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This has been the essence of the curriculum of the infamous "School of Americas", the now renamed "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation".
>>> Allen Ruff <[log in to unmask]> 05/29/04 09:44AM >>>
Techniques initially perfected in Latin America....
ALFRED W. MCCOY
Torture at Abu Ghraib followed CIA's manual
By Alfred W. McCoy | Boston Globe, May 14, 2004
THE PHOTOS from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots not of simple
brutality or a breakdown in discipline but of CIA torture techniques
that have metastasized over the past 50 years like an undetected cancer
inside the US intelligence community. From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led
secret research into coercion and consciousness that reached a billion
dollars at peak. After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric
shocks, and sensory deprivation, this CIA research produced a new method
of torture that was psychological, not physical -- best described as "no
touch" torture.
The CIA's discovery of psychological torture was a counterintuitive
breakthrough -- indeed, the first real revolution in this cruel science
since the 17th century. The old physical approach required interrogators
to inflict pain, usually by crude beatings that often produced
heightened resistance or unreliable information. Under the CIA's new
psychological paradigm, however, interrogators used two essential
methods to achieve their goals.
In the first stage, interrogators employ the simple, nonviolent
techniques of hooding or sleep deprivation to disorient the subject;
sometimes sexual humiliation is used as well.
Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on to a second stage
with simple, self-inflicted discomfort such as standing for hours with
arms extended. In this phase, the idea is to make victims feel
responsible for their own pain and thus induce them to alleviate it by
capitulating to the interrogator's power. In his statement on reforms at
Abu Ghraib last week, General Geoffrey Miller, former chief of the
Guantanamo detention center and now prison commander in Iraq, offered an
unwitting summary of this two-phase torture. "We will no longer, in any
circumstances, hood any of the detainees," the general said. "We will no
longer use stress positions in any of our interrogations. And we will no
longer use sleep deprivation in any of our interrogations."
Although seemingly less brutal, no-touch torture leaves deep
psychological scars. The victims often need long treatment to recover
from trauma far more crippling than physical pain. The perpetrators can
suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to cruelty and lasting
emotional problems.
After codification in the CIA's "Kubark Counterintelligence
Interrogation" manual in 1963, the new method was disseminated globally
to police in Asia and Latin America through USAID's Office of Public
Safety. Following allegations of torture by USAID's police trainees in
Brazil, the US Senate closed down the office in 1975.
After it was abolished, the agency continued to disseminate its torture
methods through the US Army's Mobile Training Teams, which were active
in Central America during the 1980s. In 1997, the Baltimore Sun
published chilling extracts of the "Human Resource Exploitation Training
Manual" that had been distributed to allied militaries for 20 years. In
the 10 years between the last known use of these manuals in the early
1990s and the arrest of Al Qaeda suspects since September 2001, torture
was maintained as a US intelligence practice by delivering suspects to
foreign agencies, including the Philippine National Police, who broke a
bomb plot in 1995.
Once the war on terror started, however, the US use of no-touch torture
resumed, first surfacing at Bagram Air Base near Kabul in early 2002,
where Pentagon investigators found two Afghans had died during
interrogation. In reports from Iraq, the methods are strikingly similar
to those detailed in the Kubark manual.
Following the CIA's two-part technique, last September General Miller
instructed US military police at Abu Ghraib to soften up high-priority
detainees in the initial disorientation phase for later "successful
interrogation and exploitation" by CIA and military intelligence. As
often happens in no-touch torture sessions, this process soon moved
beyond sleep and sensory deprivation to sexual humiliation. The
question, in the second, still unexamined phase, is whether US Army
intelligence and CIA operatives administered the prescribed mix of
interrogation and self-inflicted pain -- but outside the frame of these
photographs. If so, the soldiers now facing courts-martial would have
been following standard interrogation procedure.
For more than 50 years, the CIA's no-touch methods have become so widely
accepted that US interrogators seem unaware that they are, in fact,
engaged in systematic torture. But now, through these photographs from
Abu Ghraib, we can see the reality of these techniques. We have a chance
to join fully with the international community in repudiating a practice
that, more than any other, represents a denial of democracy.
Alfred W. McCoy, professor of history at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of "Closer Than Brothers," a study of
the impact of torture upon the Philippine armed forces.
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