Torture as Normalcy As American as Apple Pie

[seemslikeadream]

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, CounterPunch
May 8th, 2004


Torture's back in the news, courtesy of those lurid pictures of exultant Americans laughing as they torture their Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib prison run by the US military outside Baghdad. Apparently it takes electrodes and naked bodies piled in a simulated orgy to tickle America's moral nerve ends. Kids maimed by cluster bombs just don't do it any more. But torture's nothing new. One of the darkest threads in postwar US imperial history has been the CIA's involvement with torture, as instructor, practitioner or contractor. Since its inception the CIA has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly studying Nazi techniques and protecting their exponents such as Klaus Barbie. The CIA's official line is that torture is wrong and is ineffective. It is indeed wrong. On countless occasions it has been appallingly effective.

Remember Dan Mitrione, kidnapped and killed by Uruguay's Tupamaros and portrayed by Yves Montand in Costa-Gavras's film State of Siege? In the late 1960s Mitrione worked for the US Office of Public Safety, part of the Agency for International Development. In Brazil, so A.J. Langguth (a former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon) related in his book Hidden Terrors, Mitrione was among the US advisers teaching Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply to prisoners without killing them. In Uruguay, according to the former chief of police intelligence, Mitrione helped "professionalize" torture as a routine measure and advised on psychological techniques such as playing tapes of women and children screaming that the prisoner's family was being tortured.

In the months after the 9/11/01 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, "truth drugs" were hailed by some columnists such as Newsweek's Jonathan Alter for use in the war against Al Qaeda. This was an enthusiasm shared by the US Navy after the war against Hitler, when its intelligence officers got on the trail of Dr. Kurt Plotner's research into "truth serums" at Dachau. Plotner gave Jewish and Russian prisoners high doses of mescaline and then observed their behavior, in which they expressed hatred for their guards and made confessional statements about their own psychological makeup.

As part of its larger MK-ULTRA project the CIA gave money to Dr. Ewen Cameron, at McGill University. Cameron was a pioneer in the sensory-deprivation techniques. Cameron once locked up a woman in a small white box for thirty-five days, deprived of light, smell and sound. The CIA doctors were amazed at this dose, knowing that their own experiments with a sensory-deprivation tank in 1955 had induced severe psychological reactions in less than forty hours. Start torturing, and it's easy to get carried away.
more
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=4663

[loathesomeshrub]

1. Its official. America has lost the right to demand humane treatment

for our captured citizens. The abuse allowed by our government will continue, powered by the evil Patriot Act, in our prisons, in Guantanamo, where everyday normal people who have the power will continue to abuse people who can't defend themselves. Its so sad.

[mw]

2. Hamill says the pictures affected his treatment

Hamill: Abuse affected treatment

Sunday, May 9, 2004 Posted: 0401 GMT (1201 HKT)

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/US/South/05/08/hamill.abuse/

MACON, Mississippi (CNN) -- Former hostage Thomas Hamill says photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqis held in a Baghdad prison affected the way he was treated in the last days before he escaped.

He said he scaled back the celebration of his return home so he wouldn't anger captors of Americans still being held.

With yellow ribbons tied around trees, Hamill's hometown of Macon, Mississippi welcomed him back, just six days after he escaped from a farmhouse 50 miles north of Baghdad.

"I knew I was coming home some day," Hamill told reporters. "They were not going to keep this boy".

Hamill, 44, was driving a truck for Halliburton Corp. subsidiary KBR when his convoy was ambushed on April 9.

Four other American contractors were found dead and two are still missing from the convoy. One U.S. soldier was later found dead and one soldier is still missing.

Hamill said he chose a low-key reception Saturday to prevent angering those who still hold his co-workers hostage.

"I didn't want to play this thing up like a big grand slam home run," Hamill said.

The prisoner abuse scandal -- with photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqis held in the Abu Ghraib prison -- emerged in his last week of captivity and it caused his conditions to worsen, he said.

"That had an affect on me, captive the last few days," Hamill said. "I hate that happened. They asked me about it."

"My treatment had changed and I was afraid it was going to get a lot worse," he said. "They moved me numerous times during the ordeal."