The Hidden History of CIA Torture:
America's Road to Abu Ghraib
By Alfred W. McCoy
TomDispath.com
Thursday 09 September 2004
From ancient Rome's red-hot irons and
lacerating hooks to medieval Europe's thumbscrews, rack, and wheel,
for over 2,000 years anyone interrogated in a court of law could
expect to suffer unspeakable tortures. For the last 200 years,
humanist intellectuals from Voltaire to members of Amnesty
International have led a sustained campaign against the horrors of
state-sponsored cruelty, culminating in the United Nation's 1985
Convention Against Torture, ratified by the Clinton administration
in 1994.
Then came 9/11. When the Twin Towers
collapsed killing thousands, influential "pro-pain
pundits" promptly repudiated those Enlightenment ideals and
began publicly discussing whether torture might be an appropriate,
even necessary weapon in George Bush's war on terror. The most
persuasive among them, Harvard academic Alan M. Dershowitz,
advocated giving courts the right to issue "torture
warrants," ensuring that needed information could be prized
from unwilling Arab subjects with steel needles.
Despite torture's appeal as a
"lesser evil," a necessary expedient in dangerous times,
those who favor it ignore its recent, problematic history in
America. They also seem ignorant of a perverse pathology that allows
the practice of torture, once begun, to spread uncontrollably in
crisis situations, destroying the legitimacy of the perpetrator
nation. As past perpetrators could have told today's pundits,
torture plumbs the recesses of human consciousness, unleashing an
unfathomable capacity for cruelty as well as seductive illusions of
potency. Even as pundits and professors fantasized about
"limited, surgical torture," the Bush administration,
following the President's orders to "kick some ass," was
testing and disproving their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal
interrogation that spread quickly from use against a few "high
target value" Al Qaeda suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans
and then hundreds of innocent Iraqis.
As we learned from France's battle for
Algiers in the 1950s, Argentina's dirty war in the 1970s, and
Britain's Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970s, a nation that
harbors torture in defiance of its democratic principles pays a
terrible price. Its officials must spin an ever more complex web of
lies that, in the end, weakens the bonds of trust that are the sine
qua non of any modern society. Most surprisingly, our own pro-pain
pundits seemed, in those heady early days of the war on terror,
unaware of a fifty-year history of torture by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), nor were they aware that their
enthusiastic proposals gave cover to those in the Bush
Administration intent on reactivating a ruthless apparatus.
Torture's Perverse Pathology
In April 2004, the American public was
stunned by televised photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison
showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions,
and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while U.S. soldiers stood by
smiling. As the scandal grabbed headlines around the globe,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly assured Congress that
the abuses were "perpetrated by a small number of U.S.
military," whom New York Times columnist William Safire soon
branded "creeps."
These photos, however, are snapshots not
of simple brutality or even evidence of a breakdown in
"military discipline." What they record are CIA torture
techniques that have metastasized like an undetected cancer inside
the U.S. intelligence community over the past half century. A survey
of this history shows that the CIA was, in fact, the lead agency at
Abu Ghraib, enlisting Army intelligence to support its mission.
These photographs from Iraq also illustrate standard interrogation
procedures inside the gulag of secret CIA prisons that have operated
globally, on executive authority, since the start of the President's
war on terror.
Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib
scandal is the product of a deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward
torture since the start of the Cold War. At the UN and other
international forums, Washington has long officially opposed torture
and advocated a universal standard for human rights. Simultaneously,
the CIA has propagated ingenious new torture techniques in
contravention of these same international conventions, a number of
which the U.S. has ratified. In battling communism, the United
States adopted some of its most objectionable practices - subversion
abroad, repression at home, and most significantly torture itself.
From 1950 to 1962, the CIA conducted
massive, secret research into coercion and the malleability of human
consciousness which, by the late fifties, was costing a billion
dollars a year. Many Americans have heard about the most outlandish
and least successful aspect of this research - the testing of LSD on
unsuspecting subjects. While these CIA drug experiments led nowhere
and the testing of electric shock as a technique led only to
lawsuits, research into sensory deprivation proved fruitful indeed.
In fact, this research produced a new psychological rather than
physical method of torture, perhaps best described as
"no-touch" torture.
The Agency's discovery was a
counterintuitive breakthrough, the first real revolution in this
cruel science since the seventeenth century - and thanks to recent
revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, we are now all too
familiar with these methods, even if many Americans still have no
idea of their history. Upon careful examination, those photographs
of nude bodies expose the CIA's most basic torture techniques -
stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation.
For over 2,000 years, from ancient Athens
through the Inquisition, interrogators found that the infliction of
physical pain often produced heightened resistance or unreliable
information - the strong defied pain while the weak blurted out
whatever was necessary to stop it. By contrast, the CIA's
psychological torture paradigm used two new methods, sensory
disorientation and "self-inflicted pain," both of which
were aimed at causing victims to feel responsible for their own
suffering and so to capitulate more readily to their torturers. A
week after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, General Geoffrey Miller,
U.S. prison commander in Iraq (and formerly in Guantánamo),
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."
Under field conditions since the start of
the Afghan War, Agency and allied interrogators have often added to
their no-touch repertoire physical methods reminiscent of the
Inquisition's trademark tortures - strappado, question de l'eau,
"crippling stork," and "masks of mockery." At
the CIA's center near Kabul in 2002, for instance, American
interrogators forced prisoners "to stand with their hands
chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled," an effect
similar to the strappado. Instead of the Inquisition's iron-framed
"crippling stork" to contort the victim's body, CIA
interrogators made their victims assume similar "stress
positions" without any external mechanism, aiming again for the
psychological effect of self-induced pain
Although seemingly less brutal than
physical methods, the CIA's "no touch" torture actually
leaves deep, searing psychological scars on both victims and -
something seldom noted - their interrogators. Victims often need
long treatment to recover from a trauma many experts consider more
crippling than physical pain. Perpetrators can suffer a dangerous
expansion of ego, leading to escalating acts of cruelty and lasting
emotional disorders. When applied in actual operations, the CIA's
psychological procedures have frequently led to unimaginable
cruelties, physical and sexual, by individual perpetrators whose
improvisations are often horrific and only occasionally effective.
Just as interrogators are often seduced
by a dark, empowering sense of dominance over victims, so their
superiors, even at the highest level, can succumb to fantasies of
torture as an all-powerful weapon. Our contemporary view of torture
as aberrant and its perpetrators as abhorrent ignores both its
pervasiveness as a Western practice for two millennia and its
perverse appeal. Once torture begins, its perpetrators, plunging
into uncharted recesses of consciousness, are often swept away by
dark reveries, by frenzies of power and potency, mastery and control
- particularly in times of crisis. "When feelings of insecurity
develop within those holding power," reads one CIA analysis of
the Soviet state applicable to post-9/11 America, "they become
increasingly suspicious and put great pressures on the secret police
to obtain arrests and confessions. At such times police officials
are inclined to condone anything which produces a speedy
'confession' and brutality may become widespread."
Enraptured by this illusory power, modern
states that sanction torture usually allow it to spread
uncontrollably. By 1967, just four years after compiling a torture
manual for use against a few top Soviet targets, the CIA was
operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam as part of
its Phoenix Program that killed over 20,000 Viet Cong suspects. In
the centers themselves, countless thousands were tortured for
information that led to these assassinations. Similarly, just a few
months after CIA interrogators first tortured top Al Qaeda suspects
at Kabul in 2002, its agents were involved in the brutal
interrogation of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners. As its most troubling
legacy, the CIA's psychological method, with its legitimating
scientific patina and its avoidance of obvious physical brutality,
has provided a pretext for the preservation of torture as an
acceptable practice within the U.S. intelligence community.
Once adopted, torture offers such a
powerful illusion of efficient information extraction that its
perpetrators, high and low, remain wedded to its use. They regularly
refuse to recognize its limited utility and high political cost. At
least twice during the Cold War, the CIA's torture training
contributed to the destabilization of two key American allies,
Iran's Shah and the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos. Yet even after
their spectacular falls, the Agency remained blind to the way its
torture training was destroying the allies it was designed to
defend.
CIA Torture Research
The CIA's torture experimentation of the
1950s and early 1960s was codified in 1963 in a succinct, secret
instructional booklet on torture - the "KUBARK
Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual, which would become
the basis for a new method of torture disseminated globally over the
next three decades. These techniques were first spread through the
U.S. Agency for International Development's Public Safety program to
train police forces in Asia and Latin America as the front line of
defense against communists and other revolutionaries. After an angry
Congress abolished the Public Safety program in 1975, the CIA worked
through U.S. Army Mobile Training Teams to instruct military
interrogators, mainly in Central America.
At the Cold War's end, Washington resumed
its advocacy of universal principles, denouncing regimes for
torture, participating in the World Conference on Human Rights at
Vienna in 1993 and, a year later, ratifying the UN Convention
Against Torture. On the surface, the United States had resolved the
tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture
practices. Yet even when Congress finally ratified this UN
convention it did so with intricately-constructed reservations that
cleverly exempted the CIA's psychological torture method. While
other covert agencies synonymous with Cold War repression such as
Romania's Securitate, East Germany's Stasi, and the Soviet Union's
KGB have disappeared, the CIA survives - its archives sealed, its
officers decorated, and its Cold War crimes forgotten. By failing to
repudiate the Agency's propagation of torture, while adopting a UN
convention that condemned its practice, the United States left this
contradiction buried like a political land mine ready to detonate
with such phenomenal force in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Memory and Forgetting
Today the American public has only a vague
understanding of these CIA excesses and the scale of its massive
mind-control project. Yet almost every adult American carries
fragmentary memories of this past - of LSD experiments, the CIA's
Phoenix program in Vietnam, the murder of a kidnapped American
police adviser in Montevideo who was teaching CIA techniques to the
Uruguayan police, and of course the Abu Ghraib photographs. But few
are able to fit these fragments together and so grasp the larger
picture. There is, in sum, an ignorance, a studied avoidance of a
deeply troubling topic, akin to that which shrouds this subject in
post-authoritarian societies.
With the controversy over Abu Ghraib,
incidents that once seemed but fragments should now be coming
together to form a mosaic of a clandestine agency manipulating its
government and deceiving its citizens to probe the cruel underside
of human consciousness, and then propagating its discoveries
throughout the Third World.
Strong democracies have difficulty
dealing with torture. In the months following the release of the Abu
Ghraib photos, the United States moved quickly through the same
stages (as defined by author John Conroy) that the United Kingdom
experienced after revelations of British army torture in Northern
Ireland in the early 1970s - first, minimizing the torture with
euphemisms such as "interrogation in depth"; next,
justifying it on grounds that it was necessary or effective; and
finally, attempting to bury the issue by blaming "a few bad
apples."
Indeed, since last April, the Bush
administration and much of the media have studiously avoided the
word "torture" and instead blamed our own bad apples,
those seven Military Police. 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." Although the New York Times called his conclusions
"comical," the general's views seem to resonate with an
emerging conservative consensus. "Interrogation is not a
Sunday-school class," said Republican Senator Trent Lott.
"You don't get information that will save American lives by
withholding pancakes." In June, an ABC News/Washington Post
poll found that 35% of Americans felt torture was acceptable in some
circumstances.
In August, Major General George R. Fay
released his report on the role of Military Intelligence at Abu
Ghraib. Its stunning revelations about the reasons for this torture
were, however, obscured in opaque military prose. After interviewing
170 personnel and reviewing 9,000 documents, the general intimated
that this abuse was the product of an interrogation policy shaped,
in both design and application, by the CIA.
Significantly, General Fay blamed not the
"seven bad apples," but the Abu Ghraib interrogation
procedures themselves. Of the 44 verifiable incidents of abuse,
one-third occurred during actual interrogation. Moreover, these
"routine" interrogation procedures "contributed to an
escalating 'de-humanization' of the detainees and set the stage for
additional and severe abuses to occur."
After finding standard Army interrogation
doctrine sound, General Fay was forced to confront a single,
central, uncomfortable question: what was the source of the
aberrant, "non-doctrinal" practices that led to torture
during interrogation at Abu Ghraib? Scattered throughout his report
are the dots, politely unconnected, that lead from the White House
to the Iraqi prison cell block: President Bush gave his defense
secretary broad powers over prisoners in November 2001; Secretary
Rumsfeld authorized harsh "Counter-Resistance Techniques"
for Afghanistan and Guantanamo in December 2002; hardened Military
Intelligence units brought these methods to Iraq in July 2003; and
General Ricardo Sanchez in Baghdad authorized these extreme measures
for Abu Ghraib in September 2003.
In its short answer to this uncomfortable
question, General Fay's report, when read closely, traced the source
of these harsh "non-doctrinal methods" at Abu Ghraib to
the CIA. He charged that a flouting of military procedures by CIA
interrogators "eroded the necessity in the minds of soldiers
and civilians for them to follow Army rules." Specifically, the
Army "allowed CIA to house 'Ghost Detainees' who were
unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib," thus
encouraging violations of "reporting requirements under the
Geneva Conventions." Moreover, the interrogation of CIA
detainees "occurred under different practices and procedures
which were absent any DoD visibility, control, or oversight and
created a perception that OGA [CIA] techniques and practices were
suitable and authorized for DoD operations." With their
exemption from military regulations, CIA interrogators moved about
Abu Ghraib with a corrupting "mystique" and extreme
methods that "fascinated" some Army interrogators. In sum,
General Fay seems to say that the CIA has compromised the integrity
and effectiveness of the U.S. military.
Had he gone further, General Fay might
have mentioned that the 519th Military Intelligence, the Army unit
that set interrogation guidelines for Abu Ghraib, had just come from
Kabul where it worked closely with the CIA, learning torture
techniques that left at least one Afghani prisoner dead. Had he gone
further still, the general could have added that the sensory
deprivation techniques, stress positions, and cultural shock of dogs
and nudity that we saw in those photos from Abu Ghraib were plucked
from the pages of past CIA torture manuals.
American Prestige
This is not, of course, the first American
debate over torture in recent memory. From 1970 to 1988, the
Congress tried unsuccessfully, in four major investigations, to
expose elements of this CIA torture paradigm. But on each occasion
the public showed little concern, and the practice, never fully
acknowledged, persisted inside the intelligence community.
Now, in these photographs from Abu Ghraib,
ordinary Americans have seen the reality and the results of
interrogation techniques the CIA has propagated and practiced for
nearly half a century. The American public can join the
international community in repudiating a practice that, more than
any other, represents a denial of democracy; or in its desperate
search for security, the United States can continue its clandestine
torture of terror suspects in the hope of gaining good intelligence
without negative publicity.
In the likely event that Washington
adopts the latter strategy, it will be a decision posited on two
false assumptions: that torturers can be controlled and that news of
their work can be contained. Once torture begins, its use seems to
spread uncontrollably in a downward spiral of fear and empowerment.
With the proliferation of digital imaging we can anticipate, in five
or ten years, yet more chilling images and devastating blows to
America's international standing. Next time, however, the American
public's moral concern and Washington's apologies will ring even
more hollowly, producing even greater damage to U.S. prestige.
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The
Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, an
examination of the CIA's alliances with drug lords, and Closer Than
Brothers, a study of the impact of the CIA's psychological torture
method upon the Philippine military. He will publish a fuller
version of this essay in The New England Journal of Public Policy
(Volume 19, No. 2, 2004).
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