"Cruel Science: The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research"

Alfred W. McCoy, Boston Globe, May 15, 2004

The photos from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots, not of simple
brutality or a breakdown in discipline, but of CIA torture techniques
that have metastasized, over the past 50 years, like an undetected
cancer inside the US intelligence community.

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led massive, secret research into coercion
and consciousness that reached a billion dollars at peak. After
experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shocks, and sensory
deprivation, this CIA research produced a new method of torture that
was psychological, not physical — best described as "no touch torture."

The CIA's discovery of psychological torture was a counter-intuitive
break-through — indeed, the first real revolution in this cruel
science since the 17th century. In its modern application, the
physical approach required interrogators to inflict pain, usually by
crude beatings that often produced heightened resistance or
unreliable information. Under the CIA's new psychological paradigm,
however, interrogators used two essential methods, disorientation and
self-inflicted pain, to make victims feel responsible for their own
suffering.In the CIA's first stage, interrogators employ simple, non-violent
techniques to disorient the subject. To induce temporal confusion,
interrogators use hooding or sleep deprivation. To intensify
disorientation, interrogators often escalate to attacks on personal
identity by sexual humiliation.

Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on to a second
stage with simple, self-inflicted discomfort such as standing for
hours with arms extended. In this phase, the idea is to make victims
feel responsible for their own pain and thus induce them to alleviate
it by capitulating to the interrogator's power. In his statement on
reforms at Abu Ghraib last week, General Geoffrey Miller, former
chief of the Guantanamo detention center and now prison commander in
Iraq, 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."

Although seemingly less brutal, "no touch" torture leaves deep
psychological scars on both victims and interrogators. The victims
often need long treatment to recover from trauma far more crippling
than physical pain. The perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion
of ego, leading to escalating cruelty and lasting emotional problems.

After codification in the CIA's "Kubark Counterintelligence
Interrogation" manual in 1963, the new method was disseminated
globally to police in Asia and Latin America through USAID's Office
of Public Safety (OPS). Following allegations of torture by USAID's
police trainees in Brazil, the US Senate closed down OPS in 1975.

After OPS was abolished, the Agency continued to disseminate its
torture methods through the US Army's Mobile Training Teams, which
were active in Central America during the 1980s. In 1997, the
Baltimore Sun published chilling extracts of the "Human Resource
Exploitation Training Manual" that these Army teams had distributed
to allied militaries for 20 years.

In the ten years between the last known use of these manuals in the
early 1990s and arrest of Al Queda suspects since September 2001,
torture continued as a US intelligence practice by delivering
suspects to allied agencies, including Philippine National Police who
broke the trans-Pacific bomb plot in 1995.

Once the War on Terror started, however, the US use of "no touch"
torture resumed, first surfacing at Bagram Air Base near Kabul in
early 2002 where Pentagon investigators found two Afghans had died
during interrogation. In reports from Iraq, the methods are
strikingly similar to those detailed over 40 years ago in the CIA's
Kubark manual and later used by US-trained security forces worldwide.

Following the CIA's two-part technique, last September General Miller
instructed US military police at Abu Ghraid to soften up
high-priority detainees in the initial disorientation phase for later
"successful interrogation and exploitation" by CIA and Military
Intelligence. As often happens in "no touch" torture sessions, this
process soon moved beyond sleep and sensory deprivation to sexual
humiliation. In the second, still unexamined phase, US Army
intelligence and CIA operatives probably administered the prescribed
mix of interrogation and self-inflicted pain — outside the frame of
these photographs.

If a fuller inquiry does establish that this is was what happened at
Abu Ghraib, then these seven MPs are neither "creeps" nor weaklings
who succumbed to the prison pressure-cooker. They are ordinary
American soldiers following orders within a standard interrogation
procedure. Whatever their guilt, the court martial of these soldiers
should be just a first step up the chain of command and beyond to
far-reaching reforms.

At home and abroad, the United States has been, for over 50 years a
strong voice in the fight against torture. Simultaneously, however,
the CIA's method has become so widely accepted that US interrogators
seem unaware that they are, in fact, engaged in systematic torture.
From 1970 to 1988, Congress held hearings four times to expose the
CIA's use of torture. But each time, the public did not demand reform
and the practice persisted.

But now, through these photographs from Abu Ghraib, we can see the
reality of these interrogation techniques. We have a chance to join
fully with the international community in repudiating a practice
that, more than any other, represents a denial of democracy.

[Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of Closer Than Brothers (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), a study of the impact of torture
upon the Philippine armed forces.]