[News] Teaching Torture: The Death and Legacy of Dan Mitrione
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Thu Aug 13 11:49:26 EDT 2020
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/13/teaching-torture-the-death-and-legacy-of-dan-mitrione/
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/13/teaching-torture-the-death-and-legacy-of-dan-mitrione/>
Teaching Torture: The Death and Legacy of Dan Mitrione
by Brett Wilkins - August 13, 2020
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/l2l4l54ldlc/>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the pre-dawn darkness of Monday, August 10, 1970, Dan Mitrione’s
bullet-ridden body was discovered in the back seat of a stolen Buick
convertible in a quiet residential neighborhood of Montevideo, the
Uruguayan capital. He had just turned 50, and he had recently started a
new dream job, although it was thousands of miles from his home in
Richmond, Indiana. Who was Dan Mitrione, and what work was he doing in
Uruguay that led him to such an early and violent end?
As the Cold War heated up, one of the ways in which the United States
government fought communism abroad was through foreign assistance
programs. These were favorite vehicles for Central Intelligence Agency
and other US meddling. Dan Mitrione, a Navy veteran and former
small-town police chief from Indiana, joined one such agency, the
International Cooperation Administration, in 1960. The following year,
ICA was absorbed by the United States Agency for International
Development, which in addition to its stated mission of administering
assistance to developing nations, gained global notoriety for its role
in helping brutal dictatorships repress, torture and murder innocent
men, women and children around the world.
*Brazil Brutality *
Mitrione’s first posting was in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he worked
on the police aid program for USAID’s Office of Public Safety. OPS
trained and armed friendly — read anti-communist — Latin American police
and security officers. Ostensibly, it was meant to teach police how to
be less corrupt and more professional. In practice, it operated as a CIA
proxy. As for its parent organization, one former USAID director, John
Gilligan, later admitted
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Cold_War_Anthropology/dn6tCwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22infiltrated+from+top+to+bottom+with+cia+people%22+gilligan&pg=PT146&printsec=frontcover>
it was “infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people.” Gilligan
explained that “the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of
activity we had overseas; government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”
Before Mitrione’s arrival, standard operating procedure for Brazilian
police was to beat a suspect nearly to death; if he talked he lived, if
not, well… Under Mitrione’s tutelage, officers introduced refined
torture techniques drawn from the pages of KUBARK
<https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/>, a CIA instruction manual
describing various physical and psychological methods of breaking a
prisoner’s will to resist interrogation. Many of the abuses in KUBARK
would later become familiar to the world as the “enhanced interrogation”
techniques used during the US war against terrorism: prolonged
constraint or exertion, ‘no-touch’ torture (stress positions), extremes
of heat, cold or moisture and deprivation or drastic reduction of food
or sleep. KUBARK also covers the use of electric shock torture, a
favorite tool of both the Brazilian and Uruguayan police under
Mitrione’s instruction.
One of the most notorious Brazilian torture devices during Mitrione’s
tenure was known as the refrigerator
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/American_Torture/wiVqrgS68NoC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Otterman+American+Torture+Mitrione+the+fridge&pg=PA75&printsec=frontcover>,
a small square box barely big enough to hold a hunched-up human being.
The “fridge” was equipped with a heating and cooling unit, speakers and
strobe lights; its use drove many men mad. Under Mitrione, Brazilian
police devised a new torture technique they called the “Statue of
Liberty,” in which hooded prisoners were forced to stand on a
sharp-edged sardine tin and hold heavy objects above their heads until
they began collapsing from exhaustion, at which point powerful electric
shocks would force them upright.
Mitrione was transferred to Rio de Janeiro in 1962, where he trained the
dreaded shock troops of the Department of Political and Social Order in
suppressing dissent and democracy. He was working in this role during
the 1964 US-backed military coup
<https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/> that ousted the
democratically-elected, anti-communist president João Goulart, who had
committed the fatal sin of advocating moderately redistributive economic
policies. The coup ushered in two decades of brutal military
dictatorship. By the end of the decade, USAID had trained more than
100,000 Brazilian police. During this period, the military dictatorship
murdered hundreds of dissidents and tortured thousands more, among them
a Marxist student named Dilma Rousseff, who half a century later would
later be elected Brazil’s first woman president.
*Move to Montevideo *
In 1969, Mitrione was named the OPS’ chief public safety adviser in
Montevideo, Uruguay, replacing Adolph Saenz, a quintessential Cold
Warrior who previously led the operation that hunted and murdered Che
Guevara in Bolivia. Mitrione arrived amid a collapsing economy, labor
strikes and student protests in a country once known as the Switzerland
of South America for its high level of economic development, freedom and
stability. Mitrione’s tenure in Montevideo saw the militarization of
Uruguayan police, ever-worsening state repression and an increase in the
power and brutality of the dreaded National Directorate of Information
and Intelligence, the national security agency responsible for the death
squads that soon operated with impunity.
On the far left, National Liberation Movement rebels, more commonly
known as Tupamaros, were increasing in power and popularity and
embarrassing the government with their bold urban kidnapping and other
attacks. Named after the Inca revolutionary Túpac Amaru II — who led a
major 18th century uprising against the genocidal Spanish empire in Peru
— and inspired by the Cuban revolution, the Tupamaros were led by farm
labor organizer Raúl Sendic. Unlike other Latin American guerrilla
groups, they avoided bloodshed whenever possible and until August 1970
had never killed any of their prisoners.
The Tupamaros’ relatively restrained rebellion initially engendered
widespread popular support. But as the government’s hand grew heavier,
so too did the rebels’ attacks. Just a few years earlier, the US
ambassador lamented the “relaxed attitude” of the Uruguayan government
toward communists. That would change under Mitrione. OPS imported
<https://books.google.com/books?id=DBkPkRPmIA0C&pg=PA227&lpg=PA227&dq=adolph+saenz+che+guevara&source=bl&ots=F9IpDMw3zd&sig=ACfU3U3F3lGzamq0-J9U4AoWjdaDqY4DyQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj935muzKfqAhWBvp4KHSRrAo4Q6AEwAHoECAsQAQ%23v=onepage&q=adolph%2520saenz%2520che%2520guevara&f=false>
surveillance technology and machine guns while sending “penetration
agents” to infiltrate the Tupamaros and gather information on their
leaders, members and sympathizers, including José Mujica, who like
Rousseff in Brazil endured imprisonment and torture before ultimately
being elected president of his country decades later.
*Teaching Torture *
The late US journalist and author A.J. Langguth credited US advisers led
by Mitrione with introducing “scientific methods of torture” to Uruguay.
These included psychological tortures like playing recordings of
screaming women and children and telling prisoners it was their
relatives being tortured, to more traditional torture techniques like
electric shocks applied under the fingernails and to the genitals.
According to Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a Cuban double agent who
infiltrated the CIA and spent years in the agency’s Montevideo station,
Mitrione said
<https://books.google.com/books?id=-IbQvd13uToC&pg=PA203&lpg=PA203&dq=%2522the+precise+pain,+in+the+precise+place+in+the+precise+amount%2522&source=bl&ots=cJz6IfGmcB&sig=ACfU3U1ZESo-gopugcZ9tGqT_LLD7qlwuQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiBivOuiajqAhVgJjQIHVpXDUAQ6AEwAHoECAwQAQ%23v=onepage&q=%2522the%2520precise%2520pain%252C%2520in%2520the%2520precise%2520place%2520in%2520the%2520precise%2520amount%2522&f=false>
that the key to successful interrogation was to apply “the precise pain,
in the precise place, in the precise amount to achieve the desired effect.”
“A premature death means failure by the technician,” Mitrione told Hevia
<https://www.nytimes.com/1978/08/05/archives/cuban-agent-says-us-police-aides-urged-torture-not-merely-work-of.html>.
“You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and
with the perfection of an artist.” Mitrione walked a very fine line
between surgical and sadistic when he added: “When you get what you
want, and I always, do, it may be good to prolong the session a little
to apply another softening up, not to extract information now, but only
as a political measure, to create a healthy fear.”
In order to build the perfect underground classroom in which to teach
his Uruguayan students the tools and techniques of their torturous
trade, Mitrione soundproofed the basement of his Montevideo home. He
tested its integrity by blasting Hawaiian music or having an assistant
fire a pistol from the room while he listened from different points
outside the home. Hevia claimed it was there that Mitrione trained
Uruguayan police to torture using “beggars from the outskirts of
Montevideo,” a practice he honed to perfection while stationed in
Brazil. “There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the
different voltages on the different parts of the human body,” said Hevia.
The Cuban claimed that Mitrione personally tortured four beggars to
death in his bespoke dungeon. This fits a historical pattern: At the
notorious US Army School of the Americas (SOA), then located in Panama,
US doctors supervised torture classes in which homeless people were
kidnapped from the streets of Panama City and used as human guinea pigs.
According to
<https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/united-states-americas-terrorist-training-camp>
one former SOA instructor interviewed in the award-winning documentary
film /Inside the School of the Assassins/, “they would bring people in
from the streets to the base, and the experts would train us on how to
obtain information through torture… They had a US physician… who would
teach the students… [about] the nerve endings of the body. He would show
them where to torture, where and where not, where you wouldn’t kill the
individual.”
“The special horror of the course was its academic, almost clinical
atmosphere,” said Hevia, who described Mitrione as “a perfectionist” and
“coldly efficient.” To better electrocute victims, Mitrione experimented
with fine wires that could be slipped between their teeth and into their
gums. While some of the tortures he supervised were indeed innovative,
others were anything but clinical, like the time he deprived a trade
unionist of water for three days before giving him a pot of water mixed
with urine
<https://fair.org/extra/adolfo-perez-esquivel-on-the-new-york-times-argentina-coverage/>
to drink.
Hevia told the /New York Times /that Mitrione was no rogue agent.
Rather, he “represented the program of the American mission” in Uruguay.
“Mitrione was only carrying out policy,” the Cuban insisted. For the
United States during the Cold War, torture was not a departure from the
norm, it /was/ the norm, from the villages of South Vietnam where tens
of thousands of civilians were “neutralized” during the Phoenix Program
<https://books.google.com/books?id=GBGj4PvBfMEC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=Phoenix+Program+Vietnam+torture+execution&source=bl&ots=_r2S9y8IPl&sig=ACfU3U2DVbHCKThYbEYXDaiEtKOlbqbotA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj6gb6iuKLqAhXDo54KHb2EB804FBDoATABegQIChAB%23v=onepage&q=Phoenix%2520Program%2520Vietnam%2520torture%2520execution&f=false>
to the some of the most prestigious hospitals and research facilities in
North America, where perhaps thousands of men, women and children, many
of them unwitting victims, were subjected to torturous experimentation
during Project MK-ULTRA
<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-we-know-about-cias-midcentury-mind-control-project-180962836/>
and other mind and behavior control programs.
For Uruguay, savage torture was a departure from the norm in a nation
once regarded as a model democracy. But such outrages occurred that the
Uruguayan Senate was compelled to investigate. It concluded that torture
had become “normal, frequent and habitual,” and that common techniques
used to torture prisoners, including pregnant women, included electric
shocks to the genitals, slow compression of testicles, electric needles
under fingernails and burning with cigarettes. Filmmaker Eduardo Terra
described being subjected daily to the “submarine,”
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03064227508532430?journalCode=rioc20>
in which a prisoner is nearly drowned in a tank of electrified water
often full of urine, vomit or feces. Victor Paulo Laborde Baffico, a
former Uruguayan naval intelligence officer, later revealed
<https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/11/01/Defector-says-US-manuals-used-to-teach-torture-in-Uruguay/9775373438800/>
that the “submarine,” electroshock torture and what would later be
called waterboarding were all taught to Uruguayan military officers from
the pages of US torture manuals.
*Kidnapped, Killed *
Years later, Raúl Sendic told
<https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/21/world/uruguayan-clears-up-state-of-siege-killing.html>
the /New York Times/ that Mitrione was targeted due to his direct role
in training police in torture and in retaliation for the killing of
student protesters. The corpulent Midwesterner was kidnapped as he left
his home in suburban Carrasco on July 31, 1970. Sometime during or
shortly after his abduction, Mitrione was shot in the shoulder. His
captors treated — and apologized for
<http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/1045809/20676702/1350599879063/DialogueBeforeDeath.pdf?token=y6Ad3EHrURcn8dkr6IMMMEQC46g%253D>
— the wound. The Tupamaros demanded the release of 150 of their jailed
comrades in exchange for Mitrione’s safe release. Although the Richard
Nixon administration’s public position was that it did not negotiate
with terrorists, the US president urged Uruguayan President Jorge
Pacheco Areco to “spare no effort” to secure the safe return of both
Mitrione and Dr. Claude Fly, an American agricultural adviser abducted
by the Tupamaros on August 7. Fly suffered a heart attack
<https://archive.org/details/hiddenterrors00ajla/page/290/mode/2up?q=heart+attack>
while still in captivity in March 1971 and was rushed first to a heart
surgeon and then to the local British Hospital, and freedom.
“Sparing no effort” included a threat
<https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB324/index.htm> by the Pacheco
regime to execute the 150 prisoners and their relatives. Still, 10 days
passed, among them Mitrione’s 50th birthday on August 4, without
progress. A recorded conversation
<http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/1045809/20676702/1350599879063/DialogueBeforeDeath.pdf?token=y6Ad3EHrURcn8dkr6IMMMEQC46g%3D>
between Mitrione and his captors shows that both were uncertain, yet
apparently hopeful, about the former’s fate. When Mitrione asks how long
it will take until he is freed, one of his captors says the government
will apply pressure. “We think you are very important,” he says on the
tape. “I hope somebody thinks so,” replies Mitrione.
The Tupamaros issued seven communiques before executing Mitrione. His
body was discovered on August 10 at 4:15 in the back of that Buick. He’d
been shot twice in the head and once in the heart and back. Sendic, the
former Tupamaro leader, always insisted that the rebels did not want to
kill Mitrione and that his death was the unfortunate result of a
communication breakdown after authorities captured Tupamaro leaders who
were unable to tell his captors what to do with him. On the other hand,
Eladio Moll, a former Uruguayan rear admiral and intelligence chief
during the dictatorship, later revealed
<https://books.google.com/books?id=oBM8UiDYz1MC&pg=PA182&lpg=PA182&dq=eladio+moll+%22they+didn%27t+deserve+to+live%22&source=bl&ots=Am8hIYi22Z&sig=ACfU3U3ExixpJw0US-gJvl9_bMf_uyJAbw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwidj6Ge97HqAhXCvp4KHZ9LApoQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=eladio%20moll%20%22they%20didn't%20deserve%20to%20live%22&f=false>
that US officials told state security forces to execute Tupamaro
prisoners after interrogation because “they didn’t deserve to live.”
Back in the US, Dan Mitrione was hailed as a hero. White House spokesman
Ron Ziegler lauded
<https://books.google.com/books?id=k2RQAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA1315&lpg=PA1315&dq=white+house+statement+on+death+of+dan+mitrione&source=bl&ots=MTC-N6HeVc&sig=ACfU3U1neaRN_Q4TrNltBBEU0DqO6S28Ig&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiSx8f906LqAhXSi54KHaBWBH4Q6AEwAXoECAkQAQ%23v=onepage&q=white%2520house%2520statement%2520on%2520death%2520of%2520dan%2520mitrione&f=false>
his “devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress” as “an example
for free men everywhere,” calling him a man who “exemplified the highest
principles of the police profession.” To his wife, he was the “perfect
man.” His daughter called him “a great humanitarian.” Frank Sinatra and
Jerry Lewis even staged a benefit concert for his grieving family
— Mitrione had nine children — in his home town of Richmond, Indiana on
August 29.
*Deadly Decade *
In the days and weeks following Mitrione’s murder, US officials denied
that he tortured Uruguayan prisoners. Alejandro Otero, the ambitious
head of police intelligence, vehemently refuted the US claim. Otero
resigned after learning that Mitrione tortured his friend, a woman who
allegedly sympathized with the rebels. Days after Mitrione’s death,
Otero blamed the American
<https://books.google.com/books?id=-IbQvd13uToC&pg=PA201&lpg=PA201&dq=only+use+violence+as+a+last+resort+otero&source=bl&ots=cJz6M9BifC&sig=ACfU3U24FfjlRjhoU0p9766rAq7DK9_ycw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj916f757HqAhUVs54KHS-HBKUQ6AEwAXoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=only%20use%20violence%20as%20a%20last%20resort%20otero&f=false>
and his violent methods for fueling the flames of the Tupamaros’
insurgency. “Before then, they would only use violence as a last
resort,” he said.
The new decade was one of increasingly violent state suppression of
dissent in Uruguay. In 1972 a new president, Juan María Bordaberry,
declared a state of “internal war,” and the Tupamaros were soon
destroyed as the government escalated its repression and torture.
Congress was dissolved, total censorship was enforced and political
parties, labor unions and student groups were banned. During this
period, the right-wing military dictatorships of numerous South American
countries expanded Operation Condor
<https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/events/operation-condor-1968-1989>, a
US-backed campaign of coordinated “dirty war” state terrorism and
repression in which tens of thousands of people were killed and hundreds
of thousands more were imprisoned for their real or suspected political
beliefs.
According to Amnesty International, in the mid-1970s at least 6,000
people
<https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/204000/amr520131979en.pdf>
were being held as political prisoners in Uruguay, a country with less
than 3 million people. That’s the equivalent of 728,000 people in the
United States today. “Every Uruguayan was a prisoner except for jailers
and exiles,” said Eduardo Galeano, the internationally renowned
Uruguayan author who fled his homeland during the worst of the
oppression. It would be another decade before democracy was restored,
political prisoners like Mujica were freed and exiles like Galeano
returned home. Most human rights violators from the dictatorship years
enjoy codified immunity today, although Bordaberry died in 2011 while
serving a 30-year sentence for the murder and forced disappearance of
dissidents during Operation Condor.
*Mitrione’s Tortured Legacy *
While Congress canceled the OPS program in 1974, its various missions
were merely transferred to other agencies including the Drug Enforcement
Administration and the FBI. USAID, which helped fund opium traffickers
<https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/166680/content/4-11.pdf> in
Laos, the forced sterilization
<https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1864/peru-508.pdf>
of some 300,000 indigenous Peruvian women, Salvadoran death squads
<http://hiaw.org/defcon1/nairnelsalvadorbtds.html> and Guatemala’s
genocidal army
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Modern_Genocide_The_Definitive_Resource/JB4UBgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=USAID+Guatemala+genocide&pg=PA928&printsec=frontcover>,
continues to operate — and subvert
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/cuban-hip-hop-scene-infiltrated-us-information-youth>
— to this day.
Although Dan Mitrione has been dead for half a century, his legacy lives
on in the words and deeds of a new generation of US torturers. Many of
the psychological and “no-touch” tortures he pioneered and practiced led
to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of the US war on terrorism,
Guantánamo Bay and CIA “black sites.” Mitrione’s methodical approach to
torture — “a premature death means failure by the technician” — echoes
in the words of unrepentant Bush-era torturers and their apologists like
John Yoo, Bruce Jessen, James Mitchell, Gina Haspel and CIA
counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman, who with Mitrionesque coldness
instructed the military
<https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/cia_lawyers_torture_definition_if_the_detainee_dies_youre_doing_it_wrong>
that “if the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”
Plenty of detainees /have/ died in US custody, with dozens of their
deaths considered or ruled as criminal homicides
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1681676/> by American
military officials. Dan Mitrione would not have approved. The sheer
sloppiness of their deaths would surely have offended his clinical
sensibilities.
/*Brett Wilkins* is editor-at-large for US news at Digital Journal.
Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human
rights and war and peace. /
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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