significantly deteriorated.
In between the sessions, the conditions designed to assault Abu Zubaydah's senses persisted. He remained in solitary confinement throughout the period, naked, hooded, on a liquid diet, and chained in varying stress positions designed to cause him pain and deprive him of sleep. Loud rock music blared constantly in his blinding white-lit cell.
Within days, personnel at the Thai black site expressed concern that the psychologists were going too far. "Several on the team profoundly affected … some to the point of tears and choking up," one email stated. As early as August 9, CIA personnel told CIA headquarters that they didn't believe Abu Zubaydah was withholding information from his interrogators. However, they were repeatedly rebuffed and told that enhanced interrogation techniques should continue.
Meanwhile, Mitchell and Jessen were succeeding in breaking Abu Zubaydah. A cable from the prison reported that when an interrogator — most likely Mitchell or Jessen, who were assigned sole responsibility for Abu Zubaydah — would snap his finger twice, "Abu Zubaydah would lie flat on the waterboard."
While Mitchell and Jessen eventually achieved their goal of psychologically destroying Abu Zubaydah, he did not provide significant intelligence after the enhanced techniques were applied, according to the Senate report.
Still, Mitchell and Jessen would ultimately deem the interrogation a success, telling the CIA that the "aggressive phase… should be used as a template for future interrogation of high value captives." This wasn't, however, because Abu Zubaydah had provided information, but because they proved he wasn't withholding important intelligence:
Our goal was to reach the stage where we have broken any will or ability of subject to resist or deny providing us information (intelligence) to which he had access. We additionally sought to bring subject to the point that we confidently assess that he does not/not possess undisclosed threat information, or intelligence that could prevent a terrorist event.
As Mitchell and Jessen explained in an email to the CIA, sent two days before they stopped his torture, Abu Zubaydah was "ready to talk" the first day after they used their techniques on him: "As for our buddy; he capitulated the first time. We chose to expose him over and over until we had a high degree of confidence he wouldn't hold back." According to this twisted logic, torture was both a means and an end. "Success" meant breaking a subject's mind through torture to ensure the absence of information.
Today, Abu Zubaydah is imprisoned at Guantánamo. He continues to suffer as a result of the torture. He has permanent brain damage. He suffers from searing headaches, sensitivity to noise, and seizures. He can't recall his father's name or his own date of birth.
"That's him," Mohamed Ben Soud said earlier this year in a meeting with his lawyer, ACLU Staff Attorney Steven Watt, pointing at a photo of James Mitchell. "He was there."
Mohamed saw James Mitchell several times while he was imprisoned at COBALT, where the CIA held him for a year following his capture in April 2003 during a joint U.S.-Pakistani raid on his home. Mohamed fled his native Libya in 1991, fearing his persecution for his opposition to the Gaddafi regime. He was living in Pakistan with his wife and infant child at the time of his disappearance. As Human Rights Watch has detailed, a rapprochement between Washington and Gaddafi resulted in Libya supplying the United States with the names of citizens it claimed were terrorism suspects.
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Mitchell, Mohamed says, made an appearance at his water torture sessions at COBALT, the same CIA prison where the agency had held Suleiman a month earlier. Mitchell seemed to be observing and supervising the proceedings. That description accords with what we know from the Senate report about the many facets of Mitchell and Jessen's roles. The CIA didn't just contract the two to devise and administer the torture program. It also had them evaluating their own theory and work. That included monitoring the application of torture techniques and calibrating them in accordance with their ultimate goal of inducing learned helplessness.
For one-and-a-half days, Mohamed was kept awake in a small pitch-black, noise-filled room, hung by his arms from a metal rod, his feet barely able to touch the floor. This sketch was provided by Mohamed to the ACLU.
CIA personnel would complain about the conflict of interest inherent in the same people evaluating the effectiveness of techniques from which they were reaping enormous profits. The Senate report quotes a CIA Office of Medical Services memorandum reading:
OMS concerns about conflict of interest... were nowhere more graphic than in the setting in which the same individuals applied an EIT which only they were approved to employ, judged both its effectiveness and detainee resilience, and implicitly proposed continued use of the technique - at a daily compensation reported to be $1800/day, or four times that of interrogators who could not use the technique.
Mohamed was hooded, strapped to a board, and spun around. His interrogators poured buckets of water on his body and threatened to waterboard him. This sketch by Mohamed was first published in a 2012 Human Rights Watch report, "Delivered Into Enemy Hands."
The course of Mohamed's torture adhered closely to the "procedures" the CIA laid out in a 2004 memo to the Justice Department. Even before arriving at COBALT, Mohamed was subjected to "conditioning" procedures designed to cause terror and vulnerability. He was rendered to COBALT hooded, handcuffed, and shackled. When he arrived, an American woman told him he was a prisoner of the CIA, that human rights ended on September 11, and that no laws applied in the prison.
Quickly, his torture escalated. For much of the next year, CIA personnel kept Mohamed naked and chained to the wall in one of three painful stress positions designed to keep him awake. He was held in complete isolation in a dungeon-like cell, starved, with no bed, blanket, or light. A bucket served as his toilet. Ear-splitting music pounded constantly. The stench was unbearable. He was kept naked for weeks. He wasn't permitted to wash for five months.
Mohamed was stuffed inside a small wooden box, approximately 3x3 feet, and left alone for 45 minutes. This sketch by Mohamed was first published in a 2012 Human Rights Watch report, "Delivered Into Enemy Hands."
For Mohamed, the prolonged sleep deprivation was the most debilitating part of his torture: It drove him close to madness. Mohamed's torturers kept him awake in many different ways. They chained him in painful stress positions — seated when his broken leg was in a cast, standing once it was removed. Guards banged on his door every hour. Once his broken leg had healed, they added to his torment. Guards would take him from his cell and force him to march around the prison naked for "15 minutes every half-hour through the night and into the morning." They bombarded him with music. Once, his captors deprived him of sleep for some 36 hours, hanging him naked by his arms from a metal rod where he balanced on the tips of his toes. His legs became engorged with fluid, and he started to hallucinate.
Mohamed was forced into a coffin-like box, about 1.5 feet wide, for 45 minutes. Music was blasted from speakers on the sides of the box. This sketch by Mohamed was first published in a 2012 Human Rights Watch report, "Delivered Into Enemy Hands."
Rahman was an Afghan citizen. In 2001, after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, he fled from the war to Pakistan with his wife and their four daughters. They lived together as refugees in the Shamshatoo refugee camp located on the outskirts of the city of Peshawar. He earned a living selling wood to the other camp refugees. In October 2002, while in Islamabad for a medical checkup, he was abducted in a joint U.S.-Pakistani operation. Shortly after, Gul was rendered to the CIA's COBALT prison in Afghanistan. On November 20, 2002, after being brutally tortured for some two weeks by a team of CIA interrogators that included Bruce Jessen, he was found dead in his cell. An autopsy report and internal CIA review found that Gul likely died from hypothermia caused "in part by being forced to sit on the bare concrete floor without pants," with the contributing factors of "dehydration, lack of food, and immobility due to 'short chaining.'" Gul's family has never been formally notified of his death, nor has his body been returned to them for a dignified burial.
No one has been held accountable for his murder. An unnamed CIA officer who was trained by Jessen and who tortured Rahman up until the day before he was found dead, however, later received a $2,500 bonus for "consistently superior work."
Mitchell and Jessen made out handsomely too. From 2001 until 2005, as consultants to the CIA, they made $1.5 and $1.1 million, respectively. In 2005, they formed a company, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, to supply the CIA with more personnel to help implement and expand their program. Until the termination in 2010 of the CIA's contract with Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, the company received $81 million for its torture services, financed by the American taxpayer.
Mohamed was held in solitary in a small pitch-black cell, 13 feet high and 10 feet long. It was empty apart from a small metal bucket that served as his toilet and a rug to sleep on. He was chained to its wall at all times. Credit: As above.
READ MOHAMED'S TESTIMONY TO THE U.N. HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
Clara Usiskin, a U.K.-based human rights lawyer, met Suleiman in his native Zanzibar in 2009. He was in terrible shape, struggling with sleeping, eating, and just getting through the day. She helped arrange psychiatric treatment and regular therapy sessions, mostly conducted by phone, and some months later, Suleiman began to get back on his feet.
He has resumed his work as a fisherman, spending as much time as he can at sea to keep his body and mind occupied. After searching to no avail for Magida, he remarried, and he and his second wife have a young daughter. He is still haunted by flashbacks of his time in COBALT, but therapy has helped him to cope with them. With the help of his psychologist, he has worked to turn music back from an instrument of torture to one of comfort and often uses the reggae of Bob Marley or Burning Spear to dispel the terrors that still haunt him.
The document given to Suleiman upon his release from Bagram in Afghanistan in 2008. The date of his initial detention is incorrect.
When Suleiman was held in the Salt Pit, one of his interrogators from COBALT came to see him, bringing with him fruit and nuts. He apologized to Suleiman for torturing him and asked forgiveness. He said he had been forced to do it.
But that's the extent of the apology anyone associated with the U.S. government has offered Suleiman for his nightmare — his forced disappearance and over five years of arbitrary detention and torture. The U.S. government has given him no formal apology, nor has it aided in his rehabilitation or in that of other CIA detainees, many of whom were quietly sent back to their home countries once the CIA had no further use for them. Suleiman never even received an official explanation, let alone compensation, for his unlawful imprisonment or torture.
The torture program designed and implemented by Mitchell and Jessen ensnared at least 119 men, and killed at least one — a man named Gul Rahman who died in November 2002 of hypothermia after being tortured and left half naked, chained to the wall of a freezing-cold cell.
His torturers introduced water torture into their regimen some two weeks after Mohamed arrived in COBALT. They would submerge him naked in ice water, his cuffed hands forced over his head, until a doctor deemed his temperature dangerously low and warm water would be thrown on him. When his cast began to disintegrate from the water, a doctor first covered it in plastic, and when that didn't work, designed a cast that could be easily removed during the sessions. During later sessions, Mohamed's torturers placed a hood over his head before he was doused to make him feel like he was drowning.
After some two months of torture in COBALT, Mohamed's captors stopped the most aggressive phase of his torture, deeming him sufficiently "broken" and "cooperative." Eight months later, April 2004, Mohamed was transferred to a second CIA-run prison, codenamed ORANGE in the Senate report. He spent the next several months in solitary confinement, chained to the wall when he wasn't being interrogated. In August 2004, the United States rendered him into the hands of the same Gadaffi government he had fled fearing persecution more than a decade previously. Sentenced to life in prison following an unfair trial, Mohamed eventually won his freedom in February 2011, a day after the start of the revolution that led to Gadaffi's overthrow. Today, he lives in Misrata, Libya, together with his wife and three young children. Mohamed continues to suffer the effects of his torture at COBALT. He suffers from hearing loss, a damaged sense of taste and smell, and regular pains in his leg, which he can't walk on for a significant length of time.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE TORTURE ARCHITECTs (interactive)
For Suleiman, the release of the Senate torture report last year was a major milestone. He describes the experience of seeing his name in black and white as deeply moving. It was the closest the U.S. government had come to taking responsibility for what it did to him, and it also confirmed his story to those who had doubted his account.
"Many don't believe that Americans do that," he says. The truth coming out, he adds, "is very good for me, very good for me."
The Senate report fills in many holes in the public record resulting from years of excessive secrecy. But it is not accountability. The government has prosecuted only a handful of very low-level soldiers and one CIA contractor for prisoner abuse. The architects of the CIA's torture program, Mitchell and Jessen among them, have so far escaped any form of accountability. In fact, many have gone on to lucrative careers or comfortable retirements.
"We tortured some folks," President Obama famously said a few months before the release of the Senate torture report summary. "I understand why it happened. It's important when we look back to recall how afraid people were. People did not know whether more attacks were imminent. And there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this."
This analysis is misguided. To be sure, we lived in a time of fear. But the ban against torture is universal and fundamental, applying in times of fear and courage, insecurity and security. And the decision to torture was made deliberately, in a program characterized by human experimentation, intentional brutality, and the painstaking manipulation of the law. It was as clinical as it was cruel. It resulted in the perpetration of terrible crimes completely at odds with U.S. law, international law, and basic humanity.
Accountability is critical for the victims and survivors whose lives were undone, and for all of us who value being part of a nation of laws, one strong enough to acknowledge wrongdoing and make amends.
If this country's recent experiment in torture continues to be marked by impunity, we risk going down that path again.
No Human Rights on the High Seas
Salim v. Mitchell – Lawsuit Against Psychologists Behind CIA Torture Program
Senate Torture Report - FOIA
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Swing Left Peninsula's Aug. 31st Newsletter
California/Newsletter
by Swing Left Peninsula
"If you don't believe in climate change, come to California!"
– Governor Newsom on 8/22/2020
Hope everyone's safe and able to stay indoors! As fire and smoke envelop the Bay Area, we can agree that we've got to do everything we can to save the only planet we have. Environmental protection is one of the many crucial things at stake this November along with affordable healthcare, racial justice, women's rights, voting rights, and so much more that we Americans value and cherish.
With just 64 days from election day, every action you take between now and then can be the difference between victory and loss. We're counting on you to ramp up your efforts and donations as we near the finish line!
Calendar at a Glance: Strategic actions every day, every week (see details & more events below)
2:30-3:00pm PDT: Training for New & Reluctant Phone Bankers RSVP
3:00-5:30pm PDT: CALL Senate Priority State of the Week (with CaDems) RSVP
Tuesdays, 11:00am-1:30pm PDT: CALL NC (with NC Dems) RSVP
Wednesdays, 3:00-5:30pm PDT: CALL AZ (with Swing Left Peninsula) RSVP
Thursdays, 11:00-noonPDT: Basic Zoom & Computer Skills for Phone BanksRSVP
Fridays, 12:00-1:00pm PDT: Persuasion Training for Phone Bankers RSVP
Saturdays, 10:00am-1:00pm PDT: CALL AZ (with District LD17 in Phoenix) RSVP
Sundays, 1:00-3:30pm PDT: CALL NC (with Swing Left Peninsula) RSVP
Specific upcoming dates:
Thurs, 9/3, 5:00-6:00pm PDT: Fundraiser To Flip AZ's State Legislature RSVP
Read on for some easy ways to donate and engage with us over the coming weeks:
Triple Flip Arizona: Win, Win, Win!
Use Your Voice To Save Our Country
Other ways to get involved: Texting and Letter Writing
Swing Left Podcast
Partner Organization Activities
Meet LD17's Jennifer and AJ on September 3rd
Democracy starts in the states. It's critical that candidates who share our common values and goals are voted into state legislatures across the country because the ripple effects are felt way beyond the states themselves. Whether we live in a state or not, Republican gerrymandering impacts each one of us and is destroying our country.
At every level of the ballot, our pathway to victory in November runs through four key districts in Arizona. Senator Kirstin Sinema won these districts in 2018, even though they went for Trump in 2016. That means they're winnable again in 2020!
Unsurprisingly, when Democrats made significant progress during the mid-terms, the GOP-led legislature responded by quickly passing new voting restrictions making it harder for Arizona voters to cast an early ballot.
Which is why we're raising money for Democratic candidates running in Arizona's LD17, one of the four districts key to flipping the state:
Ajlan "AJ" Kurdoglu: A first-generation American, AJ is fighting to win a seat that the Democrats lost by only 1744 votes in 2018. A small business owner in Phoenix for 17 years, representing Arizonans is AJ's American dream. His priorities include education and healthcare.
Jennifer Pawlik: The first woman and Democrat to be elected in LD17 in 54 years, Jennifer won by just 354 votes in 2018! Her priorities include education, healthcare, and criminal justice reform. We can't flip the AZ state house without retaining this seat!
By supporting Jennifer and AJ with your dollars, you'll send a bottom-up effect to the top of the ballot and help triple-flip Arizona this November.
Join us for a virtual "Meet and Greet" with Jennifer and AJ!
Thursday, Sept 3rd, 5:00–6:00 pm PDT
RSVP here
Can't attend? Donate here!
Click here for a deeper dive into "Why Arizona's State Legislature Matters to Everyone!"
It's all hands on deck to win back the White House, the Senate, and several state legislatures, and to end Republican gerrymandering this November!
To win, we absolutely have to get every last Democratic voter to the polls. Since we cannot go canvassing in-person this year, phone calls are our most effective tool for talking to potential voters. We need many people to help the voters who have questions about ever-evolving policies on vote-by-mail, early voting, reduced polling locations, and more.
Most phone banks now take place over Zoom, which means you're not alone. You get all the training and hand-holding you need. There's always someone on Zoom to help you and you'll find a great team spirit among those making calls with you!
Before you say, "phone banking isn't for me," please watch this 3-minute video.
New to or nervous about Zoom?
New: Basic Zoom & Computer Skills for Phone Banks, Thursdays, 11am-12pm PDT RSVP
Nervous about talking to voters or just want to ease into the process?
New: Think Phone Banking Isn't for You? Training for New & Reluctant Callers, Mondays 2:30-3:00pm PDT RSVP
Phone Banking 101: Click here for Swing Left's 3-minute intro to the Why, What, & How
Experienced? Strengthen your "persuasion" techniques Fridays @ Noon PDT. RSVP
Get started now with our strategic phone banking events so you can sharpen your vote-chasing skills by the time GOTV starts in mid-September!
Flip-the-Senate Priority Calls:
The DSCC will tell us which race is most in need of calls every week, based on polling data, fundraising totals, and advertising spending.
Mondays, 3:00 – 5:00pm Pacific (with Swing Left Peninsula & CA-Dems) RSVP
Spanish: Sundays, 4:30 – 6:30pm, (San Mateo County LatinX Democratic Club) RSVP
Calls to Arizona:
We're calling strategic parts of the state, mostly Legislative District 17 (LD17) in the Phoenix area. Our calls move us closer to flipping the state legislature (and ending gerrymandering) and they send "reverse coattail" ripples up the ballot for Mark Kelly and Joe Biden. Every voter we turn out gives us a triple effect!
Wednesdays, 3:00 – 5:30pm Pacific (with Swing Left Peninsula) RSVP
Tuesdays – Fridays, 12:00 – 2:00pm Pacific (with the LD17 campaign) RSVP
Saturdays, 10:00am – 1:00pm Pacific (with the LD17 campaign) RSVP
Spanish: Tuesdays – Sundays, multiple times available (with Mark Kelly's campaign) RSVP
Calls to North Carolina:
North Carolina is the only state that promises a QUADRUPLE win! We're going for its 15 electoral votes, Senate seat, and state legislature flip…and defending Democratic Governor Roy Cooper. One call advances 3 races: Biden, Cunningham & Cooper!
Sundays, 1:00 – 3:30pm Pacific (with Swing Left Peninsula) RSVP
Tuesdays, 11:00am – 1:30pm Pacific (with the NC Dems) RSVP
Wednesdays, 2:00 – 4:30pm Pacific (with the NC Dems) RSVP
More ways to get involved: Texting & Letters
North Carolina: Texting with the NC Democratic Party Coordinated Campaign
For U.S. Senate Candidate Cal Cunningham and Joe Biden! Training included.
Tuesdays-Thursdays, 2:00pm Pacific & Saturdays, 9:00am Pacific. RSVP
Arizona: Text Training for the Mark Kelly campaign
Saturday, September 5th, 12:00 pm Pacific. RSVP
Prepare letters for Vote Forward's "Big Send" campaign and help hit their goal of 10 million GOTV letters!
To get a large number of letters (500+) to distribute to friends and family, email us at lettercaptains@swingleftpeninsula.org
Click here for our pick up and delivery options in several Peninsula cities.
Click here if you'd like to download and print letters yourself.
Click here to sign up for a Zoom Letter Party, where you can chat with other volunteers while you write!
The Letter Date Will Be Moved Up!
If you're already writing letters for the Big Send and wondering if they should be mailed earlier than planned, Vote Forward is likely to move the date up (view the details here). We will provide updates as we learn more.
How We Win: A Swing Left Podcast
And She Could Be Next
On the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment, we are joined by four powerful and inspiring women. First off, is Crooked Media's Political Director, Shaniqua McClendon. We talk about the DNC Convention and her amazing work with Vote Save America. Then we have a great interview with Nse Ufot of the New Georgia Project, and Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia the co-directors of the PBS documentary series, "And She Could Be Next". It's an inside look at the history-making women of color running and organizing in the 2018 elections. Tune in here!
Partner Organization Events
Local Event Calendar and Texting Help!
Our local DVC (Democratic Volunteer Center) maintains a fantastic calendar of events with phone banks, candidate fora, and more. Also, learn how to start TEXTING with the DVC's Getting Started Guide, or get texting help and sign up for a weekly summary of current texting campaigns on several platforms at texting@demvolctr.org.
Fundraiser for TJ Cox
Wed, Sep 2nd, 5:30 – 6:30pm
Join House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and CA Congresswoman Jackie Speier. TJ is in a very tight race and needs every dollar we can send! RSVP here (donations start at $100)
We Can Win in Iowa!
Support Theresa Greenfield for U.S. Senate and Abby Finkenaer for U.S. House
Tues, Sep 8th, 6:00 – 7:00pm
Theresa, a political newcomer, is in a toss-up race for the U.S. Senate. She's connecting with voters through her personal experience growing up in an Iowa farming family, her own personal tragedy, and her fierce defense of Social Security. She has a great chance of defeating Joni Ernst and ensuring we TAKE BACK the SENATE. Abby, a popular and effective representative of Iowa District 1, successfully flipped this seat back in 2018. We need to support her reelection to maintain our strength in the House. RSVP and Donate here.
Virtual Scavenger Hunt Fundraiser To Flip Arizona
Sun, Sept 13, 3:00 – 5:00PM
Join Swing Left Maricopa County and Swing Left Inland Valley for a virtual, good old-fashioned (but virtual) Scavenger Hunt Fundraiser. All proceeds benefit Arizona state legislature candidates in the districts key to flipping the state: House Candidates Coral Evans (LD6) & Rep. Jennifer Pawlik (LD17); Senate Candidates Felicia French (LD6) & AJ Kurdoglu (LD17). Sign up here.
Phone (and Text) Bank for TJ and Josh:
TJ Cox in CA-21: RSVP here for Phone and Text Banking and Trainings.
Josh Harder in CA-10 (Mondays and Thursdays at 5:00 – 6:30pm): Training begins promptly at 5:00pm for new phone bankers. RSVP here.
AJ Kordoglu
Jennifer Pawlik
Phone Bank
Text Bank
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. & Upcoming Events
Inauguration Events — Summary of 5 Day Schedule
Swing Left Peninsula
Three Things to Do This Week!
Three Things to Do This Week
Five Ways to Express Thanks This Week
Our November 18th Newsletter
Dear Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Wisconsin Voters: I Want to Adopt Your Biden/Harris Vote
FOCUS ON: GEORGIA
Latest from California
Convict Trump and Expel His Enablers
Hi Indivisibles, Events continue to occur at a breath-taking pace, with the
INDIVISIBLE VENTURA
Hi everyone! Today, we're going light on current politics and instead, concentrate
Well, this has been an interesting week … Tonight and tomorrow: Free
ADOPT-A-TRAITOR! – The Field Team 6 Weekly
Register Democrats. Save the World. January 15, 2021 WORLDS SAVED: 1TOTAL PROGRESSIVES REGISTERED: 30,088TOTAL
Wednesday 7pm: Virtual Town Hall With Garamendi
Hi Indivisibles, Join a Virtual Town Hall with Rep. Garamendi this Wednesday, Jan.
Hi Friends – As I sat to write this note, I

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The original master bedroom has been reconfigured for modern times in blue, white and blonde. The 500-pound French armoire came through the front window above the porch. Seven men to lift thirty feet. Equipped with blackout curtains and Euro Shower Glass wall, this corner room faces east (front) and north (side) with five windows to view the lawns, rabbits, squirrels, Russian Cypress Duo and the Main Street waltz.


There's plenty of reasons to send your child to an early childhood learning centre, beyond just taking care of them while you go to work. After all, they're like sponges, hungrily soaking up new information and experiences to make sense of their ever-expanding world.
The best early childhood education centres know and nurture this, helping little ones develop the skills – educational, behavioural, social – to get ready for big school and beyond.
Did you know that ninety percent of a child's brain develops by age five? It's a mind-blowing stat and one that makes it easy to see the advantages of immersing them in quality education programs early.
The latest research recommends children participate in early education program for at least 600 hours a year (roughly 12 hours a week) before they start primary school. Those who do "are more likely to arrive at school equipped with the social, cognitive and emotional skills they need", according to current NSW Government guidelines.
These develop through structured activities and play as they become familiar with reading, writing and first numbers. Taught in a fun, exciting way, it inspires a love of learning and discovery, paving the way for similar enthusiasm in the classroom down the track.
Not only does early childhood education grow little ones' minds and creativity, it also expands their social circles too as they learn to interact with new children and teachers on a daily basis.
While many preschoolers may have siblings, not all of them get the chance to build relationships with children the same age, and practicing this with new faces is going to offer invaluable socialisation experience.
Additionally, your child will be able to explore the fundamentals of making new friends, taking turns and working through disagreements – crucial skills to have on board when starting school. So when it's time for your little one to enter the school gates, you'll know they're primed and ready to mingle with new faces.
Got a budding artist or dancer on your hands? The right early learning centre can help foster this creative side, paving the way for healthy self-expression and confidence.
The best centres, like The Green Elephant in Sydney, provide daily creative activities – from painting to pretend play to craft to dancing – to unlock children's natural creativity and curiosity. Not only is this vital for emotional development and self-esteem, it's lots of fun too! Green Elephant even go on small group excursions to places like the Museum Of Contemporary Arts for extra adventures.
We all want our children to become kind and confident little people, and as parents, this can sometimes feel like a huge responsibility. Fortunately, early childhood education helps develop key skills like respect and patience through play with other children and following instructions from educators.
Plus these experiences teach them to regulate their emotions and develop resilience necessary to deal with outcomes and consequences that don't always go their way.
There's a great, big world out there awaiting your little one and early childhood education lets them learn about different cultures, beliefs and family structures in a fun, friendly way. Simple activities like learning about cultural festivities or singing songs in a new language all help widen children's worldview and encourage them to embrace diversity and acceptance, which are valuable lessons for later life.


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In this blog, you learn how to compare bank loans, understanding the different interest rate benchmark and the documents you need for a loan. You will learn the many financial jargon and understand how financing work. For one of the biggest debts in your life, it is worth the extra effort to know more. It is a follow-up to my earlier post on buying an executive condominium.
We are going to start by comparing the various bank loans. Only by seeing the different loans then you will know what to look for and ask. There are several websites that will help you with choosing a loan: smartloans.sg and icompareloans.com. You input the cost of the house and the amount of loan that you intend to take. After submitting, you get a list of loans with different interest rate from various banks. Personally, I like smartloans better because it has more details and it presents the details professionally. The downside is you need to enter your mobile phone number which means giving up some of your privacy.
Above is the list that I generated for myself from Smart Loans. It lists the different loans package in order of the smallest amount of total interest paid first. In this screen, I am showing the total interests for 5 years because it gives you a clearer picture of what you will be paying. Some banks will give you a lower interest rate for the first 3 years to make their package more attractive. However, the thereafter monthly is equally important because the rate is much higher (the first years are to entice) and you may not have the choice to refinance.
If you are getting a loan for a property where it is under construction, having a lower interest rate for the first 3 years will not net you much saving compared to the thereafter rate. Going by a progressive payment schedule, you will pay much lower interest at the start and the monthly payment slow increases as the loan is disbursed for each phase of construction. (Please see this section on progressive payment).
At the time of my application, DBS is giving a rate of 0.8%, 0.8%, 0.8%, 1%, 1.25% thereafter. For Citibank, their loan was 0.95%, 0.95%, 0.85%, 0.85%, 1.25% thereafter. My apartment is currently under construction so the loan is disbursed over the next 5 years. Going with the Citibank Home Saver loan saves me a little. There is a lock-in period set by the banks: this means you cannot do prepayment during this period or it will result in penalty. While most banks have zero lock-in period, Citibank has a 2 year lock in period. The main feature of the Citibank SIBOR loan is the ability to switch between 1/3/6/12 month SIBOR at anytime with zero switching fee. I will discuss on this helps in the later sections.
Bank loan interest rate comes in different flavours: floating rates (SIBOR, SOR) and fixed rates. SIBOR and SOR are rates used as a benchmark by the Banks to decide the interest rate of your loan. The bank will quote a spread plus the SIBOR rate. For example, 1M SIBOR + 0.8% means the bank used the rate of the 1 Month SIBOR and adds a spread of 0.8% on top. If the 1M SIBOR was 0.3% on 1st Jan, you will pay an effective interest rate of 1.1% for the month of January.
Fixed rates are a fixed set of rates for a number of years before it becomes floating. If DBS states that the rate is 1.99% for the next 3 years, that is what you will pay for next 3 years. Homeowners will choose a fixed rate when they want stability and a peace of mind. With the current low interest rate, fixed rate is not the best choice. This is why there are only 2 banks offering fixed rates packages. When the interest rates starts going up, we can expect to see more fixed rates packages.
Another floating rate package is the HDB Concessionary Loan that pegs the interest rates to CPF Ordinary Account interest rate + 0.1%. This is fixed at 2.6% for as long as I can remember. Most of us will be taking a bank loan as HDB has strict loan eligibility and it applies only to HDB flats.
After doing your research online, you have a slight idea on which banks to approach. Choose a bank and banker that you trust. The banker must be able to explain to you every detail of the loan. If the banker don't know the details by heart, I will be wary. Before you go off and do that, I want to touch on SIBOR and SOR because there is little discussion online and I feel this is an important part of choosing the right loan.
SIBOR stands for Singapore Interbank Offered Rate and it is the rate that Singapore banks are willing to lend money to each other. Every business day, a panel of at least 12 Contributor Banks will contribute rates for the SIBOR for maturity of 1 month, 3 months, 6 months and 12 months. After collecting the rates, the top 25% and bottom 25% are discarded. The middle 50% is averaged to derive the mean rate and becomes the SIBOR rate for that day. Although the panel of banks are not disclosed, I believe the 12 banks are: Barclays Bank PLC, Citibank N.A., Credit Suisse AG, DBS Bank Limited, Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Limited, Malayan Banking Berhad (Maybank), OCBC Limited, The Royal Bank of Scotland PLC, Standard Chartered Bank, United Overseas Bank Limited, UBS AG. The interest rate is charged on a Actual/365 day count basis. If there are 31 days from 8th Jan to 8th Feb, then the interest rate will be 31/365 multiply by the SIBOR rate on 8th Jan.
Disclaimer: the information above is based on my research online and my bank experience. You should verify any information on your own. My research sources: ABS Trading Protocol (Appendix A), SGX Interest Rate Swaps, CondoSingapore News Excerpt.
The reason for using SIBOR as a benchmark is to provide transparency to borrowers. The method of calculation ensures that the rate does not get skewed by dubious contributions at the top and bottom percentile. However, this is not to say the banks may not corroborate to push up the SIBOR rates. The LIBOR scandal was discovered in 2012 where the London banks manipulated the LIBOR rates. This resulted in criminal settlements and fines were dealt to the banks.
The SIBOR rate is published daily and you can get the rates online, Reuters (screen ABSIRFIX01) or through the Business Times. SIBOR was first used as a benchmark for housing loan in 2007 and thus it is relatively new to the scene. Prior to that, the Bank's internal board rate was used - a value that the bank derives internally. This may sound dubious now but it's what borrowers have to live with in the past.
1M vs 3M SIBOR: Which is better?
If you ask around which is better, including your banker, they will tell that 3 month SIBOR is subjected to lesser fluctuation and it is generally safer. However, is it really better? I will give you an analysis based on actual data and let you make the decision for yourself. You can get the historical SIBOR rates from MAS Domestic Interest Rate page: select "Interbank 3-month" for the 3 months SIBOR.
From the data, the 1M SIBOR is lower than the 3M SIBOR about 76% of the time (based on monthly data). A 3M SIBOR is higher because of the uncertainty. If you are going to loan someone money for 3 months, you will quote a slightly higher rate because you do not know what the rate will be in 3 months time. If there is sudden change in rate, you cannot react to the risk or opportunity in time. Hence, the higher spread between the 1 month and 3 month makes up for that uncertainty. The longer the length of the loan, the bigger the spread. The 12M SIBOR (red line) is higher than 3M SIBOR most of the time.
Why does your banker or agent say that a 3M SIBOR is better because there is less fluctuation? It is true that 1M SIBOR has more fluctuations because it is more reactive to the overall state of the world economies. But is it better? For example: on 8 Jan 1998, the interest rate went up to the highest: 1M was 20%, 3M was 14% and 12M was 12%. If you got locked in on that interest rate that day, you are the most unlucky person. It seems like 1M is a bad choice. However, your housing loan is a long-term thing. On 9 Feb 1998, 1M rate went down to 6.75%. With a 3M SIBOR loan, you get locked in at 14% for the next 3 months.
The verdict is: a 3M SIBOR is better than 1M SIBOR when the interest rate consistently goes up every month because you get locked in for 3 months and the rates goes up on the 2nd and 3rd month. Once the interest rate stabilizes or falls, the 1M SIBOR will be better than a 3M SIBOR. In the end, it all comes down to chance. When you are taking a loan for 30 years, you are getting more chances where the 1M SIBOR is better.
If the 1M SIBOR is superior, will anyone take up a 12M SIBOR? Absolutely. When there is very clear signals that the interest rate will go up, a valid strategy is to lock yourself into 12M SIBOR for stability. Right now, the US Feds is sending out the message that they will wind down their bond buying program which raises the interest rate. The difference between 1M and 12M now is 0.24% which I think the premium is worth paying for that stability. If you are employing this strategy, you should use the Citibank Home Saver Loan that lets you switch between 1M, 3M, 6M, 12M with zero cost.
SOR stands for Swap Offer Rates and it is another benchmark that Singapore banks can use, albeit less commonly. The description for SOR by ABS is: "the synthetic rate for deposits in SGD, which represents the effective cost of borrowing the SGD synthetically by borrowing USD for the same maturity, and swap out the USD in return for SGD." What...? If you are lost at the second mention of synthetic, I don't blame you.
Let me try to explain in layman terms. Swap is a financial derivative that lets you exchange your stuff for someone else's stuff. In this case, we are exchanging SGD interest rates for USD interest rate. For example, we borrowed USD $100K and pay interest on that. With that borrowed USD $100K, we exchanged for SGD $130K based on an exchange rate of 1USD to 1.3 SGD. With that SGD $130K in your hand, you loan this money to someone else and earn the interest in SGD. Did you see how we just swap paying SGD interest rate with USD interest rate? Except in SOR, the exchange never really took place. We are only simulating the rate if we actually do the swap. Hence, you keep seeing the word "synthetic" because the swap never happened at all.
The second part is getting the interest cost of borrowing USD. The USD Rate refers to USD LIBOR rate, gotten from the LIBOR01 Reuters screen. The day count convention for LIBOR is 360 in a year, hence 360 is used.
When the USD interest rate is low, SOR is a good opportunity. For the past three years, the US Feds ran their Quantitative Easing (QE) program to keep the borrowing rate low. It has forced the SOR into negative territory and this means bad business for the banks (see this blog post). A lot of banks have stopped offering SOR home loan packages. As far as I know, ANZ is the only bank continues to offer SOR packages. Now that the US Feds has given sign of tapering the QE program and we can expect the rates to go up in the near future. Factor this into your strategy if you are going for SOR.
There are many documents to prepare and paperwork to fill when taking a bank loan. It works in your favour to have a clean credit history too. Any doubts that the bank has on your credit status can affect the amount of loan you can borrow. You can get a credit report of yourself by visiting the Credit Bureau website and paying $6 online. This is only necessary if you have been late on your credit card payments and you need to know your credit score.
After speaking with the banker, you will get an idea of how much you can borrow. The banker will give you a Property Loans fact sheet based on the loan amount. This is a requirement from MAS. In the fact sheet, you will get a estimated amount you have to pay each month based on the interest rates. It also has the estimated monthly pay if the interest were to rise by 1%, 2%, 3% and so forth. I like this fact sheet because it makes you aware of the possible scenarios you have to prepare for.
The bank needs a valuation report on the value of your property and will cost between $100 to $200.
The borrower's name and mailing address. The address of the property that the letter is for.
Interest rate spread for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th year onward. The minimum effective interest rate if there is any (in the case where SIBOR becomes negative).
The rest period for the loan. Is the loan monthly-reducing or annual-reducing?
The default or late charges when you do not pay. The interest can be as high as 3% plus the bank's board rate.
The lock-in period before you can make prepayment. Most bank do not have lock-in period for building under construction. Until the loan is full disbursed which is at year 4 or 5, fully prepaying the loan will have charges on the undisbursed amount.
The refinancing rate. This is usually about 0.5% of the outstanding amount. Some banks give free conversion.
The fire insurance that you have to buy: the annual fee and the company providing it.
If you are buying an EC, it should also state that if HDB does not approve your application, there is no charges for cancelling the loan.
The letter of offer is around 10 pages and the banker should go through every terms. If he/she cannot explain in layman terms or answer your question, that should raise a red flag. To accept the letter of offer, you and your partner needs to sign on every page. This ensures that you signing for and accepting that page. We want to avoid a situation where a single page is swapped out for a slightly different term. Other document that needs to be signed are the MAS declaration, the application form and the fire insurance.
I got my loan from Citibank after looking around several banks. The banker's service was professional, prompt and you can see that she is taking care of things for you. She was able to answer my questions readily which gave me more confidence. When I asked for a law firm that was nearer to my workplace, she went and looked for one. What I also liked is the repayment schedule that was done up that shows how the payment changes as the loan is being disbursed over the years If you need my banker's contact, leave a private message and I will get back to you.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Citibank. This counts as a referral and they will give me a shopping voucher if you take up a loan.
Taking a bank loan is a requirement for many of us that is buying a home. It is a complex exercise that becomes simple once you break it down into smaller portions. After reading this post, I hope that you are better prepared to go through the process now.


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Home Wire Politics Trump: 2020 rival Buttigieg's same-sex marriage is 'great'
Trump: 2020 rival Buttigieg's same-sex marriage is 'great'
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump says he thinks "some people" may have an issue with 2020 Democratic rival Pete Buttigieg's (BOO'-tuh-juhjehz) same-sex marriage, but he thinks "it's great."
Trump tells Fox News Channel's "The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton" in an interview airing Sunday that "I think it's absolutely fine" that Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, are open about their relationship on the campaign trail.
Trump agreed with Hilton that Buttigieg's candidacy is a sign of progress for the country. He says, "I think that's something that perhaps some people will have a problem with. I have no problem with it whatsoever. I think it's good."
During his 2016 campaign, Trump suggested he'd appoint conservative justices to overturn a Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. But he called the issue "settled" shortly after his election.
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, right, and husband Chasten Glezman Buttigieg wave to the crowd during the Human Rights Campaign's 14th Annual Las Vegas Gala dinner at Caesars Palace, Saturday, May 11, 2019, in Las Vegas. (Benjamin Hager/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
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Arcadian Rhythms Stay a while and listen
Diary: May Arcadia
– June 1, 2015Posted in: General
AJ has also decided to get in on the shortform mixtape diary approach this month (see below), so I'm going to keep my contributions fairly short and sweet.
Over the past month I've been dabbling more with videos. There's probably some wry humour to be wrung from this given my remarks around YouTube in the April diary. So it goes. As it turns out, capturing videos and performing basic edits on them is relatively simple, and I feel like my narration on the Quadrant review wasn't entirely awful. The viewcount on the video and the hits on the post aren't great, but what's interesting is that this video has seen a steady trickle of traffic day by day, quite unlike what we usually see with written posts (a large spike on the day of publication, a smaller spike the day after, and then near total drop-off unless it gets linked from elsewhere).
The companion video for my review of Home is Where One Starts… didn't do so well. Probably not such a surprise: the review was written, and the video is just raw gameplay footage of a short game's opening minutes. I included it largely as an experiment, and the results of said experiment are that people aren't that interested in such videos. So now I know! I have another review appearing alongside some videos later this week, and I'm curious as to how those do. Time will tell.
Aside from dabbling with videos and managing to actually write a decent number of reviews alongside work, I've also found time to quit smoking, so I'm probably a bit sharper and meaner than I usually am. Keeping myself busy has helped with quitting. So too has revisiting some nostalgic favourites; I've sunk twenty hours into Privateer 2: The Darkening, a game that no one ever really talks about. I'm tempted to write about it to redress that balance, because I think it does still have enough charm to be worthy of minor note. We'll see, I suppose.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere
A few quick links. This piece on a pixel artist renouncing pixel art is a really interesting read, both as an aid to understanding what constitutes quality art and animation in games, the background to pixel art techniques, and finally why stepping away from such techniques can be a sensible move for both an artist and their audience. It's an insightful and refreshingly honest essay.
Over the past few months there have been a number of responses to an essay Ian Bogost wrote titled 'Video Games Are Better Without Characters'. I've been wanting to weigh in on the debate myself, largely because it seems to me that a lot of these responses, whether or not they are internally logical and rhetorically sound, are a reply to the title of Bogost's article rather than its substance. Here's a really lazy example – lazy because I've not read the piece being linked – illustrated in a quote from a Critical Distance round-up post: "Osborne not only insists that games are better with characters, but that the representation of character is necessary to include people in games. In short, presentation of human beings is, itself, a system".
This invites a "Thanks, Ted, that was the joke" sort of response, because this is literally the point Bogost himself makes when he writes, summarising the research findings of Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris, "There are lots of tools, lots of styles, lots of ways to make games about people. Human representation and identification is itself a system, one without clear answers and without sure outcomes." The thrust of Bogost's essay is that an obsessive focus on individual representation to try and address exclusion ultimately leads to a cul-de-sac of creative abstraction, because you cannot possibly accurately "represent" eight billion unique human beings. Instead, he argues, systems that represent the creator's perception of how diverse groups of people inter-relate and interact with one another as groups – and, yes, individuals – is an abstraction that is achievable by game designers and developers.
I see where Bogost is coming from although I don't wholly agree with the grandstanding conclusion. However, I can't pretend that I'm particularly in the know around this debate, as I honestly find trying to follow many such debates hugely time-consuming as well emotionally exhausting. Why the latter? Well, because they sometimes seem to fall down on either side of a drawn across a perceived rhetorical battleground, and I can't take academic debate seriously when participants start taking sides. It's a discussion, not a turf war, and whilst I understand that people feel very personally invested in such discussions the unpleasant behaviour I occasionally see is enough to turn me away. And so too others, I am quite sure.
Having seen Shaun do one of these, I felt that it was too good an opportunity not to also chime in.
Sitting a while and listening
Recently, the main thing (outside video games) I have been experimenting with is more podcasts – as a way to not kill myself at work. A thought that pops into my head about once or twice a week is that it would not be so bad if I veered my BMX into oncoming traffic, so having optimistic and/or thought provoking stuff in my ears when I get there is a good way to not go all Christopher Walken.
A recent one I picked up is called Justice Points, a podcast that deals with identity politics in video games as well as discussing things I had honestly not really thought about. Recently they have talked about how the focus seems to frequently be on the conflict between disparate groups in the current #goobergate debacle, rather than on the successes there have been as a result. In essence it is the angry articles, like the one I wrote a while back, that are now counter-productive. We should be boosting articles and podcasts that promote actual positive change rather than spending time fighting an ongoing pointless battle that no one who matters really cares about.
The other podcast I have been really getting into is You are not so smart. In particular their interview with Jon Ronson and the history of public shaming is an interesting one (although I find Jon Ronson's writing to be a little twee and lacking in depth) and is very relevant to what has been going on with social networks. There is also a lot of exploration of how we tend to react emotionally first and then rationalise those emotions; we are also prone to not examining that rationalisation once we set ourselves on that path.
Kicking Kickstarter
I tend to post a lot of links to Kickstarter campaigns on our Facebook page and once even drunkenly donated 250 dollars to a game that was looking to be PC only (it is now coming to console – maybe), so crowd funding is clearly something that interests me. Seeing an article about how pseudo-indies are killing real indie Kickstarters was an immediately interesting topic.
I pretty much agree with the 'damage' that can be done thanks to these projects which use crowd funding as a method to prove audience interest to investors, but at the same time I am sort of convinced that rather than this being a bad thing that must be stopped it is actually the future of crowd funding. It makes sense to me that you would want to get users to buy into and enthuse about your product. In essence, make them pay for you to advertise to them, and then make sure that there is a structure in place and real money people who make you accountable for delivering a product, as well as shouldering the largest portion of the blow if everything falls apart. On top of this if the real money people are professionals – and they aren't always – then they are going to have a better understanding of how deadlines and development costs actually work, as opposed to the usual armchair developers I see frequent the comments section on every article on this topic.
Free to Play has been around for a while now and I have largely ignored or been repulsed by its existence. This was easy to do when I only played games on a console but the term 'console' has less and less meaning. Some might say that consoles are over.
Regardless, what this means right now is that there are more and more Free to Play offerings coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Warframe was an early forerunner that I just bounced off hard. Its controls were just too light and geared towards mouse and keyboard for me to get into it. On top of that the purpose and direction of the game is utterly baffling; I was never really sure where I was supposed to be going and what I was supposed to be doing to progress.
Happy Wars would be a really great game in its own right and I would have loved to get into the delightful cartoon violence of its 12 versus 12 battles and 3-class system, offering simplicity for newcomers and enough depth and challenge to encourage long-term team play. I would even have been tempted to drop some money into it to get some good gear. The problem is that its lobby system is atrocious; thanks to matchmaking times upwards of five minutes (sometimes even longer than the matches themselves) I had taken to having Netflix running, snapped, at the side of my screen. One rule of a game I hate to have broken is if I have to do something else to entertain me while supposedly playing a game then I should stop playing that game right away and instead do the washing up, mop the floor, cooking; anything that is actually a chore but gives me real world results.
Setting Happy Wars aside there are two games right now that seem to scratch a gameplay itch whilst doing F2P well: SMITE and Airmech Arena. Both offer unlock models that make you feel like you have access to all the content you need for the game to be functional (£23.99 and £15.99 respectively) but then offer bells and whistles that the vain can use to distinguish themselves from the vanilla player.
Where they differ is in the style of play. Airmech Arena is an RTS game where you build units and place them using the transforming mech that you fly around the map and shoot stuff with. SMITE is a class-based game where you attempt to take over towers and encourage your armies to charge forth. It is built with League of Legends and DOTA 2 in mind but this is way more accessible for a console player, given that the camera is pulled down close and over the character's shoulder.
They are both good and I am curious to see how long they hold my attention (Awesomenauts, like SMITE a console-friendly MOBA, was played for months before I finally got tired of the dwindling player base and lack of new content). I think that Airmech Arena has the better chance as the single player mode is solid, as well as playable in short seven minute bursts, and I already have one friend who has dug deep on it.
I have been really lazy recently in writing about games but I have done a couple of spots on a friend's film blog. I wrote a drunken rant about Avengers 2 but I recommend that those who are faint of heart when it comes to Joss Whedon criticism go look at some of her stuff. My current favourite is her Kill Your Darlings review which goes off on a rant about representation of female librarians.
I am, by no means, as erudite as Shaun when it comes to music but during an attempt to start up a new series of interviews I ended up at a pub where they were showcasing new musicians. I and my interviewee had to leave due to the sound levels but not before hearing Shannon Wardrop play a song called 'Medicine'. The video doesn't do her voice justice; she is incredible live.
Tags: characters, film, free to play, kickstarter, pixel art, podcasts, smoking, systems, video
Posted June 3, 2015 at 11:49 AM
I want to play more Airmech Arena at some point. I hadn't realised until recently just what a close adaptation of Herzog Zwei it is.
Jon Ronson's book has gotten a fair amount of coverage lately. It sounds like the book itself is less than great, despite making a lot of good points, but it's a timely contribution to an important discussion.
badgercommander
Posted July 30, 2015 at 11:15 AM
Yeah, Airmech Arena is fun. Hilariously, after Potter and I both bought the premium stuff, we have both barely played it.
This is because I went into a Co-Op mission and found someone who had found a way to cheat. It sucked all the fun out of the game and I haven't been back.
Yeah, I read Jon Ronson's Psycopath Test, or whatever it was called, and I don't think much of his writing but he does have some interesting things to say (a bit like Ben Kuchera from Polygon).
Arcadian Rhythms is no longer active. Damn was it a fun five years, though.
The site is staying online indefinitely. The slideshow to the left will show random articles from the archives, and you can see our final posts below that. Enjoy! Explore!
(Who are we? We like to play games. We like to talk, rant, expound and ramble about them. We are a fun-loving, quasi-intellectual bunch of gamers and writers with so many opinions we just had to share. We slip through our days in arcadian rhythm.)
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Dialogue Tree
Shaun on Editorial: Arcadian Rhythms is Five Years Old
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Steerpike on Editorial: Arcadian Rhythms is Five Years Old
Guillaume on Arcadian obituaries: Walker
Gregg B on Editorial: Arcadian Rhythms is Five Years Old
Cloud Strife … ……… …….
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Bear vs. Games
Brainygamer
Changeloggery
Chris Spann
Critical Distance
Electron Dance
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HAWP
Idle Thumbs
Kill Screen
Mojo Menace
Nostalgia For Infinity
Plot is Gameplay's Bitch
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Really Fancy
Second Person Shooter
Tap Repeatedly
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UK Resistance
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What a turnaround! From £9.99 to £10,000!
It was obvious that the 50p was going to be in box 3 from the moment she shied away from it at the final stage of the 5th round - if she'd gone for it, it'd have been the perfecto round.
Right, one more propah, studio, Bristol-based game left. Assuming the 'on tour' shows are separate from the Dream Factory games stats-wise, then after tomorrow, we finally have a finite amount of DOND shows to compile.
Oh, and unless she plays during the tour de Tidybeard, it's a shame that Salvina isn't getting her game. Musical voice, la la la la.
Given she didn't put her Deal light on at 5 box, they might have choosen Silvana for an on tour show to increase the chances of having at least one big money game.
Watching DOND for the attractive contestants - same now as 10 years ago.
Good result from a well played penultimate studio game!


Free magnificient any use image of the Malaysia flag, The flag of Malaysia, also known as the Malay is composed of a field of 14 alternating red and white stripes along the fly and a blue canton bearing a crescent and a 14-point star known as the Bintang Persekutuan (Federal Star). It was adopted on 26 May 1950. We have a huge collection of Malaysia flags available for download you can get exactly what you need with our unique flag collection.
The free collection of Malaysia flag has huge variety of choice and can be downloaded immediately. Red, white and blue - represents Malaysia as a country belonging in the Commonwealth. Crescent and star - represents Islam, yellow symbolizes sovereignty of the Malay Rulers, The eleven-pointed star itself symbolizes "unity and co-operation". Some examples of Malaysia flags that can be found on the site are The Malaysia flag on Abstract wing and Made in Malaysia metal silver stamp with the flag symbol of Malaysian flag in the center.


There are many, many ways to personalize a Cubbies Stuffed Animal. Please take a look at our other Cubbies listings for additional sayings, designs and ideas for your Cubby.
Cubbies are unique stuffed gifts ideal for personalizing. They have removable stuffing pods which make them machine washable so they can be easily cleaned. Each Cubby has embroidered eyes and mouth, is fully tested and certified, CPSIA compliant, and approved for all ages.
Cubbies are approximately 12" to 16" depending on whether they are sitting or standing. Each Cubby will be embroidered on the belly with a special message.
These very soft and cuddly stuffed Cubbies make a perfect personalized gift and are sure to be a favorite for: Baby Showers, Adoptions, Birth Announcements, Baby's Firsts, Birthdays, Weddings Engagements, Valentine's Day, Easter, and many other Holidays and Events. A Cubby will become everyone's new best friend.
We love requests, so if there is a special message you would like to have embroidered on this Cubby please don't hesitate to ask.
Once we receive your completed order, we will create a picture Mock-up. This picture will be sent to you via Etsy conversation as a proof for you to approve. Please make sure to double check spelling, colors, and details as well. Final design approval MUST be received before we can begin the embroidery process. Once final approval has been received back from you, we will then embroider your design onto your soft and cuddly Cubby.
NO refunds or returns on personalized orders.
2. Exact letters and exact sequence of letters for the monogram.


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You may call me Xiam. I am a self-professed geek. I'd rather not list my interests as it would be difficult to fit them all in, but for some reason I find myself way too interested in my own daydreams.
Comics By Xiam
Ace Black PI
Ace Black investigates claims of the paranormal, and discovers a new dark presence in Harridan County. A sequel/spinoff to "Melody & Macabre."
EpicSaga
A boy becomes a hero and forms a ragtag team while defeating a dark overlord. A story about clichés, oddities, and the unoriginality of mankind.
Gary the Alchemist
A story about the day-to-day life of an alchemist and his imp. Updates Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
Melody and Macabre
A charming story in which a little girl's imaginary friend is, in fact, the Grim Reaper. People die, hilarity ensues. Somehow.
MM Special
Minicomics based on the world of "Melody & Macabre," not relevant to the main storyline of the series. WARNING: Read Melody & Macabre BEFORE reading this series, as there WILL be spoilers!
Time Hobo
In the far-off year 2000, an eccentric hobo found a time-traveling wristwatch. These are the chronicles of his wondrous journey.
Comics Assisted By Xiam
Comics Recomended By Xiam
Xiam's friends
Alright then.
Forum/DD stuff.
Frustrating Week...
Videos Shared By Xiam
arkcine at 1:02PM, May 18, 2012
love the comics they're top notch clever.


Increased risk of haematologic toxicity with zidovudine. May increase serum levels of didanosine. Increased serum concentration with probenecid and other drugs that inhibit renal tubular secretion and resorption. Use of IV ganciclovir with oral mycophenolate mofetil may result in increased plasma concentrations of both drugs due to competition for renal tubular secretion. Concomitant use with immunosuppressive agents (e.g. azathioprine; ciclosporin; corticosteroids) may result in excessive suppression of bone marrow or the immune system. Generalised seizure may occur when taken with imipenem and cilastatin. Concurrent use with drugs that inhibit replication of rapidly dividing cells (e.g. dapsone; pentamidine; pyrimethamine; flucytosine; cytotoxic antineoplastic agents; amphotericin B; co-trimoxazole; other nucleoside analogues) may result in additive toxicity.


Beautiful Bay front condo was new in 2008! The Coral Seas is a new modern building with beautiful roof top pool and sun deck. Breath taking views of the bay and midtown OC are to be had. Owner has put in top notch furniture, large flat panel TV's in living room with 3 bed 3 full baths with sleep sofa to sleep up to 8. This is a flexible unit with room for your friends and family. Master bedroom has king bed set with private bath, access to bay view balcony. Master bath has large separate shower, jetted soaking tub and double sink vanity. Br # 2 has 2 single beds and private bath. Br # 3 is a second Master bedroom with queen bed and private bath. Living room has queen sleeper sofa. Third full bath has door to hallway. You will enjoy the great views of the bay from the living room, master bedroom and oversized private bayfront balcony. Not your average OC Condo, 9' Tray Ceilings, large spacious rooms add to your relaxed vacation experience. Only two blocks from the beach!
Building amenities include beautiful rooftop pool with large sun deck. It offers great views of mid-town Ocean City sky line, the bay and some views of the ocean. There is also a workout room on the 4th floor for our guests' use. Parking for 2-3 vehicles in open under-building parking lot.
Elevators in Lobby, never a wait!
Sunset from the pool deck, What a View!


Join an Interpretive Naturalist on the Willow Springs Loop which combines the Lost Creek and Petroglyph Wall trails. Imagine people of the past living at Red Rock Canyon, explore underground springs, view Native American artifacts, and identify animals and plants of the Mojave Desert. Estimated 2 miles and 3 hours.
Moderate difficulty with light rock scrambling. Ages 10+. Limited Space/Registration Necessary.