FYI/Torture as Normalcy: As American as Apple Pie

[henry]

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05082004.html





Torture as Normalcy



As American  as Apple Pie



By ALEXANDER COCKBURN 

 and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR



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.



Torture destroys the tortured  and corrupts the society that sanctions
it. Just like the FBI  after 9/11/01 the CIA in 1968 got frustrated by
its inability  to break suspected leaders of Vietnam's National
Liberation Front  by its usual methods of interrogation and torture. So
the agency  began more advanced experiments, in one of which it
anesthetized  three prisoners, opened their skulls and planted
electrodes in  their brains. They were revived, put in a room and given
knives.  The CIA psychologists then activated the electrodes, hoping
the  prisoners would attack one another. They didn't. The electrodes 
were removed, the prisoners shot and their bodies burned. You  can read
about it in our book, Whiteout.



In recent years the United  States has been charged by the UN and also
by human rights organizations  such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International with tolerating  torture in US prisons, by methods
ranging from solitary, twenty-three-hour-a-day  confinement in concrete
boxes for years on end, to activating  50,000-volt shocks through a
mandatory belt worn by prisoners?  Many of the Military Police guards
now under investigation for  abuse of Iraqis earned their stripes
working as guards in federal  and state prisons, where official abuse
is a daily occurence.  Indeed, Charles Granier, one of the abusers at
Abu Ghraib and  the lover of Linndie England the Trailer Park Torturer,
worked  as a guard at Pennsylvania's notorious Greene Correctional
Unit  and has since gone back to work there.



And as a practical matter torture  is far from unknown in the
interrogation rooms of U.S. law enforcement,  with Abner Louima,
sodomized by a cop using a stick one notorious  recent example. The
most infamous disclosure of consistent torture  by a police department
in recent years concerned cops in Chicago  in the mid-70s through early
80s who used electroshock, oxygen deprivation, hanging on hooks, the
bastinado and beatings of  the testicles. The torturers were white and
their victims black  or brown. A prisoner in California's Pelican Bay
State Prison  was thrown into boiling water. Others get 50,000-volt
shocks  from stun guns.



Many states have so-called  "secure housing units" where prisoners are
kept in  solitary in tiny concrete cells for years on end, many of
them  going mad in the process. Amnesty International has denounced 
U.S. police forces for "a pattern of unchecked excessive  force
amounting to torture."



In 2000 the UN delivered a  severe public rebuke to the United States
for its record on preventing  torture and degrading punishment. A
10-strong panel of experts  highlighted what it said were Washington's
breaches of the agreement  ratified by the United States in 1994. The
UN Committee Against  Torture, which monitors international compliance
with the UN  Convention Against Torture, has called for the abolition
of electric-shock  stun belts (1000 in use in the U.S.) and restraint
chairs on  prisoners, as well as an end to holding children in adult
jails.



It also said female detainees  are "very often held in humiliating and
degrading circumstances"  and expressed concern over alleged cases of
sexual assault by  police and prison officers. The panel criticized the
excessively  harsh regime in maximum security prisons, the use of chain
gangs  in which prisoners perform manual labor while shackled
together,  and the number of cases of police brutality against racial
minorities.



So far as rape is concerned,  because of the rape factories more
conventionally known as the  U.S. prison system, there are estimates
that twice as many men  as women are raped in the U.S. each year. A
Human Rights Watch  report in April of 2001 cited a December 2000
Prison Journal  study based on a survey of inmates in seven men's
prison facilities  in four states. The results showed that 21 percent
of the inmates  had experienced at least one episode of pressured or
forced sexual  contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent
had  been raped in their facilities.



A 1996 study of the Nebraska  prison system produced similar findings,
with 22 percent of male  inmates reporting that they had been pressured
or forced to have  sexual contact against their will while
incarcerated. Of these,  more than 50 percent had submitted to forced
anal sex at least  once. Extrapolating these findings to the national
level gives  a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped.






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