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A Seven
Part Special Report
by Douglas Valentine, Author of The Phoenix Program
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
by Douglas Valentine
November 9, 2001
Karen Snell
Torture By
Proxy
John Troyer
A
New Kind of Activism
Tariq Ali
Q &
A About the War
Michael
Colby
Schoolgirl
Gets Booted
for Anti-war Views
November 8, 2001
Mokhiber/Weissman
The
Cipro Rip-Off
Mitchel Cohen
The Smear Campaign
Against Nancy Oden
Steve
Perry
American
Roulette
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 7, 2001
Bahour/Dahan
Placebo Peace
Plan
Tom Turnipseed
Bush
Gives Billions
to His Oil Buddies
Cockburn/St. Clair
Greens, Airports
and
National ID Cards
Dr. Susan
Block
Ayatollah
Asscroft
Brian J. Foley
Bombing Campaign
Not "Self-Defense" Under International Law
November 6, 2001
Mark Scaramella
Where's
That Red Cross Money Going
C.G. Estabrook
Our Torturers
Sheperd
Bliss
Scott
Nearing on War
Rep. Ron Paul
Underwriting
the Taliban
Tariq
Ali
The
General Who
Came to Dinner
Evan Ravitz
Stop the War
Through
Direct Democracy
Steve
Perry
Hunger
in Afghanistan
November 5, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
Living
in the Minefields
David Price
Terror
and Indigenous People
November 3, 2001
Declan McCullagh
Nancy Oden Interview
Daniel
Wolff
The
Memphis Blues Again
Mark Weisbrot
War on Civilians
Dave Marsh
How
the RIAA (and the FBI) Cheat Musicians
Robert Jensen
Speaking
Out Against
War on Campus
November 2, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Green
Party Leader Detained at Maine Airport; Prevented from Boarding
Any Plane
Alexander Cockburn
FBI Eyes
Torture
November 1, 2001
Dean Baker
Dying
for Patents
Sami Amarah
US Attempts
to Recruit
Russian Vets of Afghan War
Molly Secours
Where
Are the Voices of Reason? Let the Women
Be Heard
William Blum
Unleashing the
CIA
October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
the Poor,
Subsidize the Rich
Chris Clarke
Thank God
for Berkeley
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
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Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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November
9, 2001
The Wide World of Torture
By Alexander Cockburn
Open the November 5 edition of Newsweek and here's
Jonathan Alter, munching coyly on the week's hot topic, namely
the propriety of the FBI torturing obdurate September 11 suspects
in the Bureau's custody here in the United States. Alter says
no to cattleprods, but continues the sentence with the observation
that something is needed to "jump start" the stalled
investigation". The tone is lightly facetious, as in "Couldn't
we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes
of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap?" There are respectful
references to Alan Dershowitz (who is running around the country
promoting the idea of "torture warrants" issued by
judges) and to Israel, where, "until 1999 an interrogation
technique called 'shaking' was legal. It entailed holding a smelly
bag over a suspect's head in a dark room, then applying scary
psychological torment... Even now, Israeli law leaves a little
room for 'moderate physical pressure' in what are called 'ticking
time bomb' cases."
As so often with unappealing labor, Alter
arrives at the usual American solution: outsource the job: "we'll
have
to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish
allies, even if that's hypocritical."
What's striking about Alter's commentary
and others in the same idiom is the abstraction from reality,
as if torture is so indisputably a dirty business that all painful
data had best be avoided. One would have thought it hard to be
frivolous about the subject of torture, but Alter managed it.
Would one know from his commentary that
under international covenants that torture is illegal? One would
not, and one assumes that as with the war against the Taliban's
Afghanistan Alter regards the issue of legality as entirely immaterial.
Would one know that in recent years the United States has been
charged by the UN and also by human rights organizations such
as Human Rights Watch as tolerating torture in prisons in many
states, by methods ranging from solitary, 23-hour a day confinement
in concrete boxes for years on end, to activating 50,000-volt
shocks through a mandatory belt worn by a prisoner?
Would one know that since the Second
World War many nations --France during the Algerian uprising,
Britain in the war in Northern Ireland--have been convulsed by
furious debates about the issue of torture; or that one of the
darkest threads in postwar US imperial history has been the CIA's
involvement with torture, as instructor, practitioner or contractor?
Remember Dan Mitrione, ultimately kidnapped
and killed by the Tupamaros, as portrayed by Yves Montand in
Costa Gravas's State of Siege? In the late 1960s Mitrione worked
for the US Office of Public Safety, part of the Agency for International
Development. In Brazil, so A.J. Langguth (a former New York Times
bureau chief in Saigon) related in his book Hidden Terrors, Mitrione
was among US advisors teaching Brazilian police how much electric
shock to apply to a prisoner without killing them. In Uruguay,
according to the former chief of police intelligence, Mitrione
helped "professionalize" torture as a routine measure
and advised on psychological techniques, such as playing tapes
of women and children screaming giving the impression that the
prisoner's family was being tortured.
If he bothered to study up on the history,
maybe Alter would savor Mitrione's technical professionalism,
as displayed in the mantra cited by a Cuban double agent who
worked with him in Montevideo and claims to have seen him torture
to death four vagrants in the soundproofed cellar of his house
in Montevideo, for the benefit of Uruguayan police officers:
"the precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise
amount, for the desired effect."
Alter expresses a partiality for "truth
drugs", an enthusiasm shared by the US Navy after the war
against Hitler, when its intelligence officers got on the trail
of Dr Kurt Plotner's research into "truth serums" at
Dachau. Plotner gave Jewish and Russian prisoners high doses
of mescaline and then observed their behaviour in which they
expressed hatred for their guards and made confessional statements
about their own psychological makeup. The Navy's interest was
anticipated by the OSS, which developed a THC-based truth serum
of its own in its labs in St Elizabeth's Hospital. The serum
was tried without any success on scientists working on the Manhattan
Project.
Eventually through Project Bluebird,
excavation of Nazi research and development of promising avenues
in methods of extracting information was run under the aegis
of Boris Pash who ran of the CIA's Program Branch/7 which, as
disclosed in the Church hearings of 1976, had responsibility
for CIA kidnappings and interrogations. Bluebird's head in the
1950s was Morse Allen, veteran of Navy Intelligence and a specialist
in interrogation techniques, including the polygraph. He passed
from an interest in hypnosis to deeper enthusiasm for electro-shock
"therapy" and psycho-surgery.
LSD and kindred hallucinogens, were also
administered to unwitting US soldiers, over a thousand of whom
emerged with serious psychological afflictions. As part of its
larger MK-ULTRA project the CIA gave money to Dr Ewen Cameron,
at McGill University. Cameron was a pioneer in the sensory deprivation
techniques for which Jonathan Alter has issued his approval to
be used by the FBI. Cameron once locked up a woman in a small
white box for 35 days, deprived of light, smell or sound. The
CIA doctors were amazed at this routine, knowing that their own
experiments with a sensory deprivation tank in 1955 had induced
severe psychological reactions in less than 40 hours. Cameron's
favored brew for mind control was daily doses of Thorazine, Nembutal
and Seconal, followed by severe electro-shock, followed by assault
with messages on a loop-feed tape player 16 hours a day. This
monster died with his boots on, mountain climbing, but some of
his victims got $750,000 out of the CIA.
Start torturing, and it's easy to get
carried away. Torture destroys the tortured and corrupts the
society that sanctions it. Just like the FBI today, the CIA in
1968 got frustrated by its inability to break suspected leaders
of the Vietnamese Liberation Front by their habitual methods
of interrogation and torture. So they began more advanced experiments,
in one of which they anaesthetized three prisoners, opened their
skulls, planted electrodes in their brains. The prisoners were
then revived, put in a room and given knives. The CIA psychologists
then activated the electrodes, hoping they would then attack
each other. They didn't. The electrodes were removed, the prisoners
shot and their bodies burned. Alter can read about it in Gordon
Thomas's book, Journey into Madness. (The overall history narrated
above can be found in St Clair and Cockburn's Whiteout:
the CIA, Drugs and the Press, advertised on this site.)
The Israelis? They're still torturing.
In July AP and the Baltimore Sun relayed charges from Beth T'selem
of "severe torture" by police about Palestinian youths
as young as fourteen being badly beaten, their heads shoved into
toilet bowls and so forth. But they contracted out some of the
rough stuff too. When Israel finally retreated from its "security
strip" in southern Lebanon run but its puppet South Lebanese
Army, the journalist Robert Fisk visited Khiam prison, about
whose horrible tortures he had persistently reported for many
years. His report for The Independent, May 25, 2000, began thus:
" The torturers had just left but the horror remained. There
was the whipping pole and the window grilles where prisoners
were tied naked for days, freezing water thrown over them at
night. Then there were the electric leads for the little dynamo--the
machine mercifully taken off to Israel by the interrogators--which
had the inmates shrieking with pain when the electrodes touched
their fingers or penises. And there were the handcuffs which
an ex-prisoner handed to me yesterday afternoon. Engraved into
the steel were the words: 'The Peerless Handcuff Co. Springfield,
Mass. Made in USA.' And I wondered, in Israel's most shameful
prison, if the executives over in Springfield knew what they
were doing when they sold these manacles."
If those handcuffs are sold these days to the FBI's subcontractor
of choice, at least the executives will know they have Jonathan
Alter to explain the patriotic morality of their bottom line.
CP
Related Stories:
Karen Snell, Torture
By Proxy
Alexander Cockburn, FBI
Eyes Torture
Douglas Valentine, Homeland
Insecurity
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