Richard Pearson DC: Day in the Life of US Torture Victim

Richard Pearson sleeps on a mattress, often outside on his balcony. He is desperately trying to escape the United States where his fundamental civil liberties and rights have been severely violated, except he has no legal recourse.

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” — W. Edwards Deming

“I am seeing the Constitution disintegrate in my hands when I needed it the most. Without exaggeration, it’s a mirage. When the US government decides to use covert state-sponsored torture, the US Constitution becomes a flipped mirage — a desert in a lush forest.” — Richard Pearson, PhD

Most days, Richard Pearson sleeps on a mattress on his balcony. Today is no different. After a year of torture in the United States, which included the upstairs neighbors’ noise harassment, Pearson feels like he has no privacy in his apartment. He has strong evidence of illegal surveillance. A stranger told him so last summer. On his routine path, someone responded to his internal speech with objects — the cart incident. His neighbors also have responded to his solo sexual activities, dropping objects on the floor or scrapping chairs. At a hotel in Plattsburgh, New York, he had a similar experience —a hotel occupant running frantically during Pearson’s private moment. He prefers the outdoors over the possibility that someone could be eavesdropping through audio or video surveillance.

This is an accurate reconstruction of Pearson’s predicament. A bare mattress.

He wakes up under his blanket on his bare mattress. A strange feeling came over him. He had been moving between the indoors and outdoors frequently due to the fickle weather. He initially didn’t know whether he was on his balcony or on the floor of his apartment. Pulling back the thick blanket, he glanced through the glass into his apartment. Outside.

In some respect, he wishes that life would return to normal in the US. But with his efforts to get to the European Union to seek asylum or to continue research, he knows that the US is no longer his home. “How could I have been so fooled? Structural racism is one thing. A government that forfeits its constitutional obligations. That’s existential.” He has published over 150 essays on Medium, emailed various international contacts, and sought research opportunities. He thinks and writes a lot. His goal is outbound.

This morning, his feeling of statelessness hit hard. As he turns over on his mattress, his mind runs through legal doctrine after legal doctrine that has left him with no domestic remedy. “They build these doctrines exactly to do what they did to me — total state immunity. Reckless and hypocrisy come to mind.”

Not just that, the campaign was structured precisely to diffuse responsibility. The US government could claim successfully that the assailant who repeatedly punched Pearson in the head — resulting in a black eye, lacerations, and a persistent clicking — had not nothing to do with them. Even if there was evidence tying the government to the assailant, US legal doctrines immunizes the US government for private contractors’ misconduct. Government could claim that the “contractor” was acting without authority.

But Pearson knows that it precisely the point. Dozens of people and networks had their turn with Pearson. “I felt like a victim passed around at a mass rape, except the rape was torture — assaults, false arrest, behavioral steering (“pinning”), burglary, sleep deprivation, harassment, stalking, computer hacking... These sadistic bastards. It’s like encountering some alien lifeform.”

Pearson is strong and sharp. He knows that he is highly resilient, but he also knows the physical and emotional toil of torture. When he walks, he hears a clicking sound. He will wait for the European doctors to look at it. He doesn’t trust the US at all. The emotional feeling is one of deep betrayal. He is not angry — that is wasteful. He is experiencing a sense of loss and betrayal on a magnitude that few in the world could understand. This was the United States — the country that espouses liberty and freedom, that liberates oppressed populations, and supposedly governs on the rule of law. That conditions the resolution to war and aid on respecting human rights and democratic practices. The reality has sunk in for Pearson, but it’s not worth crying about. “It would only feed their sadism. I could imagine them laughing if I emotionally collapsed. That is how far gone I think they are.”

It’s 12:30pm. He wakes up late almost every morning. He hears the sound of upbeat Latino music coming from below. He gets up, pulls his mattress back into his apartment, and is deciding on what he should do today. He doesn’t have a plane ticket year, but each day, he inches closer. Whatever his tasks, his laptop will be necessary. Uncertain of his next course of action, he decides to head out.

He has one pair of dress pants, one pair of shorts, and a handful of shirts. None, except for a single shirt, have been washed since the end of March when he attempted asylum in Canada. He wanted to present a man — a tortured man — but one with clean clothes. If he came in with an odor, he though, maybe that would be a mark against him. Between his two asylum attempts, he threw away all of his other possessions. His art. Those were his prized possessions, which included some of his original art. His appliances. His furniture. His clothes — suits, ties, shorts, custom T-shirts. There wasn’t any question what he should wear. Same pair of dress pants and orange tie-dye T-shirt. He wore it every day.

Critically, he needed the foil for his groin. Two multi-layered aluminum pads stuffed between two pairs of underwear. He had been electrocuted in his penis. Strangers with odd objects. A Black man’s vulgar homophobic language(“Maybe he will slide into some pussy”). Another occasion, he felt a sharp pain in his groin area when a man and his son were involved in street theater. First, the son keeps this staring back and forth, similar to what Pearson experienced on the Greyhound on his way back from Montreal. Pearson thinks the man, who indicated that he was not from the US, was Canadian. His highly regional accent matched no US accent.

Pearson grabs his tote, which is a piece from a luggage set. He heads out today without a bath or brushing his teeth. Day 5 on the no-bath thing. He has a body odor. He doesn’t care.

On his way to the store, he walks next to parked cars on the side next to traffic. Given all that he went through from voice-to-skull to neurocognitive overrides with the Sprite incident, he cannot be too careful. The stranger’s words — “I don’t even say hi to people” — ringing in his ears. The man (“Lee”) is the one who told Pearson about the illegal surveillance in his apartment. “Lee very well knew about these weapons and people’s unhinged behavior.”

The Two Americas

As he walked out, he sees many Hispanic immigrants in the building. Their Spanish punctuated by regional accents — mostly central American. They have significantly increased in the apartment building in the last year. Some have formed something of a gang. He passes Hispanic workers painting a townhouse across the street, then more at a construction site where they are renovating a public park. He momentarily remembered the Hispanic cleaning crew for his apartment building making a comment on his odor. People are so quick to judge and be mean. Imagine once they get money, power, and influence.

The irony is not missed on him.

You have immigrants coming to this country. 11.7 to 14 million unauthorized immigrants are estimated. Most have jobs, find their version of the American dream, and get settled into communities. Pearson is not angry. Not jealous or resentful. He has a high tolerance for complexity and competing ontologies. He sees nuance when it is tempting to paint with a broad brush — pro-immigration but recognizing the growing threat of gangs from some immigrant communities.

This is Pearson’s style of rumination. He dissects. He turns over ideas, matching them on to grand theories.

He sees these gangs as a serious American problem cutting across all demographic groups. “Actually, they are out of control and pose an existential threat to the US,” says Pearson. “These gangs — most don’t see themselves that way, but that’s what they are. They are engaged in violence, crimes, psyops — and cover-ups. They crisscross society, including within government. All races and ethnicities. All regions. Multinationals to street gangs. They use a new class of invisible weapons and no-touch torture. They are part of the reason why the US faces the biggest domestic threat since September 11.”

On his ascent to the American dream after attaining his PhD, the government decided to torture him. A small fraction of these immigrant groups decided that they would take part like the Hispanic gang duo who tazed his penis. Americans took part too. Many Black Americans. In fact, it was overwhelmingly Americans. It is a sickening thought.

It is the story of the Two Americas — a schizophrenia at the heart of the US. A society that is deeply violent, not only in terms of gun violence but undercover violence like what confronted Pearson. Then, swears by the free flow of guns and gun production — and religion. Unqualified gun rights, to but. Then, the same country purports law and order —” lock-up nation”. It has more people incarcerated than the top ten developed countries combined — probably top 40. So much for the freedom and liberty schtick.

Its tension — hypocrisy — is so immense that, rather deal with it, AI dropped the US entirely when asked for a global ranking of health economies. It completely eliminated the US from a list of 90+ nations. Even AI has difficulty reconciling the Two Americas. The AI system reported that its training and implicit assumptions produce a hegemonic “exceptionalist boundary” that prevents the U.S. from being represented as a structurally failing nation.

This is the bipolar America that allowed for the torture of Pearson while moving actual criminals, rapists, and murderers through a civil court where they are given due process. And the ultimate schizophrenia? Pearson has little to no legal remedy as a US citizen. In a constitutional form a government, a man has practically no domestic remedy. Over 70 years, the courts have blocked nearly every path for redress. The Roberts Court has privileged religious liberty while narrowing viable paths for citizens to seek legal remedy when the government violates their religious rights. Even the courts cannot reconcile their own contradictions. If US Supreme Court justices’ constitutional rights were violated by the government in the same way as Pearson’s, these same justices would find themselves in the exact legal dead-end. A quintessential American phenomenon. Unfortunately, the US government does have a history of illegally intercepting private communications of justices. Pearson cannot pray aloud in his apartment due to illegal surveillance.

Pearson makes his way to the library. He settles in. Laptop opens. He begins his next essay, “9/11 Co-Conspirators Got Due Process. But an Innocent African American Man With a PhD — the Target of a Covert US Torture Program — Did Not Get Due Process”.