[News] Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib

[News at freedomarchives.org]

The Hidden History of CIA Torture:

America's Road to Abu Ghraib
By Alfred W. McCoy

 From ancient Rome's red-hot irons and lacerating hooks to medieval 
Europe's thumbscrews, rack, and wheel, for over 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 Nation's 1985 Convention 
Against Torture, 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. The most 
persuasive among them, Harvard academic Alan M. Dershowitz, advocated 
giving courts the right to issue "torture warrants," ensuring that needed 
information could be prized from unwilling Arab subjects with steel needles.

Despite torture's appeal as a "lesser evil," a necessary expedient in 
dangerous times, those who favor it ignore its recent, problematic history 
in America. They also seem ignorant of a perverse pathology that allows the 
practice of torture, once begun, to spread uncontrollably in crisis 
situations, destroying the legitimacy of the perpetrator nation. 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 and professors 
fantasized about "limited, surgical torture," the Bush administration, 
following the President's orders to "kick some ass," was testing and 
disproving their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that 
spread quickly from use against a few "high target value" Al Qaeda suspects 
to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent Iraqis.

As we 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 fifty-year history of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 
nor were they aware that their enthusiastic proposals gave cover to those 
in the Bush Administration intent on reactivating a ruthless apparatus.

Torture's Perverse Pathology

In April 2004, the American public was stunned by televised photographs 
from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed 
in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while U.S. 
soldiers stood by smiling. As the scandal grabbed headlines around the 
globe, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly assured Congress that 
the abuses were "perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military," whom New 
York Times columnist William Safire soon branded "creeps."

These photos, however, are snapshots not of simple brutality or even 
evidence of a breakdown in "military discipline." What they record are CIA 
torture techniques that have metastasized like an undetected cancer inside 
the U.S. intelligence community over the past half century. A survey of 
this history shows that the CIA was, in fact, the lead agency at Abu 
Ghraib, enlisting Army intelligence to support its mission. These 
photographs from Iraq also illustrate standard interrogation procedures 
inside the gulag of secret CIA prisons that have operated globally, on 
executive authority, since the start of the President's war on terror.

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 UN 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 U.S 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 
fifties, was costing a billion dollars 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 as a technique 
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 Agency's discovery was a counterintuitive breakthrough, the first real 
revolution in this cruel science since the seventeenth 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 expose the CIA's most basic torture techniques -- stress positions, 
sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation.

For over 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. A week after the Abu Ghraib 
scandal broke, General Geoffrey Miller, U.S. prison commander in Iraq (and 
formerly in Guantanamo), 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."

Under field conditions since the start of the Afghan War, Agency and allied 
interrogators have often added to their no-touch repertoire physical 
methods reminiscent of the Inquisition's trademark tortures -- strappado, 
question de l'eau, "crippling stork," and "masks of mockery." 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 strappado. Instead of 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 individual perpetrators whose improvisations are often horrific 
and only occasionally effective.

Just as interrogators are often seduced by a dark, empowering sense of 
dominance over victims, so their superiors, even at the highest level, can 
succumb to fantasies of torture as an all-powerful weapon. Our contemporary 
view of torture as aberrant and its perpetrators as abhorrent ignores both 
its pervasiveness as a Western practice for two millennia and its perverse 
appeal. Once torture begins, its perpetrators, plunging into uncharted 
recesses of consciousness, are often swept away by dark reveries, by 
frenzies of power and potency, mastery and control -- particularly in times 
of crisis. "When feelings of insecurity develop within those holding 
power," reads one CIA analysis of the Soviet state applicable to post-9/11 
America, "they become increasingly suspicious and put great pressures on 
the secret police to obtain arrests and confessions. At such times police 
officials are inclined to condone anything which produces a speedy 
'confession' and brutality may become widespread."

Enraptured by this illusory power, modern states that sanction torture 
usually allow it to spread uncontrollably. By 1967, just four years after 
compiling a torture manual for use against a few top Soviet targets, the 
CIA was operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam as part of 
its Phoenix Program that killed over 20,000 Viet Cong suspects. In the 
centers themselves, countless thousands were tortured for information that 
led to these assassinations. Similarly, just a few months after CIA 
interrogators first tortured top Al Qaeda suspects at Kabul in 2002, its 
agents were involved in the brutal interrogation of hundreds of Iraqi 
prisoners. As its most troubling legacy, the CIA's psychological method, 
with its legitimating scientific patina and its avoidance of obvious 
physical brutality, has provided a pretext for the preservation of torture 
as an acceptable practice within the U.S. intelligence community.

Once adopted, torture offers such a powerful illusion of efficient 
information extraction that its perpetrators, high and low, remain wedded 
to its use. They regularly refuse to recognize its limited utility and high 
political cost. At least twice during the Cold War, the CIA's torture 
training contributed to the destabilization of two key American allies, 
Iran's Shah and the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos. Yet even after their 
spectacular falls, the Agency remained blind to the way its torture 
training was destroying the allies it was designed to defend.

CIA Torture Research

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 UN 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 UN convention it 
did so with intricately-constructed reservations that cleverly exempted the 
CIA's psychological torture method. While other covert agencies synonymous 
with Cold War repression such as Romania's Securitate, East Germany's 
Stasi, and the Soviet Union's KGB have disappeared, the CIA survives -- its 
archives sealed, its officers decorated, and its Cold War crimes forgotten. 
By failing to repudiate the Agency's propagation of torture, while adopting 
a UN convention that condemned its practice, the United States left this 
contradiction buried like a political land mine ready to detonate with such 
phenomenal force in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Memory and Forgetting

Today the American public has only a vague understanding of these CIA 
excesses and the scale of its massive mind-control project. Yet almost 
every adult American carries fragmentary memories of this past -- of LSD 
experiments, the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam, the murder of a 
kidnapped American police adviser in Montevideo who was teaching CIA 
techniques to the Uruguayan police, and of course the Abu Ghraib 
photographs. But few are able to fit these fragments together and so grasp 
the larger picture. There is, in sum, an ignorance, a studied avoidance of 
a deeply troubling topic, akin to that which shrouds this subject in 
post-authoritarian societies.

With the controversy over Abu Ghraib, incidents that once seemed but 
fragments should now be coming together to form a mosaic of a clandestine 
agency manipulating its government and deceiving its citizens to probe the 
cruel underside of human consciousness, and then propagating its 
discoveries throughout the Third World.

Strong democracies have difficulty dealing with torture. In the months 
following the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the United States moved 
quickly through the same stages (as defined by author John Conroy) that the 
United Kingdom experienced after revelations of British army torture in 
Northern Ireland in the early 1970s -- first, minimizing the torture with 
euphemisms such as "interrogation in depth"; next, justifying it on grounds 
that it was necessary or effective; and finally, attempting to bury the 
issue by blaming "a few bad apples."

Indeed, since last April, the Bush administration and much of the media 
have studiously avoided the word "torture" and instead blamed our own bad 
apples, those seven Military Police. In July, the Army's Inspector General 
Paul T. Mikolashek delivered his report blaming 94 incidents of "abuse" on 
"an individual failure to uphold Army Values." Although the New York Times 
called his conclusions "comical," the general's views seem to resonate with 
an emerging conservative consensus. "Interrogation is not a Sunday-school 
class," said Republican Senator Trent Lott. "You don't get information that 
will save American lives by withholding pancakes." In June, an ABC 
News/Washington Post poll found that 35% of Americans felt torture was 
acceptable in some circumstances.

In August, Major General George R. Fay released his report on the role of 
Military Intelligence at Abu Ghraib. Its stunning revelations about the 
reasons for this torture were, however, obscured in opaque military prose. 
After interviewing 170 personnel and reviewing 9,000 documents, the general 
intimated that this abuse was the product of an interrogation policy 
shaped, in both design and application, by the CIA.

Significantly, General Fay blamed not the "seven bad apples," but the Abu 
Ghraib interrogation procedures themselves. Of the 44 verifiable incidents 
of abuse, one-third occurred during actual interrogation. Moreover, these 
"routine" interrogation procedures "contributed to an escalating 
'de-humanization' of the detainees and set the stage for additional and 
severe abuses to occur."

After finding standard Army interrogation doctrine sound, General Fay was 
forced to confront a single, central, uncomfortable question: what was the 
source of the aberrant, "non-doctrinal" practices that led to torture 
during interrogation at Abu Ghraib? Scattered throughout his report are the 
dots, politely unconnected, that lead from the White House to the Iraqi 
prison cell block: President Bush gave his defense secretary broad powers 
over prisoners in November 2001; Secretary Rumsfeld authorized harsh 
"Counter-Resistance Techniques" for Afghanistan and Guantanamo in December 
2002; hardened Military Intelligence units brought these methods to Iraq in 
July 2003; and General Ricardo Sanchez in Baghdad authorized these extreme 
measures for Abu Ghraib in September 2003.

In its short answer to this uncomfortable question, General Fay's report, 
when read closely, traced the source of these harsh "non-doctrinal methods" 
at Abu Ghraib to the CIA. He charged that a flouting of military procedures 
by CIA interrogators "eroded the necessity in the minds of soldiers and 
civilians for them to follow Army rules." Specifically, the Army "allowed 
CIA to house 'Ghost Detainees' who were unidentified and unaccounted for in 
Abu Ghraib," thus encouraging violations of "reporting requirements under 
the Geneva Conventions." Moreover, the interrogation of CIA detainees 
"occurred under different practices and procedures which were absent any 
DoD visibility, control, or oversight and created a perception that OGA 
[CIA] techniques and practices were suitable and authorized for DoD 
operations." With their exemption from military regulations, CIA 
interrogators moved about Abu Ghraib with a corrupting "mystique" and 
extreme methods that "fascinated" some Army interrogators. In sum, General 
Fay seems to say that the CIA has compromised the integrity and 
effectiveness of the U.S. military.

Had he gone further, General Fay might have mentioned that the 519th 
Military Intelligence, the Army unit that set interrogation guidelines for 
Abu Ghraib, had just come from Kabul where it worked closely with the CIA, 
learning torture techniques that left at least one Afghani prisoner dead. 
Had he gone further still, the general could have added that the sensory 
deprivation techniques, stress positions, and cultural shock of dogs and 
nudity that we saw in those photos from Abu Ghraib were plucked from the 
pages of past CIA torture manuals.

American Prestige

This is not, of course, the first American debate over torture in recent 
memory. From 1970 to 1988, the Congress tried unsuccessfully, in four major 
investigations, to expose elements of this CIA torture paradigm. But on 
each occasion the public showed little concern, and the practice, never 
fully acknowledged, persisted inside the intelligence community.

Now, in these photographs from Abu Ghraib, ordinary Americans have seen the 
reality and the results of interrogation techniques the CIA has propagated 
and practiced for nearly half a century. The American public can join the 
international community in repudiating a practice that, more than any 
other, represents a denial of democracy; or 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. Once torture 
begins, its use seems to spread uncontrollably in a downward spiral of fear 
and empowerment. With the proliferation of digital imaging we can 
anticipate, in five or ten years, yet more chilling images and devastating 
blows to America's international standing. Next time, however, the American 
public's moral concern and Washington's apologies will ring even more 
hollowly, producing even greater damage to U.S. prestige.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History at the University of 
Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin, CIA 
Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, 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. He will 
publish a fuller version of this essay in The New England Journal of Public 
Policy (Volume 19, No. 2, 2004).

Copyright C2004 Alfred W. McCoy


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