The Torture Garden

From: Rasputin/GNN
Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:36:33 / Government

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In 1994 a CIA training manual was declassified: “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual—1983”. It was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
It taught Central American regimes how to torture dissidents.
A darkly comic disclaimer (rather like the oft-seen “the views expressed in this film do not necessarily reflect…”) begins the Manuel:
“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.”
Another section states:
“While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them.”
One technique cites: “experiments conducted on volunteers who allowed themselves to be suspended in water while wearing blackout masks. They were allowed to hear only their own breathing and faint sounds from the pipes. “The stress and anxiety become almost unbearable for most subjects,” the manual says.
Former CIA agent John Stockwell writes in The Secret Wars of the CIA, June 1986:
“We had the `public safety program’ going throughout Central and Latin America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it.
They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S. AID’ written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from. They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and you could crank and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.”
“Public Safety Program”. Tell me that’s not the most mind-fuckingly Orwellion-sounding department you’ve heard in your entire life.
The head of the Office of Public safety in Montevideo, 1969-70 was Jim Jones’ good friend, Dan Mitrione.
“I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you’ll have to get involved. You’ll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves.” – Dan Mitrione
“The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.” — Dan Mitrione
“As subjects for the first testing they took beggars … from the outskirts of Montevideo, as well as a woman apparently from the frontier area with Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the effects of different voltages on the different parts of the human body…. The four of them died.” — Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, former CIA agent and associate of Mitrione
“All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do was lie there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would bring in doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets, to terrify the population so they would be afraid of the police and the government.”
Torture becomes a “normal, frequent and habitual occurrence” including “electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under the fingernails, burning with cigarettes, the slow compression of the testicles, daily use of psychological torture”
According to a report based on US State Department documents obtained by Senator James Abourezk in 1973”
“pregnant women were imprisoned with their very young infants and subjected to the same treatment” —
“Dan Mitrione was [himself] kidnapped in 1970 by the Tupamoros. They do not torture him. They demand the release of some 150 prisoners in exchange for him. With the determined backing of the Nixon administration, the Uruguayan government refuses. … Mitrione’s dead body is found on the back seat of a stolen car.”
“Mr. Mitrione’s devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere.” — Ron Ziegler, White House spokesperson
After Mitrione’s death, Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis performed at a benefit for his wife.
The art of torture is becoming more and more sophisticated.
SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIONS ASSESSMENT
STOA
6 January 1998
...describes various drugs being used in interrogation: (e.g. Aminazin, apomorphine, curare, suxamethonium, haloperidol, insulin, sulfazin, triftazin, tizertsin, sanapax, etaperazin, phrenolong, trisedil, mazjeptil, seduksin and motiden-depo)
Other torture hardware includes electroshock weapons, electrically heated hot tables, whips, iron-chain filled rubber hoses, cat-o’-nine-tails, clubs, canes, specially designed torture devices and interrogation rooms using white noise (Sweeney 1991a and 1991b) and stroboscopic UV light.
Helen Bamber, Director of the British Medical Foundation for the Treatment of the Victims of Torture, has described electroshock batons at ‘the most universal modern tool of the torturers’. (Gregory, 1995) Recent surveys of torture victims have confirmed that after systematic beating, electroshock is one of the most common factors (London, 1993);
As usual, the United States is at the fore of producing and exporting this technology around the world.
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Some charming terms for torture in Chinese:
In China there are dian ji (electrical assault), gui bian (down on knees whipping), jieju (chains and fetters), shouzhikao (finger cuffs), zhiliaio (rod fetters), menbanliao (shackleboard) (Figs. 39, 40, & 45.) and so on, (Human Rights Watch, 1992; Amnesty International, 1992b).
These techniques involve what is called, in the torture bizz, hardware. There is also software, now popularized by images from Guantanamo Bay.
Some people think software is more effective.
It is arguable whether it is more humane.
Can you use the word “humane” in describing torture of any kind?
Some think “software”, in addition to being more effective, is actually more brutal.
Because it endeavors to break the human spirit.
“What has evolved from this quest for ever more powerful techniques to break the human spirit is a classical form of operant conditioning designed to teach the target psyche debilitation, dependence and dread (Biderman & Zimmer, 1965).
Jose Barrera, a former member of the CIA-trained Battalion 316 in Honduras:
“The first thing we would say is that we know your mother, your younger brother. And better you cooperate, because if you don’t, we’re going to bring them in and rape them and torture them and kill them,” Barrera said.
The CIA’s manuel explains:
“The threat to inflict pain may trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain. In fact, most people underestimate their capacity to withstand pain.”
“The pain which is being inflicted upon him from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist. On the other hand, pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance.

“For example, if he is required to maintain rigid positions such as standing at attention or sitting on a stool for long periods of time, the immediate source of pain is not the ‘questioner’ but the subject himself.” ” After a period of time the subject is likely to exhaust his internal motivational strength.”
Inducing dread: The manual says a breakdown in the prisoner’s will can be induced by strong fear, but cautions that if this dread is unduly prolonged, “the subject may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him.”
It adds: “It is advisable to have a psychologist available whenever regression is induced.”
What makes a man capable of torturing his fellow man?
A woman who testified internationally after the declassification of the CIA’s torture manuel stated:
“The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.’ She couldn’t break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people….”
Could you torture someone?
I remember a line from The Corporation where Chomsky says: “Any one of us…could be a gas chamber attendent or a Saint”.
I think a lot of it has to do with hierarchy, especially the pronounced military form. Take the Japanese during WWII, who committed probably the most barbarous torture the world has ever seen. Their command structures were extremely rigid. Obedience was enforced with vicious punishment for tiny infractions, or even no infractions at all, as Iris Chang outlines in her book The Rape of Nanking.
Honore Daumier’s famous cartoon of one soldier whipping another, each inferior in rank to the next, is a good repesentation, I think. The rage one feels towards one’s “superior” is sublimated onto one’s “inferior”.
Throw in some race/class/national “superiority” complexes, some “divine will” and some “greater good” and you’re good to go.
So where does it all end?
I think the light at the end of the tunnel, unfortunately.
“Some interrogation techniques are intended to kill. For example the use of a heavy wooden roller to crush the limbs of detainees in Kashmir. This practice results in the release of myoglobin, heme and other related muscle proteins and toxins (Rhabdomyolysis) which leads to acute renal failure. In the absence of kidney dialysis, the results are fatal.127 Other regimes have resorted to delayed poisoning of their dissidents who die after their release from incarceration, e.g. by the use of Thallium which was deployed against Kurds in Iraq and most recently (according to the ongoing Truth Commission), by South Africa’s Apartheid regime.128
Cockburn:
“Start torturing and it’s easy to get carried away. Torture destroys the tortured and corrupts the society that sanctions it. Just like the FBI after September 11, the CIA in 1968 got frustrated by its inability to break suspected leaders of Vietnam’s National Liberation Front by its usual methods of interrogation and torture. So the agency began more advanced experiments, in one of which it anesthetized three prisoners, opened their skulls and planted electrodes in their brains. They were revived, put in a room and given knives. The CIA psychologists then activated the electrodes, hoping the prisoners would attack one another. They didn’t. The electrodes were removed, the prisoners shot and their bodies burned. You can read about it in Gordon Thomas’ book “Journey into Madness.”
That passage is from an article called “Torture: as American as Apple Pie”.
It reminds me of a Negativland song: “The Bottom Line”.
Over the sounds of a man screaming under brutal electro-shock torture, a soothing voice opines:
“The threat of death just isn’t enough to control people, so the ante has been raised. How? With torture. And high-tech torture at that. As the technocrats say, “it’s functional”.
That’s why everyone who’s intelligent and un-anaesthatized enough to care, has sort of put their life on hold…underneath all the defensive layers of denial…we’re all afraid of being tortured…homosexually gang raped or having it happen to someone we love…we’re all self-consciously living a lie…we’re all happy Joes…
How did it happen here in the land of the free and the home of the brave?...I mean in some banana Republic…some distance past like the Spanish Inquisition or WWI: the Nazis and the fanatical Japs…but not us Ameicans…GI Joe, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Autumn in New York, baseball, college football, Glenn Miller…somehow it doesn’t fit with torture…but it does of course it does…because it was always a facade the image of America…and now the facade has finally failed….like a burned out clutch, or a decayed tooth that breaks open…they both smell bad, strange, ominous…