Alfred W. McCoy: Torture at Abu Ghraib Followed CIA's Manual

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> Alfred W. McCoy: Torture at Abu Ghraib Followed CIA's Manual
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> Published on Friday, May 14, 2004 by the Boston Globe
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>
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> Torture at Abu Ghraib Followed CIA's Manual
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> by Alfred W. McCoy
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>
>
> THE PHOTOS from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots not of simple
> brutality
>
> or a breakdown in discipline but of CIA torture techniques that have
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> metastasized over the past 50 years like an undetected cancer inside
> the US
>
> intelligence community. From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led secret research
> into
>
> coercion and consciousness that reached a billion dollars at peak.
> After
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> experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shocks, and sensory
>
> deprivation, this CIA research produced a new method of torture that
> was
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> psychological, not physical – best described as "no touch" torture.
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>
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> The CIA's discovery of psychological torture was a counterintuitive
>
> breakthrough – indeed, the first real revolution in this cruel
> science since
>
> the 17th century. The old physical approach required interrogators to
> inflict
>
> pain, usually by crude beatings that often produced heightened
> resistance or
>
> unreliable information. Under the CIA's new psychological paradigm,
> however,
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> interrogators used two essential methods to achieve their goals.
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>
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> In the first stage, interrogators employ the simple, nonviolent
> techniques of
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> hooding or sleep deprivation to disorient the subject; sometimes sexual
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> humiliation is used as well.
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>
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> Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on to a second
> stage with
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> simple, self-inflicted discomfort such as standing for hours with arms
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> extended. In this phase, the idea is to make victims feel responsible
> for
>
> their own pain and thus induce them to alleviate it by capitulating to
> the
>
> interrogator's power. In his statement on reforms at Abu Ghraib last
> week,
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> General Geoffrey Miller, former chief of the Guantanamo detention
> center and
>
> now prison commander in Iraq, offered an unwitting summary of this
> two-phase
>
> torture. "We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the
> detainees,"
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> the general said. "We will no longer use stress positions in any of our
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> interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep deprivation in any of
> our
>
> interrogations."
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>
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> Although seemingly less brutal, no-touch torture leaves deep
> psychological
>
> scars. The victims often need long treatment to recover from trauma
> far more
>
> crippling than physical pain. The perpetrators can suffer a dangerous
>
> expansion of ego, leading to cruelty and lasting emotional problems.
>
>
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> After codification in the CIA's "Kubark Counterintelligence
> Interrogation"
>
> manual in 1963, the new method was disseminated globally to police in
> Asia and
>
> Latin America through USAID's Office of Public Safety. Following
> allegations
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> of torture by USAID's police trainees in Brazil, the US Senate closed
> down the
>
> office in 1975.
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>
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> After it was abolished, the agency continued to disseminate its torture
>
> methods through the US Army's Mobile Training Teams, which were active
> in
>
> Central America during the 1980s. In 1997, the Baltimore Sun published
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> chilling extracts of the "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual"
> that
>
> had been distributed to allied militaries for 20 years. In the 10 years
>
> between the last known use of these manuals in the early 1990s and the
> arrest
>
> of Al Qaeda suspects since September 2001, torture was maintained as a
> US
>
> intelligence practice by delivering suspects to foreign agencies,
> including
>
> the Philippine National Police, who broke a bomb plot in 1995.
>
>
>
> Once the war on terror started, however, the US use of no-touch torture
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> resumed, first surfacing at Bagram Air Base near Kabul in early 2002,
> where
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> Pentagon investigators found two Afghans had died during
> interrogation. In
>
> reports from Iraq, the methods are strikingly similar to those
> detailed in the
>
> Kubark manual.
>
>
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> Following the CIA's two-part technique, last September General Miller
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> instructed US military police at Abu Ghraib to soften up high-priority
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> detainees in the initial disorientation phase for later "successful
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> interrogation and exploitation" by CIA and military intelligence. As
> often
>
> happens in no-touch torture sessions, this process soon moved beyond
> sleep and
>
> sensory deprivation to sexual humiliation. The question, in the
> second, still
>
> unexamined phase, is whether US Army intelligence and CIA operatives
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> administered the prescribed mix of interrogation and self-inflicted
> pain –
>
> but outside the frame of these photographs. If so, the soldiers now
> facing
>
> courts-martial would have been following standard interrogation
> procedure.
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>
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> For more than 50 years, the CIA's no-touch methods have become so
> widely
>
> accepted that US interrogators seem unaware that they are, in fact,
> engaged in
>
> systematic torture. But now, through these photographs from Abu
> Ghraib, we can
>
> see the reality of these techniques. We have a chance to join fully
> with the
>
> international community in repudiating a practice that, more than any
> other,
>
> represents a denial of democracy.
>
>
>
> Alfred W. McCoy, professor of history at the University of
> Wisconsin-Madison,
>
> is the author of "Closer Than Brothers," a study of the impact of
> torture upon
>
> the Philippine armed forces.
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