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<dd><h2><b>The Hidden History of CIA Torture:</b></h2>
<dd><font size=2>America's Road to Abu Ghraib<br>
</b>
<dd>By Alfred W. McCoy <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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</i> 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. <br><br>
<dd>Torture's Perverse Pathology</b> <br><br>
<dd>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</i> columnist William Safire
soon branded "creeps." <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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."
<br><br>
<dd>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</i>, question de l'eau</i>, "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</i>. 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 <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>CIA Torture Research</b> <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>Memory and Forgetting</b> <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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."
<br><br>
<dd>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</i> 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.
<br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>American Prestige</b> <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of <a href="??">The Politics of
Heroin, CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade</a>, an examination of
the CIA's alliances with drug lords, and Closer Than Brothers</i>, 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</i> (Volume 19, No. 2,
2004).<br><br>
</font>
</dl>
<dd><font face="arial" size=2>Copyright C2004 Alfred W. McCoy <br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
</dl><font size=3 color="#FF0000">The Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br>
(415) 863-9977<br>
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