CIA Torture

A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror

By Alfred W. McCoy

Metropolitan Books, 2006, 290 pages, $38.95 (hb)

American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib & Beyond

By Michael Otterman

Melbourne University Press, 2007, 285 pages, $24.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/37884

While Washington is keen to tout its world leadership in all fields from wealth to fizzy soft-drinks, one area of its pre-eminence it is shy about plugging is the "science of pain", as Alfred McCoy and Michael Otterman explore in their respective books A Question of Torture and American Torture.

The 50-year tale of moral and political degeneracy begins at the end of World War II, with the recruitment of Nazi scientists who oversaw human interrogation experiments at the Dachau concentration camp. Sensationalist CIA scares of "Red brainwashing" fed a vast, covert program of mind-control from 1950: the CIA's MK-ULTRA program, involving hypnotism, electric shock, sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic drugs (particularly LSD) as information extraction aids. Test subjects were unsuspecting soldiers, prisoners, drug rehabilitation patients, North Korean POWs, party-goers, clients of prostitutes, kids on summer camp, suspected spies and dubious defectors.

The psychological torture of sensory deprivation was the most dramatic. The elite university psychologists on the CIA payroll honed the devastatingly simple techniques of shutting down sight, auditory and tactile senses; social isolation; forced standing; stress positions; sleep disruption; personal and sexual humiliation; and extremes of heat and cold, dark and light, silence and noise.

These techniques were the bright new world of "no-touch" torture, seemingly less brutal than physical torture, but its psychological and physical results — disorientation, psychosis, anxiety, panic, hallucinations, amnesia and epilepsy among them — excited the CIA and the US Army, which through its SERE (Search, Escape, Resistance and Evasion) program tortured its own soldiers using psychological means, rationalised as "inoculation" against "communist torture" but conveniently training new generations of military torturers.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA conducted massive field experiments in the new torture techniques. Under the guise of "fighting communism", the CIA trained 1 million police in "counterinsurgency" in nearly 50 countries, in half of which Amnesty International had documented torture, including Iran, Brazil, Uruguay and the Philippines. In south Vietnam the CIA-supervised Phoenix program of torture and summary executions killed more than 100,000 Vietnamese. The CIA director, lacking all sense of irony, described the program's aim as protecting the Vietnamese people from "terrorism".

September 11, 2001, breathed new life into the use of torture by the US. The White House argued that the "war on terror" rendered "obsolete" the Geneva Conventions' strict limitations on questioning of prisoners and made "quaint" some of its provisions, like those prohibiting torture.

At Bagram Air Base and other secret prisons in Afghanistan, "coercive interrogation" was taught by CIA and army experts. At Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, torture was carried out by military police, private contractors, the CIA and teams from the Pentagon's Special Access Program — torture specialists with a flair for sadistic innovation that disgusted FBI interrogators and even some CIA operatives.

In Guantanamo Bay, small cages and no exercise, little food or hygiene, fear and anxiety were the backdrop to torture techniques including the simulated rape, torture and murder of family members, injections with drugs, short-shackling (the painful tying of hands and feet together), defiling of the Koran, threatening with attack dogs, and the terrifying physical and psychological sensation of drowning through "water-boarding".

In the White House "war on terror" catechism, Guantanamo Bay contained "the worst of the worst". However, independent investigations found that most prisoners had a non-existent or very vague association with terrorism. Many were paying the price for the US bounties offered to Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan, like David Hicks who was worth US$1000 for his captors. In 2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross was told by US military intelligence officers that 70-90% of Guantanamo Bay detainees had been arrested by mistake.

Torture was also outsourced. "Extraordinary rendition" saw suspects kidnapped by the CIA and sent to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan and Uzbekistan — countries where torture was known to be practised, often by secret police trained in their craft by the CIA. Among those "rendered" were victims of anti-terrorist hysteria, like Mamdouh Habib, caught up in the torture conveyor belt between Pakistan, Cairo, Bagram and Guantanamo Bay for four years from 2001.

The torture revelations generated desperate attempts to absolve the architects of the torture policy from blame. Eleven military investigations, 12 congressional hearings and 40 White House briefings, says McCoy, were all designed to bury the scandal and to cover up a trail of responsibility that went all the way up to the top — the president, defence secretary, and the secretary of state. Nobody above the rank of sergeant has gone to jail for prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere.

In 1994, Washington effectively legalised psychological torture through its 19 diplomatic "reservations" (15 more than any other country) to its ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. This convention outlawed "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental". However the Republican and Democrat administrations of Ronald Reagan, George Bush senior and Bill Clinton exempted sensory deprivation, stress positions, sleep disruption, isolation and similar techniques from their definition of torture. After 2001, the linguistic wizards in the Justice Department further redefined torture to be torture only if the intention was to inflict pain. If the intention was to extract information, it was not torture. This sleight of tongue gave the CIA further authority to torture.

The case for torture (in 2005, two-thirds of US people polled believed torture could be justified in some circumstances) is demolished by both authors. As attested by senior US armed forces personnel with decades of military experience and by former CIA agents, torture simply does not work. It yields rubbish. To stop the pain, the victim says what they think the interrogator wants to hear. Even the US Army has officially declared torture to be illegal, immoral and impractical, acknowledging its "unreliable results" and noting as well the "negative consequences" undermining international and domestic support for Washington's wars.

As McCoy and Otterman show, torture invariably spreads from the few "high-value" suspects to the low-value and innocent many. CIA torture quickly spread from a handful of al Qaeda suspects to hundreds of Afghans, thousands of Iraqis and many innocent and peripheral victims from across the world. The toll of maimed bodies and minds from US President George Bush's secret orders in 2001 are chilling proof of the greasy slope — McCoy writes of "some 14,000 Iraqi 'security detainees' subjected to harsh interrogation, often with torture; 1,100 'high-value' prisoners interrogated with systematic torture, at Guantanamo and Bagram; 150 extraordinary, extralegal renditions of terror suspects to nations notorious for brutality; 68 detainees dead under suspicious circumstances".

Torture by the CIA and US military is not a thing of the past, despite Washington's carefully cultivated public repudiation of torture. Both of these books rigorously sheet home responsibility to the well-tailored parliamentary eminences whose deft hand on the official memo, whose versatile vocabulary in the word games around torture, whose selfless readiness to sacrifice subordinates, whose nimble footwork in the bureaucratic dance of cover-up, has condemned, for half a century and counting, hundreds of thousands to gross and murderous abuse in, as McCoy bitterly concludes, the CIA's "covert warfare in the cause of US power globally".