HOW TO CREATE A TERRORIST: A Review of Colin Ross, M.D., The CIA Doctors

The stated aim of The CIA Doctors by Colin Ross, M.D. is an excellent and much-needed one: "to prove that the Manchurian Candidate is fact, not fiction, ...and that "the creation of controlled disassociation was a major goal of mind control research." (p. 10) As he says, he is not a conspiracy theorist and has no axe to grind against the CIA: his concern is that his fellow psychiatrists, including some of the most prestigious individuals and medical schools in the country, have violated and are violating their Hippcratic Oath by their participation in the unethical programs of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. A case in point is the eminent psychiatrist G.H. Estabrooks, the only participant who actually admitted-- indeed boasted-- that he was able to create totally new and programmed personalities: as he said, "The key to creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man's personality, or creating multipersonality, with the aid of hypnotism... This is not science fiction. This has and is being done. I have done it." (p. 151). There is however one major problem with this book. It was orginally written in 2000, and when Dr. Ross revised it in 2006, he did not add any new material to speak of. Thus the connection between the experiments carried out by the CIA during the Cold War and the treatment of detainees in the so-called "War on Terror" is not made explicit, as it is in Alfred McCoy's A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Yet the similarity between the way that "Manchurian candidates" were created during the Cold War and terrorist suspects are being treated today is striking.

Take for example, Mohammed Al Qahtani, one of the "Guantánamo Six" on trial for his life under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Mr. Al Qahtani is one of the few terrorist suspects who have been permitted to have civilian lawyers, in his case from the progressive Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). A CCR information paper on Al Qahtani lists the abuses to which he has been subjected, in a manner which is at times a bit confusing. For instance, he is described as having been subjected to "forced administration of numerous IVs during interrogation." Is it really possible that his captors thought that Al Qahtani would be severely affected by merely being poked repeatedly with hypodermic needles? Having myself been a victim of forced drugging and drug-induced torture, I could not help but wonder when I read this, "What was in those hypodermic needles?" One passage in The CIA Doctors was invaluable in answering that question. It concerns "interrogations" (I shall put this word in quotes whenever the aim does not appear to be the acquisition of intelligence) of various individuals, under the CIA program ARTICHOKE. During these so-called "interrogations", subjects were given unspecified chemicals intravenously. Then, to quote a CIA document, "1. A false memory was introduced into the subject's mind without his conscious control of the process, which took 15 to 20 minutes. 2. The procedure was repeated, this time taking 40 to 45 minutes. 3. The procedure was repeated again with interrogation added." (p. 39)

The possibility that Al Qahtani may have been subjected to the same regime is reinforced by the fact that both the ARTICHOKE victims and Al Qahtani were subjected to repeated strip searches, extreme solitary confinement, sleep and food deprivation, and exposure to severe cold. Abuses up to and including torture have a definite role to play in the creation of a new identity, whether that of a "Manchurian Candidate" or terrorist. That is to say, they are part of the process of depatterning. As Ross says, in the first phase of the creation of a new personality, the subject is depatterned, which means they are reduced to a vegetable state through a combination of massive amounts of electroconvulsive shocks, drug-induced sleep and sensory isolation and deprivation. When fully depatterned, patients are incontinent of urine and feces, unable to feed themselves, and unable to state their name, age, location, or the current date (p. 124) As O'Brien says to Winston in 1984, "We will empty you and fill you with ourselves." It is after this depatterning that the narco-hypnotic process begins, and the subject acquires a new identity and memory. The new identity could make subjects commit violent crimes which they had no natural inclination for, as well as confessing to ones they did not commit. For instance, one woman subject of CIA experimentation who was afraid of firearms was induced to shoot another subject with a gun she believed was loaded. Others were able to set off time-bombs at the mere mention of a particular code-word. (pp. 46-47)

Of course, the fact that the subject has acquired a new identity has to be hidden from the subject himself or herself. One of the most puzzling things to anyone who has done research on CIA abuses is why an agency charged with the acquisition of intelligence would take an interest in procedures, such as electroconvulsive treatment (ECT), which are notorious for producing amnesia. The explanation is to be found in the following CIA document, quoted by Ross: "Quite often amnesia occurs for events just prior to the convulsion, during the convulsion and during the post-seizure period. It is possible that hypnosis or hypnotic activity induced during the post-seizure state might be lost in amnesia. This would be very valuable." Interrogation, including torture, was often conducted after the experiments, simply to determine if the amnesia surrounding the implanted memory could be breached. (p. 49) In other words, our government might be taking completely innocent individuals, reducing them to a vegetable state through torture, giving them a new identity as a terrorist by means of narco-hypnosis, and then torturing them again in order to see if they believe in this new identity enough to confess, not just to their torturers, but when they are trotted out before the public. Someone like Al Qahtani would have no recollection of the introduction of a false memory through chemicals and hypnosis any more than the subjects of ARTICHOKE did. Victims of ARTICHOKE methods believed the memories implanted in their minds were real to the extent that they could even pass lie-detector tests regarding them. (pp. 38-42)

As Alfred McCoy has stated in A Question of Torture, these CIA methods have "metastasized" to other segments of our government, for instance the military which runs Guantánamo. Given this fact, and the similarity of the treatment meted out to suspects in the "War on Terror" to those subjected to CIA experiments, it is easy to see why the Guantánamo Six are to be tried by military commissions which ignore all established rules of due process. If they were to be tried by a normal civilian court, their testimony would have to be dismissed as unreliable, not simply because they have been tortured, but because they have been subjected to what the CIA calls PSYWAR. Whereas traditional methods of interrogation, whether they employ torture or not, aim at the discovery of truth, PSYWAR aims at the creation of falsehood-- false confessions, false identities, false attribution of violent crimes (such as 9/11). To the inhumanity of torture it adds the supreme indignity of robbing an individual of his or her own free will. Men like Al Qahtani are victims of trauma beyond what most of us can imagine and completely unfit to stand trial before any court. If they were guilty, they could have been tried years ago and, even if they had been roughed up a bit, convicted to the applause of nearly everyone. As it is they have been psychologically maimed to the point that we will never know the truth. And these six have undoubtedly been chosen because they are the ones with whom PSYWAR has been the most successful-- what indescribable horrors are being inflicted upon those who are still holding out against it?

The trial of the Guantánamo Six is a travesty of justice, not simply because the military commissions violate constitutional safeguards of due process, but because the minds of the accused have been tampered with. Certainly they have been victims of torture, and one can see in the types of tortures to which they have been subjected all the earmarks of PSYWAR. Given the widespread involvement of politicians, military men, intelligence specialists, medical personnel and pharmacists enjoying the utmost power and prestige in this outrage, one can only conclude that the real agent of terrorism in this world lies not in the Muslim world-- even that of Muslim extremists-- but in our own society.

CIA EXEMPTION FROM TORTURE BAN

I am ashamed to say that, having little faith in the news media, I only learned yesterday about the failure of the attempt of Congress to finally make the McCain Amendment outlawing cruel and degrading treatment of detainees in the so-called "War on Terror" apply to the CIA as well. The agency was exempted from the original ban, but it appears that last month, our Democratic Congress finally got up enough votes to force the CIA to comply with the ban. Predictably, President Bush vetoed this legislation, and Congress was unable to override his veto. The Administration has come out publicly in favor of torture. As my own local newspaper, the San José Mercury-News, said in an editorial on March 13, "Had lawmakers succeeded, they would have raised America's standing among civlized nations." And that standing badly needs to be raised, for America is fast sliding into ignominy as one of the most notorious abusers of human rights in history, not excepting the Nazis and the Soviets under Stalin. I am surprised that Congress finally (if belatedly)found the moral backbone to take a stand on this issue, but not surprised that John McCain, who originally authored the amendment banning cruel and degrading treatment and is now running for president, has refused to stand by his original position. After all, the Powers that Be have to be appeased if one wants the figurehead position of President, and those Powers include above all the very agency which has been exempted.

Now the big question is, with our government giving its approval to such barbarism, is it right for six inmates of Guantánamo to be put on trial for their lives using evidence obtained this way? And if we are to try them, should we not also try the leaders of an Agency which the Center for Constitutional Rights says has acted "criminally, shamefully and dangerously"? Since December 5, the US Supreme Court has been considering an appeal which would enable it to strike down the Military Commissions Act of 2006 as unconstitutional. As CCR says, "the verdict is expected this spring." Today is the first day of spring. Let us hope that the Court will act to prevent this show trial before six men lose their lives as a result of phony "confessions" which have been tortured out of them. If it does not, then despite the efforts of Congress to do something to make the ban on torture absolute, our entire government will have put itself beyond the pale of civilization.

TWO OMINOUS DANGER SIGNS

I have long warned that our government-- by which I do not mean simply the Bush Administration-- is moving toward totalitarianism. Recently there have been two ominous danger signs that that the final step toward fascism is about to be taken. The first concerns the break-down of our two-party system, one of the unwritten "checks and balances" which has worked very well to keep any one political group from amassing too much power. Of course that break-down has been on-going for some time now, but it has recently reached new heights-- or one might better say new depths-- in the marked preference that Hilary Clinton has shown for the probable Republican nominee, John McCain, over her opponent for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama. I wrote in my last blog that the presidential elections offer us little choice, but I confess that I am beginning to feel sorry for Obama, whom Clinton has treated viciously. And I am beginning to think that he might indeed be willing to restore the Constitution if elected, although he won't come out and say so openly as did former Candidate Senator Chris Dodd, who has now thrown his support to him. After all, that strategy did not work for Dodd, and Obama cannot be blamed for concluding that it won't work for him. But unfortunately we will never know if he would have restored the constitutional liberties that the Military Commissions Act has taken away, for Obama has no chance of obtaining the Democratic nomination. Gary Hart has written that by saying that only she and McCain are capable of being Commander-in-Chief, Clinton has broken the "last rule in politics" by betraying her own party. That is true, but she has done more than that. She has signaled, in her abominable contempt for her fellow Democrat, that whatever the people think, whomever we want to be president, she has absolute confidence that she will win the Democratic nomination because the VIPs who really control this country-- the intelligence establishment and STRATCOM above all-- have decided that the only people they would accept as Commander-in-Chief are McCain and Clinton, and thus Obama has been ruled out. Along with the total spinelessness of Congress in failing to repeal the Military Commissions Act, and (so far) the unwillingness of the Supreme Court to strike it down as unconstitutional, this removes one of the few barriers to the concentration of power which the Founders feared, and thus to tyranny.

The other danger sign is the increasing number of hints the Bush Administration is offering that it opposes the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As a avid conservationst, I of course know of the numerous ways that it is giving increased license to hunters. This is certainly bad news for endangered species such as the Yellowstone wolves, but it has even more ominous implications for the American people. Being knee-jerk opponents of gun rights, most liberals cannot see the obvious implications. The National Rifle Association is a powerful lobby, which has often protected those rights in the past. But I know, having been a member, that it is composed primarily of hunters. Its main concern is not self-defense or defense against tyrannical government, but the preservation of the right to hunt. Having heard of these pro-hunting measures I wondered, could the Administration (and hence the real rulers, for whom it is a mere mouthpiece) be "throwing a bone" to the NRA in preparation for the introduction of legislation banning handguns? I did a net search. And sure enough, it turns out that the Bush Administration is taking a stand on gun control which is unprecedented for a Republican Administration. According to the Second Amendment rights group Gun Owners of America, it has filed a brief before the Supreme Court in the case of D.C v. Heller, arguing that any gun ban-- no matter how sweeping-- could be constitutional if some court determines that it is "reasonable". To quote Larry Pratt, president of GOA, "What the Bush Administration has done is to, on the one hand, say the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, but on the other hand, courts can make of it what they will... they can use 'lawyerese'-- they can call it 'reasonable security'-- which means they can play with the constitution any which way they want." (http://www.onenewsnow/Legal/Default.aspx?id=65462).

What does all this mean? It means that the right-wing hunters who dominate the NRA will still be able to hunt-- even endangered species-- which will defang the the most powerful opponent of gun prohibition. Knowing the NRA as well as I do, I suspect that it may raise a feeble voice when the Administration introduces a measure to ban handguns alone, but since such a ban would not touch the rifles and shotguns that most of its members care most about, its ability to block the measure will be greatly reduced. The real victims will be the people who need handguns for self-defense against criminals-- for instance women who for any reason must live alone-- especially mothers-- and those who oppose our government's policies in other areas. And why is the Administration taking this stance? Because it has such a commitment to the protection of human life? Can one possibly believe that of a government that is pursuing policies of genocide around the world? Of course not. It is because it is aiming to do exactly what the Second Amendment was enacted to prevent-- remove any possibility of its opponents being able to defend themselves against incursions upon their liberties. Unfortunately the mindless anti-gun mentality of the otherwise progressive forces in this country will leave it helpless to do anything to retain this last bastion of liberty, as the Administration well knows. And with the NRA essentially mollified, there will be no barrier against the banning of handguns, which has always accompanied the rise of dictators everywhere.

Thomas Jefferson, who was passionately pro-gun, must be wracked with torment in his grave at this latest step toward tyranny.