![\"exploitation\"\/](\"https:\/\/lh7-us.googleusercontent.com\/UKATtYUjlCDQcyidAK27o2jJ6H5H0CwNJIDnzXk9SB8-W2EbVZfr9BrubSJibW1xFupM-FjZjKlPhmOX1hiscqIFe99BDl8JyBVVqrdWPTIaCPVUqzId6siH32tSh2V8OtxPNX1xMpXgtx7XXjERbgI\")
I settled into my life and role. What choice did I have? Every time I reached out for help, people would either act dumb or become targets of the kidnapper I had been forced to live with. She used blackmail, threats, harassment, drugging, hardcore interrogation techniques that would leave even Gitmo workers questioning morality, manipulation, and when that failed \u2013 murder. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She truly was the dark shadow that hung over my life. I felt profoundly personally responsible for each person harmed, and it tore at me. For years at a time, I ceased to reach out for help. I didn’t want to do further harm. It was bad enough when it happened to me. After all, that was inevitable. But I couldn’t stand to watch it be done to others. I still felt an underlying connection with humanity back then, and I could feel their pain on a deep and tangible level. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I endured. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
On a self-preserving and less altruistic level, I was often scared to say anything when I was asked if I was okay. I would analyze each situation and reasonably assume that the person asking would not be effective in going against the recruiter to save me, even if I told them the truth. Their failed attempts and my admitting that I was uncomfortable with what was going on, at least to some degree, would risk my hard-earned reputation as completely willing, blind, and accepting of what I was trapped in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That reputation was important for my safety in the situation I was \u201dlegally\u201d obligated to remain in as a minor. It made me seem harmless and on the team of those who owned me, rather than appearing to be an enemy. In addition, more than any potential would-be savior, that hard-earned status was truly vital for any potentially effective future exit plans. I was going to have to crawl out on my own, but I was also going to need to use their activities as a launching pad for my plans, so that they would let me come along as an assistant, and I could then use the situation and their weight to get my own objective reached. As a tool, I needed to become a wielder of tools. It wasn’t easy from my position. All I had to work with was their trust in me. Reputation is always key. During those years, so were endurance and eternal patience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did everything I could to protect the world from the people I was trapped with in that situation. I insulated strangers from it, I never invited my friends home, and I sacrificed myself more times than I can count \u2013 because I lived with the enemy. I knew their tactics, and outsiders didn’t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also did it because I still had faith in humanity, thanks to memories of my mother in Argentina. Those memories and feelings of connection were the flame of life that kept me going through the darkness all those years, even as I was intentionally drowned and revived over and over again in a room beneath Yale New Haven Hospital, drowned for what purpose I will never understand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s possible that room saw even more human suffering than I did in those years. It was a large storage room, accessed via a somewhat active lower hospital hallway, and then a very short hall that branched from that. It was directly at the end of the short hall. The room was large enough to hold dozens of pieces of equipment. When near the back wall of that room, especially on the right side, I could hear the cars in the parking structure it must have shared a wall with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because it was officially deemed a storage room, no one had to sign any lists, documents, or schedules to utilize it for their research purposes. It was an off-the-books medical lab right on Yale\u2019s campus, in full sight of anyone who walked by. The best part of it, from a research perspective, was that allocating expensive or heavy medical equipment to it without approval was incredibly easy. All you had to do was send the equipment to storage, a process that required no oversight at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The research I witnessed there went against humanity. However, not all of it was quite so dark. The room wasn\u2019t only used by the recruiter\u2019s professional cohort (although, they definitely had first priority). The paperless loophole that it provided was also being utilized by some of the university\u2019s graduate students. In order to meet the unrealistically high expectations and reputation of Yale research proposals being of an almost clairvoyant level of accuracy in predicted outcomes, they actually needed to test their theories before asking an ethics board for approval to test them. They needed to ensure that the result of each proposal would lead to a success. The off-use lab was incredibly convenient for exactly that. And in all honestly, they may have used the room more. After all, military research doesn\u2019t require the extra work of gaining an ethics board\u2019s approval. It\u2019s unethical by nature, and that is accepted because it is presumed any of the research is for the benefit of national security. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One semi-example of the room\u2019s use would be Charles Morgan\u2019s utilization of it (if you remember, he was the one who would go on to be cited as a CIA psychiatrist in a Medscape article later in his career). While he was still a student, he utilized the room to test his \u201cmore humane\u201d military interrogation techniques. He had a (now published) theory that people of certain ethnicities respond differently to coercive interrogation. I was there for that one\u2026 that or multiple students were fighting for foreigner interrogation grants during that time and I have him confused with one of the hoard. Either way, apparently my being from South America and the tiniest bit Iranian was enough to qualify me as a participant in that earliest research.
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