[ Iraq? Abu Graib? Sono almeno 50 anni che la CIA insegna e pratica la
tortura! Lo spiega in grande dettaglio uno studio apparso sulla rivista
cattolica National Catholic Reporter... ]
http://www.counterpunch.org/hodge11032004.html
http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=6812&s2=05
The CIA and Abu Ghraib
50 Years of Teaching and Training Torturers
JAMES HODGE and LINDA COOPER, CounterPunch
November 3, 2004 - Last April when Americans found themselves looking
at photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing naked and hooded Iraqis at Abu
Ghraib prison, it's a safe bet that most didn't realize they were
looking at torture techniques refined by the Central Intelligence
Agency over the last half century.
The Bush administration worked overtime to convince Americans that what
they were seeing was the work of a "few bad apples," whom the president
said exhibited "disgraceful conduct" that "dishonored our country and
disregarded our values."
Even as late as July, the Army's inspector general, Paul Mikolashek,
claimed that "these abuses should be viewed as what they are:
unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals."
A month later, after human rights groups pointed to evidence of much
wider culpability, two government reports -- one released by an Army
panel chaired by Major Gen. George Fay, the other by a commission
headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger -- confirmed what
many already sensed: that the abuse went far beyond the seven arrested
MPs.
The 171-page Fay report cites more than two-dozen military intelligence
officers, along with several military contractors. It details some 44
incidents, including the stripping, hooding and sodomizing of
detainees; subjecting them to temperature extremes; leading them around
naked on leashes; and attaching electrical wires to their genitals. In
one case, two naked youths were terrorized by snarling, unmuzzled
military dogs held by military personnel who competed to try to make
the teenagers defecate.
The two reports have been presented as sweeping indictments of U.S.
military leadership, but Human Rights Watch, the largest U.S. human
rights group, said the reports utterly fail to assess the obvious: the
role that official government policies played in bringing about the
horrendous abuse.
While the Schlesinger report notes administration policies -- such as
the Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department opinion that redefined torture as
pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical
injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even
death" -- it fails to evaluate whether the policies played a role in
contributing to the abuses.
The Schlesinger panel, whose members were handpicked by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "seems to go out of its way not to find any
relationship between Rumsfeld's approval of interrogation techniques
designed to inflict pain and humiliation and the widespread
mistreatment and torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Guantánamo," said Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch.
Not only do they leave the dots unconnected, but they fail to make
critical links to the past, said Alfred McCoy, professor of history at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of "Closer Than
Brothers," a study of the impact of the CIA's torture methods on the
Philippine military.
In an interview with NCR and in his own writings, McCoy described the
photos at Abu Ghraib as snapshots of "CIA torture techniques that have
metastasized over the last 50 years like an undetected cancer inside
the U.S. intelligence community."
Throughout the 1950s and early '60s, the CIA -- the lead agency doing
interrogations at Abu Ghraib -- financed and conducted secret research
on coercion and human consciousness, McCoy said. "The scale of that
research should not be minimized. By the late '50s, it reached a
billion dollars a year. The agency was providing the majority of the
funding for a half-dozen leading psychology departments."
The research ranged from using electric shock, to giving LSD to
unsuspecting subjects, to employing sensory deprivation. It was the
latter experiments that bore fruit, he said, producing a revolutionary
new psychological torture paradigm that was superior to various
physical methods that had been used for 2,000 years, from ancient
Rome's hot irons to the medieval rack and wheel.
"People will say anything to stop pain," McCoy said. "The information
extracted is inherently unreliable. And that's the problem the CIA
solved with these psychological methods."
The basic techniques -- the use of stress positions, sensory
deprivation and sexual humiliation -- are aimed at making victims feel
responsible for their own pain and suffering. But McCoy added that
while it appears less abusive than physical torture, the psychological
torture paradigm causes deep psychological damage to both victims and
their interrogators, who can become capable of unspeakable physical
cruelties.
The results of the CIA torture experiments were codified in 1963 in a
secret manual known as "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation." Four
years later, the CIA was operating some 40 interrogation centers in
Vietnam as part of its Phoenix Program, McCoy said. Eventually the
CIA's psychological methods were spread worldwide through the U.S.
Agency for International Development's Public Safety program and U.S.
Army Mobile Training Teams.
In 1983, the KUBARK manual provided the model for the CIA's "Human
Resource Exploitation Training Manual," whose methods were used by the
brutal, U.S.-trained Honduran Battalion 3-16 during the tenure of
then-U.S. ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte, now ambassador to
Iraq.
About the same time, the CIA compiled the "Psychological Operations in
Guerrilla Warfare" manual for the Nicaraguan contra commandos, then
seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government with the aid of the
Reagan administration.
That's not all. Six manuals, also linked to a CIA program, were used at
the U.S. Army's School of the Americas and distributed across Latin
America by Army Mobile Training Teams in the 1980s. They advocated
everything from executions of guerrillas to extortion, coercion and
false imprisonment.
A 1992 Pentagon investigation, whose findings were kept a secret of
state under then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, said the six manuals
"evolved from lesson plans used in an intelligence course at [the
School of the Americas]. They were based, in part, on old material
dating back to the 1960s from the Army's Foreign Intelligence
Assistance program, titled 'Project X.' This material had been retained
in the files of the Army intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz."
Project X documents, which have been linked to the CIA's Phoenix
Program, were destroyed in 1992 by the Defense Department, but a
telling reference to Fort Huachuca is buried in the Fay report on Abu
Ghraib. A five-member U.S. Army Mobile Training Team from Fort Huachuca
was sent to the Iraq prison, the report says, "to conduct an overall
assessment of interrogation operations, present training and provide
advice and assistance."
One of the mobile team members, identified as SFC Walters, told the Fay
panel that he "may have contributed to the abuse at Abu Ghraib." When
questioned by a military contract employee for ideas on how to get the
prisoners to talk, the report says, "Walters related several stories
about the use of dogs as an inducement."
Walters also gave advice about how detainees are most susceptible
during the first few hours after capture: "The prisoners are captured
by soldiers, taken from their familiar surroundings, blindfolded and
put into a truck and brought to this place (Abu Ghraib); and then they
are pushed down a hall with guards barking orders and thrown into a
cell, naked; and that not knowing what was going to happen or what the
guards might do caused them extreme fear."
But the report concludes that it "is unclear and likely impossible to
definitively determine" the extent to which "word of mouth" techniques
were passed to the interrogators in Abu Ghraib by the Mobile Training
Team from Fort Huachuca.
It also proved impossible for the Fay and Schlesinger panels to
determine the extent of the CIA's role because neither had sufficient
access to the agency. Both, however, pointed fingers in its direction.
The Fay report notes that the CIA's detention and interrogation
practices "led to a loss of accountability, abuse, reduced interagency
cooperation, and an unhealthy mystique that further poisoned the
atmosphere at Abu Ghraib." It also states that CIA officers held "Ghost
Detainees" -- including an Iraqi citizen later found dead in a shower,
handcuffed with a sandbag over his head, and "three Saudi national
medical personnel working for the coalition in Iraq" who were held
under false names. The Army allowed the CIA to imprison unidentified
and unaccounted-for detainees, thereby circumventing the "reporting
requirements under the Geneva Conventions."
Likewise, the Schlesinger panel found that the "CIA's detention and
interrogation practices contributed to a loss of accountability at Abu
Ghraib," but it claims it did not have a mandate or "sufficient access
to CIA information" to pursue the matter.
Fay concludes that techniques such as "removing clothing, isolating
people for long periods of time, using stress positions, exploiting
fear of dogs and implementing sleep and light deprivation" were "new
ideas" that some U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib learned while working
in Afghanistan and the U.S. Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The methods, however, are anything but "new." An examination of CIA
interrogation manuals shows that they date back before the Vietnam War,
supporting charges by human rights advocates that Abu Ghraib is no
aberration. What is new is that photographic evidence became public.
Interrogation manual
The authors of the CIA's 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual -- a guide on
the art of using fear, threats and pain to cause debility or
psychological regression -- were fully aware of the illegality of their
methods: "KUBARK's lack of executive authority abroad and its
operational need for facelessness make it particularly vulnerable to
attack in the courts or the press."
The Fay report noted that the death of the Iraqi found in the shower
remained unsolved due partly to the fact that "CIA officers operating
at Abu Ghraib used alias' [sic] and never revealed their true names."
The KUBARK manual notes that prior approval "must be obtained for the
interrogation of any source against his will and under any of the
following circumstances: If bodily harm is to be inflicted" or "if
medical, chemical or electrical methods or materials are to be used."
Before using an interrogation site, "it should be studied carefully.
... The electric current should be known in advance, so that
transformers and other modifying devices will be on hand if needed."
It notes that psychological rather than physical debility will break a
suspect sooner: "The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys
resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict
pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of
pain." Elsewhere, it notes, "Intense pain is quite likely to produce
false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress."
The manual, which cites numerous psychological studies and says all
detainees should be given a psychological assessment, contains
descriptions of different personality types and which techniques to use
to interrogate them.
"If a coercive technique is to be used, or if two or more are to be
employed jointly, they should be ... carefully selected to match his
personality."
"Persons with intense guilt feelings," it advises, "may cease
resistance and cooperate if punished in some way because of the
gratification induced by punishment."
All of the basic techniques used in Iraq are found in the manual's
pages: sexual humiliation, the use of stress positions and sensory
deprivation.
The manual first advises that a suspect's clothes should be taken. It
later notes, "In the simple torture situation the contest is one
between the individual and his tormenter. When the individual is told
to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is
introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but
the victim himself."
The manual lists the principal coercive techniques of interrogation as
"deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar
methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility
and hypnosis, narcosis [use of drugs] and induced regression."
The response to coercion, it says, typically contains "at least three
important elements: debility, dependency and dread."
"Disrupting normal time patterns like sleep and food" can cause
disorientation, fear, helplessness and regression. "Deprivation of
stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact
with an outer world," noting that inducing regression will dissolve
resistance and create dependence.
"Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an
ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no
light ... which is soundproofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc. An
environment still more subject to control, such as water tank or iron
lung, is even more effective."
The manual also suggests threatening a detainee suspected of feigning
mental illness by telling him that he might need "a series of electric
shock treatments or a frontal lobotomy."
The 1963 KUBARK manual -- and its descendant, the "Human Resource
Exploitation Training Manual 1983" -- were both released in the 1990s
with numerous deletions after The Baltimore Sun threatened the CIA with
a lawsuit. The newspaper sought the manuals in connection with its 1995
series about the CIA-trained Honduran Battalion 3-16, a secret army
unit whose torture methods mirrored those in the manuals.
Honduras, which shares borders with Nicaragua and El Salvador, was used
by the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s as a base to fight
Salvadoran rebels and to topple the Nicaraguan Sandinista government
with the CIA-trained contra rebels.
Washington's key man in Honduras was Gen. Gustavo Alvárez, a graduate
of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, who created 3-16 with the
CIA's help and who worked closely with U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte,
whose reports gave the impression that the Honduran military respected
human rights.
However, Battalion 3-16 atrocities were detailed in a 1988 New York
Times story, headlined "Testifying to Torture." Florencio Caballero, a
3-16 interrogator who later fled to Canada, told the Times that the CIA
trained him and two dozen others in psychological methods. They were
taught "to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand
up, don't let him sleep, keep him naked and in isolation, put rats and
cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals,
throw cold water on him, change the temperature."
Caballero said the CIA taught that psychological coercion was more
effective than physical torture, but that interrogations often
degenerated into physical torture. He told of a 24-year-old woman named
Ines Murillo who was stripped, starved, deprived of sleep, beaten,
burned, electrically shocked and sexually molested.
Fay's Abu Ghraib report makes the same point about dehumanizing
interrogations degenerating: "What started as nakedness and
humiliation, stress and physical training, carried over into sexual and
physical assaults."
Human Rights Watch makes a similar point, saying that U.S. forces
operating in Iraq, Guantánamo and Afghanistan have "used interrogation
techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting
them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of
sleep -- in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention
against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment. This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort and
humiliation has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings,
sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning and near asphyxiation.
Detainees have died under questionable circumstances while
incarcerated."
The 1983 CIA Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual states, "While
we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you
aware of them and the proper way to use them." It states that if they
are to be used, they always require "prior HQS approval."
The Schlesinger report says U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo were
required to get approval from Rumsfeld or the U.S. Southern Command
before using certain methods such as hooding, stripping, 30-day
isolations, stress positions and playing on a detainee's phobias.
The 1983 manual advises that a subject should be arrested in the early
morning when the subject "least expects it" and when it would cause
"intense feelings of shock, insecurity and psychological stress." He
should be "rudely awakened and immediately blindfolded and handcuffed"
and transported "by circuitous route." Excessive force should not be
used because "if they break the subject's jaw, he will not be able to
answer questions."
Similarly, the Fay report on Abu Ghraib notes, "It became a common
practice for maneuver elements to round up large quantities of Iraqi
personnel in the general vicinity of a specified target as a cordon and
capture technique. Some operations were conducted at night, resulting
in some detainees being delivered to collection points only wearing
night clothes or under clothes."
The 1983 manual advises that the subject should be "completely stripped
and told to take a shower. Blindfold remains in place while showering
and guard watches throughout. Subject is given a thorough medical
examination, including all body cavities."
The Fay report noted that nudity likely "contributed to an escalating
'de-humanization' of the detainees and set the stage for additional and
more severe abuses to occur." Meanwhile, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, writing
in the July issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, said that
evidence is mounting "that U.S. doctors, nurses and medics have been
complicit in torture and other illegal procedures in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Guantánamo Bay." Doctors, he said, have "turned over prisoners'
medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the
prisoners' weaknesses or vulnerabilities."
The "exploitation" manual goes on to say the interrogation room is the
"battleground" where the interrogator "has total control over the
subject" and can manipulate the environment "to create unpleasant or
intolerable situations to disrupt patterns of time, space and sensory
perception."
The Fay report blames many of the abuses at Abu Ghraib on
misinterpretations of a paragraph in an "outdated" 1987 Army field
manual, which reads in part: "The interrogator should appear to be the
one who controls all aspects of the interrogation to include the
lighting, heating and configuration of the interrogation room, as well
as the food, shelter and clothing given to the source."
The 1983 interrogation manual states the subject should be placed in a
soundproof cell and not allowed to relax. Furthermore, "there should be
no built-in toilet facilities," and the subject should "either be given
a bucket or escorted by a guard to the latrine. The guard stays at his
side the entire time."
Cells should have windows that can be "covered to disrupt the sense of
night and day."
"Heat, air and light should be externally controlled." Interrogators
should disrupt the subject's patterns of eating and sleeping. "Meals
and sleep should be granted irregularly" to disorient the subject and
destroy his capacity to resist. "If successful," a handwritten note
adds, "it causes serious psychological damage and therefore is a form
of torture."
The handwritten note was added in the mid-1980s after another CIA
manual was made public and caused a public fury. Other revisions have
also been written in, but the original text is still easily readable.
The manual also states, "Many psychologists consider the threat of
inducing debility to be more effective than debility itself."
Like KUBARK, the 1983 exploitation manual lists various personality
types and how to deal with them during questioning. It advises making a
psychological assessment to determine which personality category the
subject fits in, noting "any psychological abnormalities ... what his
potential vulnerabilities are. How he views his potential for surviving
his situation."
The subject must be convinced that the interrogator "controls his
ultimate destiny." The number of variations in techniques, the manual
says, "is limited only by the experience and imagination" of the
interrogator.
"The torture situation is an external conflict, a contest between the
subject and his tormentor. The pain which is being inflicted upon him
from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist. On the
other hand, pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more
likely to sap his resistance." One example given was requiring the
subject "to maintain rigid positions, such as standing at attention or
sitting on a stool for long periods of time."
In a section named "Coercive Techniques," interrogators are advised not
to make empty threats. "If a subject refuses to comply once a threat
has been made, it must be carried out. If it is not carried out, then
subsequent threats will also prove ineffective."
"The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological
regression in the subject." However, if "the debility-dependency-dread
state is unduly prolonged, the subject may sink into a defensive apathy
from which it is hard to arouse him." The symptoms most commonly
associated with solitary confinement and sensory deprivation are
"hallucinations and delusions."
In an ambiguous note, interrogators are advised to ask themselves a
cautionary question: If the subject is released, "will he be able to
cause embarrassment by going to the newspapers or courts?"
The CIA developed the "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare"
manual to help train Nicaraguan contras, whom the Reagan administration
armed and financed in an effort to overthrow the Sandinista government
in the 1980s.
Unlike the 1963 KUBARK and 1983 interrogation manuals, the CIA contra
guide deals not with counterinsurgency measures, but with creating an
insurgent force. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy in that it sheds light
on the Reagan administration's use of an abusive proxy army, its
snubbing of international law, and again on John Negroponte, who was
the ambassador to Honduras when the contras used Honduras as a staging
ground to attack Nicaragua.
The manual, which The Associated Press exposed in a 1984 story,
advocates that contras assassinate Nicaraguan officials, seize power
through acts of torture and terrorism, and create "martyrs" by placing
their supporters in "confrontation with the authorities, in order to
bring about uprisings or shootings, which will cause the death of one
or more persons, who would become the martyrs."
The training manual, along with the CIA's mining of Nicaraguan harbors,
played a part in a ruling by the International Court of Justice that
the United States had broken international law, should pay reparations
and stop its war against Nicaragua. But the Reagan administration
refused to recognize the court's jurisdiction.
The current Bush administration has adopted the same stance toward the
International Criminal Court, refusing to join the world's first
permanent war crimes tribunal, partly out of fear that the court could
prosecute U.S. military personnel and their superiors. In addition, the
Bush administration has withheld military aid and training to nations
that refuse to sign "Article 98 waivers," agreements stating that they
will not extradite U.S. citizens accused of war crimes to the Hague for
prosecution by the court.
SOA manuals
The six manuals used at the U.S. Army School of the Americas and
distributed across Latin America by Mobile Training Teams were used
from 1982 to 1991, throughout most of the Reagan and Bush
administrations.
They carried the titles "Handling of Sources," "Revolutionary War and
Communist Ideology," "Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla,"
"Interrogation," "Combat Intelligence," and "Counterintelligence."
A 1992 Pentagon investigation of the manuals found that they advocated
executions of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse and coercion. The
findings were kept secret until September 1996 when the Pentagon
disclosed them, fearing that Congressman Joseph Kennedy had obtained a
copy of the manuals.
Kennedy, who conducted a five-year campaign to close the school, told
the media later that "according to the Pentagon's own excerpts, School
of the Americas students were advised to imprison those from whom they
were seeking information; to 'involuntarily' obtain information from
those sources -- in other words, torture them; to arrest their parents;
to use 'motivation by fear'; pay bounties for enemy dead; execute
opponents; subvert the press; and use torture, blackmail and even
injections of truth serum to obtain information."
The "Revolutionary War" manual offers perhaps the most timely tie-in:
maintaining that an insurgent "does not have a legal status as a
prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention." The current Bush
administration has tried to reclassify POWs held at Guantánamo as
"unlawful combatants" to strip them of protections under the Geneva
Conventions.
Another manual advised counter-intelligence agents to use fear and
false imprisonment. Up to 90 percent of the detainees at Abu Ghraib
were falsely detained and had no connection whatever with terrorism,
according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The School of the Americas, renamed in 2000 the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation, has produced hundreds of human
rights abusers, which the Pentagon has repeatedly called "a few bad
apples." Its 1992 Pentagon investigation also claimed that the manuals
had been compiled from outdated instructional material, an argument
also made by the Fay panel in its Abu Ghraib report.
The 1992 Pentagon report on the School of the Americas called it
"incredible" that the use of the manuals "evaded the established system
of doctrinal controls." Nevertheless, the investigators "could find no
evidence that this was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to violate
Department of Defense or Army policies."
Kennedy, who did his own investigation, said the manuals were assembled
at Fort Huachuca under the supervision of Maj. Richard L. Montgomery,
who had worked in the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam.
Despite the Pentagon's insistence that the material was not properly
reviewed, Kennedy said, the training material was sent to the Pentagon
for review, and it was returned to the School of the Americas approved
and unchanged.
A similar defense has been mounted for the other interrogation manuals.
The Reagan administration, for example, claimed that the CIA's contra
manual had not been officially approved and was the work of an
"overzealous freelancer" under contract with the CIA.
It's the photographic evidence that separates the current scandal from
those in the past.
"We were caught red-handed," said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst for
the National Security Archive. "I think the types of abuses and human
rights atrocities committed by our allies like Augusto Pinochet had a
degree of separation for the American public. But this scandal
eliminates that distance. The abuse was not only committed directly by
the U.S. military but it was captured on digital camera."
James Hodge and Linda Cooper are the authors of Disturbing the Peace:
The Story of Father Roy Bourgeois and the Movement to Close the School
of the Americas, published this fall by Orbis Books.
This article originally appeared in the National Catholic Reporter.
tortura! Lo spiega in grande dettaglio uno studio apparso sulla rivista
cattolica National Catholic Reporter... ]
http://www.counterpunch.org/hodge11032004.html
http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=6812&s2=05
The CIA and Abu Ghraib
50 Years of Teaching and Training Torturers
JAMES HODGE and LINDA COOPER, CounterPunch
November 3, 2004 - Last April when Americans found themselves looking
at photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing naked and hooded Iraqis at Abu
Ghraib prison, it's a safe bet that most didn't realize they were
looking at torture techniques refined by the Central Intelligence
Agency over the last half century.
The Bush administration worked overtime to convince Americans that what
they were seeing was the work of a "few bad apples," whom the president
said exhibited "disgraceful conduct" that "dishonored our country and
disregarded our values."
Even as late as July, the Army's inspector general, Paul Mikolashek,
claimed that "these abuses should be viewed as what they are:
unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals."
A month later, after human rights groups pointed to evidence of much
wider culpability, two government reports -- one released by an Army
panel chaired by Major Gen. George Fay, the other by a commission
headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger -- confirmed what
many already sensed: that the abuse went far beyond the seven arrested
MPs.
The 171-page Fay report cites more than two-dozen military intelligence
officers, along with several military contractors. It details some 44
incidents, including the stripping, hooding and sodomizing of
detainees; subjecting them to temperature extremes; leading them around
naked on leashes; and attaching electrical wires to their genitals. In
one case, two naked youths were terrorized by snarling, unmuzzled
military dogs held by military personnel who competed to try to make
the teenagers defecate.
The two reports have been presented as sweeping indictments of U.S.
military leadership, but Human Rights Watch, the largest U.S. human
rights group, said the reports utterly fail to assess the obvious: the
role that official government policies played in bringing about the
horrendous abuse.
While the Schlesinger report notes administration policies -- such as
the Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department opinion that redefined torture as
pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical
injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even
death" -- it fails to evaluate whether the policies played a role in
contributing to the abuses.
The Schlesinger panel, whose members were handpicked by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "seems to go out of its way not to find any
relationship between Rumsfeld's approval of interrogation techniques
designed to inflict pain and humiliation and the widespread
mistreatment and torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Guantánamo," said Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch.
Not only do they leave the dots unconnected, but they fail to make
critical links to the past, said Alfred McCoy, professor of history at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of "Closer Than
Brothers," a study of the impact of the CIA's torture methods on the
Philippine military.
In an interview with NCR and in his own writings, McCoy described the
photos at Abu Ghraib as snapshots of "CIA torture techniques that have
metastasized over the last 50 years like an undetected cancer inside
the U.S. intelligence community."
Throughout the 1950s and early '60s, the CIA -- the lead agency doing
interrogations at Abu Ghraib -- financed and conducted secret research
on coercion and human consciousness, McCoy said. "The scale of that
research should not be minimized. By the late '50s, it reached a
billion dollars a year. The agency was providing the majority of the
funding for a half-dozen leading psychology departments."
The research ranged from using electric shock, to giving LSD to
unsuspecting subjects, to employing sensory deprivation. It was the
latter experiments that bore fruit, he said, producing a revolutionary
new psychological torture paradigm that was superior to various
physical methods that had been used for 2,000 years, from ancient
Rome's hot irons to the medieval rack and wheel.
"People will say anything to stop pain," McCoy said. "The information
extracted is inherently unreliable. And that's the problem the CIA
solved with these psychological methods."
The basic techniques -- the use of stress positions, sensory
deprivation and sexual humiliation -- are aimed at making victims feel
responsible for their own pain and suffering. But McCoy added that
while it appears less abusive than physical torture, the psychological
torture paradigm causes deep psychological damage to both victims and
their interrogators, who can become capable of unspeakable physical
cruelties.
The results of the CIA torture experiments were codified in 1963 in a
secret manual known as "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation." Four
years later, the CIA was operating some 40 interrogation centers in
Vietnam as part of its Phoenix Program, McCoy said. Eventually the
CIA's psychological methods were spread worldwide through the U.S.
Agency for International Development's Public Safety program and U.S.
Army Mobile Training Teams.
In 1983, the KUBARK manual provided the model for the CIA's "Human
Resource Exploitation Training Manual," whose methods were used by the
brutal, U.S.-trained Honduran Battalion 3-16 during the tenure of
then-U.S. ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte, now ambassador to
Iraq.
About the same time, the CIA compiled the "Psychological Operations in
Guerrilla Warfare" manual for the Nicaraguan contra commandos, then
seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government with the aid of the
Reagan administration.
That's not all. Six manuals, also linked to a CIA program, were used at
the U.S. Army's School of the Americas and distributed across Latin
America by Army Mobile Training Teams in the 1980s. They advocated
everything from executions of guerrillas to extortion, coercion and
false imprisonment.
A 1992 Pentagon investigation, whose findings were kept a secret of
state under then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, said the six manuals
"evolved from lesson plans used in an intelligence course at [the
School of the Americas]. They were based, in part, on old material
dating back to the 1960s from the Army's Foreign Intelligence
Assistance program, titled 'Project X.' This material had been retained
in the files of the Army intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz."
Project X documents, which have been linked to the CIA's Phoenix
Program, were destroyed in 1992 by the Defense Department, but a
telling reference to Fort Huachuca is buried in the Fay report on Abu
Ghraib. A five-member U.S. Army Mobile Training Team from Fort Huachuca
was sent to the Iraq prison, the report says, "to conduct an overall
assessment of interrogation operations, present training and provide
advice and assistance."
One of the mobile team members, identified as SFC Walters, told the Fay
panel that he "may have contributed to the abuse at Abu Ghraib." When
questioned by a military contract employee for ideas on how to get the
prisoners to talk, the report says, "Walters related several stories
about the use of dogs as an inducement."
Walters also gave advice about how detainees are most susceptible
during the first few hours after capture: "The prisoners are captured
by soldiers, taken from their familiar surroundings, blindfolded and
put into a truck and brought to this place (Abu Ghraib); and then they
are pushed down a hall with guards barking orders and thrown into a
cell, naked; and that not knowing what was going to happen or what the
guards might do caused them extreme fear."
But the report concludes that it "is unclear and likely impossible to
definitively determine" the extent to which "word of mouth" techniques
were passed to the interrogators in Abu Ghraib by the Mobile Training
Team from Fort Huachuca.
It also proved impossible for the Fay and Schlesinger panels to
determine the extent of the CIA's role because neither had sufficient
access to the agency. Both, however, pointed fingers in its direction.
The Fay report notes that the CIA's detention and interrogation
practices "led to a loss of accountability, abuse, reduced interagency
cooperation, and an unhealthy mystique that further poisoned the
atmosphere at Abu Ghraib." It also states that CIA officers held "Ghost
Detainees" -- including an Iraqi citizen later found dead in a shower,
handcuffed with a sandbag over his head, and "three Saudi national
medical personnel working for the coalition in Iraq" who were held
under false names. The Army allowed the CIA to imprison unidentified
and unaccounted-for detainees, thereby circumventing the "reporting
requirements under the Geneva Conventions."
Likewise, the Schlesinger panel found that the "CIA's detention and
interrogation practices contributed to a loss of accountability at Abu
Ghraib," but it claims it did not have a mandate or "sufficient access
to CIA information" to pursue the matter.
Fay concludes that techniques such as "removing clothing, isolating
people for long periods of time, using stress positions, exploiting
fear of dogs and implementing sleep and light deprivation" were "new
ideas" that some U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib learned while working
in Afghanistan and the U.S. Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The methods, however, are anything but "new." An examination of CIA
interrogation manuals shows that they date back before the Vietnam War,
supporting charges by human rights advocates that Abu Ghraib is no
aberration. What is new is that photographic evidence became public.
Interrogation manual
The authors of the CIA's 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual -- a guide on
the art of using fear, threats and pain to cause debility or
psychological regression -- were fully aware of the illegality of their
methods: "KUBARK's lack of executive authority abroad and its
operational need for facelessness make it particularly vulnerable to
attack in the courts or the press."
The Fay report noted that the death of the Iraqi found in the shower
remained unsolved due partly to the fact that "CIA officers operating
at Abu Ghraib used alias' [sic] and never revealed their true names."
The KUBARK manual notes that prior approval "must be obtained for the
interrogation of any source against his will and under any of the
following circumstances: If bodily harm is to be inflicted" or "if
medical, chemical or electrical methods or materials are to be used."
Before using an interrogation site, "it should be studied carefully.
... The electric current should be known in advance, so that
transformers and other modifying devices will be on hand if needed."
It notes that psychological rather than physical debility will break a
suspect sooner: "The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys
resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict
pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of
pain." Elsewhere, it notes, "Intense pain is quite likely to produce
false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress."
The manual, which cites numerous psychological studies and says all
detainees should be given a psychological assessment, contains
descriptions of different personality types and which techniques to use
to interrogate them.
"If a coercive technique is to be used, or if two or more are to be
employed jointly, they should be ... carefully selected to match his
personality."
"Persons with intense guilt feelings," it advises, "may cease
resistance and cooperate if punished in some way because of the
gratification induced by punishment."
All of the basic techniques used in Iraq are found in the manual's
pages: sexual humiliation, the use of stress positions and sensory
deprivation.
The manual first advises that a suspect's clothes should be taken. It
later notes, "In the simple torture situation the contest is one
between the individual and his tormenter. When the individual is told
to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is
introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but
the victim himself."
The manual lists the principal coercive techniques of interrogation as
"deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar
methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility
and hypnosis, narcosis [use of drugs] and induced regression."
The response to coercion, it says, typically contains "at least three
important elements: debility, dependency and dread."
"Disrupting normal time patterns like sleep and food" can cause
disorientation, fear, helplessness and regression. "Deprivation of
stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact
with an outer world," noting that inducing regression will dissolve
resistance and create dependence.
"Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an
ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no
light ... which is soundproofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc. An
environment still more subject to control, such as water tank or iron
lung, is even more effective."
The manual also suggests threatening a detainee suspected of feigning
mental illness by telling him that he might need "a series of electric
shock treatments or a frontal lobotomy."
The 1963 KUBARK manual -- and its descendant, the "Human Resource
Exploitation Training Manual 1983" -- were both released in the 1990s
with numerous deletions after The Baltimore Sun threatened the CIA with
a lawsuit. The newspaper sought the manuals in connection with its 1995
series about the CIA-trained Honduran Battalion 3-16, a secret army
unit whose torture methods mirrored those in the manuals.
Honduras, which shares borders with Nicaragua and El Salvador, was used
by the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s as a base to fight
Salvadoran rebels and to topple the Nicaraguan Sandinista government
with the CIA-trained contra rebels.
Washington's key man in Honduras was Gen. Gustavo Alvárez, a graduate
of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, who created 3-16 with the
CIA's help and who worked closely with U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte,
whose reports gave the impression that the Honduran military respected
human rights.
However, Battalion 3-16 atrocities were detailed in a 1988 New York
Times story, headlined "Testifying to Torture." Florencio Caballero, a
3-16 interrogator who later fled to Canada, told the Times that the CIA
trained him and two dozen others in psychological methods. They were
taught "to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand
up, don't let him sleep, keep him naked and in isolation, put rats and
cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals,
throw cold water on him, change the temperature."
Caballero said the CIA taught that psychological coercion was more
effective than physical torture, but that interrogations often
degenerated into physical torture. He told of a 24-year-old woman named
Ines Murillo who was stripped, starved, deprived of sleep, beaten,
burned, electrically shocked and sexually molested.
Fay's Abu Ghraib report makes the same point about dehumanizing
interrogations degenerating: "What started as nakedness and
humiliation, stress and physical training, carried over into sexual and
physical assaults."
Human Rights Watch makes a similar point, saying that U.S. forces
operating in Iraq, Guantánamo and Afghanistan have "used interrogation
techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting
them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of
sleep -- in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention
against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment. This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort and
humiliation has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings,
sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning and near asphyxiation.
Detainees have died under questionable circumstances while
incarcerated."
The 1983 CIA Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual states, "While
we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you
aware of them and the proper way to use them." It states that if they
are to be used, they always require "prior HQS approval."
The Schlesinger report says U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo were
required to get approval from Rumsfeld or the U.S. Southern Command
before using certain methods such as hooding, stripping, 30-day
isolations, stress positions and playing on a detainee's phobias.
The 1983 manual advises that a subject should be arrested in the early
morning when the subject "least expects it" and when it would cause
"intense feelings of shock, insecurity and psychological stress." He
should be "rudely awakened and immediately blindfolded and handcuffed"
and transported "by circuitous route." Excessive force should not be
used because "if they break the subject's jaw, he will not be able to
answer questions."
Similarly, the Fay report on Abu Ghraib notes, "It became a common
practice for maneuver elements to round up large quantities of Iraqi
personnel in the general vicinity of a specified target as a cordon and
capture technique. Some operations were conducted at night, resulting
in some detainees being delivered to collection points only wearing
night clothes or under clothes."
The 1983 manual advises that the subject should be "completely stripped
and told to take a shower. Blindfold remains in place while showering
and guard watches throughout. Subject is given a thorough medical
examination, including all body cavities."
The Fay report noted that nudity likely "contributed to an escalating
'de-humanization' of the detainees and set the stage for additional and
more severe abuses to occur." Meanwhile, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, writing
in the July issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, said that
evidence is mounting "that U.S. doctors, nurses and medics have been
complicit in torture and other illegal procedures in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Guantánamo Bay." Doctors, he said, have "turned over prisoners'
medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the
prisoners' weaknesses or vulnerabilities."
The "exploitation" manual goes on to say the interrogation room is the
"battleground" where the interrogator "has total control over the
subject" and can manipulate the environment "to create unpleasant or
intolerable situations to disrupt patterns of time, space and sensory
perception."
The Fay report blames many of the abuses at Abu Ghraib on
misinterpretations of a paragraph in an "outdated" 1987 Army field
manual, which reads in part: "The interrogator should appear to be the
one who controls all aspects of the interrogation to include the
lighting, heating and configuration of the interrogation room, as well
as the food, shelter and clothing given to the source."
The 1983 interrogation manual states the subject should be placed in a
soundproof cell and not allowed to relax. Furthermore, "there should be
no built-in toilet facilities," and the subject should "either be given
a bucket or escorted by a guard to the latrine. The guard stays at his
side the entire time."
Cells should have windows that can be "covered to disrupt the sense of
night and day."
"Heat, air and light should be externally controlled." Interrogators
should disrupt the subject's patterns of eating and sleeping. "Meals
and sleep should be granted irregularly" to disorient the subject and
destroy his capacity to resist. "If successful," a handwritten note
adds, "it causes serious psychological damage and therefore is a form
of torture."
The handwritten note was added in the mid-1980s after another CIA
manual was made public and caused a public fury. Other revisions have
also been written in, but the original text is still easily readable.
The manual also states, "Many psychologists consider the threat of
inducing debility to be more effective than debility itself."
Like KUBARK, the 1983 exploitation manual lists various personality
types and how to deal with them during questioning. It advises making a
psychological assessment to determine which personality category the
subject fits in, noting "any psychological abnormalities ... what his
potential vulnerabilities are. How he views his potential for surviving
his situation."
The subject must be convinced that the interrogator "controls his
ultimate destiny." The number of variations in techniques, the manual
says, "is limited only by the experience and imagination" of the
interrogator.
"The torture situation is an external conflict, a contest between the
subject and his tormentor. The pain which is being inflicted upon him
from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist. On the
other hand, pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more
likely to sap his resistance." One example given was requiring the
subject "to maintain rigid positions, such as standing at attention or
sitting on a stool for long periods of time."
In a section named "Coercive Techniques," interrogators are advised not
to make empty threats. "If a subject refuses to comply once a threat
has been made, it must be carried out. If it is not carried out, then
subsequent threats will also prove ineffective."
"The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological
regression in the subject." However, if "the debility-dependency-dread
state is unduly prolonged, the subject may sink into a defensive apathy
from which it is hard to arouse him." The symptoms most commonly
associated with solitary confinement and sensory deprivation are
"hallucinations and delusions."
In an ambiguous note, interrogators are advised to ask themselves a
cautionary question: If the subject is released, "will he be able to
cause embarrassment by going to the newspapers or courts?"
The CIA developed the "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare"
manual to help train Nicaraguan contras, whom the Reagan administration
armed and financed in an effort to overthrow the Sandinista government
in the 1980s.
Unlike the 1963 KUBARK and 1983 interrogation manuals, the CIA contra
guide deals not with counterinsurgency measures, but with creating an
insurgent force. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy in that it sheds light
on the Reagan administration's use of an abusive proxy army, its
snubbing of international law, and again on John Negroponte, who was
the ambassador to Honduras when the contras used Honduras as a staging
ground to attack Nicaragua.
The manual, which The Associated Press exposed in a 1984 story,
advocates that contras assassinate Nicaraguan officials, seize power
through acts of torture and terrorism, and create "martyrs" by placing
their supporters in "confrontation with the authorities, in order to
bring about uprisings or shootings, which will cause the death of one
or more persons, who would become the martyrs."
The training manual, along with the CIA's mining of Nicaraguan harbors,
played a part in a ruling by the International Court of Justice that
the United States had broken international law, should pay reparations
and stop its war against Nicaragua. But the Reagan administration
refused to recognize the court's jurisdiction.
The current Bush administration has adopted the same stance toward the
International Criminal Court, refusing to join the world's first
permanent war crimes tribunal, partly out of fear that the court could
prosecute U.S. military personnel and their superiors. In addition, the
Bush administration has withheld military aid and training to nations
that refuse to sign "Article 98 waivers," agreements stating that they
will not extradite U.S. citizens accused of war crimes to the Hague for
prosecution by the court.
SOA manuals
The six manuals used at the U.S. Army School of the Americas and
distributed across Latin America by Mobile Training Teams were used
from 1982 to 1991, throughout most of the Reagan and Bush
administrations.
They carried the titles "Handling of Sources," "Revolutionary War and
Communist Ideology," "Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla,"
"Interrogation," "Combat Intelligence," and "Counterintelligence."
A 1992 Pentagon investigation of the manuals found that they advocated
executions of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse and coercion. The
findings were kept secret until September 1996 when the Pentagon
disclosed them, fearing that Congressman Joseph Kennedy had obtained a
copy of the manuals.
Kennedy, who conducted a five-year campaign to close the school, told
the media later that "according to the Pentagon's own excerpts, School
of the Americas students were advised to imprison those from whom they
were seeking information; to 'involuntarily' obtain information from
those sources -- in other words, torture them; to arrest their parents;
to use 'motivation by fear'; pay bounties for enemy dead; execute
opponents; subvert the press; and use torture, blackmail and even
injections of truth serum to obtain information."
The "Revolutionary War" manual offers perhaps the most timely tie-in:
maintaining that an insurgent "does not have a legal status as a
prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention." The current Bush
administration has tried to reclassify POWs held at Guantánamo as
"unlawful combatants" to strip them of protections under the Geneva
Conventions.
Another manual advised counter-intelligence agents to use fear and
false imprisonment. Up to 90 percent of the detainees at Abu Ghraib
were falsely detained and had no connection whatever with terrorism,
according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The School of the Americas, renamed in 2000 the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation, has produced hundreds of human
rights abusers, which the Pentagon has repeatedly called "a few bad
apples." Its 1992 Pentagon investigation also claimed that the manuals
had been compiled from outdated instructional material, an argument
also made by the Fay panel in its Abu Ghraib report.
The 1992 Pentagon report on the School of the Americas called it
"incredible" that the use of the manuals "evaded the established system
of doctrinal controls." Nevertheless, the investigators "could find no
evidence that this was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to violate
Department of Defense or Army policies."
Kennedy, who did his own investigation, said the manuals were assembled
at Fort Huachuca under the supervision of Maj. Richard L. Montgomery,
who had worked in the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam.
Despite the Pentagon's insistence that the material was not properly
reviewed, Kennedy said, the training material was sent to the Pentagon
for review, and it was returned to the School of the Americas approved
and unchanged.
A similar defense has been mounted for the other interrogation manuals.
The Reagan administration, for example, claimed that the CIA's contra
manual had not been officially approved and was the work of an
"overzealous freelancer" under contract with the CIA.
It's the photographic evidence that separates the current scandal from
those in the past.
"We were caught red-handed," said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst for
the National Security Archive. "I think the types of abuses and human
rights atrocities committed by our allies like Augusto Pinochet had a
degree of separation for the American public. But this scandal
eliminates that distance. The abuse was not only committed directly by
the U.S. military but it was captured on digital camera."
James Hodge and Linda Cooper are the authors of Disturbing the Peace:
The Story of Father Roy Bourgeois and the Movement to Close the School
of the Americas, published this fall by Orbis Books.
This article originally appeared in the National Catholic Reporter.