The Torturers' Apprentice,
Exporting Abuse,
Oil Profiteers
excerpted from the book
Static
Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders
and the People Who Fight Back
by Amy Goodman and David Goodman
Hyperion, 2006, hardcover
The Torturers' Apprentice
p149
President George W. Bush, January 2004
No President has ever done more for human
rights than I have.
p160
For decades, the CIA has been perfecting its interrogation methods
and exporting them around the world. The famous Abu Ghraib torture
photos of hooded detainees and naked men being sexually humiliated
depict the culmination of a century of American research into
torture.
Alfred McCoy, professor of history at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of A Question
of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on
Terror (Metropolitan, 2006). He explained on Democracy Now! the
madness behind the methods.
"If you look at the most famous of
photographs from Abu Ghraib-of the Iraqi standing on the box,
arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical
wires from his arms-in that photograph you can see the entire
fifty-year history of CIA torture," McCoy noted. "It's
very simple: He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms
are extended for self-inflicted pain. Those are the two very simple
fundamental CIA techniques, developed at enormous cost.
"From 1950 to 1962, the CIA ran a
massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the
mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human
consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion
in individual interrogation. They tried LSD, they tried mescaline,
they tried all kinds of drugs. They tried electroshock, truth
serum, sodium pentothal. None of it worked.
"What worked was very simple behavioral
findings, outsourced to our leading universities-Harvard, Princeton,
Yale, and McGill. The first breakthrough came at McGill .. . .
Dr. Donald 0. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist,
had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which
was a partner with the CIA in this research. And he found that
he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within forty-eight
hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating, or pain.
All he did was he had student volunteers sit in a cubicle with
goggles, gloves, and headphones so that they were cut off from
their senses. And within forty-eight hours, denied sensory stimulation,
they would suffer-first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown."
The Abu Ghraib images are simply a snapshot
of the CIA method: "They show people with bags over their
heads. If you look at the photographs of the Guantánamo
detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers
in Dr. Hebb's original cubicle."
McCoy continued, "The second major
breakthrough that the CIA had came in New York City at Cornell
University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under
contract from the CIA studied Soviet KGB torture techniques. They
found that the most effective KGB technique was self-inflicted
pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as
they stand-you're not beating them, they have no resentment-you
tell them, 'You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us,
and you can sit down.' As they stand, what happens is the fluids
flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt,
they separate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down."
Through a process of trial and error,
the CIA refined its methods by experimenting with a variety of
torture techniques, from beating, to secretly giving American
soldiers hallucinogenic drugs. "LSD certainly didn't work-you
scramble the brain. You got unreliable information," said
McCoy. "But what did work was the combination of these two
rather boring, rather mundane behavioral techniques: sensory disorientation
and self-inflicted pain."
p162
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was determined to adapt psychological
torture techniques to be used in the war on terror. His torture
point person was Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, appointed in 2002
to be head of the Guantánamo Bay detention center-a.k.a.,
Gitmo. "General Miller turned Guantánamo into a de
facto... torture research laboratory," explained McCoy. "Under
General Miller at Guantánamo, [the U.S. military] perfected
the CIA torture paradigm. They added two key techniques. They
went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the original research.
They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly
Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity.
'And then they went further still. Under
General Miller, they created these things called BSCT (Biscuit)
teams-behavioral science consultation teams-and they actually
had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing
interrogation. And these psychologists would identify individual
phobias, like fear of dark or attachment to mother. And by the
time we're done, by 2003, under General Miller, Guantánamo
had perfected ... a [multifaceted] assault on the human psyche:
sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity,
and individual fears and phobia."
American-style torture, fine-tuned in
offshore jails, was now ready to be unleashed on a larger stage.
In mid-2003, Rumsfeld sent General Miller to Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq. Miller famously promised to "Gitmo-ize" Abu
Ghraib. He carried through on his promise.
p164
The new methods bore the hallmarks of the CIA's signature torture
techniques. "It was a combination of self-inflicted pain,
stress positions, and sensory disorientation," Professor
McCoy observed. "If you look at the 1963 CIA KUBARK Counterintelligence
Interrogation Manual, you look at the 1983 CIA interrogation training
manual that they used in Honduras for training Honduran officers
in torture and interrogation, and then twenty years later, you
look at General Sanchez's 2003 orders, there's a striking continuity
across this forty-year span, in both of the general principles:
this total assault on the existential platforms of human identity
and existence, and the.. . way of achieving that, through the
attack on these sensory receptors."
Rumsfeld, not content to leave the details
to the grunts, has been an enthusiastic micro-manager of torture.
Newsweek reported that when he read a report in November 2002
about new interrogation techniques at Guantánamo that called
for standing for four hours straight, Rumsfeld scribbled in the
margin, "Why is standing limited to 4 hours?.. . I stand
for 8 hours a day." Perhaps if he were standing naked, with
loud music blasting, bright lights shining, attack dogs lunging,
and guards softening him up, Rumsfeld would understand why limits,
even flimsy ones, were needed.
Nothing appears to diminish Rumsfeld's
lust for torture. According to a December 2005 report by the Army
inspector general obtained by Salon.com reporters Michael Scherer
and Mark Benjamin, Rumsfeld "was personally involved"
in the interrogation in late 2002 of Mohammed al-Kahtani, an al
Qaeda detainee who was dubbed "the 20th hijacker." Rumsfeld
communicated weekly with Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller about the interrogation
sessions.'
According to Salon.com, al-Kahtani "suffered
from what Army investigators have called 'degrading and abusive'
treatment by soldiers who were following the interrogation plan
Rumsfeld had approved. Kahtani was forced to stand naked in front
of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, and
was forced to wear women's underwear and to perform 'dog tricks'
on a leash. He received 18-to-20-hour interrogations during 48
of 54 days."
Rumsfeld later "expressed puzzlement"
at the charge that his policies led to abuses at Guantánamo.
Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, an investigator who interviewed Rumsfeld
twice in 2005 about the case, recounted Rumsfeld saying, "My
God, you know, did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on
this guy's head?"'
The defense secretary-with the strong
backing of President Bush, who had declared that the Geneva Conventions
didn't apply to "terrorists"-was signaling to the troops:
Take off the gloves. Break the law. Torture.
p166
The Bush administration has gone to great lengths to give the
appearance of legal cover to its torture policies. When top justice
Department lawyers warned that new interrogation rules violated
international law, the 'White House found midlevel attorneys at
the department, such as John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to draft memos
(some of which the administration has been forced to rescind)
arguing that torture was legal.
p167
When the eulogy for American democracy is written, this will stand
out as a signal achievement: how an American president and vice
president championed torture, how Congress acquiesced, / how the
courts provided legal cover for the sadists, all while sage media
pundits politely debated the merits of our descent into barbarism.
Exporting Abuse
p168
Arundhati Roy
Of course, there is an alternative to
terrorism. It's called justice.
p169
The abuses at SCI Greene were well known. Amnesty International
Secretary General Pierre Sane declared after visiting the supermax
prison in 1997, "Death row in Pennsylvania looks and feels
like a morgue .... From the moment that condemned prisoners arrive,
the state tries to kill them slowly, mechanically and deliberately
- first spiritually, and then physically."
p170
"What they're running there is a concentration camp. It's
like an Alcatraz mentality. It's horrible," said Grisel Ybarra,
an attorney who represented an inmate at SCI Greene. She charged
that she had been ordered to remove her bra to walk through a
metal detector, and had been subjected to racist and sexist treatment.
"In my 22 years as an attorney, I have never, ever, ever
seen a place such as Greene. I have never seen such bigots in
my life."'
Prisons are a flourishing industry in
Pennsylvania, as they are all around the United States. The Pennsylvania
Department of Corrections houses over 42,000 inmates in twenty-five
prisons; the state corrections budget was more than $1.3 billion
in 2005. SCI Greene is the most secure of Pennsylvania's prisons,
and is home to most of the state's 223 death row prisoners.
Death row epitomizes the racism in America's
criminal justice system. The United States has always been far
more eager to execute blacks than whites. In Pennsylvania, 60
percent of the death row prisoners are black.' In Philadelphia,
blacks are four times more likely to be sentenced to death than
whites.' Nationwide, blacks comprise 12 percent of the national
population, but they account for 42 percent of the country's 3,314
death row inmates (as of 2004), and one in three of those executed
since 1977.
p171
With mandatory sentences and three-strikes-and-you're-out laws,
the prison population in America exploded in the 1990s. American
prisons are home to over 2 million inmates-an increase of 600,000
prisoners since 1995. One in 136 Americans is now in jail, and
the prison population grows by about 1,100 prisoners per week.
14 African-Americans are disproportionately thrown behind bars:
According to the Justice Department, almost 17 percent of black
men in 2001 had prison experience, compared with 8 percent of
Hispanic men and 3 percent of white men. Black males born in 2001
have a one in three chance of doing time, compared with one in
six for Hispanic males and one in seventeen for white males. If
2001 incarceration rates remain the same, about 7 percent of people
born that year can expect to serve a prison sentence during their
lifetimes; that compares with 2 percent of people born in 1974.
These days, rehabilitation is out, and
punishment is the rage. In the 1970s, there were only a few supermax
prisons (a supermax is designed to hold prisoners in single cells
for twenty-three hours per day, offering minimal contact with
staff or other prisoners). Today, more than two-thirds of states
have supermax facilities, housing some 20,000 prisoners."
"We're working under the burden of
laws and practices that have developed over thirty years that
have focused on punishment and prison as our primary response
to crime," said Malcolm Young, executive director of the
Sentencing Project, which promotes alternatives to prison."
When it comes to punishment, money is
no object: The cost of keeping an inmate in a maximum security
prison is now about $57,000 per year-double the cost of regular
prison and far more than the cost of most colleges.
p189
Digna Ochoa (1964-2001), slain Mexican human rights lawyer
Anger is energy, it's a force It's injustice
that motivates us to do something, to take risks, knowing that
if we don't, things will remain the same.
Oil Profiteers
p199
George Orwell
War against a foreign country only happens
when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
p200
Bush's approach to the energy crisis mirrors his approach to war:
Give the illusion of caring about it, while privately enabling
the plundering and profiteering to continue. So when President
Bush declared in his 2006 State of the Union speech, 'America
is addicted to oil," he hoped we wouldn't remember that the
energy bill that the president signed five months earlier, which
was brokered by Dick Cheney, encouraged Americans to use even
more oil.
p201
Instead of actually doing something about America's oil addiction,
Bush put the drug pushers in charge of finding a cure. Cheney's
Energy Task Force, formed in January 2001, was charged with developing
a national energy policy, which it released four months later.
This policy formed the basis of the 2005 energy bill. The national
energy policy read like an industry wish list. It recommended:
* Opening up the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge for oil and natural gas drilling.
* Giving tax breaks and subsidies to encourage
the construction of more coal and nuclear power plants
* Not requiring new technology on cars
that would increase fuel economy
* Dumbing down the fuel economy rules
for light trucks and SUVs, the most inefficient vehicles
* Deregulating the electricity market
and gutting rules that protect consumers from price gouging.
p203
Writing the 2005 Energy Bill was the opportunity to mm the Cheney
Task Force recommendations into law-and lots of cold cash. The
energy companies left nothing to chance. Since 2001, energy corporations
have plied federal politicians with $115 million in campaign contributions.
It was a bipartisan orgy, but lucky Republicans received three-quarters
of these corporate bribes.' You were especially well compensated
if you were on the House-Senate Energy Bill conference committee,
whose sixty-five members have received some $9.7 million in contributions
since 2001.
As the payoffs were handed out, Texans
were at the front of the line. As the Boston Globe observed, the
bill is "a $14.5 billion extravaganza ... that highlighted
the clout of [Texas], home to the president, the House majority
leader, and the chairman of the committee overseeing the energy
legislation .... Energy companies based in Texas will be eligible
for billions in tax benefits."
p205
In 2005, ExxonMobil, whose fortunes had already been soaring,
hit the jackpot: Its $36 billion annual profit was the largest
in history for any corporation in the world. Unfortunately, the
only thing most Americans would experience from this windfall
would be price gouging and emptier pockets: While ExxonMobil's
profit shot up 45 percent over the company's 2004 result, its
tax bill rose only 14 percent. Just to make sure ExxonMobil didn't
feel any pain, President Bush rejected an attempt in early 2006
to levy a onetime windfall profits tax on the oil industry.
Congress certainly wouldn't want to put
the squeeze on struggling Exxon employees-such as former Exxon
chairman Lee Raymond, who was paid $686 million from 1993 to 2005.
That works out to $144,573 per day while he ran the company."
But when it came time to explain to Congress why gas prices were
so high, Raymond insisted in 2005 it was all because of global
supply and demand, and he was feeling the pain like any average
Joe. "We're all in this together, everywhere in the world,"
he said.
To put ExxonMobil's bonanza into perspective,
the company's 2005 revenue of $371 billion surpassed the $281
billion gross domestic product of Saudi Arabia that year, and
also exceeded the $245 billion GDP of Indonesia, the world's fourth
most populous [country and an OPEC member.
This orgy of corporate profits prompted
Ralph Nader to write a letter to new ExxonMobil chairman Rex Tillerson:
"Over $36 billion last year, after modest taxes, yet you
blithely ignored urgent pleas by members of Congress, especially
that of the powerful Chairman, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)
to contribute some significant deductible money to charities which
help impoverished American families pay the exorbitant prices
for heating oil this past winter. Rarely has there been such a
demonstration of corporate greed and insensitivity by a company
that has received huge government welfare subsidies, de-regulation
and tax expenditures over the years at the expense of the smaller
taxpayers of America.
The good times just keep on rolling for
the energy industry. No wonder Boone Pickens, head of BP Capital
Management, a billion-dollar hedge fund that trades energy futures,
said of the high times: "I've never had so much fun in my
life .
Static
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