American Ingenuity

I have written here and elsewhere on the subject of torture that 1) it is widely misunderstood on the left; 2) it didn’t start eight years ago, 3) it is not done for for the purpose of gaining intelligence; and 4) what we stumbled upon at Abu Ghraib was classic U.S. use of techniques developed in the last half century. I’ve further said that torture is meant to break people down, and is in standard use in our many counter-insurgency campaigns. (Right now, those would be Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Colombia, and surely many other places.)

Iraq, an illegal invasion used to set up a permanent occupation, was a “shock and awe” campaign, but a counter-insurgency as well. Our leaders did not know to what extent there would be resistance – but once it became apparent that it was there and was widespread, they went to work on breaking its back. It’s a long and tedious process – rebels have to be broken, one by one. U.S. soldiers break down doors of homes in the middle of the night, terrifying the family, and take away fathers and young men to places like Abu Ghraib for the purpose of torturing them. (There are many Abu Ghraibs.) Once done, victims are released back into the population, but they are not the same. They are traumatized and no longer resistant to the new authority structure. (The message: Resistance is futile.)

Torture not only worked to break down individuals, but also sent a powerful message to others. In general, torture was an important facet of our terror campaign against Iraq.

People don’t believe me, of course. There’s a widespread notion in the population that the U.S. is both better and different than other countries. Consequently, what we find is the general impression that Abu Ghraib was isolated, not that terrible, and anyway is now behind us. Further, Democrats like to believe that it started with Bush and stopped with Obama.

Not so. Not so. Here’s an excerpt from a 2006 book by Alfred W. McCoy called A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. I saw Mr. McCoy in a TV interview months ago, then promptly forgot his name as was never able to recover the lost memory. I stumbled upon him in other reading. This from the introduction:

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reach a cost of a billion dollars annually – a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind. After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shock, and sensory deprivation the work then produced a new approach to torture that was psychological, not physical, perhaps best described as “no-touch torture”. The agency’s discovery was a counterintuitive breakthrough – indeed, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries. To test, and then propagate, its distinctive form of torture, the CIA operated covertly within its own society, penetrating and compromising key American institutions – universities, hospitals, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the armed forces. As the lead agency within the larger intelligence community, the CIA has long been able to draw upon both military and civil resources to amplify its reach and reduce its responsibility. Moreover, the agency’s attempts to conceal these programs from executive and legislative review have required manipulation of its own government through clandestine techniques, notably disinformation, and destruction of incriminating documents.

Still, if genius is discovery of the obvious, then CIA perfection of psychological torture was a major scientific turning point, albeit unheralded and unnoticed in the world beyond its secret safe houses. For more than two thousand years, interrogators had found that mere physical pain, no matter how extreme, often produced heightened resistance. By contrast, the CIA’s psychological paradigm fused two new methods, “sensory deprivation”, and “self-inflicted pain”, whose combination causes victims to feel responsible for their suffering and thus capitulate more readily to their torturers. Although seemingly benign, the term “sensory disorientation” means, in this CIA usage, something far more invasive. Through relentless probing into the essential nature of the human organism to reveal its physiological and psychological vulnerabilities, the CIA’s “sensory deprivation” has evolved into a total assault on all the senses and sensibilities – auditory, visual, tactile, temporal, temperature, survival, sexual and cultural. Refined through years of practice, the method relies on simple, even banal procedures – isolation, standing, heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence – for a systematic assault on all the human senses. The fusion of these two techniques, sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, creates a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the fundamentals of personal identity.

The notorious photo of an Iraqi in a box, arms extended and wires to his hands, exposes this covert method. The hood is for sensory deprivation, and the arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. A week after the scandal broke, the U.S. prison chief in Iraq summarized this two-phased torture. “We ill 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.”

Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, no-touch torture leaves deep psychological scars on both victims and interrogators. One British journalists who observed this method’s use in Northern Ireland called sensory deprivation “the worst form of torture” because it provokes more anxiety among the interogatees than traditional tortures, leaves no scars, and produces long lasting effects. Victims often need extensive treatment to recover from injury far more crippling than mere physical pain. Perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating cruelty and lasting emotional disorders. Though any ordinary man or woman can be trained to torture, every gulag has a few masters who take to the task with a sadistic flair – abhorred by their victims and valued by their superiors. Applied under the pressure of actual field operations after 1963, psychological torture soon gave way to unimaginable cruelties, physical and sexual, by individual perpetrators whose improvisations, plumbing the human capacity for brutality, are often horrifying.

I guess we can be proud of one thing – we did apply good ol’ American ingenuity to torture, and by god, made it better than ever before.