Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Political paralysis over torture
By Alfred W McCoy
If, like me, you've been following America's torture policies not just for the
past few years, but for decades, you can't help but experience that eerie
feeling of deja vu these days. With the departure of George W Bush and Dick
Cheney from Washington and the arrival of President 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 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 Central Intelligence Agency (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 pre-empt 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 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 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."
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 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 Dwight
Eisenhower 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
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.
After codifying its new interrogation methods in the KUBARK manual, the CIA
spent the next 30 years promoting these torture techniques within the US
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 United Nations
Convention Against Torture, seemingly resolving the tension between its
anti-torture principles and its torture practices. Yet when president Bill
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
reproduced verbatim in Section 2340 of the US Federal Code and later in the War
Crimes Act of 1996. Through this legal legerdemain, Washington managed to
agree, via the UN Convention, to ban physical abuse even while exempting the
CIA from the UN'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, Bush
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 10 "enhanced"
interrogation methods designed by agency psychologists, including
"waterboarding". This use of cold water to block breathing triggers the
"mammalian diving reflex", hardwired into every human brain, thus inducing an
uncontrollable terror of impending death.
As Jane 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 PhD
psychologists was considered one "way for CIA officials to skirt measures such
as the Convention Against Torture".
From recently 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".
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