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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
The U.S. Has a History of Using Torture
Alfred W. McCoy
December 3, 2006
Mr. McCoy is J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A Question of Torture: CIA
Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2006).
In April 2004, Americans were stunned when CBS broadcast those
now-notorious photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, showing hooded
Iraqis stripped naked while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As this
scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were "perpetrated by a small number of
U.S. military," whom New York Times columnist William Safire soon branded
"creeps"--a line that few in the press had reason to challenge.
When I looked at these photos, I did not see snapshots of simple brutality
or a breakdown in military discipline. After more than a decade of studying
the Philippine militarys torture techniques for a monograph published by
Yale back 1999, I could see the tell-tale signs of the CIAs psychological
methods. For example, that iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi with fake
electrical wires hanging from his extended arms shows, not the sadism of a
few "creeps," but instead the two key trademarks of the CIAs
psychological torture. The hood was for sensory disorientation. The arms
were extended for self-inflicted pain. It was that simple; it was that
obvious.
After making that argument in an op-ed for the Boston Globe two weeks after
CBS published the photos, I began exploring the historical continuity, the
connections, between the CIA torture research back in the 1950s and Abu
Ghraib in 2004. By using the past to interrogate the present, I published a
book titled A Question of Torture last January that tracks the trail of an
extraordinary historical and institutional continuity through countless
pages of declassified documents. The findings are disturbing and bear
directly upon the ongoing bitter debate over torture that culminated in the
enactment of the Military Commissions law just last October.
From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code
of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with
costs that reached a billion dollars a year. Many have heard about the most
outlandish and least successful aspect of this research -- the testing of
LSD on unsuspecting subjects and the tragic death of a CIA employee, Dr.
Frank Olson, who jumped to his death from a New York hotel after a dose of
this drug. This Agency drug testing, the focus of countless sensational
press accounts and a half-dozen major books, led nowhere.
But obscure CIA-funded behavioral experiments, outsourced to the countrys
leading universities, produced two key findings, both duly and dully
reported in scientific journals, that contributed to the discovery of a
distinctly American form of torture, psychological torture. With funding
from Canadas Defense Research Board, famed Canadian psychologist Dr.
Donald O. Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in just
48 hours. What had the doctor donedrugs, hypnosis, electroshock? No, none
of the above.
For two days, student volunteers at McGill University, where Dr. Hebb was
chair of Psychology, simply sat in comfortable cubicles deprived of sensory
stimulation by goggles, gloves, and ear muffs. One of Hebbs subjects,
University of California-Berkeley English professor Peter Dale Scott, has
described the impact of this experience in his 1992 epic poem, "Listening
to the Candle":
nothing in those weeks added up
yet the very aimlessness
preconditioning my mind
of sensory deprivation
as a paid volunteer
in the McGill experiment
for the US Air Force
(two CIA reps at the meeting)
my ears sore from their earphones
amniotic hum my eyes
under two bulging halves of ping pong balls
arms covered to the tips with cardboard tubes
those familiar hallucination
I was the first to report
as for example the string
of cut-out paper men
emerging from a manhole
in the side of a snow-white hill
distinctly two-dimensional
Dr. Hebb himself reported that after just two to three days of such
isolation "the subjects very identity had begun to disintegrate." If you
compare a drawing of Dr. Hebbs student volunteers published in "Scientific
American" with later photos of Guantanamo detainees, the similarity is, for
good reason, striking.
During the 1950s as well, two eminent neurologists at Cornell Medical
Center working for the CIA found that the KGBs most devastating torture
technique involved, not crude physical beatings, but simply forcing the
victim to stand for days at timewhile the legs swelled, the skin erupted
in suppurating lesions, the kidneys shut down, hallucinations began. Again,
it you look at those hundreds of photos from Abu Ghraib you will see
repeated use of this method, now called "stress positions."
After codification in its 1963 KUBARK manual, the CIA spent the next thirty
years propagating these torture techniques within the US intelligence
community and among anti-communist allies across Asia and Latin America.
Although the Agency trained military interrogators from across Latin
America, our knowledge of the actual torture techniques comes from a single
handbook for a Honduran training session, the CIAs "Human Resources
Exploitation Manual 1983." To establish control at the outset the
questioner should, the CIA instructor tells his Honduran trainees,
"manipulate the subjects environment, to create unpleasant or intolerable
situations, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory
perception." To effect this psychological disruption, this 1983 handbook
specified techniques that seem strikingly similar to those outlined 20
years earlier in the Kubark Manual and those that would be used 20 years
later at Abu Ghraib.
After the Cold War
When the Cold War came to a close, Washington resumed its advocacy of human
rights, ratifying the UN Convention Against Torture in 1994 that banned the
infliction of "severe" psychological and physical pain. On the surface,
the United States had apparently resolved the tension between its
anti-torture principles and its torture practices.
Yet when President William Clinton sent this UN Convention to Congress for
ratification in 1994, he included language drafted six years earlier by the
Reagan administrationwith four detailed diplomatic "reservations" focused
on just one word in the conventions 26-printed pages. That word was "mental."
Significantly, these intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations
re-defined torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory
deprivation and self-inflicted painthe very techniques the CIA had refined
at such great cost. Of equal import, this definition was reproduced
verbatim in domestic legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN
Convention--first in Section 2340 of the US Federal Code and then in the
War Crimes Act of 1996.
Remember that obscure number--Section 2340for, as we will see, it is the
key to unlocking the meaning of the controversial Military Commissions Law
enacted by the US Congress just last September.
In effect, Washington had split the UN Convention down the middle, banning
physical torture but exempting psychological abuse. By failing to repudiate
the CIAs use 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, just 10 years
later, in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
War on Terror
Right after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001,
President Bush gave his White House staff wide secret orders, saying, "I
dont care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."
In the months that followed, Administration attorneys translated their
presidents otherwise unlawful orders into U.S. policy into three
controversial, neo-conservative legal doctrines: (1.) the president is
above the law, (2.) torture is legally acceptable, and (3.) the US Navy
base at Guantanamo Bay is not US territory.
To focus on the single doctrine most germane to the history of
psychological torture, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee found grounds,
in his now notorious August 2002 memo, for exculpating any CIA
interrogators who tortured, but later claimed their intention was
information instead of pain. Moreover, by parsing the UN and US definitions
of torture as "severe" physical or mental pain, Bybee concluded that pain
equivalent to "organ failure" was legaleffectively allowing torture right
up to the point of death.
Less visibly, the administration began building a global gulag for torture
at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo, and a half-dozen additional sites
worldwide. In February 2002, the White House assured the CIA that the
administrations public pledge to abide by spirit of the Geneva Conventions
did not apply to its operatives; and, significantly, it allowed the Agency
ten "enhanced" interrogation methods designed by Agency psychologists that
included "water boarding."
Waterboarding
Over the past three years, this term "water boarding" has surfaced
periodically in press accounts of CIA interrogation without any real
understanding of psychologically devastating impact of this seemingly
benign method. It has a venerable lineage, first appearing in a 1541 French
judicial handbook, where it was called "Torturae Gallicae Ordinariae" or
"Standard Gallic Torture." But it would now become, under the War on
Terror, what CIA director Porter Goss called, in March 2005 congressional
testimony, a "professional interrogation technique."
There are several methods for achieving water boardings perverse effect of
drowning in open air: most frequently, by making the victim lie prone and
then constricting breathing with a wet cloth, a technique favored by both
the French Inquisition and the CIA; or, alternatively, by forcing water
directly and deeply into the lungs, as French paratroopers did during the
Algerian War.
After French soldiers used the technique on Henri Alleg during the Battle
for Algiers in 1957, this journalist wrote a moving description that turned
the French people against both torture and the Algerian War. "I tried,"
Alleg wrote, "by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as
possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long
as I could. But I couldnt hold on for more than a few moments. I had the
impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took
possession of me."
Let us think about the deeper meaning of Allegs sparse words--"a terrible
agony, that of death itself." As the water blocks air to the lungs, the
human organisms powerful mammalian diving reflex kicks in, and the brain
is wracked by horrifically painful panic signals--death, death, death.
After a few endless minutes, the victim vomits out the water, the lungs
suck air, and panic subsides. And then it happens again, and again, and
again--each time inscribing the searing trauma of near death in human memory.
Guantanamo
In late 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld appointed General Geoffrey Miller
to command Guantanamo with wide latitude for interrogation, making this
prison an ad hoc behavioral laboratory. Moving beyond the CIAs original
attack on sensory receptors universal to all humans, Guantanamos
interrogators stiffened the psychological assault by exploring Arab
"cultural sensitivity" to sexuality, gender identity, and fear of dogs.
General Miller also formed Behavioral Science Consultation teams of
military psychologists who probed each detainee for individual phobias,
such as fear of dark or attachment to mother.
Through this total three-phase attack on sensory receptors, cultural
identity, and individual psyche, Guantanamo perfected the CIAs
psychological paradigm. Significantly, after regular inspections of
Guantanamo from 2002 the 2004, the Red Cross reported: "The construction of
such a system
cannot be considered other than an intentional system of
cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture."
Abu Ghraib
These enhanced interrogation policies, originally used only against top Al
Qaeda operatives, soon proliferated to involve thousands of ordinary Iraqis
when Baghdad erupted in a wave of terror bombings during mid 2003 that
launched the resistance to the US occupation. After a visit from the
Guantanamo chief General Miller in September 2003, the U.S. commander for
Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, issued orders for sophisticated
psychological torture.
As you read the following extract from those orders, please look for the
defining attributes of psychological torture--specifically, sensory
disorientation, self-inflicted pain, and that recent innovation, attacks on
Arab cultural sensitivities.
U. Environmental Manipulation: Altering the environment to create moderate
discomfort (e.g. adjusting temperatures or introducing an unpleasant smell)
V. Sleep Adjustment: Adjusting the sleeping times of the detainee (e.g.
reversing the sleeping cycles from night to day).
X. Isolation: Isolating the detainee from other detainees ... [for] 30 days.
Y. Presence of Military Working Dogs: Exploits Arab fear of dogs while
maintaining security during interrogations
AA. Yelling, Loud Music, and Light Control: Used to create fear, disorient
detainee and prolong capture shock...
CC. Stress Positions: Use of physical posturing (sitting, standing,
kneeling, prone, etc.
Indeed, my review of the hundreds of still-classified photos taken by
soldiers at Abu Ghraib reveals, not random, idiosyncratic acts from
separate, sadistic minds, but just three psychological torture techniques
repeated over and over ad nauseum: hooding for sensory deprivation; short
shackling, long shackling, and enforced standing for self inflicted pain;
and dogs, total nudity, and sexual humiliation for that recent innovation,
exploitation of Arab cultural sensitivity. It is no accident that Private
Lynndie England was photographed leading an Iraqi detainee leashed like a dog.
After Abu Ghraib
Lets look at the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, seeing how America
moved by degrees to legalization of these CIA psychological torture
techniques. Confronted by public anger over detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib,
the Bush White House has fought back by defending torture as a presidential
prerogative. By contrast, an ad hoc civil society coalition of courts,
press, and human rights groups has mobilized to stop the abuse.
In a dramatic denouement of June 2006, the US Supreme Court decided in
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that Bushs military commissions were illegal because
they did not meet the requirement, under common Article 3 of the Geneva
Conventions, that Guantanamo detainees be tried with "all the judicial
guarantees
recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
Then on September 6, in a dramatic bid to legalize his now-illegal policies
in the aftermath of the Hamdan decision, President Bush announced he was
transferring fourteen top Al Qaeda captives from secret CIA prisons to
Guantanamo Bay. At once both repudiating and legitimating past abuses, Bush
denied that he had authorized "torture" while simultaneously defending the
CIA's use of a tough "alternative set of procedures" to extract "vital
information." To allow what he called the "CIA program" to go forward,
President Bush announced that he was sending legislation to Congress that
would legalize the same presidential prerogatives in treating detainees
that had been challenged by the Supreme Court.
At first, Bushs bill seemed to arouse strong opposition by three
Republican veterans on the Senate Armed Services Committee--Senators
Graham, McCain, and Warner. But after tense, daylong negotiations inside
Vice President Cheneys Senate office on September 21, these Republican
partisans reached a compromise that sailed through Congress within a week,
and without any amendments, to become the Military Commissions Law 2006.
Among its many objectionable features, this law strips detainees of their
habeas corpus rights, sanctions endless detention without trial, and allows
the use of tortured testimony before Guantanamos Military Commissions.
Most significantly, this law allows future CIA interrogators ample latitude
for use of psychological torture by using, verbatim, the narrow definition
of "severe mental pain" the U.S. first adopted back in 1994 when it
ratified the UN Convention Against Torture and enacted a complementary
Federal law, Section 2340 of the US code, to give force to this treaty.
The current laws elusive definition of "severe mental pain" is concealed
under Para. 950 V, Part B, Sub-Section B on page 70 of the 96-page
"Military Commissions Law 2006" that reads: "Severe Mental Pain or
Suffering Defined: In this section, this term 'severe mental pain
has the
meaning given that term in Sect. 2340 (2) of Title 18 [of the Federal code]."
And what is that definition in section 2340? This is, of course, the same
highly limiting definition the US first adopted back in 1994-95 when it
ratified the UN Anti-Torture Convention.
Simply put, this legislations highly restricted standard for severe mental
suffering does not prohibit any aspect of the sophisticated torture
techniques that the CIA has refined, over the past half-century, into a
total assault on the human psyche.
To make this point clear, let us compare the laws very narrow, four-part
standard for "severe mental suffering" with the CIAs psychological
techniques to see which, if any, of the agencys actual methods are banned.
Under this law, Section 2340, there are only four practices that
constitute, in any way, "severe mental pain," including: drug injection;
death threats; threats against another; and extreme physical pain.
In actual practice, this definition does not ban any of the dozens of CIA
psychological methods developed over five decades, which include:
--First, self-inflicted pain, via enforced standing and so-called "stress
positions" which are cruel contortions enforced by shackling.
--Second, sensory disorientation through temporal and environmental
manipulation exemplified sleep deprivation, protracted isolation, and
extremes of heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, isolation and
intensive interrogation.
--Third, attacks on cultural identity through sexual humiliation and use
of dogs.
--Fourth, attacks on individual psyche by exploiting fears and phobias.
--Fifth, hybrid methods such as water boarding.
--Sixth and most importantly, creative combinations of all these methods
which otherwise might seem, individually, banal if not benign.
If you wish an analogy to make the curious exclusionary logic of this
legislation perfectly clear, it would be as if US homicide law had taken a
leaf from the popular board game "Clue" and defined murder as only those
killings "done by Mrs. White, in the Conservatory, with the
Candlestick"thus, by its omissions, legalizing all murders done by more
conventional means such as poison, pistols, rifles, knives, ropes, clubs,
or bombs.
To test my critical, perhaps overly cynical assessment of this new law, let
us ask whether this new law bans the most extreme of the CIAs "enhanced"
methods--water boarding. While the White House has refused comment, Vice
President Cheney stated recently that using "a dunk in water" to extract
information was "a no-brainer for me." As the administrations leader on
interrogation policy, Cheneys words make clear, despite White House
denials, that water boarding is legal under the new law.
By its omissions, this legislation has effectively legalized the CIAs
right to use methods that the international community, embodied in the Red
Cross and the UN Human Rights Committee, considers psychological
torture. For the first time in the 200 years since 1791 when United States
ratified the Fifth Amendment banning self-incrimination, Congress has
passed a law allowing coerced testimony into US courts.
The implications of this Military Commissions Law are profound and will
most certainly face legal challenge. Indeed, just a few weeks ago seven
retired Federal judges challenged this law before the US Court of Appeals
in Washington, DC, saying that it has "one specific and fundamental flaw":
i.e., it allows the military tribunals to accept evidence obtained by
torture. But when this case reaches the Supreme Court, we cannot expect
that a more conservative Roberts court will overturn this law with the same
ringing rhetoric that we have seen in two recent landmark decisions, Rasul
v. Bush and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
Conclusion
If this law stands, with its provisions for torture and drumhead justice,
then the United States will suffer continuing damage to its moral
leadership in the international community. Looking through a glass darkly
into the future, Washington may try to return to that convenient
contradiction that marked US policy during the Cold War: public compliance
with human rights treaties and secret torture in contravention of those
same diplomatic conventions.
Yet the world is no longer blind to these once-clandestine CIA methods and
this attempt at secrecy will likely produce another scandal similar to Abu
Ghraib. But next time our protestations of innocence will ring hollow and
the damage to US prestige will be even greater.
source:
http://www.hnn.us/articles/32497.html
===
-muslim voice-
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