"Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author
of The Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity in the
Global Drug Trade, an examination of the CIA's
alliances with drug lords, ..."

"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."

Quotes above are from the September 10, 2004
article farther down.

--------

In Iraq the USA may be about to repeat its
mistake in Vietnam: The massive CIA
*Phoenix-Program of brutal torture of hundreds of
thousands, many to death, and indiscriminate
death squad killings of tens of thousands, to
prop up dictatorial puppets - all while speaking
about "democracy" and "freedom." The only
question left is whether maybe this time around
the puppets will be forced by the USA to ALLOW
Iraq to have a real multi-party democracy.
*Phoenix Program in Vietnam. U.S. terrorism,
torture, and death squads on an industrial scale.
Tens of thousands murdered. Hundreds of thousands
tortured:
http://corporatism.tripod.com/phoenix.htm and
http://www.corporatism.netfirms.com/phoenix.htm

Thousands of brutal photos of torture and death
of many Iraqi, Afghan, and other prisoners have
been reported by the mainstream press to have
been shown to Congress but never been allowed by
the Administration into public view. The torture
and death-squad coverup continues.

----------

----September 10, 2004. ZNet article by Al McCoy
begins----

The Hidden History of CIA Torture:
America's Road to Abu Ghraib
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=6199

by Alfred W. McCoy. September 10, 2004

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Torture's Perverse Pathology

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 columnist
William Safire soon branded "creeps."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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, question de
l'eau, "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. 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

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.

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."

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.

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.

CIA Torture Research

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.

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.

Memory and Forgetting

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.

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.

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."

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 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

American Prestige

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.

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.

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.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author
of The Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity in the
Global Drug Trade
[
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556524838/nationbooks08
], an examination of the CIA's alliances with
drug lords, and Closer Than Brothers, 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 (Volume 19, No.
2, 2004).

Copyright C2004 Alfred W. McCoy

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com,
a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a
steady flow of alternate sources, news, and
opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in
publishing and author of The End of Victory
Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

----end of September 10, 2004 ZNet article by Al
McCoy.------

-------------


=====
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