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Torture - The American Dream |
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According to researchers, not only did the US design this secret police and torture regime, they actually managed it on a daily basis, down to the selection and running of agents. The CIA in the Philippines and Indonesia developed a massive 1000-page torture manual based on direct experimentation that was subsequently distributed for decades to all their dictator-puppets in Central and South America. It was until at least well into the 1980s that the US CIA was distributing its euphemistically-titled "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983", teaching its dictators all the fine points of how to torture their own people. And it was in Central and South America that the CIA participated so actively in the training of torture methods, even bringing many "students" to the US to study and practice, so the US could export the savage brutality to its colonies. The US actively taught, and supported, torture as a means of civilian control, including the numerous CIA-sponsored "death squads" in Central America. None of this is a secret any longer. This is an interesting article from the Los Angeles Times, published on May 3, 2009: See the reference at bottom of page. The US has had a 45-year history of torture. The difference between American involvement in South American atrocities in 1964 and 'enhanced interrogation' now is that modern-day US officials appear proud of themselves. "This was our greatest moment. We detained suspected terrorists indefinitely without charges (many of whom were innocent), without lawyers, without a hearing. We tortured many and sent many to foreign venues where greater torture could be inflicted. We gave military trials to 3 of the more than 700 we imprisoned. Of those tried before military courts, two are free, one remains in prison. We broke the Guinness World Record for the number of times we waterboarded one suspect." Americans, with their perverted moralistic Christianity, are the worst of peoples for their hypocrisy and selective amnesia. Their nation was built on slavery, genocide, war and military colonisation, on child labor and brutal capitalism. But as soon as they stop doing any one of those things, Americans immediately suffer total amnesia about their own dirty past and begin to loudly condemn any other nation doing what they themselves were doing only yesterday. It is not generally known, but Taiwan is among the locations in Asia where the US spread its torture regime. When the US decided to abandon China and Mao after the Second World War, and to throw its lot in with Chiang Kai-Shek, American torture methods were taught and implemented in Taiwan as well. According to one American author: "At the time, I was researching a book on the United States' role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Tom Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator's files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture." He tells us the stories came not only from Iran, Greece and the Americas, but also from Taiwan. While other American and European agencies were hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the US intelligence community was smuggling them into America, unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The same was true with Japanese war criminals. Between 1945 and 1955 alone, more than 500 scientists and other specialists with Nazi ties were brought to the US, many because of their experience in torture and 'enhanced interrogation' methods. In 1963, the CIA had synthesized many of the findings from its MK-ULTRA psychological research program into what became known as the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook, which cited the MK-ULTRA studies, and other secret research programs as the scientific basis for their interrogation methods. Cameron regularly traveled around the U.S. teaching military personnel about his techniques (hooding of prisoners for sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, humiliation, etc.), and how they could be used in interrogations. Latin American paramilitary groups working for the CIA and U.S. military received training in these psychological techniques at places like the School of the Americas, and even today, many of the torture techniques developed in the MKULTRA studies and other programs are being used at U.S. military and CIA prisons such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In the aftermath of the Congressional hearings, major news media mainly focused on sensationalistic stories related to LSD, "mind-control", and "brainwashing", and rarely used the word "torture". But these CIA researchers were a rational group of men who had run torture laboratories and medical experiments in major U.S. universities, and who had tortured, raped, and psychologically abused young children, driving many of them permanently insane. Medical professionals gathered and collected data on the CIA’s use of torture techniques on detainees, in order to refine those techniques, and to "to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies", according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights. Sleep deprivation tests were performed on prisoners in 48-, 96- and 180-hour increments. Doctors also collected data intended to help them judge the emotional and physical impact of the techniques so as to "calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation" and to determine if using certain types of techniques would increase a subject's "susceptibility to severe pain.". The CIA denied the allegations, claiming they never performed any experiments on anybody. And of course, the CIA Director ordered all the records destroyed, so the whole truth can never now be known. But it continues unabated: In August 2010, the U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon announced that it had partnered with a jail in Castaic, California in order to use prisoners as test subjects for a new non-lethal weapon system that "fires an invisible heat beam capable of causing unbearable pain." Torture is now solidly installed in America’s repressive arsenal, not in the shadows where it has always lurked, but up front and central, vigorously applauded by prominent politicians. Covertly, there was always plenty of torture, just as there were assassinations, high and low. After World War Two the CIA’s predecessor, OSS, imported Nazi experts in interrogation techniques. US officials looked at Nazi human experimentation and in 1945, the US Navy recruited Dr Kurt Plotner, who had supervised human experimentation at the Dachau concentration camp, to continue his interrogation "research". The military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) embarked on a quest to find sharper tools to break down prisoners and extract confessions. The US military quickly found it was not exotic potions that worked. It is rather that if you put someone in a room, strip them naked and don’t give them food for a week or two, they will be willing to confess to anything. The military found that after 12 hours participants became susceptible to suggestion. The US military then aunched its Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (Sere) programme – supposedly designed to inoculate soldiers against the stress of torture. Starting in 1953, students in Sere were hooded, nearly drowned, positioned into painful and sexually explicit positions, subjected to abuse focusing on their race and religion, and held in solitary confinement for days at a time. The methods centred on self-inflicted pain, sensory deprivation and humiliation to render victims delirious, dependent and highly suggestible. Training camps were opened around the world – in South Korea in 1953 and in Britain in 1954. While the US military tortured its own soldiers, the CIA embarked on a programme to discover powerful drugs to control the body and mind, mostly using LSD. After these programmes failed miserably, the agency turned to the techniques used by the military. According to the CIA’s 1963 Kubark counter-intelligence interrogation training manual, techniques "succeed even with highly resistant sources [by] inducing regression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance". From the late 1950s, the CIA and US military exported their torture methods to US allies in south east Asia and importantly Latin America via counter-insurgency training programmes. Torture techniques were deployed in the Vietnam War in the form of the Phoenix programme, which aimed to "root out the Communist infrastructure in Vietnam". It was a CIA creation. Making a pyramid of naked people is not authorised explicitly – but enforced nakedness and ritualising humiliation is. Sleep deprivation is authorised by the commanding generals as is the use of dogs against Muslims. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 legalised these methods of torture for use by the CIA in secret prisons. Today hypothermia, forced standing, sleep deprivation and simulated drowning are legal tools in the interrogator’s toolbox. Since 2001, more than 800 allegations of abuse have surfaced and at least 34 US-held prisoners have been murdered while in custody. Sleep deprivation and forced standing inflict enormous damage. Although it sounds innocuous, sleep deprivation is one of the cruellest forms of torture. Waterboarding, a form of mock execution, cruelly fuses both the mental and physical. In fact, these people are in "torture labs", as the new US 'black' installation in Indonesia which pretends to be a "freedom medical facility". Just as the US was obscenely eager to get to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the H-Bombs were dropped, to 'examine and catalog' the results of their new monstrosity, so the US is still obscenely eager to test, examine and catalog the results of their new torture methods. The American liberal conscience began to make its accommodation with torture in June, 1977, which was the month the London Sunday Times published a major expose of torture of Palestinians by the Israeli armed forces and the security agency, Shin Bet. Suddenly American supporters of Israel were arguing that certain techniques – sensory deprivation, prolonged stress positions while hooded, incarceration in "cells" the size of packing crates, etc – somehow weren’t really torture, or were morally justifiable torture under "ticking time bomb" theory. Ahead lay the repellent spectacle of Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, and a supposed liberal defender of civil rights, recommending to Israel the notion of "torture warrants". The targets of the warrants being "subjected to judicially monitored physical measures designed to cause excruciating pain without leaving any lasting damage." One form of torture recommended by the Harvard professor was "the sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails." On the home front torture as a drastic mode of social control flowered luxuriantly in the America’s prison system, whose population began to rocket up in the 1970s to its present 2.5 million total. Sanctioned male rape goes hand in hand with increasingly sadistic solitary confinement with prolonged sensory deprivation – a condition in which some 25,000 prisoners are currently being driven mad. Return to Index U.S. has a 45-year history of torture - LA Times. US Way of Torture. US Torture. The abuse of prisoners The US in Iraq: A worse record than Saddam's. These "Men of War" are so morally deformed that anything is possible The Shaming of America. Details Exposed of the Brutality of the US War in Iraq. Humiliate, strip, threaten. Military interrogation manuals discovered How the CIA protected Nazi murderers. Records: U.S. Protected Nazi Gestapo Agents. The CIA and Nazi War Criminals. | |||||||||||
