Milo's Papa,
Sorry or what your wife endured, and the worries that you are both now experiencing.
Judith Herman, in "Trauma and Recovery" is very specific, that the first stage upon which all other stages of recovery are based is establishing safety and self care.
Within that, we need to take stock of what are actual threats, and what is the drasticizing of our past experiences and flashbacks to the feelings of helplessness aloneness as a child against seemingly omnipotent adult world, that is part and parcel of PTSD.
Herman herself had direct experiences of that, as her family was subject to the McCarthyite purges.
Do gangs murder people who stand in the way of their plunder, or spill their sordid little secrets, or who even just know something sensitive?
Hell yes! all of the fecking time. With the biggest gang in an area and hence the most capable of violence (they usually use the name "government"), the death is usually plausibly deniable, but with enough clues
pour encourage les autres.
There is also the ancient Greek adage, that
"those whom the gods would destroy, they first make [people think of as]
mad". Sorry that you have just had an experience of that, here of all places.
British researcher Richard Bentall's recent work on the life and trauma histories of patients diagnosed as psychotically paranoid, shows, as did the work of Janet and Freud in the 1890s with "hysterical" female patients, backgrounds of incredibly unsafe environments.
This of course raises the side question of why, even here on this forum, the suggestion of psychosis renders someone's account invalid, the ravings of a fevered mind.
cui bono?
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Release of documents does suggest that the program is less sensitive than it once was, the release may only be partial. Admission of part of the story might fool some people that full disclosure has been made, while more sensitive information remains hidden from us children.
for an example of partial release, watch the BBC "Timewatch" documentaries from the early 1990s about "Operation Gladio" in Europe. they're up on youtube, still. the Author of the documentaries, Alan Francovich was an interesting guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Francovich
"Gladio" was the codename for a secret army in Europe, which came to public attention in around 1990 and was investigated and reports published by several European governments. Its exploits included pretty much all of the supposedly "far left" terror attacks in Europe and the kidnap and murder of a former prime minister of Italy. to find coverage of bombing campaigns in Britain and Ireland, and British state collusion (arguably from the same play book and at the same time as "Gladio") one would have to go to the Republic of Ireland.
There are also ridiculous theories, deliberately put about, in order to allow people with genuine information to be dismissed as, yes, as nutters.
There is the matter of time. What your wife experienced, may be largely supersceded by newer techniques, knowledge and research, and many of the people at who's hands she suffered, are probably no longer in a position to hurt others, or at least not so easily as perhaps they could back then.
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I have only limited knowledge of the accounts of political refugees, but from what I do know, if your wife is feeling seriously unsafe herself, get her to safety.
make it look like your going on a package holiday, return flights, sun cream, appropriate luggage for the week or fortnight list of addresses for holiday postcards...
no obvious signs of selling up.
Incidentally, the united state does have something of an invisible Berlin Wall, few banks outside of the united state will give an American a bank account, it's just too complicated and too risky for them.
The price of going into exile is often high, and the means are often "illegal" and come with the serious risk of being robbed or worse on the way, for example the ancestors of the small Jewish community in Dublin, believed they'd arrived safely in America, because that's what they'd paid the people traffickers of their day for, as they fled from the tzar's pogroms. Only you and your wife can decide if the risks and costs are worth it to you.
Traditionally, the Republic of Ireland and Spain were destinations for political refugees from Britain, as until recently, neither had an extradition treaty with Britain, and both places were inhospitable to British murder gangs (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Gang ). If you need to, you'll work out the possible options for yourselves.
