[News] Back to the Future in Torture Policy

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Tom Dispatch

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175080/alfred_mccoy_back_to_the_future_in_torture_policy
posted 2009-06-07 17:32:55


Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Back to the Future in Torture Policy

When the 
<http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444>Abu 
Ghraib photos were released in 2004, it seemed 
that most Americans were shocked by such novel 
and horrific images, but at least one was not. 
I'm talking about Alfred McCoy, who had been 
following the Central Intelligence Agency since 
the early 1970s, when it unsuccessfully tried to 
stop the publication of his book, The Politics of 
Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.

As soon as McCoy saw the now grimly iconic images 
of hooded figures, naked men on leashes, and the 
like, his reaction -- even grimmer than that of 
the rest of us -- was recognition. He had long 
been studying the CIA's pioneering research into 
methods of psychological torture. (The Agency had 
embarked on this project in the early 1950s, 
initially studying old Soviet and Chinese methods 
of interrogating and breaking prisoners.) As a 
result, he knew that what was unique at Abu 
Ghraib was not the methods of abuse, but those 
images. Thanks to cell phones and computers, 
these could be taken in quantity and passed 
around by anyone in the vicinity. Those photos, 
he also knew, were no record of aberrations: they 
represented policy and were recognizably out of 
the CIA's several-decade-old torture playbook.

That this was so still remains little understood 
today, even though in 2006 McCoy published an 
important book, 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082484/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>A 
Question of Torture, on the subject (and even 
earlier wrote a 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1795/%20alfred_mccoy_on_the_cia_s_road_to_abu_ghraib>post 
at TomDispatch laying out some of this grim 
history). His work has since been incorporated 
into, for instance, Jane Mayer's 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307456293/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>The 
Dark Side, a striking account of the war on 
terror as a torture fest. Yet the history offered 
in his book remains largely ignored or 
missing-in-action in our world -- and without it 
much of the so-called torture debate of this 
moment makes less sense than it should.

Recently, McCoy read a front-page New York Times 
piece headlined "U.S. Relies More on Aid of 
Allies in Terror Cases," which 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html>began 
this way: "The United States is now relying 
heavily on foreign intelligence services to 
capture, interrogate and detain all but the 
highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside 
the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, 
according to current and former American government officials."

Again, McCoy quickly recognized ancient history 
returning to haunt us. After all, until the Bush 
era, American administrations regularly 
outsourced torture (and torture techniques) to 
foreign allies. So read his latest piece of 
missing history below and then, if you want to 
grasp the depths of this old story, which shows 
no sign of ending, get your hands on a copy of 
his book. (To catch a superb TomDispatch audio 
interview with McCoy in which he discusses the 
CIA's "Manhattan Project of the mind," click 
<http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/>here.) Tom



Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze

America's Political Paralysis Over Torture
By Alfred W. McCoy

If, like me, you've been following America's 
torture policies not just for the last few years, 
but for decades, you can't help but experience 
that eerie feeling of déjà vu these days. With 
the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney 
from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, 
it may just be back to the future when it comes 
to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, 
do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the 
outsourcing of torture that went on, with the 
support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years.

Like Chile after the regime of General Augusto 
Pinochet or the Philippines after the 
dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Washington 
after Bush is now trapped in the painful politics 
of impunity. Unlike anything our allies have 
experienced, however, for Washington, and so for 
the rest of us, this may prove a political crisis without end or exit.

Despite dozens of official inquiries in the five 
years since the 
<http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444>Abu 
Ghraib photos first exposed our abuse of Iraqi 
detainees, the torture scandal continues to 
spread like a virus, infecting all who touch it, 
including now Obama himself. By embracing a 
specific methodology of torture, covertly 
developed by the CIA over decades using countless 
millions of taxpayer dollars and graphically 
revealed in those Iraqi prison photos, we have 
condemned ourselves to retreat from whatever 
promises might be made to end this sort of abuse 
and are instead already returning to a bipartisan 
consensus that made torture America's secret weapon throughout the Cold War.

Despite the 24 version of events, the Bush 
administration did not simply authorize 
traditional, bare-knuckle torture. What it did do 
was develop to new heights the world's most 
advanced form of psychological torture, while 
quickly recognizing the legal dangers in doing 
so. Even in the desperate days right after 9/11, 
the White House and Justice Department lawyers 
who presided over the Bush administration's new 
torture program were remarkably punctilious about 
cloaking their decisions in legalisms designed to preempt later prosecution.

To most Americans, whether they supported the 
Bush administration torture policy or opposed it, 
all of this seemed shocking and very new. Not so, 
unfortunately. Concealed from Congress and the 
public, the CIA had spent the previous 
half-century developing and propagating a 
sophisticated form of psychological torture meant 
to defy investigation, prosecution, or 
prohibition -- and so far it has proved 
remarkably successful on all these counts. Even 
now, since many of the leading psychologists who 
worked to advance the CIA's torture skills have 
remained silent, we understand surprisingly 
little about the psychopathology of the program 
of mental torture that the Bush administration applied so globally.

Physical torture is a relatively straightforward 
matter of sadism that leaves behind broken 
bodies, useless information, and clear evidence 
for prosecution. Psychological torture, on the 
other hand, is a mind maze that can destroy its 
victims, even while entrapping its perpetrators 
in an illusory, almost erotic, sense of 
empowerment. When applied skillfully, it leaves 
few scars for investigators who might restrain 
this seductive impulse. However, despite all the 
myths of these last years, psychological torture, 
like its physical counterpart, has proven an 
ineffective, even counterproductive, method for 
extracting useful information from prisoners.

Where it has had a powerful effect is on those 
ordering and delivering it. With their egos 
inflated beyond imagining by a sense of being 
masters of life and death, pain and pleasure, its 
perpetrators, when in office, became forceful 
proponents of abuse, striding across the 
political landscape like Nietzschean supermen. 
After their fall from power, they have continued 
to maneuver with extraordinary determination to 
escape the legal consequences of their actions.

Before we head deeper into the hidden history of 
the CIA's psychological torture program, however, 
we need to rid ourselves of the idea that this 
sort of torture is somehow "torture lite" or 
merely, as the Bush administration renamed it, 
"enhanced interrogation." Although seemingly less 
brutal than physical methods, psychological 
torture actually inflicts a crippling trauma on 
its victims. "Ill treatment during captivity, 
such as psychological manipulations and forced 
stress positions," Dr. Metin Basoglu 
<http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/64611.php>has 
reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry 
after interviewing 279 Bosnian victims of such 
methods, "does not seem to be substantially 
different from physical torture in terms of the severity of mental suffering."

A Secret History of Psychological Torture

The roots of our present paralysis over what to 
do about detainee abuse lie in the hidden history 
of the CIA's program of psychological torture. 
Early in the Cold War, panicked that the Soviets 
had somehow cracked the code of human 
consciousness, the Agency mounted a "Special 
Interrogation Program" whose working hypothesis 
was: "Medical science, particularly psychiatry 
and psychotherapy, has developed various 
techniques by means of which some external 
control can be imposed on the mind/or will of an 
individual, such as drugs, hypnosis, electric shock and neurosurgery."

All of these methods were tested by the CIA in 
the 1950s and 1960s. None proved successful for 
breaking potential enemies or obtaining reliable 
information. Beyond these ultimately unsuccessful 
methods, however, the Agency also explored a 
behavioral approach to cracking that "code." In 
1951, in collaboration with British and Canadian 
defense scientists, the Agency encouraged 
academic research into "methods concerned in 
psychological coercion." Within months, the 
Agency had defined the aims of its top-secret 
program, code-named 
<http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book1/html/ChurchB1_0198a.htm>Project 
Artichoke, as the "development of any method by 
which we can get information from a person 
against his will and without his knowledge."

This secret research produced two discoveries 
central to the CIA's more recent psychological 
paradigm. In classified experiments, famed 
Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb found that he 
could induce a state akin to drug-induced 
hallucinations and psychosis in just 48 hours -- 
without drugs, hypnosis, or electric shock. 
Instead, for two days student volunteers at 
McGill University simply sat in a comfortable 
cubicle deprived of sensory stimulation by 
goggles, gloves, and earmuffs. "It scared the 
hell out of us," Hebb said later, "to see how 
completely dependent the mind is on a close 
connection with the ordinary sensory environment, 
and how disorganizing to be cut off from that support."

During the 1950s, two neurologists at Cornell 
Medical Center, under CIA contract, found that 
the most devastating torture technique of the 
Soviet secret police, the KGB, was simply to 
force a victim to stand for days while the legs 
swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, 
and hallucinations began -- a procedure which we 
now politely refer to as "stress positions."

Four years into this project, there was a sudden 
upsurge of interest in using mind control 
techniques defensively after American prisoners 
in North Korea suffered what was then called 
"brainwashing." In August 1955, President 
Eisenhower 
<http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=59249>ordered 
that any soldier at risk of capture should be 
given "specific training and instruction designed 
to... withstand all enemy efforts against him."

Consequently, the Air Force developed a program 
it dubbed SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, 
Escape) to train pilots in resisting 
psychological torture. In other words, two 
intertwined strands of research into torture 
methods were being explored and developed: 
aggressive methods for breaking enemy agents and 
defensive methods for training Americans to resist enemy inquisitors.

In 1963, the CIA distilled its decade of research 
into the curiously named 
<http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/01-01.htm>KUBARK 
Counter-intelligence Interrogation manual, which 
stated definitively that sensory deprivation was 
effective because it made "the regressed subject 
view the interrogator as a father-figure... 
strengthening... the subject's tendencies toward 
compliance." Refined through years of practice on 
actual human beings, the CIA's psychological 
paradigm now relies on a mix of sensory overload 
and deprivation via seemingly banal procedures: 
the extreme application of heat and cold, light 
and dark, noise and silence, feast and famine -- 
all meant to attack six essential sensory pathways into the human mind.

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082484/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
[]
After codifying its new interrogation methods in 
the KUBARK manual, the Agency spent the next 30 
years promoting these torture techniques within 
the U.S. intelligence community and among 
anti-communist allies. In its clandestine journey 
across continents and decades, the CIA's 
psychological torture paradigm would prove 
elusive, adaptable, devastatingly destructive, 
and powerfully seductive. So darkly seductive is 
torture's appeal that these seemingly scientific 
methods, even when intended for a few Soviet 
spies or al-Qaeda terrorists, soon spread 
uncontrollably in two directions -- toward the 
torture of the many and into a paroxysm of 
brutality towards specific individuals. During 
the Vietnam War, when the CIA applied these 
techniques in their search for information on top 
Vietcong cadre, the interrogation effort soon 
degenerated into the crude physical brutality of 
the Phoenix Program, producing 46,000 
extrajudicial executions and little actionable intelligence.

In 1994, with the Cold War over, Washington 
ratified the 
<http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm>U.N. 
Convention Against Torture, seemingly resolving 
the tension between its anti-torture principles 
and its torture practices. Yet when President 
Clinton sent this Convention to Congress, he 
included four little-noticed diplomatic 
"reservations" drafted six years before by the 
Reagan administration and focused on just one 
word in those 26 printed pages: "mental."

These reservations narrowed (just for the United 
States) the definition of "mental" torture to 
include just four acts: the infliction of 
physical pain, the use of drugs, death threats, 
or threats to harm another. Excluded were methods 
such as sensory deprivation and self-inflicted 
pain, the very techniques the CIA had propagated 
for the past 40 years. This definition was 
<http://law.justia.com/us/codes/title18/18usc2340.html>reproduced 
verbatim in Section 2340 of the U.S. Federal Code 
and later in the 
<http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002441----000-.html>War 
Crimes Act of 1996. Through this legal 
legerdemain, Washington managed to agree, via the 
U.N. Convention, to ban physical abuse even while 
exempting the CIA from the U.N.'s prohibition on psychological torture.

This little noticed exemption was left buried in 
those documents like a landmine and would 
detonate with phenomenal force just 10 years later at Abu Ghraib prison.

War on Terror, War of Torture

Right after his public address to a shaken nation 
on September 11, 2001, President Bush 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A30216-2004Mar27>gave 
his staff secret orders to pursue torture 
policies, adding emphatically, "I don't care what 
the international lawyers say, we are going to 
kick some ass." In a dramatic break with past 
policy, the White House would even allow the CIA 
to operate its own global network of prisons, as 
well as charter air fleet to transport seized 
suspects and "render" them for endless detention 
in a supranational gulag of secret "black sites" from Thailand to Poland.

The Bush administration also officially allowed 
the CIA ten "enhanced" interrogation methods 
designed by agency psychologists, including 
"waterboarding." This use of cold water to block 
breathing triggers the "mammalian diving reflex," 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammalian_diving_reflex>hardwired 
into every human brain, thus inducing an 
uncontrollable terror of impending death.

As Jane Mayer 
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer>reported 
in the New Yorker, psychologists working for both 
the Pentagon and the CIA "reverse engineered" the 
military's SERE training, which included a brief 
exposure to waterboarding, and flipped these 
defensive methods for use offensively on al-Qaeda 
captives. "They sought to render the detainees 
vulnerable -- to break down all of their senses," 
one official told Mayer. "It takes a psychologist 
trained in this to understand these rupturing 
experiences." Inside Agency headquarters, there 
was, moreover, a "high level of anxiety" about 
the possibility of future prosecutions for 
methods officials knew to be internationally 
defined as torture. The presence of Ph.D. 
psychologists was considered one "way for CIA 
officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture."

 From recently 
<http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/policy/national/olc_050510_bradbury_20pg.htm>released 
Justice Department memos, we now know that the 
CIA refined its psychological paradigm 
significantly under Bush. As described in the 
classified 2004 Background Paper on the CIA's 
Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques, each 
detainee was transported to an Agency black site 
while "deprived of sight and sound through the 
use of blindfolds, earmuffs, and hoods." Once 
inside the prison, he was reduced to "a baseline, 
dependent state" through conditioning by "nudity, 
sleep deprivation (with shackling...), and dietary manipulation."

For "more physical and psychological stress," CIA 
interrogators used coercive measures such as "an 
insult slap or abdominal slap" and then 
"walling," slamming the detainee's head against a 
cell wall. If these failed to produce the results 
sought, interrogators escalated to waterboarding, 
as was done to Abu Zubaydah "at least 83 times 
during August 2002" and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad 
183 times in March 2003 -- so many times, in 
fact, that the repetitiousness of the act can 
only be considered convincing testimony to the 
seductive sadism of CIA-style torture.

In a parallel effort launched by Bush-appointed 
civilians in the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense 
Donald Rumsfeld gave General Geoffrey Miller 
command of the new American military prison at 
Guantanamo in late 2002 with ample authority to 
transform it into an ad hoc psychology lab. 
Behavioral Science Consultation Teams of military 
psychologists 
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/marks>probed 
detainees for individual phobias like fear of the 
dark. Interrogators stiffened the psychological 
assault by exploiting what they saw as Arab 
cultural sensitivities when it came to sex and 
dogs. Via a three-phase attack on the senses, on 
culture, and on the individual psyche, 
interrogators at Guantanamo perfected the CIA's psychological paradigm.

After General Miller visited Iraq in September 
2003, the U.S. commander there, General Ricardo 
Sanchez, ordered Guantanamo-style abuse at Abu 
Ghraib prison. My own review of the 1,600 
still-classified photos taken by American guards 
at Abu Ghraib -- which journalists covering this 
story seem to share like Napster downloads -- 
reveals not random, idiosyncratic acts by "bad 
apples," but the repeated, constant use of just 
three psychological techniques: hooding for 
sensory deprivation, shackling for self-inflicted 
pain, and (to exploit Arab cultural 
sensitivities) both nudity and dogs. It is no 
accident that Private Lynndie England was 
famously photographed leading an Iraqi detainee leashed like a dog.

These techniques, 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html>according 
to the New York Times, then escalated virally at 
five Special Operations field interrogation 
centers where detainees were subjected to extreme 
sensory deprivation, beating, burning, electric 
shock, and waterboarding. Among the thousand 
soldiers in these units, 34 were later convicted 
of abuse and many more escaped prosecution only 
because records were officially "lost."

"Behind the Green Door" at the White House

Further up the chain of command, 
<http://www.democrats.com/senate-armed-services-committee-report-on-torture>National 
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, as she 
recently told the Senate, "convened a series of 
meetings of NSC [National Security Council] 
principals in 2002 and 2003 to discuss various 
issues
 relating to detainees." This group, 
including Vice President Cheney, Attorney General 
John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, 
and CIA director George Tenet, met dozens of 
times inside the White House Situation Room.

After watching CIA operatives mime what Rice 
called "certain physical and psychological 
interrogation techniques," these leaders, their 
imaginations stimulated by graphic visions of 
human suffering, repeatedly authorized extreme 
psychological techniques stiffened by hitting, 
walling, and waterboarding. According to an April 
2008 ABC News report, Attorney General Ashcroft 
once 
<http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=4583256>interrupted 
this collective fantasy by asking aloud, "Why are 
we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

In mid-2004, even after the Abu Ghraib photos 
were released, these principals met to approve 
the use of CIA torture techniques on still more 
detainees. Despite mounting concerns about the 
damage torture was doing to America's standing, 
shared by Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice 
commanded Agency officials with the cool demeanor 
of a dominatrix. "This is your baby," she reportedly said. "Go do it."

Cleansing Torture

Even as they exercise extraordinary power over 
others, perpetrators of torture around the world 
are assiduous in trying to cover their tracks. 
They construct recondite legal justifications, 
destroy records of actual torture, and paper the 
files with spurious claims of success. Hence, the 
CIA destroyed 92 interrogation videotapes, while 
Vice President Cheney now 
<http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,524237,00.html>berates 
Obama incessantly (five times in his latest Fox 
News interview) to declassify "two reports" which 
he claims will show the informational gains that 
torture offered -- possibly because his staff 
salted the files at the NSC or the CIA with 
documents prepared for this very purpose.

Not only were Justice Department lawyers 
aggressive in their advocacy of torture in the 
Bush years, they were meticulous from the start, 
in laying the legal groundwork for later 
impunity. In three torture memos from May 2005 
that the Obama administration recently 
<http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html>released, 
Bush's Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stephen 
Bradbury repeatedly cited those original U.S. 
diplomatic "reservations" to the U.N. Convention 
Against Torture, replicated in Section 2340 of 
the Federal code, to argue that waterboarding was 
perfectly legal since the "technique is not 
physically painful." Anyway, he added, careful 
lawyering at Justice and the CIA had punched 
loopholes in both the U.N. Convention and U.S. 
law so wide that these Agency techniques were 
"unlikely to be subject to judicial inquiry."

Just to be safe, when Vice President Cheney 
presided over the drafting of the 
<http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/154/2006/en>Military 
Commissions Act of 2006, he included clauses, 
buried in 38 pages of dense print, defining 
"serious physical pain" as the "significant loss 
or impairment of the function of a bodily member, 
organ, or mental faculty." This was a striking 
paraphrase of the outrageous definition of 
physical torture as pain "equivalent in intensity 
to... organ failure, impairment of bodily 
function, or even death" in 
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=jay+bybee+torture+memorandum&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=>John 
Yoo's infamous August 2002 "torture memo," 
already repudiated by the Justice Department.

Above all, the Military Commissions Act protected 
the CIA's use of psychological torture by 
repeating verbatim the exculpatory language found 
in those Clinton-era, Reagan-created reservations 
to the U.N. Convention and still embedded in 
Section 2340 of the Federal code. To make doubly 
sure, the act also made these definitions 
retroactive to November 1997, giving CIA 
interrogators immunity from any misdeeds under 
the Expanded War Crimes Act of 1997 which 
punishes serious violations with life imprisonment or death.

No matter how twisted the process, impunity -- 
whether in England, Indonesia, or America -- 
usually passes through three stages:

1. Blame the supposed "bad apples."

2. Invoke the security argument. ("It protected us.")

3. Appeal to national unity. ("We need to move forward together.")

For a year after the Abu Ghraib exposé, 
Rumsfeld's Pentagon blamed various low-ranking 
bad apples by 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1795/alfred_mccoy_on_the_cia_s_road_to_abu_ghraib>claiming 
the abuse was "perpetrated by a small number of 
U.S. military." In his statement on May 13th, 
while refusing to release more torture photos, 
President Obama 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/us/politics/14photos.html>echoed 
Rumsfeld, claiming the abuse in these latest 
images, too, "was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals."

In recent weeks, Republicans have taken us deep 
into the second stage with 
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cheney23-2009may23,0,2634231.story?track=rss>Cheney's 
statements that the CIA's methods "prevented the 
violent deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people."

Then, on April 16th, President Obama brought us 
to the final stage when he released the four 
Bush-era memos detailing CIA torture, 
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Statement-of-President-Barack-Obama-on-Release-of-OLC-Memos/>insisting: 
"Nothing will be gained by spending our time and 
energy laying blame for the past." During a visit 
to CIA headquarters four days later, Obama 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/us/politics/21intel.html>promised 
that there would be no prosecutions of Agency 
employees. "We've made some mistakes," he 
admitted, but urged Americans simply to 
"acknowledge them and then move forward." The 
president's statements were in such blatant 
defiance of international law that the U.N.'s 
chief official on torture, Manfred Nowak, 
reminded him that Washington was actually obliged 
to investigate possible violations of the Convention Against Torture.

This process of impunity is leading Washington 
back to a global torture policy that, during the 
Cold War, was bipartisan in nature: publicly 
advocating human rights while covertly 
outsourcing torture to allied governments and 
their intelligence agencies. In retrospect, it 
may become ever more apparent that the real 
aberration of the Bush years lay not in torture 
policies per se, but in the President's order 
that the CIA should operate its own torture 
prisons. The advantage of the bipartisan torture 
consensus of the Cold War era was, of course, 
that it did a remarkably good job most of the 
time of insulating Washington from the taint of 
torture, which was sometimes remarkably widely practiced.

There are already some clear signs of a policy 
shift in this direction in the Obama era. Since 
mid-2008, U.S. intelligence has captured a 
half-dozen al-Qaeda suspects and, instead of 
shipping them to Guantanamo or to CIA secret 
prisons, has 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html>had 
them interrogated by allied Middle Eastern 
intelligence agencies. Showing that this policy 
is again bipartisan, Obama's new CIA director 
Leon Panetta 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/us/politics/18policy.html>announced 
that the Agency would continue to engage in the 
rendition of terror suspects to allies like 
Libya, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia where we can, as 
he 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html>put 
it, "rely on diplomatic assurances of good 
treatment." Showing the quality of such 
treatment, Time magazine 
<http://mideast.blogs.time.com/2009/05/24/who-killed-ibn-al-sheikh-al-libi/>reported 
on May 24th that Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who 
famously confessed under torture that Saddam 
Hussein had provided al-Qaeda with chemical 
weapons and later admitted his lie to Senate 
investigators, had committed "suicide" in a Libyan cell.

The Price of Impunity

This time around, however, a long-distance 
torture policy may not provide the same 
insulation as in the past for Washington. Any 
retreat into torture by remote-control is, in 
fact, only likely to produce the next scandal 
that will do yet more damage to America's international standing.

Over a 40-year period, Americans have found 
themselves mired in this same moral quagmire on 
six separate occasions: following exposés of 
CIA-sponsored torture in South Vietnam (1970), 
Brazil (1974), Iran (1978), Honduras (1988), and 
then throughout Latin America (1997). After each 
exposé, the public's shock soon faded, allowing 
the Agency to resume its dirty work in the shadows.

Unless some formal inquiry is convened to look 
into a sordid history that reached its depths in 
the Bush era, and so begins to break this cycle 
of deceit, exposé, and paralysis followed by more 
of the same, we're likely, a few years hence, to 
find ourselves right back where we are now. We'll 
be confronted with the next American torture 
scandal from some future iconic dungeon, part of 
a dismal, ever lengthening procession that has 
led from the tiger cages of South Vietnam through 
the Shah of Iran's prison cells in Tehran to Abu 
Ghraib and the prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

The next time, however, the world will not have 
forgotten those photos from Abu Ghraib. The next 
time, the damage to this country will be nothing short of devastating.

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of 
History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 
He is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082484/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>A 
Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the 
Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan 
Books), which is also available in Italian and 
German translations. Later this year, Policing 
America's Empire: The United States, the 
Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance 
State, a forthcoming book of his, will explore 
the influence of overseas counterinsurgency 
operations on the spread of internal security 
measures here at home. To catch a TomDispatch 
audio interview in which McCoy discusses the 
CIA's "Manhattan Project of the mind," click 
<http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/>here.

Copyright 2009 Alfred W. McCoy




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