The use of torture by the United States as policy is repellent and goes against treaties the U.S. has signed. However, the truth is
torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanemo prisons is not something new.
The U.S. has been practicing torture in interrogations for decades. Both Democrats and Republicans (like McCain) know that, or should know that, but choose not to discuss it.
The information herein should be read and broadcast widely. If otherwise well-informed people think that torture will go away with the defeat of BushCo and the neo-cons (should that even occur), then they are mistaken.
I am asking, for maybe the second time since I have been on Daily Kos, for recommendations. The information herein has been posted by others a total of 4 times in the past 2 years, garnering a total of 20 recommendations: of course, hardly anyone saw this material. If you wish to refer to the latter diaries, please look here, here, here, and here. I particularly recommend the last diary, by populistparty. -- Also see activist links at end of diary.
For the rest, read on...
The website at
The National Security Archive released the following almost two years ago. The seriousness of the truth behind these records has still not penetrated the political consciousness of most Americans.
Washington D.C. May 12, 2004: CIA interrogation manuals written in the 1960s and 1980s described "coercive techniques" such as those used to mistreat detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to the declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The Archive also posted a secret 1992 report written for then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney [PDF file] warning that U.S. Army intelligence manuals that incorporated the earlier work of the CIA for training Latin American military officers in interrogation and counterintelligence techniques contained "offensive and objectionable material" that "undermines U.S. credibility, and could result in significant embarrassment."
The two CIA manuals, "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual-1983" [see PDF files for Parts One and Two] and "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation-July 1963," were originally obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Baltimore Sun in 1997. The KUBARK manual includes a detailed section on "The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources," with concrete assessments on employing "Threats and Fear," "Pain," and "Debility." The language of the 1983 "Exploitation" manual drew heavily on the language of the earlier manual, as well as on Army Intelligence field manuals from the mid 1960s generated by "Project X"-a military effort to create training guides drawn from counterinsurgency experience in Vietnam. Recommendations on prisoner interrogation included the threat of violence and deprivation and noted that no threat should be made unless the questioner "has approval to carry out the threat." The interrogator "is able to manipulate the subject's environment," the 1983 manual states, "to create unpleasant or intolerable situations, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception."
Since the 1983 manual relies so heavily on the KUBARK manual of two decades earlier, I will concentrate on the latter. Zeroing in on the 1963 document strengthens my main point: that torture is not a new policy of the U.S. government.
The 1992 document deserves a brief look, however. In it, Werner Michel, an assistant to Cheney, is trying to clean up a situation in which U.S. Army Intelligence rules of interrogation made its way into manuals used to train Latin American military and intelligence personnel. It should be strongly noted that the worry is NOT over HOW the U.S. uses torture, but that that the fact it does will be discovered through its release in foreign manuals.
From the 1992 memo, marked "Secret" [note, this is a PDF file]:
An Army review, dated 21 February 1992, conducted at our request... concluded that five of the seven manuals contained language and statements in violation of legal, regulatory or policy prohibitions.... To illustrate, the manual Handling of Sources... refers to motivation by fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum....
It is incredible that the use of the lesson plans since 1982, and the manuals since 1987, evaded the established system of doctrinal controls.
Now, to the KUBARK document. The following is from Wikipedia:
KUBARK was a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency cryptonym for the CIA itself.
The cryptonym KUBARK appears in the title of a 1963 CIA document, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, which describes interrogation techniques, including, among other things, "coercive counterintelligence interrogation of resistant sources", that is, torture techniques.
Sections of these manuals were used to create a later CIA document, Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual - 1983.
After Congress began investigating reports of Central American atrocities in the mid 1980s, particularly in Honduras, the CIA's "Human Resource Exploitation" manual was hand edited to alter passages that appeared to advocate coercion and stress techniques to be used on prisoners. CIA officials attached a new prologue page on the manual stating:
"The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults or exposure to inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation is prohibited by law, both international and domestic; it is neither authorized nor condoned".
One section states:
"Interrogations conducted under compulsion or duress are especially likely to involve illegality. . . . Therefore, prior approval at the higher level must be obtained for the interrogation of any source against his will under any of the following circumstances: If bodily harm is inflicted; if medical, chemical or electric methods or materials are used to induce acquiescence."
OK... so what's in this manual? Here's some relevant quotes. And note, there will be some deletions, as the FOIA process did not allow for unredacted documents.
Interrogation: obtaining information by direct questioning of a person or persons under conditions which are either partly or fully controlled by the questioner or are believed by those questioned to be subject to his control. Because interviewing, debriefing, and eliciting are simpler methods of obtaining information from cooperative subjects, interrogation is usually reserved for sources who are suspect, resistant, or both....
Legal and Policy Considerations
The legislation which founded KUBARK specifically denied it any law-enforcement or police powers. Yet detention in a controlled environment and perhaps for a lengthy period is frequently essential to a successful counterintelligence interrogation of a recalcitrant source. [approx. three lines deleted] This necessity, obviously, should be determined as early as possible.
The legality of detaining and questioning a person, and of the methods employed,
[approx. 10 lines deleted]....
Interrogations conducted under compulsion or duress are especially likely to involve illegality and to entail damaging consequences for KUBARK. Therefore prior Headquarters approval at the KUDOVE [Office of the Director] level must be obtained for the interrogation of any source against his will and under any of the following circumstances:
1. If bodily harm is to be inflicted.
2. If medical, chemical, or electrical methods or materials are to be used to induce acquiescence.
3. [approx. 3 lines deleted]
A great deal of time is given over to psychological considerations of interrogation:
Types of Sources: Personality Categories
The number of systems devised for categorizing human beings is large, and most of them are of dubious validity. Various categorical schemes are outlined in treatises on interrogation. The two typologies most frequently advocated are psychologic-emotional and geographic-cultural. Those who urge the former argue that the basic emotional-psychological patterns do not vary significantly with time, place, or culture. The latter school maintains the existence of a national character and sub-national categories, and interrogation guides based on this principle recommend approaches tailored to geographical cultures.
It is plainly true that the interrogation source cannot be understood in a vacuum, isolated from social context. It is equally true that some of the most glaring blunders in interrogation (and other operational processes ) have resulted from ignoring the source's background. Moreover, emotional-psychological schematizations sometimes present atypical extremes rather than the kinds of people commonly encountered by interrogators. Such typologies also cause disagreement even among professional psychiatrists and psychologists....
The ideal solution would be to avoid all categorizing. Basically, all schemes for labelling people are wrong per se; applied arbitrarily, they always produce distortions. Every interrogator knows that a real understanding of the individual is worth far more than a thorough knowledge of this or that pigeon-hole to which he has been consigned. And for interrogation purposes the ways in which he differs from the abstract type may be more significant than the ways in which he conforms.
The manual goes on to label nine personality types of interrogatee, which you can go to the document to peruse if you wish. It is morbidly fascinating.
It is interesting to see that the interrogation is not haphazard:
The Interrogation Plan
Planning for interrogation is more important than the specifics of the plan. Because no two interrogations are alike, the interrogation cannot realistically be planned from A to Z, in all its particulars, at the outset. But it can and must be planned from A to F or A to M. The chances of failure in an unplanned CI interrogation are unacceptably high. Even worse, a "dash-on-regardless" approach can ruin the prospects of success even if sound methods are used later.
Given the spate of photos of tortured victims in Iraq, it's also fascinating to see that, even in 1963, photographing the victim was an integral part of the process:
The interrogation room affords ideal conditions for photographing the interrogatee without his knowledge by concealing a camera behind a picture or elsewhere.
Then, there's the psychology and demeanor of the professional torturer/interrogator:
Once questioning starts, the interrogator is called upon to function at two levels. He is trying to do two seemingly contradictory things at once: achieve rapport with the subject but remain an essentially detached observer. Or he may project himself to the resistant interrogatee as powerful and ominous (in order to eradicate resistance and create the necessary conditions for rapport) while remaining wholly uncommitted at the deeper level, noting the significance of the subjects reactions and the effectiveness of his own performance. Poor interrogators often confuse this bi-level functioning with role-playing, but there is a vital difference. The interrogator who merely pretends, in his surface performance, to feel a given emotion or to hold a given attitude toward the source is likely to be unconvincing; the source quickly senses the deception. Even children are very quick to feel this kind of pretense. To be persuasive, the sympathy or anger must be genuine; but to be useful, it must not interfere with the deeper level of precise, unaffected observation. Bi-level functioning is not difficult or even unusual; most people act at times as both performer and observer unless their emotions are so deeply involved in the situation that the critical faculty disintegrates. Through experience the interrogator becomes adept in this dualism. The interrogator who finds that he has become emotionally involved and is no longer capable of unimpaired objectivity should report the facts so that a substitution can be made.
Not all torture involves force. There are "non-coercive" methods, as well.
There are a number of non-coercive techniques for inducing regression. All depend upon the interrogator's control of the environment and, as always, a proper matching of method to source. Some interrogatees can be repressed by persistent manipulation of time, by retarding and advancing clocks and serving meals at odd times -- ten minutes or ten hours after the last food was given. Day and night are jumbled.
When all else fails, there is...
The Theory of Coercion
Coercive procedures are designed not only to exploit the resistant source's internal conflicts and induce him to wrestle with himself but also to bring a superior outside force to bear upon the subject's resistance. Non-coercive methods are not likely to succeed if their selection and use is not predicated upon an accurate psychological assessment of the source. In contrast, the same coercive method may succeed against persons who are very unlike each other. The changes of success rise steeply, nevertheless, if the coercive technique is matched to the source's personality. Individuals react differently even to such seemingly non-discriminatory stimuli as drugs. Moreover, it is a waste of time and energy to apply strong pressures on a hit-or-miss basis if a tap on the psychological jugular will produce compliance.
All coercive techniques are designed to induce regression. As Hinkle notes in "The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject as it Affects Brain Function"(7), the result of external pressures of sufficient intensity is the loss of those defenses most recently acquired by civilized man: "... the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to meet new, challenging, and complex situations, to deal with trying interpersonal relations, and to cope with repeated frustrations. Relatively small degrees of homeostatic derangement, fatigue, pain, sleep loss, or anxiety may impair these functions." As a result, "most people who are exposed to coercive procedures will talk and usually reveal some information that they might not have revealed otherwise."
Note, the last quote belies the general belief, as often reported in the press, that torture doesn't work. It DOES work... sometimes. It's just that the information isn't always reliable. However the Gestapo, for instance, used torture with some success during World War II. Also, as a psychologist, I have interviewed torture and interrogation survivors who were crushed with guilt because they DID give information under torture. This is the dirty secret of torture, and must be confronted if we are to banish the practice forever. Everything true must be confronted.
The belief that torture is ineffective is predicated by confusing the infliction of extreme pain with torture.
Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex "admissions" that take still longer to disprove. KUBARK is especially vulnerable to such tactics because the interrogation is conducted for the sake of information and not for police purposes.
If an interrogatee is caused to suffer pain rather late in the interrogation process and after other tactics have failed, he is almost certain to conclude that the interrogator is becoming desperate. He may then decide that if he can just hold out against this final assault, he will win the struggle and his freedom. And he is likely to be right. Interrogatees who have withstood pain are more difficult to handle by other methods. The effect has been not to repress the subject but to restore his confidence and maturity.
So, what's a CIA torturer to do?
It has been plausibly suggested that, whereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself. "In the simple torture situation the contest is one between the individual and his tormentor (.... and he can frequently endure). When the individual is told to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself. The motivational strength of the individual is likely to exhaust itself in this internal encounter.... As long as the subject remains standing, he is attributing to his captor the power to do something worse to him, but there is actually no showdown of the ability of the interrogator to do so."
And there are other options, as well.
Deprivation of Sensory Stimuli
The chief effect of arrest and detention, and particularly of solitary confinement, is to deprive the subject of many or most of the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations to which he has grown accustomed....
...a person cut off from external stimuli turns his awareness inward, upon himself, and then projects the contents of his own unconscious outwards, so that he endows his faceless environment with his own attributes, fears, and forgotten memories.
More.
Threats and Fear
The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain. In fact, most people underestimate their capacity to withstand pain. The same principle holds for other fears: sustained long enough, a strong fear of anything vague or unknown induces regression, whereas the materialization of the fear, the infliction of some form of punishment, is likely to come as a relief. The subject finds that he can hold out, and his resistances are strengthened. "In general, direct physical brutality creates only resentment, hostility, and further defiance"....
The threat of death has often been found to be worse than useless.... Many prisoners, in fact, have refused to yield in the face of such threats who have subsequently been 'broken' by other procedures." (3) The principal reason is that the ultimate threat is likely to induce sheer hopelessness if the interrogatee does not believe that it is a trick; he feels that he is as likely to be condemned after compliance as before. The threat of death is also ineffective when used against hard-headed types....
The document goes on to discuss the pros and cons of use of pain, hypnosis, use of drugs (not too effective, according to the CIA, who spent years working at this idea in what was known as MK-ULTRA, a CIA mind-control research program), and induction of debility. Regarding the latter, KUBARK has this to say:
The available evidence suggests that resistance is sapped principally by psychological rather than physical pressures. The threat of debility - for example, a brief deprivation of food - may induce much more anxiety than prolonged hunger, which will result after a while in apathy and, perhaps, eventual delusions or hallucinations. In brief, it appears probable that the techniques of inducing debility become counter-productive at an early stage. The discomfort, tension, and restless search for an avenue of escape are followed by withdrawal symptoms, a turning away from external stimuli, and a sluggish unresponsiveness.
Another objection to the deliberate inducing of debility is that prolonged exertion, loss of sleep, etc., themselves become patterns to which the subject adjusts through apathy. The interrogator should use his power over the resistant subject's physical environment to disrupt patterns of response, not to create them. Meals and sleep granted irregularly, in more than abundance or less than adequacy, the shifts occuring on no discernible time pattern, will normally disorient an interrogatee and sap his will to resist more effectively than a sustained deprivation leading to debility.
There is much, much more in the documents I have described. I have given a lot for any diary, and taxed, no doubt, the abilities of the reader to withstand usual diary attention. I hope you will bookmark this page as a reference.
And, then, take political action:
World Organisation Against Torture
Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch
Survivors International