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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="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/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Teaching Torture: The Death and Legacy
of Dan Mitrione<br>
</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/l2l4l54ldlc/"
rel="nofollow">Brett Wilkins - August 13, 2020</a><br>
<br>
</span> </div>
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<p><img
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<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Brazil Brutality </strong></p>
<p>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,
<a
href="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">later
admitted</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/">KUBARK</a>,
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.</p>
<p>One of the most notorious Brazilian torture devices
during Mitrione’s tenure was known as <a
href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/American_Torture/wiVqrgS68NoC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Otterman+American+Torture+Mitrione+the+fridge&pg=PA75&printsec=frontcover">the
refrigerator</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/">US-backed
military coup</a> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Move to Montevideo </strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="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">imported</a>
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.</p>
<p><strong>Teaching Torture </strong></p>
<p>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, <a
href="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">Mitrione
said</a> 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.”</p>
<p>“A premature death means failure by the technician,” <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/1978/08/05/archives/cuban-agent-says-us-police-aides-urged-torture-not-merely-work-of.html">Mitrione
told Hevia</a>. “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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <a
href="https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/united-states-americas-terrorist-training-camp">According
to</a> one former SOA instructor interviewed in the
award-winning documentary film <em>Inside the School of
the Assassins</em>, “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.”</p>
<p>“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 <a
href="https://fair.org/extra/adolfo-perez-esquivel-on-the-new-york-times-argentina-coverage/">water
mixed with urine</a> to drink.</p>
<p>Hevia told the <em>New York Times </em>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 <em>was</em> the norm, from the
villages of South Vietnam where tens of thousands of
civilians were “neutralized” during the <a
href="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">Phoenix
Program</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-we-know-about-cias-midcentury-mind-control-project-180962836/">Project
MK-ULTRA</a> and other mind and behavior control
programs.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03064227508532430?journalCode=rioc20">the
“submarine,”</a> 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, <a
href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/11/01/Defector-says-US-manuals-used-to-teach-torture-in-Uruguay/9775373438800/">later
revealed</a> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Kidnapped, Killed </strong></p>
<p>Years later, Raúl Sendic <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/21/world/uruguayan-clears-up-state-of-siege-killing.html">told</a>
the <em>New York Times</em> 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 — <a
href="http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/1045809/20676702/1350599879063/DialogueBeforeDeath.pdf?token=y6Ad3EHrURcn8dkr6IMMMEQC46g%253D">and
apologized for</a> — 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 <a
href="https://archive.org/details/hiddenterrors00ajla/page/290/mode/2up?q=heart+attack">suffered
a heart attack</a> while still in captivity in March
1971 and was rushed first to a heart surgeon and then to
the local British Hospital, and freedom.</p>
<p>“Sparing no effort” <a
href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB324/index.htm">included
a threat</a> 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 <a
href="http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/1045809/20676702/1350599879063/DialogueBeforeDeath.pdf?token=y6Ad3EHrURcn8dkr6IMMMEQC46g%3D">recorded
conversation</a> 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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="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">later
revealed</a> that US officials told state security
forces to execute Tupamaro prisoners after interrogation
because “they didn’t deserve to live.”</p>
<p>Back in the US, Dan Mitrione was hailed as a hero.
White House spokesman Ron Ziegler <a
href="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">lauded</a>
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.</p>
<p><strong>Deadly Decade </strong></p>
<p>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 <a
href="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">blamed
the American</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/events/operation-condor-1968-1989">Operation
Condor</a>, 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.</p>
<p>According to Amnesty International, in the mid-1970s <a
href="https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/204000/amr520131979en.pdf">at
least 6,000 people</a> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Mitrione’s Tortured Legacy </strong></p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/166680/content/4-11.pdf">opium
traffickers</a> in Laos, the <a
href="https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1864/peru-508.pdf">forced
sterilization</a> of some 300,000 indigenous Peruvian
women, <a
href="http://hiaw.org/defcon1/nairnelsalvadorbtds.html">Salvadoran
death squads</a> and Guatemala’s <a
href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Modern_Genocide_The_Definitive_Resource/JB4UBgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=USAID+Guatemala+genocide&pg=PA928&printsec=frontcover">genocidal
army</a>, continues to operate — <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/cuban-hip-hop-scene-infiltrated-us-information-youth">and
subvert</a> — to this day.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/cia_lawyers_torture_definition_if_the_detainee_dies_youre_doing_it_wrong">instructed
the military</a> that “if the detainee dies, you’re
doing it wrong.”</p>
<p>Plenty of detainees <em>have</em> died in US custody,
with dozens of their deaths <a
href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1681676/">considered
or ruled as criminal homicides</a> by American
military officials. Dan Mitrione would not have
approved. The sheer sloppiness of their deaths would
surely have offended his clinical sensibilities.</p>
</div>
<p> <i><strong>Brett Wilkins</strong> 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. </i> </p>
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