(Cross-posted at my blog)
Well holy shit. Just last week Cheney was talking about how torture 'works' and how he wants memos released that prove it works. President Obama was wrong to selectively release memos, he said, when there are memos out there that prove torture is effective.
So what brought on this change? I mean really. He seemed so convinced it works and is necessary. He was practically ready to list specific catastrophic events that were prevented by torture. He seemed so well-versed in recent intelligence matters.
I'm pretty surprised.
Oh... it was 1992. Oops.
Torture manuals from the '60s were reused by the Reagan administration, after being (PDF) halted during the Carter administration because of human rights abuses, and Cheney, as Defense Secretary in the Bush 1 adminstration, upon the discovery of the manuals asked for an investigation. He received a report saying that the manuals contain embarrassing material that could undermine US credibility.
Cheney agreed and ordered all the manuals destroyed. A later report admitted that the all the manuals were not destroyed.
They contained such ideas as
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."
School of the Americas Watch has more:
The research ranged from using electric shock, to giving LSD to unsuspecting subjects, to employing sensory deprivation. It was the latter experiments that bore fruit, he said, producing a revolutionary new psychological torture paradigm that was superior to various physical methods that had been used for 2,000 years, from ancient Rome?s hot irons to the medieval rack and wheel.
?People will say anything to stop pain,? McCoy said. ?The information extracted is inherently unreliable. And that?s the problem the CIA solved with these psychological methods.?
The basic techniques -- the use of stress positions, sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation -- are aimed at making victims feel responsible for their own pain and suffering. But McCoy added that while it appears less abusive than physical torture, the psychological torture paradigm causes deep psychological damage to both victims and their interrogators, who can become capable of unspeakable physical cruelties.
The results of the CIA torture experiments were codified in 1963 in a secret manual known as ?KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation.? Four years later, the CIA was operating some 40 interrogation centers in Vietnam as part of its Phoenix Program, McCoy said. Eventually the CIA?s psychological methods were spread worldwide through the U.S. Agency for International Development?s Public Safety program and U.S. Army Mobile Training Teams.
When an investigation was done, Cheney made sure to hide it, using the state secret privilege.
A 1992 Pentagon investigation, whose findings were kept a secret of state under then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, said the six manuals ?evolved from lesson plans used in an intelligence course at [the School of the Americas]. They were based, in part, on old material dating back to the 1960s from the Army?s Foreign Intelligence Assistance program, titled ?Project X.? This material had been retained in the files of the Army intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.
In 1996, the report was released.
On September 30, 1996, Secretary White asked the DoD Inspector General to review a March 10, 1992 report by the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight and supporting material. This action was taken because of questions raised by the use of objectionable training materials in the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility and in the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga. The Inspector General determined that the March 10 report was adequate for concluding that no deliberate and orchestrated attempt was made to violate Department of Defense or U.S. Army policies, that the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight decision not to pursue the issue of individual responsibility was justified, and that further investigation to assess individual responsibility was not required.
The Inspector General investigation concludes that the Department acted appropriately in 1992 to stop the use of improper materials in training foreign military officers, Secretary White said. Secretary Cohen and I are committed to doing everything we can to prevent such mistakes from happening again.
Mistakes were made. We will do everything we can to make sure mistakes aren't made but we will not try to find out why mistakes were made. Just know they were made.
Hey I've heard that excuse before!
I'll let you stop and catch your breath from all the shock.
The manual first advises that a suspect?s clothes should be taken. It later notes, ?In the simple torture situation the contest is one between the individual and his tormenter. 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 manual lists the principal coercive techniques of interrogation as ?deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis [use of drugs] and induced regression.?
The response to coercion, it says, typically contains ?at least three important elements: debility, dependency and dread.?
?Disrupting normal time patterns like sleep and food? can cause disorientation, fear, helplessness and regression. ?Deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject?s mind of contact with an outer world,? noting that inducing regression will dissolve resistance and create dependence.
?Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light ... which is soundproofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc. An environment still more subject to control, such as water tank or iron lung, is even more effective.
Remember the recent report of Zubaydah, who was placed in a small, dark, enclosed space with insects, because he was afraid of them? The Bybee memo:
You [the CIA] would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us [the Department of Justice] that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him. You would, however, place a harmless insect in the box. You have orally informed us that you would in fact place a harmless insect such as a caterpillar in the box with him.
This has been used before:
"If a person did not like cockroaches, then that person might be more cooperative if there were cockroaches running around the room," Caballero said.
These manuals were released in the '90s through a FOIA request from the Baltimore Sun in connection with a story they were doing about atrocities in Honduras by a CIA trained battalion, while, incidentally, John Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras.
These atrocities consisted of torture and murder:
Atrocities committed by Honduran death squads were reported by James LeMoyne, former El Salvador bureau chief for The New York Times, on June 5, 1988. In his article, LeMoyne told the story of Florencio Caballero, a self-confessed interrogator in a Honduran army death squad. Caballero says he was trained in Texas by the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to Caballero, who sought exile in Canada, he and 24 others were taken to Texas between 1979 and 1980 to be trained by the army and the CIA. Caballero says that, in Texas, the Americans taught
"interrogation in order to end physical torture in Honduras. They taught us psychological methods - to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don't let him sleep, keep him naked and isolation, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature."
It gets even more sick:
Caballero told LeMoyne about the torture of 24 year old Ines Murillo in 1983, which LeMoyne was able to confirm. Murillo was a prisoner in a secret army jail in Honduras, and Caballero interrogated her and watched her get tortured. For 80 days, Murillo was beaten, electrically shocked, burned, starved, exposed, threatened, stripped naked, and sexually molested. To keep her from sleeping, her captors poured water on her head every ten minutes.
The guy who helped fund OBL through the CIA, as well as coming up with Iran Contra:
The House Intelligence Committee held hearings on its disclosure, and high level officials spoke out strongly against the document, and called for the resignation of William Casey, then-Director of the CIA. The ultimate outcome, however, was nothing dramatic or decisive. A few American officials got a slap on the wrist.
Throughout all of this, various government agencies kept releasing statements that it is not the policy of the United States to torture. The manuals were supposedly not designed to teach anyone to torture, America doesn't do that!
In later copies of the manuals, they added a cover sheet that said something like, don't use this info to torture.
I'm sure that cover sheet saved lots of lives.
Some CIA agents did not like that the CIA was using their intelligence to support right-wing dictators who were murdering a lot of people, so they wrote books and helped expose the things the CIA was doing in our name.
In response to that, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was passed, supported by Bush. George H. W. anyway.
George H.W. Bush called the agent a traitor to the American people. Barbara Bush wrote that the agent was responsible for the murder of another one, and was sued and lost.
Recently, after the outing of Valerie Plame, there was talk of making the act broader and turning it into more of a "state secrets" act, which would have turned the purpose of the act on its head and protected these kinds of activities.
We were told that Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples who got bored and decided to torture people. Now we know it was a lot more than that. People TAUGHT this treatment and others acted it out.
A week after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, General Geoffrey Miller, U.S. prison commander in Iraq (and formerly in Guantanamo), 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."
The higher-ups were saying over and over and over again that it was just a few troops acting on their own.
In July, the Army's Inspector General Paul T. Mikolashek delivered his report blaming 94 incidents of "abuse" on "an individual failure to uphold Army Values."
Why do they hate the US military so much that they'd use them as scapegoats?
This has all happened before... over and over...
For all the hooha over the horror of U.S. treatment of Iraqi prisoners, the fact is such torture has been the rule, not the exception. Indeed, this scandal features a cast of characters who were in power the last time the U.S. sanctioned torture.
Take Donald Rumsfeld. In 1983, he didn’t let a few gassed Kurds get in the way of maintaining good relations with Saddam Hussein. Seymour Hersh convincingly reports in the New Yorker that Rumsfeld authorized expanding the "black" program used to interrogate Taliban "enemy combatants" in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib’s "prisoners of war" in Iraq.
And who could forget John Negroponte? Between 1981 and 1985, he was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. As ambassador, Negroponte filed reports with the State Department that gave the impression that the Honduran military supported human rights. At the same time, he was overseeing the construction of El Aguacate airbase, which was used as a U.S. training camp for the Nicaraguan Contras and as a torture center for Battalion 316, a Honduran army intelligence unit. The Baltimore Sun reported in 1995 that Battalion 316, which was trained and supported by the CIA, used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In August 2001, a mass grave was unearthed at El Aguacate containing 185 corpses, including two Americans.
Cheney WAS right, torture does undermine US credibility.
The Bush administration would like you to believe that because we live in a post-9/11 world, everything has changed and we need a bigger military and Cold War defense systems and pre-emptive attacks.
The only problem is, they've been saying this for decades:
Gen. Colin L. Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to the scenario study in remarks to reporters on Feb. 4, but provided few details about them. He said the scenarios did not refer to specific countries as potential adversaries for planning purposes, but the documents indicate otherwise.
A Feb. 4 memorandum accompanying the scenarios instructed the secretaries of the military departments in the Pentagon that "these draft scenarios should be used" in the preparation of each service's spending plans for the 1994-1999 budget years. The memorandum was sent by David S. C. Chu, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Program Analysis and Evaluation, acting on behalf of Defense Secretary Cheney.
The scenarios, usually included in a document known as the defense planning guidance, were issued separately this year because the formal guidance document is months behind schedule due to rapidly unfolding events in the former Soviet Union. These scenarios are expected to be incorporated in the guidance document when it is completed next month. Logistic Ability
General Powell, in his remarks on Feb. 4, said the scenarios "helped us size the force and also more importantly, size the power projection capability" needed to move troops, tanks and artillery on transport aircraft and cargo ships to distant potential war zones.
There are documents which talk about "disarming capabilities," (PDF) similar to pre-emptive war.
And if you think a quaint little thing called "other branches of government" would have prevented war, well, you'd be wrong. Cheney, who has argued for unitary executive powers since at least the '70s, says that Bush I should not have even asked Congress for an authorization for the frst Gulf War, and that if they didn't grant it, he would've told the president, basically, fuck the American people. We're doing this.
Q: The Congressional vote. Do you recall discussing with the President what he would have done if he'd lost the votes.
Cheney: It was my view at the time [that] we were absolutely committed to getting Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait one way or the other, no matter what we had to do. We had to have the Saudis as allies in that venture, but if no-one else had been with us if it had just been the United States and Saudi Arabia, without the United Nations, without the authorisation of the Congress, we were prepared to go ahead. I argued in public session before the Congress that we did not need Congressional authorisation. That in fact we had the Truman precedent from the Korean crisis of 1950 that the Senate and all ratified the United Nations charter. By this time the UN Security Council had authorised the use of force back in November saying that we could do it by January 15th if he wasn't out by then and that legally and from a constitutional stand point we had all the authority we needed.
I was not enthusiastic about going to Congress to ask for an additional grant of authority. I was concerned that they might well vote NO and that would make life more difficult for us, or that even if they voted YES and then we had a disaster on our hands and it didn't work they'd still be against us. The President to his great credit felt very strongly that he wanted the Congress on board and he felt we could get them on board and he was correct. We went to work on them and had that vote and in fact prevailed. I think having had the Congress vote ultimately was a major plus.
Q: But if you'd lost the vote ...?
Cheney: If we'd lost the vote in Congress, I would certainly have recommended to the President we go forward anyway. Again, as I say, you don't go back having deployed forces over there and decided it was of strategically vital interest. The worst thing you could do in terms of the situation in that part of the world once you've got 500,000 troops out there in the desert is you can't leave them there indefinitely, you cannot sustain that kind of deployment over time. Then you're in real trouble if you decide you're gonna bring them home...
All these policies: torture, unitary executive, ignoring Congress, ignoring the courts, most of these are not new and especially needed because it's post 9/11. I mean, the only things that are missing from an authoritarian presidency is their support for ignoring FISA courts back then, and for putting activist judges in the courts. If it weren't for those two things being new, we would have been under a dictator.
"We strongly believe it is unwise for the president to concede any lack of constitutional power to authorize electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes," wrote Robert Ingersoll, then-deputy secretary of state, in a 1976 memorandum to President Ford about the proposed bill on electronic surveillance (FISA courts).
George H.W. Bush, then director of the CIA, wanted to ensure "no unnecessary diminution of collection of important foreign intelligence" under the proposal to require judges to approve terror wiretaps, according to a March 1976 memorandum he wrote to the Justice Department. Bush also complained that some major communications companies were unwilling to install government wiretaps without a judge's approval. Such a refusal "seriously affects the capabilities of the intelligence community," Bush wrote.
In another document, Jack Marsh, a White House adviser, outlined options for Ford over the wiretap legislation. Marsh alerted Ford to objections by Bush as CIA director and by Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft over the scope of a provision to require judicial oversight of wiretaps. At the time, Rumsfeld was defense secretary, Kissinger was secretary of state and Scowcroft was the White House national security adviser.
[...]
Notes from a 1975 meeting between Cheney, then White House chief of staff, then-Attorney General Edward Levi and others cite the "problem" of a New York Times article by Seymour Hersh about U.S. submarines spying inside Soviet waters. Participants considered a formal FBI investigation of Hersh and the Times and searching Hersh's apartment "to go after (his) papers," the document said.
Oh... well shit.
The changes the Bush administration so desperately fought for and won were changes those same people have wanted for decades. They just used 9/11 as an excuse. They just want the president to have sole power.
Well at least they don't have a plan to take all our courts yet.
WASHINGTON -- Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens. Intimidated by terrorists and inflamed by a passion for rough justice, we are letting George W. Bush get away with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts.
Oh. In 2001, too.
And if you think that legacy is over, no. Bush's chosen judges are lifetime appointments, so consider the courts owned for awhile:
The new president ejected the American Bar Association from the screening process, ending its half-century role of reviewing candidates' credentials before a nomination. Bush turned to lawyers who had been on Ronald Reagan's judicial selection team to help seek out prominent conservative thinkers.
Authoritarian legal opinions crafted by sick, murderous torturers? Check.
Disregarding the Congress on the off-chance that they can't be bullied into doing everything he wanted anyway? Check.
Systematically removing power from every single branch of government and giving it to the executive branch? Check.
All of this was done using the tragedy of 9/11 as impetus.
Motherfuckers.