Torture at Abu Ghraib Followed CIA's Manual
by Alfred W. McCoy
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 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 experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric
shocks, and sensory deprivation, this CIA research
produced a new method of torture that was
psychological, not physical -- best described as "no
touch" torture.
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, interrogators used
two essential methods to achieve their goals.
In the first stage, interrogators employ the simple,
nonviolent techniques of hooding or sleep deprivation
to disorient the subject; sometimes sexual humiliation
is used as well.
Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on
to a second stage with simple, self-inflicted
discomfort such as standing for hours with arms
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, 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," the general
said. "We will no longer use stress positions in any
of our interrogations. And we will no longer use
sleep deprivation in any of our interrogations."
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.
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 of torture by USAID's
police trainees in Brazil, the US Senate closed down
the office in 1975.
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 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 resumed, first surfacing at Bagram
Air Base near Kabul in early 2002, where 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.
Following the CIA's two-part technique, last September
General Miller instructed US military police at Abu
Ghraib to soften up high-priority detainees in the
initial disorientation phase for later "successful
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 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.
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.)
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company