America's tortuous road to Abu
Ghraib By Alfred W McCoy
From
ancient Rome's red-hot irons and lacerating hooks to
medieval Europe's thumbscrews, rack and wheel, for more
than 2,000 years anyone interrogated in a court of law
could expect to suffer unspeakable tortures. For the
past 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 Nations' 1985 Convention
Against Torture, ratified in the United States by the
administration of president Bill Clinton in 1994.
Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001.
When the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center
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 President
George W 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
pried 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 the United
States. They also seem ignorant of a perverse pathology
that allows the practice of torture, once begun, to
spread uncontrollably in crises, 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, America's own pro-pain pundits seemed, in
those heady early days of the "war on terror", unaware
of a 50-year history of torture by the US 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 Last April, the US 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
US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 Bush's "war on
terror".
Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib
scandal is the product of a deeply contradictory US
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 US 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 1950-62, the CIA conducted massive, secret
research into coercion and the malleability of human
consciousness that, by the late 1950s, 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 (the psychedelic drug
lysergic acid diethylamide) 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 17th century - and thanks to recent
revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, 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 more than 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, US 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."
Under field conditions since the start of the
Afghan War, CIA 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, US 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-September 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 40
interrogation centers in South Vietnam as part of its
Phoenix Program that killed more than 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 US 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 key US 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 US 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 US
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 US
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 many of
the media have studiously avoided the word "torture" and
instead blamed America's own bad apples, those seven
Military Police. In July, the US 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
'dehumanization' of the detainees and set the stage for
additional and severe abuses to occur".
After
finding standard US Army interrogation doctrine sound,
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, 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 [Department of
Defense] visibility, control, or oversight and created a
perception that OGA [other government agency, ie, 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, Fay seems
to say that the CIA has compromised the integrity and
effectiveness of the US military.
Had he gone
further, 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
Afghan 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 US debate over torture in recent
memory. From 1970-88, 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
US 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 10 years, yet more chilling images and
devastating blows to America's international standing.
Next time, however, the US public's moral concern and
Washington's apologies will ring even more hollowly,
producing even greater damage to US 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).
(Copyright 2004 Alfred W McCoy. Used
with permission of Tomdispatch.)
