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?