AN OPEN LETTER TO DARIUS REJALI

Professor Rejali:

I first became interested in your work when I read your article "Electricity: The Global History of a Torture Technology", which is discussed in my last blog. I even considered buying your book, Torture and Democracy. But I have read enough now to see that your theories, which caused me some concern from the start, are counter-productive and indeed even dangerous. No doubt you are sincerely devoted to stopping torture as it is practiced today, but in fact nothing is more likely to give torturers encouragement than the conclusions which you are championing. I am referring specifically to a passage from your published comments in a panel discussion sponsored by the Carnegie Council, and held in the New York Public Library on June 1, 2005. On that occasion you said:

"Does it work? Well, let me be clear. There are three ways you can use torture: to cause fear, to elicit a false confession, to get true information. Can organizations use torture to intimidate prisoners? Yes. Can organizations use torture to produce false confessions? Yes, absolutely, though it's hard. But these cases of torture working are not the important ones. The real question is whether organizations can apply torture professionally to produce true information better than other forms of intelligence-gathering." (http://www.eceia.org/resources/transcripts/5207.html/pf_printable?

In this you are dead wrong. For there is overwhelming evidence that our government uses torture not to obtain information which could save lives, but for the first two purposes, for which you admit that it works. In dismissing those first two cases as unimportant, you are giving the torturers the victory at the very outset. I suspect that your unwillingness to confront the real aim of torture by by United States stems from a tendency, surprising in someone who grew up under the Shah, to confuse democracy with prosperity and consumerism, and fail to see that a government which uses torture on a routine basis, no matter how stealthfully, cannot long remain a democracy: through its own actions it is laying the foundations for totalitarianism.

You must be aware that the Iraq War was initiated partly because of the "confession" of Ibn Al-Sheikh Al-Libi, that Iraq was giving Al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction, which he later recanted and which has been proven to be untrue: in fact Iraq had no WMDs. Do you think that this was an accident? Can you not see that that confession was deliberately elicited in order to get the U.S. into a war which people would otherwise not have supported? You have been studying torture, especially as practiced by democracies, all your life. So you cannot have failed to notice that since the nineteen-fifties, the CIA has been conducting programs, such as MK-ULTRA, ARTICHOKE AND BLUEBIRD, aimed at radically changing the subject's personality. These methods utilize a combination of mental and physical tortures, such as electroconvulsive treatment, severe sensory deprivation, and hallucinogenic drugs, along with hypnosis, to "depattern" individuals to an infantile state from which they can be re-programmed to be whatever the government wants them to be. The facts are laid out in Alfred W. McCoy's A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror(see especially pp. 29-59). Such methods produce amnesia, delusions, hallucinations and psychosis, which obviously have no use in the elicting of true information. Why then has it been developing them? Dr. Colin Ross, M.D., has offered an answer in The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists : they are being used to produce new personalities, to create what used to be called "Manchurian Candidates", and must now (since the Cold War is over) be termed "phony terrorists".

But our government, concerned as it is with the protection of American lives, would never do such a thing, right? You above all should know how false that assumption is. Stealthy methods of torture may have been developed to fool the public in democracies, but they have invariably have been used to create dictatorships. Even at the height of the Cold War, there were in fact far more more CIA-created and U.S.-supported dictatorships in the world than Communist ones. If the Communists seemed to control a comparable number of people, it was because they had control of the two great Eurasian giants, the Soviet Union and China. But in terms of the number of states which were dictatorships, right-wing ones far outnumbered Communist ones. Everywhere the CIA applied its methods, the result was dictatorship. And one of these places was your own native Iran. Another was Vietnam, where thousands of American and millions of Vietnamese lives were lost in order to maintain the power of the vicious and dicatorial regime of South Vietnam. The CIA called it "PHOENIX". To the Vietnamese, it was torture and murder on a mass scale, most often of innocent civilians unconnected with the Viet Cong. Douglas Valentine has detailed this in his book, the Phoenix Program. And with the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the terror has come home. With the the U.S. Constitution gutted by that act and others supposedly designed to protect us from "terrorists", our government now has the capability to do more harm to American citizens than any foreign terrorist could ever do.

In your essay, "Electricity...", you say that "torture is part and parcel of the spread of democratization. In an age where... democratization is touted as the province of all that is right, it is striking to see that electric torture is more linked to the latter than to authoritarian regimes. It arises and spreads as police forces re-invent themselves in the face of democratization and international human rights scrutiny and as well-to-do consumers increasingly fear for their security." This assertion ignores two facts. First, although democratic governments may indeed embrace "stealthy" methods to fool a democratic public, the goal and actual result of their efforts is to produce and support dictatorship. If "wealthy consumers" fear more for their security than for their liberty, it is because they have lost the love of liberty which is the only secure basis upon which democracy can rest. Materialism, consumerism, and all that are associated with them are not concomitants of democracy, they are its antithesis. And therein lies the danger of your thesis: it encourages complacency. When people for whom "democracy" means primarily "prosperity" hear it, and read articles such as the one in Newsweek which implies that the CIA is now torturing thousands of detainees who no longer have any intelligence value (if indeed they ever did-- see the October, 8, 2007 issue, page 66), they are bound to say, "Why not? If it is necessary to maintain our way of life, let it continue." Not, be it noted, "our safety", for as you have pointed out, torture has little value for the accumulation of the intelligence necessary for that.

Your thesis can only strengthen the fatal link between public complacency and our government's grab for totalitarian power, because it accepts as true the prevailing lie that the real terrorists are somewhere "out there", when in fact they are right here in our own government. And frankly, I do not understand how a scholar who grew up in Iran under the Shah, and has devoted his life to the study of torture, can have reached such conclusions. Arguing-- as all too many human rights groups do-- over whether or not torture is effective in elicting true intelligence is arguing over hypotheticals. If we want to deal with the real problem of torture today, we have to look at how it furthers the aim of those whose interest is not in saving human lives but in the acquisiton of power. You have already admitted that torture works very well for their purposes, which are to inspire terror and elicit false confessions. So how on earth do you propose to stop it?

GEORGE H.W.BUSH: PRIME SUSPECT IN THE CASE OF 9/11: A Review

There is one overwhelming problem with Joseph J. Trento's Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA. Trento is an investigative journalist and a good one, who has made excellent use of his acquaintances among the insiders. But after a number of well-written and fascinating chapters showing how the CIA has become increasingly privatized, tainted by its association with foreign dictators, and corrupted by its dealings in arms and drugs, he stops short of drawing the obvious conclusion. In his final chapter he says that today's CIA has become "at best irrelevant and at worst a joke" (p. 353). Try telling that to the poor wretches it is torturing in its prisons all over the world! His conclusion is contradicted by all the evidence he presents, for the CIA which emerges from his narrative is one that is having the most profound influence upon both American political life and the world at large. Why does Trento start out as such a critic of the CIA and end up its apologist? I think because he cannot face the implications of all the evidence he presents, which is that the CIA's goal has never been to assist the president by providing intelligence which could save American lives, but to maximize its own power. In that endeavor it has been supremely successful, trampling on human rights and civil liberties to an extent unparalleled in human history. Today it can apprehend anyone in any part of the world and send them to its gulag of concentration camps, beyond the reach of their families, lawyers and even the Red Cross, to be held indefinitely, tortured and possibly murdered. Neither Hitler nor Stalin enjoyed this kind of global reach.

Trento's focus upon George H.W. Bush is appropriate, for in the march toward totalitarianism which is now reaching its climax, the forty-first president of the United States played a pivotal role. One can indeed say that his presidency-- the first in which a former Director of the CIA held the office-- marks the "Rubicon moment" in American history, the moment when this country took a turn on to the toad to totalitarianism from which it is no longer possible to turn back. To be sure, the stage was set by the establishment of the CIA in 1947, with help of Bush's father Prescott Bush, who had made a fortune from doing business with the Nazis. But before the Bush presidency, it was possible for Americans to stand back and say, "Stop!" After all, the enemy which confronted us then was a real one, even if its power was grossly exaggerated by the Right. The American people had not yet fallen for the Big Lie. That no one took the initiative to rein in an ever more out-of-control CIA is the fault above all of a spineless and self-interested Congress. It is heartbreaking to read, in Trento's account, of how the Church Committee degenerated into a mere platform for Frank Church's presidential aspirations (pp. 60-61). For this was the moment, right after Watergate, when something could really have been done.

It was also the moment when Bush, who had been working for the CIA from his early days with Zapata Oil, was given control of the Agency by President Ford. Although he never went through Junior Officer Training, Bush does indeed, as Trento says, possess the character of a career intelligence officer (p. 13) This is why people have described him variously as "having no core" and "moderate": the face he presents to the world is but the facade of the classic intelligence operative who never reveals his true self-- if indeed he is even aware of it. Throughout his life, Bush fought for one thing above all: the furtherance of the interests of the CIA. In the face of timid congressional investigations-- investigations he openly opposed in principle-- he was easily able to strenghthen it and raise its morale although he only held the office of DCI for one year. And the re-invigorated CIA survived the reforming efforts directed at it by President Carter and his DCI, Stansfield Turner. When Reagan was elected, Bush played a key role in running the Iran-Contra affair. But in 1986, something vitally important happened to change the world in which the CIA operated. Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. Russia had long been a frustration to Cold Warriors because its massive nuclear arsenal made war directly against it impossible. The U.S. was confined to doing battle with Soviet proxies such as North Vietnam, and such wars could and did turn out to be debacles. With the advent of Gorbachev, it became impossible to whip up the kind of fear and hatred of the Soviet Union which could sustain the military-industrial complex. But Bush, who as Trento shows had a long and close relationship with the Saudi royal family, could see that there was another alternative which would work even better than anti-Communism. After he was elected president, he moved quickly to end a now useless Cold War and initiate a confrontation with the Muslim Middle East.

When I read about the First Gulf War in Trento's book, I could not help but think of my own perception of that war as it was occurring. For it was abundantly clear to me even then that far from being a surprise to the United States, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a set-up. After all, the Iraqi dictator had gone to Bush's ambassador to Iraq to sound her out on the possible reaction of the U.S. to such an invasion, and she had given him the green light. And Bush himself was obviously egging him on with comments such as "He's going to get his ass kicked," language unworthy of America's chief executive which was bound to be given the most offensive interpretations in the Arab world (it may even have carried overtones of homosexual rape). Saddam Hussein's response could not have been better suited to the interests of a president whose ratings were falling and a military-industrial complex which was trembling at the prospect of peace breaking out. And most telling of all was something I heard from a policy analyst on what was then the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour: he said that Americans should expect terrorist attacks on their own soil. This scared the hell out of me, not because I thought that there was any prospect of such attacks occurring, but because I knew then that the Big Lie was being born, and that its purpose could only be to deprive us of our civil liberties. The first war against Iraq ended without any such incidents, but then, it takes a long time to get such things rolling, and maybe Bush was having trouble convincing his friend Osama bin Laden to take the rap. Besides, he had a son who was very likely to run for president in his turn. What better legacy to pass on to him than 9/11? This is where Trento really falls down. If the attacks were really a surprise to the CIA, how can one explain the complaisance of the Secret Service in not whisking Bush Jr. to safety as soon as they learned of the collapse of the Twin Towers? In fact, 9/11 was the CIA's greatest success. For it now had the American people right where it wanted them: in such an hysteria of fear and hatred that they would finally give the intelligence establishment what it had wanted all along-- total power.

It is time for Americans to realize that they are being manipulated. Take for instance such a small thing as the constantly rising cost of stamps. The revenue of course goes to finance America's now endless wars. But we are being told that it is the cost of fuel-- why? To put Americans in a mood of resentment against the Middle East in general and Iran in particular, in the hope that that country will retaliate against U.S sanctions by closing the Straits of Hormuz and in so doing justify an attack on it. Such an attack may well involve the use of weapons of mass destruction. Those Americans who do not believe that it is worth killing Iranian children just so that one can drive to one's corner grocery store when one could easily walk are already on the list compiled through NSA/AT&T spying and will be arrested as Unlawful Enemy Combatants and sent to the concentration camps which are now being built for that purpose by Kellogg, Brown and Root under the Military Commissions Act. The CIA gulag is growing. Trento's title, "Prelude to Terror", is a good one, but the terror about to be unleashed on our society is the product of our own government.

THE BELL TELEPHONE HOUR: Burnham's The Managerial Revolution

Beginning in the early nineteen-seventies I was greatly influenced by the writings of three men: George Orwell, whom as everyone knows was the author of 1984; James Burnham, author of the book which inspired that novel, The Managerial Revolution, and Karl Wittfogel, who wrote Oriental Despotism. These men had three things in common: all were originally Marxists, all ultimately became more conservative (or at least, in Orwell's case, anti-Stalinist), and all taught that the future held not a worker's paradise but a state controlled by governmental bureaucrats and industrial managers, despotic in form. Since Orwell, whose book I have been reading and re-reading since I was in high school, was British and died in 1950, I had long assumed that Burnham (whom I knew only indirectly, from Orwell's commentary upon him) was British and died before I began to think about politics (I knew that Wittfogel was a naturalized American citizen of German descent). So it was with surprise that, when I was recently attempting to re-discover my own intellectual roots, I learned that Burnham, a native-born American, had survived until 1987, and indeed inspired a number of right-wing thinkers (for instance Samuel Francis, whom I find too offensively racist to be worth arguing with). As I am myself of the opposite political persuasion, it seemed worthwhile to read Burnham's book and find out why his theories, as conveyed by Orwell, had so influenced me and why the implications I had drawn from them were so different. To be sure, there were similarities. When I first discovered the "managerial revolution", which might better be called the "bureaucratic revolution", I too was afraid that Communism would triumph and impose a bureaucratic despotism upon us. But perhaps because I have never been a Marxist, and saw no necessary connection between power and the ownership or even control of property, I also glimpsed warning signs within our own society and government, which have become all the more obvious since the collapse of Communism and particularly, after the events of September 11, 2001. Wittfogel, with his emphasis upon the deleterious effects of large-scale irrigation systems upon non-Western societies, had led me to view modern technology as a threat to liberty in every country of the world. What was it about Burnham's theories which ultimately led me to look toward Washington D.C. and not foreign nations as the center of the new bureaucratic despotism? And who exactly are the new managers?

Burnham takes as his starting-point World War II, in the midst of which his book was written (though before the U.S. officially entered it). This is appropriate, as we shall see. He asserts that the war is only the external manifestation of a social revolution. Although that social revolution will replace capitalist society, which is generally characterized by parliamentary democracy and individualism, it will not usher in a socialist utopia. His dismissal of Soviet Russia as a genuine socialist society is all the more persuasive in that the process of movement away from the socialist ideal was later to be repeated in China and other Communist countries. His attempt to prove that socialism is not the only alternative to capitalism and that when capitalism is defeated it will be by another force entirely is persuasive except in one particular, for there is one passage in which, as we now know, he is demonstrably wrong. He says, "Experience has shown that there is not the slightest prospect of ridding capitalism of mass unemployment... Even total war, the most drastic conceivable 'solution', could not end mass unemployment in England and France, nor will it do so in this country." (p. 6). In fact, of course, it did-- and this has vastly more relevance to his theory of the bureaucratic revolution than he himself realizes.

For as he says elsewhere, advances in military technology have rendered obsolete one central tenet of socialist belief-- that the mass citizen armies which characterize capitalist society will ultimately turn their weapons against their oppressors. That is because "victory is today seen to depend upon complicated mechanical [sic--'electronic' would be more accurate] devices-- airplanes, tanks and bombers." (pp. 52-53) Burnham comes so close, yet fails to grasp, that the ultimate vehicle for the furtherance of his new managerial class would be the National Security State, with its continual readiness for and actual participation in unending warfare, which makes it more dangerous than any government which has ever existed. In this he may be excessively constrained by his own Marxist background. For he fails to see that in today's world, power is determined not by ownership or control of the means of production, but by the possession of knowledge, information--especially concerning all advanced technology which has any military application-- and in that fact lies the key to identifying the rulers of the new bureaucratic despotism.

Burnham's prediction that state ownership of all the means of production would replace private ownership (p. 72) has also proven false, but this does not mean that there is no truth in his theories-- actually he himself often confuses corporate ownership with state ownership, as if he did not realize that the former is still, after all, private. The important point is that in Burnham's theory, the managerial revolution is bringing about a situation in which political power is the determinant of economic power-- that is to say, if the advent of capitalism represented what Robert Heilbroner has called "the making of economic society", the advent of the managerial revolution represents its end. This is stated unequivocally by Burnham, who thus unintentionally undercuts the Marxist basis of his analysis: in the new managerial society, "The most powerful will also be the wealthiest." (p.94) Of course private corporations linger on, conveying to leftists the impression that they are fighting capitalism and to rightists the impression that they are defending it. But they have changed significantly in character, because technology has become more complex. As Burnham asserts,

"It is unnecessary to stress that the most important branches of modern industry are highly complex in technical organization. The tools, machines, and procedures involved are the results of highly developed scientific and technical operations. The division of labor is minute and myriad; and the turning out of the final product is possible only through the technical co-ordination of a vast number of separate tasks... A century ago, there were scarcely any trained chemists, physicists, biochemists, or even engineers functioning directly in industry, a fact which is plainly witnessed by the almost complete lack of educational facilities for training such industrial scientists and engineers. The comparatively primitive techniques of those days did not require such persons; today few branches of industry could operate without their services." (pp. 78-9)

These specialists require a new kind of management, which usually cannot be accomplished by the actual owners:

"This task of direction and coordination is itself a highly specialized function. Often it requires acquaintance with the physical sciences (or the psychological and social sciences, since human beings are not the least among the instruments of production) and with engineering." (p. 80)

Thus has the "management-controlled corporation" been born: quoting Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Burnham says:

"By 'management-controlled', as they explained, they meant that the managments [executives-- we would today call them CEOs] of these companies, though owning only minor percentages of the shares of their corporations, were in actuality self-perpetuating, in control of the policies and the boards of directors of the companies and able to manipulate them at will, through proxies, majority votes of the nominal owners, the shareholders. The American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation is the classic example of 'management-controlled'. (p. 88)

This assertion is bound to raise eyebrows among any aware defender of civil liberties today. It also raises the question, what is the relationship of the managers of these corporations to the managers of the state? And this is where Burnham makes his truly historic contribution, a contribution which Orwell was to illustrate so devastatingly in 1984. Discussing the location of sovereignty in modern society, Burnham says:

"Sovereignty has shifted from parliament to the administrative bureaus... How plainly is reflected in the enormous growth of the 'executive branch' of government... in comparison with the other two branches. Indeed, most of the important laws passed by Congress in recent years have been laws to give up some of its sovereign powers to one or another agency outside its control." (pp. 147-8)

Or, one might better say, to the non-elected part of the executive branch. In this connection, one must not take use of the term "bureaucrat" to imply plodding inefficiency. Bureaucrats in a democracy are plodding and inefficient because they have to follow the law and comply with directives passed down to them from democratically-elected officials. Having written a biography of Albert Speer, I know that bureaucrats in a totalitarian society can be exceptionally dynamic and efficient. So can bureaucrats who belong to what Bill Moyers called "the secret government" in our society-- that portion of the executive branch which refuses to subordinate itself to the rule of law or to democratically-elected leaders.

One such bureaucracy, the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA, was brought into being by the National Security Act of 1947. It was signed into law by President Harry Truman, who later-- as if to confirm Burnham-- lamented that it had grown from a mere intelligence-gathering tool of the president to an "operational and at times policy-making arm of the government." Subordinate to it is the National Security Agency (NSA), which was created in 1952 and operates under the Department of Defense. Both agencies are supposed to deal primarily with foreign threats, but both have come to exercise excessive control over American citizens. Being essentially similar, the corporate managerial elite often cooperates with such government bureaucracies. That this is true can be seen from a case which recently came to public attention and which concerns the "classic example" of a management-controlled corporation, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).

In 2006, a man named Mark Klein, who had worked as a technician for AT&T for some 22 years, made public is discovery of the collusion of that corporation with the NSA. A special room had been installed in the corporation's San Francisco office, which the regular work force were not allowed to enter. Klein's technical specialty enabled him to discover that AT&T was electronically "splitting off" records of the activities conducted by private individuals on the internet-- whether e-mails, websearches or whatever-- and sending them to the NSA. According to Klein, "This potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens." Klein took the information to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, an organization which aims at the impossible goal of protecting the privacy of internet users, which eagerly took up the cause. EEF filed a class action suit against AT&T , and various branches of the ACLU also did so. When U.S District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the government could not use the state secrets privilege to block the lawsuit, the government appealed. The Senate passed an act which grants immunity to phone companies which assist in electronic surveillance, while the House passed one denying them such immunity. That such a divided Congress will be able to muster the votes necessary to overrule the inevitable presidential veto is unlikely, and in any case, intelligence agencies pay no attention to any law.

Meanwhile, the man who was in charge of the program, a despotic bureaucrat of Orwellian character, was making progress in his career. General Michael Hayden was director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005. During that time, he developed a strategy to increase the government's use of private industry for domestic surveillance. The first case which came to the public's attention involved warrantless wiretapping of phone calls made to parties outside the United States. The NSA's computer-based system searched for "tagged words" which might reveal the presence of a terrorist plot. Naturally this was bound to affect innocent citizens as well. As one television commentator complained, "Why should I be targeted by the government just because I have told someone overseas that my friend is writing her dissertation on jihad?" But the abuse represented by the warrantless wiretapping of telephone calls is dwarfed by the internet surveillance discovered by Klein. For in the first instance, however unconstitutional the method, there was at least a legitimate concern that someone might be in the process of conspiring to commit a violent act. The internet surveillance, by contrast, seems to aim at discovering the political opinions of people and targeting them on that basis. The mere fact that someone belongs or contributes to an organization which opposes government policy, such as the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights or EFF, can make him or her an object of interest to intelligence agencies. A blog such as this one and the ones which have preceded it on this blogspot undoubtedly make me an object of interest to them. But political opinions, as opposed to illegal actions, are none of the government's business. For his work in compiling lists of dissidents which will undoubtedly be used to nip in the bud any organized movement against future governmental outrages, such as the use of weapons of mass destruction or the declaration of martial law, General Hayden was made Director of the CIA, America's premier intelligence agency and chief promoter of lawlessness and terrorism throughout the world.

All this tends to support the Burnham thesis in its essentials. There is a profound difference between what we used to call capitalism and what the power which a corporation like AT&T represents today. For in contrast to the past, when private enterprise often found itself in opposition to government and in that respect may have exercised a salutary brake upon it (as government in turn exercised a salutary brake upon the rapacious greed of entrepreneurs), now management-run corporations work hand-in-hand with their bureaucratic counterparts. How any leftist today can think that the force he is opposing is capitalism, or any right-winger think that he is defending freedom, is beyond me. For it is clear that an alliance has been forged between the corporate managerial elite and governement bureacracies which is opposed both to traditional capitalism and political liberty. And of all the government agencies which pose a threat to liberty, the most dangerous are the intelligence agencies. We must not forget that the CIA is responsible for overthrowing democratically-elected governments and supporting dictatorships around the world. It is impossible not to think that the repressive methods it has been perfecting-- including torture-- will not be turned upon the Americans whose names have been complied through the NSA-AT&T collusion. When one contemplates this, it seems very appropriate that the CIA-run PHOENIX program in Vietnam called electrical torture "the Bell Telephone Hour".

WHY HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS ARE IMPOTENT TO STOP TORTURE

The true goal of torture by the United States government is not the acquisition of intelligence which can save lives. That is an established fact. From its inception, the CIA has been conducting experiments (under programs such as BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, and MKULTRA) to see if it can create a "Manchurian Candidate". Such programs used methods amounting to torture to reduce people to a state of infantile dependence so that a new identity and memory could be implanted in them by means of narco-hypnosis. The techniques they used, such as electroconvulsive treatment or ECT, severe sensory deprivation, and mind control drugs including LSD, have no conceivable use in genuine interrogation, that is to say, the quest for truth. They were used instead to create falsehood: a false identity, false memories, false confessions. The argument that during the Cold War, they served a legitimate purpose in creating the "perfect spy", are easily answered by the rhetorical question, "Would any self-respecting CIA officer voluntarily submit himself to such a regime in order to conduct more effective espionage?" Of course not. As I have argued in preceding blogs, and as is clear from Alfred McCoy's A Question of Torture and Colin Ross' The CIA Doctors, these methods were designed to be used against unwilling victims in order to make them into whatever our government wanted them to be. Recent evidence that Mohammed Al Qahtani, a member of the Guantánamo Six and client of the Center for Constitutional Rights, was subjected to this regime emerges from the fact that, according to a CCR factsheet, IV injections were forcibly administered to him during interrogation, a clear indication that he had been drugged and probably hypnotized. Of course he would not remember what he felt or experienced as a result of those injections, for the creation of amnesia surrounding the implantation of false memories is one of the goals of the CIA's PSYWAR program. The Guantánamo Six and their fellow-prisoners are probably the modern equivalent of "Manchurian candidates": CIA-manufactured terrorists.

Why is it then that the anti-torture movement persists in maintaining that torture "doesn't work"? For indeed that is the constant refrain of organizations such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. Quite obviously torture works if one's goal is an evil one. And if the goal of torture by our government is not the acquisition of intelligence, then the argument that "torture doesn't work" for that purpose is quite irrelevant. Not only that, it gives our opponents far too much credit in assuming that they are simply overzealous interrogators angry about the events of 9/11 and desperate to ferret out facts which will prevent another such catastrophe. In fact, they are far more sinister than that, as evil as Hitler and vastly more powerful and cunning. Why will anti-torture activists not face this reality? I think because of their background in the tradition of pacifism and civil disobedience. Ingrained in many people of my generation is the notion that if they themselves behave morally, they can somehow shame their opponents into doing the same. This requires opponents which have a conscience and a basic sense of decency. To recognize that the opponents we are facing today have neither is to realize that whether we are sincere or insincere, whether we approach them in a nonviolent manner or with Molotov cocktails, whether we aim at the restoration of the U.S. Constitution or the erection of some secular or religious utopia, they will be equally likely to target us as they have anyone who opposes them. And that is a frightening possibility.

The U.S. executive branch as it exists today is the most powerful government which has ever existed. In addition to the most sophisticated methods of drawing forth false confessions, it also possesses the most lethal arsenal of weapons of mass destruction-- nuclear, space, and other weapons (such as scalar) which most people have never heard of. Thus it represents the most dangerous force with which the mankind has ever had to contend. Every conscientious individual in the world, and every nation which has any self-respect, has to live with the fact that it is faced with a terrible choice. It can kowtow to this force and lose all its freedom and dignity, in the process permitting the outrageous abuses to continue. Or it can oppose it, at the risk of essentially committing suicide. That is to say, the nation which fights back against the United States will most likely be destroyed, and the individual-- American or foreign, who opposes its government will be killed or forced to take his own life lest he be subject to its tortures. This is a prospect that most human rights activists today evidently cannot face. And if they do not face it, they will inevitably lose. In order to win, they must face the fact that they may have to give up their lives. For in our fight against the face of the perfect totalitarianism which is taking shape in this country-- more effective than that of the Nazis or the Stalinists-- death can be a victory. As O'Brien says in Orwell's 1984: "We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we can never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation." When I first read this as a teenager in the nineteen-sixties (I have read it many times since), I vowed that if I were ever faced with such a situation I would essentially stage a kamikaze attack upon Big Brother, fighting back in a manner which would ensure my instant death, so that the forces of repression could not transform me into a turncoat of their own making. And I still think that is the best solution.

This is not that we necessarily have to die. But we must be prepared to do so because our enemy is utterly vicious, ruthless and without scruple. This is war, and as much as one wishes to live, in a war one must be prepared to die. Pollyannish and pacifistic notions of "shaming" one's opponents into reform will only earn their laughter. They could not be happier when their opponents stick to the tired old argument that "torture does not work" because then they know that they have succeeded in deceiving them as to their true purpose. They also know that it works very well if the goal is to produce an empty shell of a human being into which they can pour their own filth. Let us make it clear that we are wise to them, and intend to fight the real enemy with every means at our disposal, not set up some innocuous "straw man" in order to reassure ourselves. If the choice is between arguing ineffectually against torture and thus ensuring our continued survival, and waging an effective battle against the Monster in Washington DC at the risk of our lives, let us choose to fight and die free!!!

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.

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS LEAVE US NO CHOICE

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.

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.

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?

CONTRA DERSHOWITZ

In recent years there has been a growing awareness of the fact that our government uses torture on a routine basis. Advocates of torture have defended the practice with statements such as the following, by Jane Harman of the House Intelligence Committee, "If you're serious about trying to get information in advance of an attack, interrogation has to be one of the main tools. I'm okay with it not being pretty." Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has gone further. He argues that in a "ticking bomb scenario", government agencies should have access to a "torture warrant" which would allow them to torture openly and with accountability (his preferred method is sticking needles under the fingernails). As he says, "If anybody has any doubt that our CIA, over time, has taught people to torture, has encouraged torture, has probably itself tortured in extreme cases, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn." And furthermore, he adds, "Don't you think that if we ever had a ticking-bomb case, regardless of your views or mine, that the CIA would actually either torture themselves or subcontract the job to Jordan, the Philippines or Egypt... to do the torturing for us?" Human rights advocates have responded in a predictable manner which misses the main problem with Dershowitz's argument. As Vincent Warren, Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, maintains, torture is "illegal, immoral and does not work." In a debate with Dershowitz, Ken Roth, Director of Human Rights Watch, said that the prohibition on torture is "one of the basic, absolute prohibitions that exist in international law. It exists regardless of the severity of the security threat." In fact, both sides are arguing about hypotheticals and ignoring the reality. For they both assume that torture has been used by our government, and was designed, for the purpose of extracting information which could save lives. In actual fact, although Dershowitz is right that torture has been used-- and much more extensively than he maintains-- by agencies such as the CIA, it has not been used, nor was it intended to be used, in order to extract information. The specific techniques in common use, called "Psywar", are demonstrably useless for that purpose. But they are useful for a much more sinister one-- the erection of a totalitarian state.

The suspect in the so-called "War on Terror", whether he is guilty or innocent, is from day one treated as a subhuman being. He is immediately hooded to induce sensory deprivation, and taken to a prison in a secret location, where he may be subject to further sensory deprivation by confinement in a darkened, soundproof cell. He may be isolated from other prisoners, shackled to the floor, subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures, deprived of food and water, subjected to a capriciously changing routine, stripped naked, not allowed to urinate or defecate or forced to do so in the sight of others, made to stand in "stress positions", and subject to sexual assault, electrical shocks and waterboarding. All this happens before he is "interrogated", as reputable individuals-- for instance FBI agents who were excluded from the process at Guantanamo-- can attest. All these methods have been shown to produce psychosis-like results. By the time the suspect encounters the "interrogator", he is no longer able to trust any promises of better treatment for cooperation which may be offered. He may have lost his will to live. Indeed, he may no longer be in his right mind, and completely unable to respond to such questions as "Where is your training camp located? What sort of terrorist activities is your organization planning?"-- if indeed, he ever knew the answers to begin with. This is not a matter of excessive force so much as the wrong kind of force employed to produce results which cannot possibly yield "actionable intelligence".

As Alfred W. McCoy has documented in his excellent book, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, most of the methods of torture in common use by the U.S. government today have their origins in the CIA. If one examines their history, one finds a CIA hierarchy enthralled with the success of such totalitarian spectacles as the Stalinist show-trials and North Korean "brainwashing", and trying to work out its own methods of producing the same results with the aid of unscrupulous psychologists and psychiatrists. These methods rely a great deal upon psychological stresses, although they have always been accompanied by physical coercion. If one examines the various methods explored by the CIA in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, culminating in the Kubark Manual of Interrogation (1963-- "Kubark" was the CIA cryptonym for its own headquarters), one can see how antithetical they are to the goal of obtaining intelligence. The simplest of these methods is sensory deprivation. In 1951, with CIA backing, Dr. Donald Hebb did a study of the effects of such such isolation. He found that after just four hours of total sensory deprivation, subjects "could not follow a connected train of thought." They progressively lost touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations and other pathological effects."

Other techniques explored by the CIA have been electroconvulsive treatment or ECT, familiar to us as a treatment for depression (remember the skeleton in Eagleton's closet?), which has been widely criticized by mental health activists because of the fact that it can cause amnesia, hypnosis, which heightens a subject's suggestibility to delusions introduced by the hypnotist, and above all LSD, which contrary to widespread belief, was not unleashed on American society by Timothy Leary but rather Allen Dulles. This experimentation involved the use of unsuspecting human guinea pigs and led to at least one death. It is a well-known fact that LSD can produce hallucinations and ultimately, psychosis. Amnesia, delusions, hallucinations, psychosis-- how do these help an interrogator get at the truth? If anything, they would seem impediments. CIA methods are so exclusively oriented toward "breaking" a subject-- that is to say, destroying him psychologically-- that a 1983 training guide for the Honduran government advises the so-called interrogator to do things which are directly antithetical to the acquisition of intelligence, such as "asking nonsensical questions" and incredibly, "rewarding non-cooperation"! If Dershowitz thinks that the CIA can be confined to torturing only for information in "ticking bomb scenarios" by a "torture warrant", or that it will subject any of its highly illegal activities to the rule of law, I have a bridge to sell him in Brooklyn.

Okay, you may say, but these guys deserve it-- although of course you cannot know, any more than I can, whether or not they are really terrorists, because they've never had a fair trial of the sort we offered even to Nazi war criminals. Maybe you think they deserve it just because they're Muslims. But then be honest-- you're not after intelligence that can save human lives, you are out to punish and hurt them for your own gratification. If you are going to argue for a torture warrant, why not say why you really want it, and not hide behind the fallacy that you are concerned with the protection of human life?