Still not missing saurian studies, still not having withdrawal symptoms ...
The one exception that confirmed the many reasons for taking a holyday break ...
Still up on Xmas Eve?
Is the lizard Oz editorialist running out of gas?
Is there no coal to hand to help with the steaming, the frothing and the bubbling?
Desperate for ideas for last minute Xmas gifts?
Do you have a reptile handy who would treasure a forever gift?
To which the infallible Pope provided a note this Xmas Eve ...
Meanwhile, the Streisand effect has kicked in, in a bigly way ...
Those following the machinations of Bari Weiss at CBS will have already seen the leaked video.
The pond is pleased to have discovered a transcript at Reddit.
The pond can't vouch for its accuracy, but whatever ... it's still part of the Streisand effect...
Video Audio Transcription 60 Minutes: Inside CECOT
Reporter: You may recall earlier this year, when the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, a country most had no connection to. The White House claimed the men were terrorists, part of a violent gang, and invoked a centuries-old wartime power, saying it allowed them to deport some men immediately, without due process, an unusual strategy that sparked an ongoing legal battle. Tonight, you'll hear from some of those men. They describe torture, sexual and physical abuse inside CECOT, one of El Salvador's harshest prisons, where they say they endured four months of hell.
Reporter: It began as soon as the planes landed. The deportees thought they were headed back to Venezuela, but then saw hundreds of Salvadoran police waiting for them on the tarmac. Shackled, they were paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses, and delivered to CECOT, El Salvador's notorious maximum-security prison.
Luis Muñoz Pinto: When we got there, the CECOT director was talking to us. First thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again. He said, "Welcome to hell. I'll make sure you never leave."
Reporter: Did you think you were going to die there?
Luis Muñoz Pinto: We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.
Reporter: We met Luis Muñoz Pinto in Colombia. He was a college student in repressive Venezuela and hoped to seek asylum in the United States. In 2024, he says he waited in Mexico until his scheduled appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in California. During that interview...
Luis Muñoz Pinto: They just looked at me and told me I was a danger to society.
Reporter: You have no criminal record.
Luis Muñoz Pinto: I don't even—I never even got a traffic ticket.
Reporter: Nevertheless, he was detained by Customs. He says he spent six months locked up in the U.S. waiting for a decision on his asylum case when he was deported. One of 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT between March and April. Inside, he says their hands and feet were tied, forced to their knees, their heads were shaved.
Luis Muñoz Pinto: It was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn't take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves. When you get there, you already know you're in hell. You don't need anyone else to tell you.
Reporter: He says the guards began savagely beating them with their fists and batons. Tell me about what they did to you personally.
Luis Muñoz Pinto: Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled, to the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall; that was when they broke one of my teeth.
Reporter: CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, was built in 2022 as a key part of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's sweeping anti-gang crackdown. The massive prison, designed to hold 40,000 inmates, and its harsh reputation, are a point of pride for Bukele, who regularly allows social media influencers to tour it.
Influencer: As you can see, we're literally in the middle of the desert.
Reporter: Guards show off cramped cells where metal bunks are stacked four high. There are no mattresses or sheets. Inmates said they had no access to the outdoors and no contact with relatives. International observers warned CECOT was violating the UN standard for minimum treatment of prisoners. And two years ago, during the Biden administration, the U.S. State Department cited "... torture... and life-threatening prison conditions..." in its report on El Salvador. But this year, during a meeting with President Bukele at the White House, President Trump expressed admiration for El Salvador's prison system.
Donald Trump: They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games.
Reporter: In March, the U.S. struck a deal to pay El Salvador $4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees at CECOT.
White House Spokesperson: These are heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators, who have no right to be in this country, and they must be held accountable.
Reporter: The U.S. government said these people are the worst of the worst.
Juan Pappier: These people are migrants. And the sad reality is that the U.S. government tried to make an example out of them. They sent them to a place where they were likely to be tortured, to send migrants across Latin America the message that they should not come to the United States.
Reporter: Juan Pappier is a deputy director at the nonprofit Human Rights Watch. In an 81-page report released in November, the organization concluded there was "... systematic torture and other abuses..." at CECOT and that "... at least 48.8 percent..." of the Venezuelans the U.S. sent there "... had no criminal record." "... Only 8 (3.1 percent) had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense." How do you know they weren't gang members?
Juan Pappier: We cross-referenced federal databases, databases in all 50 states in the United States, and also obtained criminal records in Venezuela and in other countries where these people lived. And the information we obtained in the United States is based on data provided by ICE.
Reporter: So, ICE's own records said...
Juan Pappier: ICE's own records say that only 3% had been sentenced for a violent or potentially violent crime.
Reporter: 60 Minutes reviewed the available ICE data. It confirms the findings of Human Rights Watch. It shows 70 men had pending criminal charges in the U.S., which could include immigration violations. We don't know because the Department of Homeland Security has never released a complete list of the names or criminal histories of the men it sent to CECOT. Rapid deportations have been a key part of the Trump administration's immigration overhaul. The administration considers anyone who crosses the border illegally to be a criminal. Illegal crossings are now at a historic low. But some immigration attorneys say the administration has used flawed criteria to justify deportation.
Luis Muñoz Pinto: I have some tattoos. None of them have anything to do with any criminal group. I explained to them, saying that I didn't belong to any gang, to which the agent responded, "But you are Venezuelan."
Reporter: 60 Minutes reviewed this document agents used to assess Venezuelans. A person with eight points was designated as a Tren de Aragua gang member and deportable. Tattoos an immigration officer suspected of being gang-related earned four points. Criminologists who study gangs say tattoos are not a reliable way to identify Venezuelan gang members because, unlike some Central American gangs such as MS-13, Tren de Aragua does not use tattoos to signal membership.
Reporter: Venezuelan national William Lozada Sanchez was also deported to CECOT. He told us the guards there also accused Venezuelans with tattoos of being gang members. He detailed months of abuse and being forced into stress positions. So you had to be on your knees for 24 hours?
William Lozada Sanchez: Yes, because they put a guard there to watch us so that we wouldn't move.
Reporter: What would happen if you couldn't make it?
William Lozada Sanchez: They'd take us to "the island."
Reporter: What's "the island"?
William Lozada Sanchez: The island is a little room where there's no light, no ventilation, nothing. It's a cell for punishment where you can't see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour. And they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us while we were in there.
Luis Muñoz Pinto: The torture was never-ending. They would take you there and beat you for hours and leave you locked in there for days.
Reporter: Some of the deportees described being sexually assaulted by the guards. They were hitting your private parts?
Luis Muñoz Pinto: Yes.
Reporter: With a baton?
Luis Muñoz Pinto: No, they touched them with their hands.
Reporter: And they did that to multiple people?
Luis Muñoz Pinto: To most of us.
Reporter: The men say they grew weaker by the day. They claim the prison lights were left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep, and that food and medicine were often withheld. Did you have access to clean water?
Luis Muñoz Pinto: They never gave us access to clean water. The same water from our baths and toilets was the same water that we had to drink and survive on. If we had serious injuries, when the doctors examined us, they told us that drinking water would heal it.
Reporter: So they're telling the injured prisoners to drink water, and the water's filthy. Luis Muñoz Pinto: Super filthy. The sicker and more injured we were, the better it was for them.
Reporter: In late March, about 10 days after the first U.S. deportees arrived, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the prison. Did they speak to anybody—any of the prisoners?
Luis Muñoz Pinto: Never. Not with any of the detainees. They never spoke to us. We only saw the cameras.
Reporter: At some point, Secretary Noem went to another area of the prison to record this video.
Kristi Noem: I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here to incarcerate them and have consequences.
Reporter: The men standing behind her, heavily tattooed, who are those men? Do we know?
Juan Pappier: We know that those men in her video are not Venezuelans. They are Salvadorans, probably accused of being gang leaders, probably people who have been in jail for many, many years in El Salvador.
Reporter: Human Rights Watch was able to confirm that with the help of this intrepid team of students at UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center.
Student: All the visible men have either an "MS" on their chest, or "13," or an "ES" for El Salvador, and all those gangs are associated with El Salvador. Not the Venezuelans.
Reporter: To help verify the deportees' stories for Human Rights Watch, the team of students combed through open-source data for weeks. Students are trained in advanced techniques and follow strict international standards for obtaining digital evidence that can be used in courts. Analyzing satellite imagery, they mapped the prison and identified the building where the Venezuelans were held. And remember all those influencers who filmed inside CECOT? One toured an isolation cell.
Influencer: These are the rooms of solitary confinement. And they get absolutely nothing to use to sleep or to rest. Just pure concrete.
Reporter: A show-and-tell of the armory confirmed CECOT had the weapons the Venezuelans say guards used on them.
Student: What we did see in these videos was the use of the T-batons on prisoners. Additionally, we also saw the use of painful body positions. They were showing that off in the video, and they do that sort of—a practice. Reporter: But it was this interview with the prison warden that proved to be most helpful.
Warden: The light system is 24 hours a day.
Student: One of the questions that we had was, "Are the lights on 24/7?" He said, "Yes, they are." So he's talking about how hot it can get in the prison. So there's this sort of pride around the poor conditions and around the suffering.
Reporter: Using extreme temperatures or light to disorient inmates is also prohibited under UN standards.
Alexa Koenig: I think one of the things that the work of this team has really shown is that a lot of these stories can be believed. If you can bring that together with the physical evidence, I think you have the strongest possible case for accountability, whether it's in a court of public opinion or at some point in a court of law.
Reporter: The Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request.
Reporter: In July, after four months, the 252 Venezuelan men were finally released from CECOT and sent back to Caracas in exchange for 10 Americans that had been imprisoned in Venezuela. The Trump administration has arranged more deals, some valued at millions of dollars, to offload U.S. deportees to other so-called third countries, nations to which they have no connection. Among them, war-torn South Sudan and Uganda, which have well-documented histories of torturing prisoners.
And after that, have a 'toon to celebrate ...
Meanwhile, followers of the far right in the disunited states will have been delighted by the civil war that erupted at the latest karnival konvention of extreme far right klowns ...
Per Crikey, and Charlie Lewis (sorry, paywall) ...
Harpers provided a lengthy preamble to the current feuding, which revolves in part around Israel ...
A couple of teaser trailers ...
At this year’s ceremonial turkey pardon, Trump praised a farmer from Wayne County, North Carolina, for raising two “record-setting” birds, but then pivoted to his own electoral margin of victory: “I won that county by 92 percent.” (In fact, he won it by 16 percentage points.) At a McDonald’s corporate event last month, Trump claimed that the United States controls 92 percent of the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico (the Gulf of America, as he calls it). It’s really about 46 percent. Trump won the veterans’ vote, he said on Veterans Day, with “about 92 percent or something,” and in July, he said he won farmers—well, “by 92 percent.” (More accurate estimates of the portion of the electorate he won would be 65 percent of veterans and 78 percent of voters in farming counties, according to exit polls and election data.)
His fixation on the number between 91 and 93 has been a feature for a while. In April, Trump claimed that egg prices had fallen by 92 percent. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics said 12.7 percent.) And at a rally shortly before last November’s election, while railing against journalists and the media, he allowed that “not all of them” are “sick people.” Just “about 92 percent.” That one, admittedly, is difficult to fact-check.
I came upon this curious pattern in the course of tracking down the basis for a far more serious claim the president has made repeatedly as part of his justification for the U.S. military buildup near Venezuela. More than two dozen strikes on small boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 100 people since September. The strikes have formed the core of the administration’s ongoing campaign to treat President Nicolás Maduro as a “narco-terrorist,” which many view as a veneer for wanting to see the Venezuelan strongman ousted from power and work with a new government to secure access to the country’s oil and rare earth minerals.
Read: Trump knows what he wants, just not how to get there
“The drugs coming in through the sea are down to—they’re down by 92 percent,” Trump told Politico on December 8. At a roundtable later the same day, he went with “92 or 94 percent.” Three days later: “Drug traffic by sea is down 92 percent,” Trump said in the Oval Office. A day after that brought a new estimate: “We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water,” he told reporters.
More often than not, the president links the 92 (or more) percent claim to another: “Every one of those boats you see get shot down, you just saved 25,000 American lives.” In December alone, he has cited that figure—25,000 American lives saved per boat strike—on at least six different occasions.
So enjoying all the holyday reading to hand, so pleased to be taking a break from herpetology studies, so enjoying all the grift, or is that grit?
