A tall man wearing an officer’s uniform courteously entered the ship’s dining room. He introduced himself as an admiral of the Dutch navy and said he was an emissary for a top-secret committee of the United Nations. “We need you to decipher something for us,” he cautiously requested.
“What is it?” the Oxford cryptologist inquisitively asked.
“A blank page,” the admiral softly replied.
“But I’ll need a symbol,” the professor objected. “At least a line, or a few dots, something…”
Nightfall touched the horizon after a day’s journey. A group of persons trekked along a tapered footpath into untried woodland.
“Why must we meet here?” the weary professor asked.
“A blank page,” replied a Canadian voyager clutching his field glasses.
They sat by a campfire and continued their discussion. “I was a firmware engineer for a global digital provider,” the clean shaved Canadian said. “During maintenance I found a blank web page that was receiving a huge amount of daily visits.”
“Did you check the IP addresses of the visitors?” The professor inquired.
“At first it seemed to be another dirty bunch sharing raunchy erotica,” the engineer carefully watched the footpath trail as he spoke. “They used an odd astronomy recipe, like Morse code. If a recurrent IP failed to visit the blank page or made more than one visit per day, a communication port would robotically open. I think that may have allowed them to exchange sex-torture subject matter.”
The sound of a crowd drawing near invaded the evening stillness. The Chinese negotiator and an Italian envoy remained standing at a tent porch as the familiar admiral paced into the campsite without airs, wearing grubby khakis and a snug jacket. “We need to know what’s behind the CIA tortures,” the admiral tersely beckoned the professor.
Thus began the unlikely mission of the Oxford cryptologist and an undisclosed group of United Nations representatives from assorted homelands such as Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, Turkey, Japan, and Russia –– to name only a few. At long last it was discovered that the CIA had made use of “psychics” during the 1970s. But due to the affluent demands of lobbyists, some influential “skeptics” were eventually substituted instead, partly because they supposedly knew more about how to tackle and resolve religious overloads. Opportune cynics scorned straight morals. They effortlessly became the foremost producers of explicit representations of sexual activity. Paradoxically, the leading consumers of pornography according to later press reports were excessive religious traditionalists. The ominous partnership of supply and demand traded immense stockpiles of capital. Members of an intelligence sector of the US government were charged with sex abuse and torture in interrogations. Behind closed doors, the CIA destroyed nearly 100 graphic videos of such interrogations.
Margie Schoedinger was a young woman from Houston, Texas who made a complaint in 2002 that she had been repeatedly drugged and raped by clandestine US government agents that wore face covers. They purportedly exposed her to indignity and trauma. But due to the “far-fetched atmosphere” of her allegations, the local authorities presumed that Margie Schoedinger was in all probability psychologically disturbed.
Two years later, horrible Abu Ghraib prison photos were seen around the world. Images of US government agents wearing face covers while fiendishly afflicting prisoners looked just like Margie Schoedinger’s original descriptions. Evidently, she had counseled us wisely. But by then, Margie had passed away from a gunshot wound in an apparent suicide.
A medical helicopter waited above the isolated encampment to airlift a photographer who had suffered a head injury. The Oxford professor examined some photos an Australian supervisor had given him. A Brazilian mediator watched on. They were demonstrations of water boarding. “Notice anything absent?” The Australian abruptly asked and paused for a long moment. “There are no boards in these photographs,” the Brazilian finally pointed out.
Today:
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