I have long maintained that this country is no longer governed by it elected officials but by non-elected bureaucrats, in particular the intelligence establishment, above all the CIA, and certain elements in the military (with the support of course of big money). The ongoing campaign for president, which is pushing the far more serious issue of the trial of the Guantánamo Six off center stage, rather proves my point. For about a year I had supported Chris Dodd, as he seemed to be the only person in the public eye who was seriously concerned about the Military Commissions Act under which the Guantánamo Six are to be tried, for Democratic nominee. As it became clear that he was falling behind in the race, I lost interest. But just the other day I saw him in a segment of the News Hour standing next to Barack Obama, and sure enough, the following day I received an e-mail circular from the Dodd campaign urging me to vote for Obama. But interestingly enough, when I read the arguments which Senator Dodd put forward as to why voters should support Obama, the primary reason I had originally supported the Senator himself was missing. That is to say, there was nothing about restoring the Constitution or repealing the Military Commissions Act. We are in the worst constitutional crisis in U.S. history, yet neither of the Democratic front-runners will say anything about the most pressing issue of the moment: the manner in which our government is fighting the so-called "War on Terror", which involves violations of the civil liberties of Americans and the human rights of foreigners. When I look at what is happening in this country now, in Guantánamo and around the world in the secret CIA prisons, when I witness our government's quest for absolute dominance in space and the erection of a shield which will protect it from retaliation, thus facilitating a first strike, I see events more dangerous than those which led up to the Nazi holocaust and World War II. Yet one would never know this from listening to the candidates. For the U.S. presidential race now has about as much political importance as the World Series.
Why will the Democratic candidates say nothing about the most important issue of all? Some will answer, that subject is taboo. The American people are afraid of a terrorist attack, and to question the measures our government has been taking in the so-called "War on Terror" is to risk sounding "soft on terror". But who has planted that fear in the minds of Americans? And why, in the seven years which have elapsed since the events of 9/11, has our government not brought forward one individual who was involved in those events (with the exception of Zacarias Moussaoui, a bit player at best), for a fair and public trial? No matter how heinous the crimes such individuals may have committed, they deserve that-- indeed, they must have it if we are to know the truth. After all, we gave fair and open trials even to the Nazi War Criminals, who had killed millions. Some say that the terrorist suspects cannot tried because they have been "interrogated aggressively" (i.e., tortured) and that would make their testimony inadmissable in court. But so many of our federal judges are now mere "rubber stamp" placemen that such testimony would probably be accepted, and let's face it, if the defendant(s) could be proven to truly have played a role in 9/11, the American people would applaud. If the case was thrown out of court because the defendants had been tortured, there would be massive demonstrations against the court's decision, and the defendants would undoubtedly be placed back in the custody of the military or CIA. In either case, there would be no possibility of a truly dangerous terrorist being released and the Republicans would look like heroes for just trying to bring these people to account. So why have there been no such trials? Why is the trial which is finally about to be held, of the Guantánamo Six, being conducted in such secrecy and in violation of all hallowed rules of due process, to the extent that many career military men who could have served as counsel for the defendants have resigned in protest? There can be only two reasons: either the defendants are innocent or they know that our own government was complicit in the attacks of 9/11.
Evidence of that complicity is to be found in the manner in which detainees in the "War on Terror" have been "questioned". For the methods used to "interrogate" them, known collectively as PSYWAR, are not designed to elicit intelligence but rather to spread terror and produce false confessions. I have referred again and again in these blogs to Alfred W. McCoy's excellent book, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, which demonstrates this. The thing that stands out most about these methods, inspired by the Stalinist show trials and Chinese and North Korean "brainwashing", is how inappropriate they are to the CIA's stated mission. Utilizing a combination of physical brutality and psychological pressures, they aim to sever a person's contact with reality and destroy his sense of identity so that he will become whatever the so-called "interrogator" wants him to be. In this they resemble more than anything the methods used in Orwell's classic 1984. As O'Brien says to Winston as he is torturing him, "We will empty you and fill you with ourselves." The implication is that the CIA is not seeking "actionable intelligence" but attempting to produce broken zomby-like individuals who can be trotted out before a court and "confess" whatever crimes they are accused of, a process which is facilitated by the irregular nature of the military commissions. And where the truth really lies is something that the public will never be allowed to know. This adds nothing to the security of Americans, but provides very effective cover for the misdeeds of our government, misdeed which may well include the murder of thousands of its own citizens.
So what if the presidential candidates did emphasize the threat to our liberty and the travesty of justice that these show-trials represent? I naturally think of what happened to John F. Kennedy after he handed down National Security Memoranda 55, 56 and 57, which would have splintered the CIA. And I think as well of a less well-known figure from my own Bay Area. Representative Leo Ryan Jr. was an outspoken critic of the CIA in Congress. He co-authored a Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which aimed to limit the funding of covert actions and increase congressional oversight of them. In 1978, he traveled to Guyana to investigate reported abuses at the settlement of the People's Temple there. Although Ryan had been concerned about the growing influence of cults, it was probably his concern about the ongoing lawlessness of the CIA which prompted him to make this investigation, particularly after investigative reporter Jack Anderson published a syndicated column suggesting that the Jonestown colony was really being run by the CIA. Just as Ryan was investigating, and finding that a number of the residents of Jonestown actually wanted to leave, he was murdered along with four journalists. One People's Temple member, Larry Layton, was convicted of the murder. But soon after Ryan was murdered, nine hundred men, women and children belonging to the Jonestown colony were found dead. Could Layton have been responsible for all these deaths or was he a mere scapegoat? The question acquires further weight when one discovers that not many of the deaths-- widely believed to be suicides-- were clearly murders, with the fatal injections in places the deceased individual could not possibly have reached. What is of still more significance is the large quantity of mind-altering drugs of a certain type which were found at Jonestown.
According to John Judge, author of "The Black Hole of Guyana: The Untold Story of the Jonestown Massacre" (http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/Jonestown.html) "Guyanese troops discovered a large cache of drugs, enough to drug the entire population of Georgetown, Guyana for more than a year. According to survivors, these drugs were being used regularly to "control" a population of only 1,100 people." The drugs all belonged to a group with which this author has had personal experience, the major tranquilizers or neuroleptics. Neuroleptics can have a variety of effects, none of them therapeutic. Some induce a state of mental torture known as tardive akathisia, in which the victim cannot sit or lie still, and is afflicted with extreme anxiety. The effects of this type are similar to a "bad trip" on another drug unleashed on American society by the CIA, LSD. Others leave the person in a zombie-like state, unable to think coherently or protest his/her treatment. Having experienced both these reactions from prescribed neuroleptic drugs myself, I was not surprised to learn that the CIA, which had been experimenting with mind-controlling drugs from the nineteen-fifties through its programs MK-ULTRA, was using them on inmates of the psychiatric prison at Vacaville, California. And why not the poor and Black people who predominated at Jonestown? More than 20 months after Leo Ryan was killed, his five adult children filed a lawsuit based on extensive investigation charging that "the Jonestown Colony was infilitrated with agents of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States," and that they were working as part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. It essentially accused agents of the CIA of being responsible for Ryan's death. The suit was dropped for reasons which have never been fully disclosed, but which have been linked to threats delivered by the CIA (see http://www.freedommag.org/english/vol2914/page08.htm. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which would have imposed controls on the CIA, was dropped soon after Ryan's death (see the Wikipedia article on Ryan).
So what would happen if we for once had elected officials who were willing to not only speak out against CIA tyranny, but also take action against it? The answer is clear: we have had such elected officials, and they have been murdered, one can guess by whom. No wonder the presidential elections leave us no choice. And the double meaning is intentional: perhaps it is no longer possible to remedy this problem by working peacefully through the system.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
THE DEATH PENALTY IS NOT THE ISSUE!
It is probably well known by now to anyone who keeps up with the news that six detainees in the War on Terror are about to be put on trial for their alleged role in the attacks of 9/11. They will be tried by one of the notorious military commissions established by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. They are facing death, which is disturbing because if the judgement of this kangaroo court is ever overturned and the men are found innocent, we won't be able to give them back their lives. But what is equally disturbing is the way that some critics of this trial are focusing excessively upon the so-called "penalty". For instance, Clive Stafford Smith, a British lawyer who has worked with inmates at Guantánamo, says, "Anyone can see the hypocrisy of espousing human rights, and then trampling on them. We will infuriate our allies who firmly oppose the death penalty." ("US Accused of Using Kangaroo Court to Try Men Accused of Role in 9/11 Attacks," Truthout, February 12, 2008). It is hard to believe that anyone who is familiar with the hellish conditions under which detainees at Guantanámo live could be so callous as to wish to deny them relief. Death will surely be welcomed by men who have been put through such tortures. But if giving them relief from their sufferings were the only possibility, it would be better for legal precedent in this country if Al Quaeda were to bomb Guantánamo. From an American court, one would expect not just relief but justice. The trial in question does indeed trample on human rights. But that is not because the men are threatened with death. It is because, given the conditions under which they are to be tried, which violate every norm of due process, they cannot possibly obtain a fair trial, and therefore justice. If the so-called "penalty" is carried out, it will not be a "death penalty" but murder.
We must be careful not to hamstring ourselves here. After all, whether or not the accused in this trial are terrorists or not, there are terrorists among us. And unlike the accused, the real nature of whose crimes is not known and cannot be known given the conditons under which they have lived and under which they are to be tried, the crimes of the worst terrorists in the world are plain for all to see. They are the people who have organized this kangaroo court, and include the most powerful individuals in our government. The list would certainly include the entire Bush Administration and the entire leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency. If the American people ever get up enough courage to replace this thoroughly rotten government with one which respects the United States Constitution, we must be prepared to try them. And we cannot do so by Smith's standards. According to A.J. Langguth's Hidden Terrors, a Navy captain who had acted as a torturer for the U.S.-backed Brazilian dictatorship in the early nineteen-seventies, told Fernando Gabiera, a young journalism student and his victim, "I'm a torturer, but you are not. If the socialists ever come to power, I'll be in a good position, because you're a coward, and you won't torture me." (p. 201) It pains me to know that Gabeira did not have the presence of mind to reply, "You're right-- we won't torture you-- but you won't be in a good position, because you'll be dead. We will try you and you will most likely be executed for your crimes."
Whatever government replaces this one, which is badly in need of replacement (a replacement which cannot come about through this presidential elections farce, which is by now no more politically meaningful than the World Series), it must not stoop to using torture on a routine basis as this government does. Nor must it inflict any penalty without giving the accused the benefit of due process, including access to a writ of habeas corpus, a lawyer, and a fair trial. After all, we gave all that even to the Nazis. But the death penalty is a perfectly appropriate punishment for those found guilty of practicing political terrorism through PSYWAR, death squads, staged "terrorist attacks" etc. After all, if a person is really guilty, what is the alternative? So long as prisons remain the abusive places they are-- and given human nature, for which power is usually an irresistable license to abuse, they most likely will-- there is little difference between death and life imprisonment. Indeed, death may be the more humane alternative. And do we really want to support the Bush Administration and the leaders of the CIA at public expense for the rest of their lives? Don't we have better ways of spending public monies?
Let's make no bones about it-- terrorists convicted by a fair and public trial deserve death. That would be true of the men accused in the present case if they could be proven to have been the agents responsible for 9/11, which will not be possible because their trial will not be fair and public. But it seems very likely that the real responsibility for that tragedy lies elsewhere, in the very people who have tortured them in order to terrorize them into silence and are now proposing to murder them so that the the American people will never know the truth. And one can only hope that these criminals-- Bush, Cheney, the present and former Secretaries of Defense, the present and former Attorneys General, and General Michael Hayden, the Director of the CIA, among others, will someday receive the penalty they so richly deserve: death.
We must be careful not to hamstring ourselves here. After all, whether or not the accused in this trial are terrorists or not, there are terrorists among us. And unlike the accused, the real nature of whose crimes is not known and cannot be known given the conditons under which they have lived and under which they are to be tried, the crimes of the worst terrorists in the world are plain for all to see. They are the people who have organized this kangaroo court, and include the most powerful individuals in our government. The list would certainly include the entire Bush Administration and the entire leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency. If the American people ever get up enough courage to replace this thoroughly rotten government with one which respects the United States Constitution, we must be prepared to try them. And we cannot do so by Smith's standards. According to A.J. Langguth's Hidden Terrors, a Navy captain who had acted as a torturer for the U.S.-backed Brazilian dictatorship in the early nineteen-seventies, told Fernando Gabiera, a young journalism student and his victim, "I'm a torturer, but you are not. If the socialists ever come to power, I'll be in a good position, because you're a coward, and you won't torture me." (p. 201) It pains me to know that Gabeira did not have the presence of mind to reply, "You're right-- we won't torture you-- but you won't be in a good position, because you'll be dead. We will try you and you will most likely be executed for your crimes."
Whatever government replaces this one, which is badly in need of replacement (a replacement which cannot come about through this presidential elections farce, which is by now no more politically meaningful than the World Series), it must not stoop to using torture on a routine basis as this government does. Nor must it inflict any penalty without giving the accused the benefit of due process, including access to a writ of habeas corpus, a lawyer, and a fair trial. After all, we gave all that even to the Nazis. But the death penalty is a perfectly appropriate punishment for those found guilty of practicing political terrorism through PSYWAR, death squads, staged "terrorist attacks" etc. After all, if a person is really guilty, what is the alternative? So long as prisons remain the abusive places they are-- and given human nature, for which power is usually an irresistable license to abuse, they most likely will-- there is little difference between death and life imprisonment. Indeed, death may be the more humane alternative. And do we really want to support the Bush Administration and the leaders of the CIA at public expense for the rest of their lives? Don't we have better ways of spending public monies?
Let's make no bones about it-- terrorists convicted by a fair and public trial deserve death. That would be true of the men accused in the present case if they could be proven to have been the agents responsible for 9/11, which will not be possible because their trial will not be fair and public. But it seems very likely that the real responsibility for that tragedy lies elsewhere, in the very people who have tortured them in order to terrorize them into silence and are now proposing to murder them so that the the American people will never know the truth. And one can only hope that these criminals-- Bush, Cheney, the present and former Secretaries of Defense, the present and former Attorneys General, and General Michael Hayden, the Director of the CIA, among others, will someday receive the penalty they so richly deserve: death.
Monday, February 11, 2008
WHY DOES OUR GOVERNMENT TORTURE?
I have just received, via TRUTHOUT, an article written by the a member of the Associated Press claiming that there is a secret detention center inside Guantanamo. It seems that even many of the army people responsible for running the detention center at large do not know of its existence. Like 24 or so secret prisons located around the globe, holding perhaps some 3,000 prisoners (an estimate by Chalmers Johnson, based upon one of Bush's speeches-- see Nemesis, p. 124), it is undoubtedly being run by the CIA and is a hellhole where torture is routine. And it is very important that the American people know why such places exist. As I made clear in an earlier blog, CONTRA DERSHOWITZ, the methods used by the CIA, termed collectively PSYWAR, are not aimed at the acquisition of intelligence. Indeed, they make such acquisition impossible, producing as they do a state of psychosis in the subject which would make him unable to respond to simple questions such as "Where is your terrorist group's headquarters?" or "What attacks is it planning?" (see Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, especially pp. 21-59)>. PSYWAR is basically a form of "brainwashing" which is aimed at breaking a person so that he can be whatever one wants him to be, not breaking down his resistence to providing information, which is a different matter altogether. A person who no longer knows who he is and is cut off completely from reality cannot convey "actionable intelligence". But he may be very susceptible to exploitation for other purposes. It is those other purposes which this blog seeks to explore.
First of all, there is sheer sadism. Shocking evidence of this was provided in the October 8 issue of Newsweek Magazine. In an article entitled, "The Constitution in Peril", Christopher Dickey quoted a CIA officer "privy to high-level discussions at the agency" who wished to remain anonymous as saying that there was internal opposition to having prisoners who no longer had any intelligence value-- if indeed they ever had any-- remain at secret sites. Some argued, quite reasonably, that they should be turned over to the judicial system for fair and open trials. But others argued that "these people were just scum and they wanted to waterboard them every day forever. The waterboarders won out..." (p.66). This suggests that the majority of so-called "interrogators" who work for the CIA have lost all pretence of professionalism and have become mere thugs, for the CIA's stated mission is to gather intelligence, not indulge the sadism of its employees. And the most disturbing thing is that many of their victims may be innocent. According the the Center for Constitutional Rights, many of the people now in custody of the CIA were handed over for a bounty or for reasons of personal revenge. And there is also the possibility that even if these men are guilty, they know things about the complicity of our own government in the events of 9/11 which makes it impossible for them to be tried in public.
We cannot know for certain that a prisoner is a terrorist unless he is given a a fair and open trial. Doing so would not make it impossible for him to receive severe punishment if he does indeed turn out to be a terrorist: indeed, twelve of the high-ranking Nazis tried in the major trial in Nuremberg in 1945 were executed. That was a military tribunal, but with once crucial difference from the military commissions of today, established under the Military Commissions Act: these people were given all the rights of due process which our government guarantees to American citizens, despite the fact that they were not and never would be on soveriegn U.S. territory. That is to say, our government treated even Nazis-- guilty of killing millions-- better than it is treating suspects in the War on Terror! The most persuasive evidence that the majority of terrorist suspects detained by the U.S. government today are not guilty as charged is its refusal to give them a fair and open trial. As the director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Vincent Warren, says about today's Military Commissions system, "Career military officers have already resigned because they could not stomach participating in a military commission system that goes against every principle of justice, due process and the rule of law (e-mail circular of February 11, 2008). There is overwhelming evidence that all these detainees have been tortured. But what does this torture produce? In many cases, false confessions. Once reduced to a "basket case" out of touch with reality, a prisoner will say anything his torturers want him to in order to stop the pain. It was the false "confessions" of Ibn Shiekh al Libi and another terror suspect code-named "Curveball", obtained under torture, and implicating the Iraqi government in the provision of weapons of mass destruction to Al Quaeda, which got the U.S. into the War in Iraq. Later, in January 2004, Al-Libi recanted his claims. But it was too late. The U.S. was involved in a war which still drags on with apparent hopelessness. And Al-Libi? He has since disappeared. Our government is right now seeking the death sentence in a case involving a client of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Mohammed Al Qahtani. According to Vincent Warren, "The military commissions allow secret evidence, hearsay evidence, and evidence obtained through torture." (e-mail circular). To execute a prisoner when he has not been given a fair trial is a very convenient way to get rid of someone who may either be innocent or in possession of damning evidence against our own government. It is time to ask, if these prisoners are guilty as charged, why aren't they being given fair and open trials?
The obtaining of false confessions has been a special goal of torture since 9/11, which may well have been a phony terrorist attack to begin with. However, there is one other goal of American torture-- spreading terror-- which has a long history indeed. An examination of the history of the CIA, the main propagator of torture in the world today, from its founding in 1947, shows that it has spent far more time trying to topple moderate and democratically-elected governments and prop up dictators than in gathering intelligence which could save American lives. One need only mention its role in the fall of Iran's Mossadegh and the return of the Shah, with his vicious CIA-trained secret police Savak to power in 1953, the replacement of Indonesia's Sukarno by Suharto in 1967, and the toppling of Chile's Salvadore Allende in favor of the dictator Pinochet in 1973. Such activities require rather different skills than those required for the gathering of intelligence. When one reads the harrowing accounts of individual cases in A. J. Langguth's study of police brutality in Latin America, Hidden Terrors, one is struck by how little the CIA-trained personnel inflicting these horrible tortures cared about intelligence. Suspects were beaten mercilessly before their identities were even known. When they were tortured, it was not necessarily a punishment for refusing to answer questions, for in many cases, "no questions had been asked. It was a preliminary lesson, to impress on the captured the consequences of being arrested." Of the Christian nationalist Flavio Freitas, Langguth says, "True to their new [CIA-inspired] procedures, the police tortured him for three days and nights with no serious questioning." Many of the people treated in this fashion not surprisingly went mad, making them inaccessible to any real interrogation. (pp. 162-3; 193; 202).
The best-known figure in this repression was Dan Mitrione, whose misdeeds, kidnapping by the Tupameros and execution were dramatized in the 1973 film State of Siege. Although not a CIA man himself, his approach to "interrogation" expressed perfectly the principles of his teachers in "the Company". Indeed, he was widely believed to be a CIA officer, and was listed as such in a book entitled Who's Who in the CIA. Mitrione was assigned by AID to take charge of police operations in Montivideo, Uruguay, in February, 1970. Within a month of his appointment, a respected Uruguayan newspaper was reporting an increase in incidents of torture by the police. Mitrione brought new, high-tech, American equipment such as electric needles. In an interview given to a Brazilian newspaper in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that U.S. advisors, particularly Mitrione, had instituted torture as a routine measure, to the means of inflicting pain, they had added scientific refinement, and "to that a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoner that is was his family that was being tortured." Manuel Hevia Coscullela, a Cuban double agent, speaks of a torture demonstration in the basement of Mitrione's house" "They took four beggars, including one woman. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the effects of different voltages on the different parts of the body, as well as demonstrating the use of a drug which induces vomiting..." Later Hevia told the New York Times that Mitrione personally tortured four beggars to death. "The special horror of the course was its academic, almost clinical atmosphere." (see Langguth pp. 254, 286-7, McCoy pp. 71-73).
Mitrione's philosophy, as he confided it to Manuel Hevia, was instructive. "First there should be a softening-up period, with the usual blows and insults. The object is to humiliate the prisoner, to isolate him from the reality outside his cell . Naturally that would have to include the reality of any violent activities he had been involved in or was planning, if there were any-- in other words, the sorts of things about which information was most needed. "No questions, just blows and insults. Then blows in total silence." After that, with the person most likely in a state of suicidal despair, the "interrogation" begins. Mitrione maintained that one should leave the subject some ray of hope or else he will become resigned to his own death, but everything about his methods seem calculated to produce exactly this result. "When you get what you want, and you always get it, it may be good to prolong the session a little to apply another softening-up. Not to extract information now, but as a political instrument, to scare him away from further rebel activity." One can see immediately how counterproductive this is to the quest for intelligence. For a genuine subversive, knowing from his comrades who had been captured before him that he would be punished by police interrogators for his subversive activities, not just questioned about them, would have the highest motivation to minimize and indeed lie about them. A rational interrogation policy requires that the interrogator accept that the subject has a different ideology and different goals from himself, otherwise his quest for information will suffer. Dan Mitrione considered himself a first-rate interrogator: as he told Hevia, "In my profession, I'm the best." (Langguth, pp. 309-313). But his own theory and practice of interrogation shows that he was no interrogator at all. Indeed, he might better be called a terrorist.
Perhaps the most important example of how torture has been used as an instrument of terror is the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam, which has been exhaustively detailed by Douglas Valentine in his book, The Phoenix Program. From the standpoint of those who genuinely wanted to stop the advance of totalitarian Communism, the War in Vietnam was a dismal failure. But it might not have been to the CIA. For the Phoenix program provided valuable experience in how to set up a totalitarian state and keep it running, experience which is being put to the test today. Just as the CIA had originally modelled its so-called "interrogation techniques" on the Stalinist show-trials, so the Phoenix program was modeled on the atrocities of the Viet Cong. Ironically, what was essentially a terrorist program was sold to the American people as an attempt to protect the Vietnamese against terrorism (sound familiar?). Its victims were civilians, not soldiers. CIA officer Pat McGarvey recalled to Seymour Hersh that "some psychological warfare guy thought of a way to scare the hell out of villagers. When we killed a VC there, they wanted us to spreadeagle the guy, put out his eye, cut a hole in the back of his head and put his eye in there. The idea was that fear is a good weapon." Likewise, "ears were cut off corpses and nailed to houses to let the people know that Big Brother was listening as well." As with the torture of civilians, "the subliminal purpose of terror tactics was to drive people into a state of infantile dependence." (Valentine, The Phoenix Program, pp. 40-1, 59, 47-8, 13, 62, 63).
Potential torture victims were supplied by paid informants. Anthony Herbert, in his autobiography Soldier, said that when he was asked to cooperate with the CIA PSYWAR and informant program, he questioned the method of obtaining potential VC prisoners. He suggested that informers might have ulterior motives, such as "revenge or personal gain", and that some of their stool pigeons might be "double or triple agents". The man in charge of the program, CIA Province officer Warren Milberg, conceded the point, noting that the Special Branch recruited informants "who clearly fabricated information which they thought their Special Branch case operators wanted to hear," and that when this information was compiled and produced in the form of blacklists, a distinct possibility existed that some of the names on the list had little relation to the actual person or that the people so named were not, in fact, members of the Vietcong Infrastructure. When Congressional hearings were held on this program at the time, and a representative asked DCI William Colby "Are you certain you know a loyal member of the VCI from a loyal member of the South Vietnamese citizenry?" Colby answered "No." (Valentine, "When the Phoenix Comes Home to Roost", available on-line). But this fact didn't seem to bother anyone working on the Phoenix program.
The Provincial Interrogation Centers or PICs where the hapless blacklisted people were sent were hellholes. Housing them consisted of "solitary confinement in cells the size of closets." Tortures included "rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, rape followed by murder, electric shock [called significantly, in a phrase that reveals the totally American origin of these abuses, the 'Bell Telephone Hour'], the water treatment [known today as waterboarding], the 'airplane', in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind his back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten, and the use of police dogs." After being "pumped" for information or perhaps just the sadistic pleasure of the torturers, the victims were usually "dumped"-- CIA Director Colby admitted to 20,587 deaths. The men who ran the PICs knew full well how horrible they were: One of them told the director of the program, John Patrick Muldoon, "John, if we lose this war one day, we could end up in these goddamn things if we get caught." Muldoon asked him what he would do if that happened. He said he'd rather kill himself than go through what the CIA called "interrogation". Despite all this suffering and carnage, the gains in terms of intelligence were minimal. Muldoon said "Some guys thought they [the PICs] were the biggest waste of time and money ever spent because they didn't produce anything [in terms of intelligence] (Valentine, The Phoenix Program, pp. 79, 85-86). But clearly their goal was not the acquisition of intelligence: it was the spreading of terror. And this is the model for the program which Douglas Valentine, in his essay "The Phoenix Comes Home to Roost", says that Homeland Security is planning to unleash on the American people. Who then are the real terrorists?
First of all, there is sheer sadism. Shocking evidence of this was provided in the October 8 issue of Newsweek Magazine. In an article entitled, "The Constitution in Peril", Christopher Dickey quoted a CIA officer "privy to high-level discussions at the agency" who wished to remain anonymous as saying that there was internal opposition to having prisoners who no longer had any intelligence value-- if indeed they ever had any-- remain at secret sites. Some argued, quite reasonably, that they should be turned over to the judicial system for fair and open trials. But others argued that "these people were just scum and they wanted to waterboard them every day forever. The waterboarders won out..." (p.66). This suggests that the majority of so-called "interrogators" who work for the CIA have lost all pretence of professionalism and have become mere thugs, for the CIA's stated mission is to gather intelligence, not indulge the sadism of its employees. And the most disturbing thing is that many of their victims may be innocent. According the the Center for Constitutional Rights, many of the people now in custody of the CIA were handed over for a bounty or for reasons of personal revenge. And there is also the possibility that even if these men are guilty, they know things about the complicity of our own government in the events of 9/11 which makes it impossible for them to be tried in public.
We cannot know for certain that a prisoner is a terrorist unless he is given a a fair and open trial. Doing so would not make it impossible for him to receive severe punishment if he does indeed turn out to be a terrorist: indeed, twelve of the high-ranking Nazis tried in the major trial in Nuremberg in 1945 were executed. That was a military tribunal, but with once crucial difference from the military commissions of today, established under the Military Commissions Act: these people were given all the rights of due process which our government guarantees to American citizens, despite the fact that they were not and never would be on soveriegn U.S. territory. That is to say, our government treated even Nazis-- guilty of killing millions-- better than it is treating suspects in the War on Terror! The most persuasive evidence that the majority of terrorist suspects detained by the U.S. government today are not guilty as charged is its refusal to give them a fair and open trial. As the director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Vincent Warren, says about today's Military Commissions system, "Career military officers have already resigned because they could not stomach participating in a military commission system that goes against every principle of justice, due process and the rule of law (e-mail circular of February 11, 2008). There is overwhelming evidence that all these detainees have been tortured. But what does this torture produce? In many cases, false confessions. Once reduced to a "basket case" out of touch with reality, a prisoner will say anything his torturers want him to in order to stop the pain. It was the false "confessions" of Ibn Shiekh al Libi and another terror suspect code-named "Curveball", obtained under torture, and implicating the Iraqi government in the provision of weapons of mass destruction to Al Quaeda, which got the U.S. into the War in Iraq. Later, in January 2004, Al-Libi recanted his claims. But it was too late. The U.S. was involved in a war which still drags on with apparent hopelessness. And Al-Libi? He has since disappeared. Our government is right now seeking the death sentence in a case involving a client of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Mohammed Al Qahtani. According to Vincent Warren, "The military commissions allow secret evidence, hearsay evidence, and evidence obtained through torture." (e-mail circular). To execute a prisoner when he has not been given a fair trial is a very convenient way to get rid of someone who may either be innocent or in possession of damning evidence against our own government. It is time to ask, if these prisoners are guilty as charged, why aren't they being given fair and open trials?
The obtaining of false confessions has been a special goal of torture since 9/11, which may well have been a phony terrorist attack to begin with. However, there is one other goal of American torture-- spreading terror-- which has a long history indeed. An examination of the history of the CIA, the main propagator of torture in the world today, from its founding in 1947, shows that it has spent far more time trying to topple moderate and democratically-elected governments and prop up dictators than in gathering intelligence which could save American lives. One need only mention its role in the fall of Iran's Mossadegh and the return of the Shah, with his vicious CIA-trained secret police Savak to power in 1953, the replacement of Indonesia's Sukarno by Suharto in 1967, and the toppling of Chile's Salvadore Allende in favor of the dictator Pinochet in 1973. Such activities require rather different skills than those required for the gathering of intelligence. When one reads the harrowing accounts of individual cases in A. J. Langguth's study of police brutality in Latin America, Hidden Terrors, one is struck by how little the CIA-trained personnel inflicting these horrible tortures cared about intelligence. Suspects were beaten mercilessly before their identities were even known. When they were tortured, it was not necessarily a punishment for refusing to answer questions, for in many cases, "no questions had been asked. It was a preliminary lesson, to impress on the captured the consequences of being arrested." Of the Christian nationalist Flavio Freitas, Langguth says, "True to their new [CIA-inspired] procedures, the police tortured him for three days and nights with no serious questioning." Many of the people treated in this fashion not surprisingly went mad, making them inaccessible to any real interrogation. (pp. 162-3; 193; 202).
The best-known figure in this repression was Dan Mitrione, whose misdeeds, kidnapping by the Tupameros and execution were dramatized in the 1973 film State of Siege. Although not a CIA man himself, his approach to "interrogation" expressed perfectly the principles of his teachers in "the Company". Indeed, he was widely believed to be a CIA officer, and was listed as such in a book entitled Who's Who in the CIA. Mitrione was assigned by AID to take charge of police operations in Montivideo, Uruguay, in February, 1970. Within a month of his appointment, a respected Uruguayan newspaper was reporting an increase in incidents of torture by the police. Mitrione brought new, high-tech, American equipment such as electric needles. In an interview given to a Brazilian newspaper in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that U.S. advisors, particularly Mitrione, had instituted torture as a routine measure, to the means of inflicting pain, they had added scientific refinement, and "to that a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoner that is was his family that was being tortured." Manuel Hevia Coscullela, a Cuban double agent, speaks of a torture demonstration in the basement of Mitrione's house" "They took four beggars, including one woman. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the effects of different voltages on the different parts of the body, as well as demonstrating the use of a drug which induces vomiting..." Later Hevia told the New York Times that Mitrione personally tortured four beggars to death. "The special horror of the course was its academic, almost clinical atmosphere." (see Langguth pp. 254, 286-7, McCoy pp. 71-73).
Mitrione's philosophy, as he confided it to Manuel Hevia, was instructive. "First there should be a softening-up period, with the usual blows and insults. The object is to humiliate the prisoner, to isolate him from the reality outside his cell . Naturally that would have to include the reality of any violent activities he had been involved in or was planning, if there were any-- in other words, the sorts of things about which information was most needed. "No questions, just blows and insults. Then blows in total silence." After that, with the person most likely in a state of suicidal despair, the "interrogation" begins. Mitrione maintained that one should leave the subject some ray of hope or else he will become resigned to his own death, but everything about his methods seem calculated to produce exactly this result. "When you get what you want, and you always get it, it may be good to prolong the session a little to apply another softening-up. Not to extract information now, but as a political instrument, to scare him away from further rebel activity." One can see immediately how counterproductive this is to the quest for intelligence. For a genuine subversive, knowing from his comrades who had been captured before him that he would be punished by police interrogators for his subversive activities, not just questioned about them, would have the highest motivation to minimize and indeed lie about them. A rational interrogation policy requires that the interrogator accept that the subject has a different ideology and different goals from himself, otherwise his quest for information will suffer. Dan Mitrione considered himself a first-rate interrogator: as he told Hevia, "In my profession, I'm the best." (Langguth, pp. 309-313). But his own theory and practice of interrogation shows that he was no interrogator at all. Indeed, he might better be called a terrorist.
Perhaps the most important example of how torture has been used as an instrument of terror is the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam, which has been exhaustively detailed by Douglas Valentine in his book, The Phoenix Program. From the standpoint of those who genuinely wanted to stop the advance of totalitarian Communism, the War in Vietnam was a dismal failure. But it might not have been to the CIA. For the Phoenix program provided valuable experience in how to set up a totalitarian state and keep it running, experience which is being put to the test today. Just as the CIA had originally modelled its so-called "interrogation techniques" on the Stalinist show-trials, so the Phoenix program was modeled on the atrocities of the Viet Cong. Ironically, what was essentially a terrorist program was sold to the American people as an attempt to protect the Vietnamese against terrorism (sound familiar?). Its victims were civilians, not soldiers. CIA officer Pat McGarvey recalled to Seymour Hersh that "some psychological warfare guy thought of a way to scare the hell out of villagers. When we killed a VC there, they wanted us to spreadeagle the guy, put out his eye, cut a hole in the back of his head and put his eye in there. The idea was that fear is a good weapon." Likewise, "ears were cut off corpses and nailed to houses to let the people know that Big Brother was listening as well." As with the torture of civilians, "the subliminal purpose of terror tactics was to drive people into a state of infantile dependence." (Valentine, The Phoenix Program, pp. 40-1, 59, 47-8, 13, 62, 63).
Potential torture victims were supplied by paid informants. Anthony Herbert, in his autobiography Soldier, said that when he was asked to cooperate with the CIA PSYWAR and informant program, he questioned the method of obtaining potential VC prisoners. He suggested that informers might have ulterior motives, such as "revenge or personal gain", and that some of their stool pigeons might be "double or triple agents". The man in charge of the program, CIA Province officer Warren Milberg, conceded the point, noting that the Special Branch recruited informants "who clearly fabricated information which they thought their Special Branch case operators wanted to hear," and that when this information was compiled and produced in the form of blacklists, a distinct possibility existed that some of the names on the list had little relation to the actual person or that the people so named were not, in fact, members of the Vietcong Infrastructure. When Congressional hearings were held on this program at the time, and a representative asked DCI William Colby "Are you certain you know a loyal member of the VCI from a loyal member of the South Vietnamese citizenry?" Colby answered "No." (Valentine, "When the Phoenix Comes Home to Roost", available on-line). But this fact didn't seem to bother anyone working on the Phoenix program.
The Provincial Interrogation Centers or PICs where the hapless blacklisted people were sent were hellholes. Housing them consisted of "solitary confinement in cells the size of closets." Tortures included "rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, rape followed by murder, electric shock [called significantly, in a phrase that reveals the totally American origin of these abuses, the 'Bell Telephone Hour'], the water treatment [known today as waterboarding], the 'airplane', in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind his back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten, and the use of police dogs." After being "pumped" for information or perhaps just the sadistic pleasure of the torturers, the victims were usually "dumped"-- CIA Director Colby admitted to 20,587 deaths. The men who ran the PICs knew full well how horrible they were: One of them told the director of the program, John Patrick Muldoon, "John, if we lose this war one day, we could end up in these goddamn things if we get caught." Muldoon asked him what he would do if that happened. He said he'd rather kill himself than go through what the CIA called "interrogation". Despite all this suffering and carnage, the gains in terms of intelligence were minimal. Muldoon said "Some guys thought they [the PICs] were the biggest waste of time and money ever spent because they didn't produce anything [in terms of intelligence] (Valentine, The Phoenix Program, pp. 79, 85-86). But clearly their goal was not the acquisition of intelligence: it was the spreading of terror. And this is the model for the program which Douglas Valentine, in his essay "The Phoenix Comes Home to Roost", says that Homeland Security is planning to unleash on the American people. Who then are the real terrorists?
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