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Hidden history of cia torture { September 19 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/19/INGJ68OT8H1.DTLhttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/19/INGJ68OT8H1.DTL
The hidden history of CIA torture
Abu Ghraib is only the newest U.S. atrocity
- Alfred W. McCoy
Sunday, September 19, 2004
From ancient Rome's red-hot irons and lacerating hooks to medieval Europe's thumbscrews, rack and wheel, for more than 2,000 years anyone interrogated in a court of law could expect to suffer unspeakable tortures.
For the last 200 years, humanist intellectuals from Voltaire to members of Amnesty International have led a sustained campaign against the horrors of state-sponsored cruelty, culminating in the United Nations' 1985 Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by the Clinton administration in 1994.
Then came 9/11. When the twin towers collapsed, killing thousands, influential pro-pain pundits promptly repudiated those Enlightenment ideals and began publicly discussing whether torture might be an appropriate, even necessary, weapon in George Bush's war on terror.
But as past perpetrators could have told today's pundits, torture plumbs the recesses of human consciousness, unleashing an unfathomable capacity for cruelty as well as seductive illusions of potency.
Even as pundits fantasized about "limited, surgical torture," the Bush administration, following the president's orders after 9/11 to "kick some ass, " was testing and disproving their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that spread quickly from use against a few "high-value target" al Qaeda suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent Iraqis.
As we should have learned from France's battle for Algiers in the 1950s, Argentina's Dirty War in the 1970s and Britain's Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970s, a nation that harbors torture in defiance of its democratic principles pays a terrible price.
Its officials must spin an ever more complex web of lies that, in the end, weakens the bonds of trust that are the sine qua non of any modern society.
Most surprisingly, our own pro-pain pundits seemed, in those heady early days of the war on terror, unaware of a 50-year history of torture by the CIA, nor were they aware that their enthusiastic proposals gave cover to those in the Bush administration intent on reactivating a ruthless apparatus.
Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib scandal is the product of a deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward torture since the start of the Cold War.
At the United Nations and other international forums, Washington has long officially opposed torture and advocated a universal standard for human rights.
Simultaneously, the CIA has propagated ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions, a number of which the United States has ratified.
In battling communism, the United States adopted some of its most objectionable practices -- subversion abroad, repression at home and, most significantly, torture itself.
From 1950 to 1962, the CIA conducted massive, secret research into coercion and the malleability of human consciousness, which, by the late 1950s, was costing $1 billion a year.
Many Americans have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of this research -- the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects.
While these CIA drug experiments led nowhere, and the testing of electric shock led only to lawsuits, research into sensory deprivation proved fruitful indeed. In fact, this research produced a new psychological rather than physical method of torture, perhaps best described as "no-touch" torture.
The CIA's discovery was a counterintuitive breakthrough, the first real revolution in this cruel science since the 17th century -- and thanks to recent revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, we are now all too familiar with these methods, even if many Americans still have no idea of their history.
Upon careful examination, those photographs of nude bodies from Abu Ghraib expose the CIA's most basic torture techniques -- stress positions, sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation.
For 2,000 years, from ancient Athens through the Inquisition, interrogators found that the infliction of physical pain often produced heightened resistance or unreliable information -- the strong defied pain, while the weak blurted out whatever was necessary to stop it.
By contrast, the CIA's psychological torture paradigm used two new methods, sensory disorientation and "self-inflicted pain," both of which were aimed at causing victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and so to capitulate more readily to their torturers.
Under field conditions since the start of the Afghan war, CIA and allied interrogators have often employed methods reminiscent of the Inquisition's trademark tortures -- including strappado and the "crippling stork."
At the CIA's center near Kabul in 2002, for instance, American interrogators forced prisoners "to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled," an effect similar to the medieval strappado.
Instead of using the Inquisition's iron-framed "crippling stork" to contort the victim's body, CIA interrogators made their victims assume similar "stress positions" without any external mechanism, aiming again for the psychological effect of self-induced pain.
Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, the CIA's "no touch" torture actually leaves deep, searing psychological scars on both victims and -- something seldom noted -- their interrogators.
Victims often need long treatment to recover from a trauma many experts consider more crippling than physical pain. Perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating acts of cruelty and lasting emotional disorders.
When applied in actual operations, the CIA's psychological procedures have frequently led to unimaginable cruelties, physical and sexual, by perpetrators whose improvisations are often horrific and only occasionally effective.
The CIA's torture experimentation of the 1950s and early 1960s was codified in 1963 in a succinct, secret instructional booklet on torture -- the "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual, which would become the basis for a new method of torture disseminated globally over the next three decades.
These techniques were first spread through the U.S. Agency for International Development's Public Safety program to train police forces in Asia and Latin America as the front line of defense against communists and other revolutionaries.
After an angry Congress abolished the Public Safety program in 1975, the CIA worked through U.S. Army Mobile Training Teams to instruct military interrogators, mainly in Central America.
At the Cold War's end, Washington resumed its advocacy of universal principles, denouncing regimes for torture, participating in the World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna in 1993 and, a year later, ratifying the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
On the surface, the United States had resolved the tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices.
Yet even when Congress finally ratified this U.N. convention, it did so with intricately constructed reservations that cleverly exempted the CIA's psychological torture methods. The practice, never fully acknowledged, persisted inside the intelligence community.
Last April, in photographs from Abu Ghraib, ordinary Americans finally saw the reality and results of interrogation techniques the CIA has propagated and practiced for nearly half a century. Gen. George Fay's recent report blamed the CIA's influence for use of torture by military intelligence personnel at Abu Ghraib. In their harsh treatment of "ghost detainees," CIA interrogators moved about the prison with a corrupting "mystique" and extreme methods that "fascinated" Army interrogators.
The American public can join the international community in repudiating a practice that, more than any other, represents a denial of democracy. Alternatively, in its desperate search for security, the United States can continue its clandestine torture of terror suspects in the hope of gaining good intelligence without negative publicity.
In the likely event that Washington adopts the latter strategy, it will be a decision posited on two false assumptions: that torturers can be controlled and that news of their work can be contained. Yet, once torture begins, its use seems to spread uncontrollably in a downward spiral of fear and empowerment that may someday bring us another Abu Ghraib.
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of "The Politics of Heroin," an examination of the CIA's alliances with drug lords, and "Closer Than Brothers," a study of the impact of the CIA's psychological torture method upon the Philippine military. A longer version of this essay appeared on www.tomdispatch.com.
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