Questioning Torture cover story 020306

COVER STORY
Questioning
torture
In a disturbing new book,
Alfred McCoy examines
techniques of psychological
coercion, made in the U.S.A.
By Robert Chappell
ou probably saw the photos. The
pyramid of naked, hooded Iraqis.
PFC Lyndie England leading a
crawling man with a leash, like a
dog. And, perhaps most famously, a hooded man standing on a box with his arms
extended, wires attached to his hands.
For many Americans, these images
were an occasion for outrage. Alfred
McCoy’s reaction had another element:
He knew. He knew exactly.
“When I saw that iconic photograph
of the Iraqi standing on the box, hooded,
with arms extended, I said, ‘That’s it,’”
recalls McCoy, 60, a UW-Madison historian and expert on the unsettling subject of CIA torture. “Hooded for sensory
disorientation. Arms extended for selfinflicted pain. Textbook, by-the-book
psychological torture. They’ve either
been trained in it, they’ve mimed it
informally because they’re working
with people who are doing it, or they
have orders to do it.”
What happened at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib
prison, McCoy realized, was rooted
solidly in the CIA’s 50-year, multi-billiondollar global program of psychological
torture. It was a realization that prompted him to complete a major treatise of
the topic. Published last month by Henry Holt and Company as part of the
American Empire Project, A Question
of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the
Cold War to the War on Terror is a compact, 209-page narrative that lays bare a
hidden and unsavory aspect of our
nation’s history.
Torture is not a pleasant thing to
Y
Alfred McCoy will read from
and discuss his new book on
Thursday, Feb. 9, at the
Wisconsin Veterans Museum,
30 W. Mifflin St., 7 pm,
and Wednesday, Feb. 15, at
Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative,
426 W. Gilman St., 7 pm.
KIM KEYES
know a lot about. To grasp what humans
are capable of, to probe the deepest,
darkest recesses of evil, is, says McCoy,
“enormously, enormously depressing.
It’s an uncommon topic, and it’s an
uncommon expertise. It’s not something
you can write about easily.”
McCoy is no stranger to dark topics.
His seminal work, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug
Trade, was first published in 1972, with
revised editions in 1991 and 2003. The
massive tome solidified his status as an
expert in Southeast Asian history and
politics, as well as his reputation among
some as a conspiracy theorist. But the
book is meticulously documented, and
the CIA’s efforts to suppress publication
probably means it’s pretty close to the
mark.
The early reaction to McCoy’s latest
book is mostly positive. Forbes.com
praises it as “scrupulously documented
and grippingly told.” The New York
Observer faults McCoy for “shortcuts
taken to make connections that don’t
actually exist” but ultimately calls the
book “worthwhile.”
Worthwhile? For McCoy, the process
of producing this book was nothing
short of torturous.
Tormenting the mind
It all began with an HBO contract.
“In 1986,” recalls McCoy, “I had my
15 minutes of fame when I exposed [Filipino President Ferdinand] Marcos’ fake
war medals and got an article with my
ISTHMUS | FEBRUARY 3, 2006 | THEDAILYPAGE.COM
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COVER STORY | Questioning torture, cont.
A Timeline of Torture
Montreal, June 1, 1951
A bespectacled, pipe-smoking genius checks into a
single room, with bath, at the Ritz-Carlton. Sir Henry
Tizard is a giant in the world of applied physics and
a powerful advocate for the use of science in war. He is in Montreal on behalf
of the British Ministry of Defence to
address the Canadian Association of
Physicists. While there, he meets behind
closed doors with Canadian Defence
Research Board chairman Dr. Ormond
Tizard
Solandt, a number of Canadian scientists and a senior researcher from the
CIA. They are focused on a new kind of war against
a new enemy, the Soviets, utilizing a new weapon,
the human mind.
Montreal, 1951–54
Psychologists including Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill
University demonstrate that just four hours of isolating
a person in a dimly lit chamber with mittens on his
hands, a foam pillow under his head and low background noise renders him unable to follow a connected
train of thought. Forty-eight hours of this sensory
deprivation produces hallucinations. Hebb’s study is
inexplicably published as an attempt to prevent
railroad and highway accidents.
Philippines, Aug. 5, 1974
Journalism student Maria Elena Ang is arrested on
her way to church. A group of between 10 and 20 men
batter her with questions that she cannot answer.
She is slapped and stripped; exposed wires are tied to
her right hand and foot. Another barrage of questions
comes. Her body stiffens as electricity courses through
her. The interrogators torment her for two hours, then
again that evening. She is then placed naked on a table,
her head hanging off one end as her captors pour
water down her throat until she feels like she’s drowning. She passes out twice, but remains lucid enough
to feel the sexual assaults.
Philippines, October 1982
Father Edgardo Kangleon is interrogated by one
Lieutenant Figueroa, who carries with him a thick stack
of purported evidence — likely blank paper or unrelated
documents. When Kangleon refuses to cooperate, he is
beaten, accused of having sex with a nun and called
a homosexual. Finally, to end the suffering, he pleads
for his tormentor to become his savior. “Go get
Lt. Figueroa,” he calls out. “I am ready to cooperate.”
He confesses to being a Communist agent and names
other clergy members as comrades. His confession
is a lie.
Bagram, Afghanistan, December 2002
A prisoner in the United States’ war on terror dies in
U.S. custody. The official cause of death is reported as
a heart attack; three months later, The New York Times
exposes that as a lie. The man’s military death certificate has an X in the box next to “homicide;” the cause
of death is described as “blunt-force trauma to the lower extremities.” It is later determined that the victim -–
a farmer named Dilawar -– had the life drained from his
body over five excruciating days, chained to the ceiling
of a cell.
Abu Ghraib, Iraq, January 2004
Military Police specialist Joseph M. Darby slips
a compact disc full of digital photos under the door
of the prison’s Criminal Investigation Division.
10
ISTHMUS | FEBRUARY 3, 2006 | THEDAILYPAGE.COM
documentation on the front page of The
New York Times and across the front
pages of the opposition press in Manila. For that reason, momentarily, I was
widely known as a Philippines expert.”
HBO decided to make a miniseries
on the fall of Marcos, with actor Gary
Busey in the lead role and McCoy as the
chief historical consultant. In doing his
research, McCoy met
with the Philippine
government’s chief
political strategist.
“I went in there
expecting a discussion of civil/military
relations and the use
and misuse of the
military,”
McCoy
says. “Instead, we descended into the
dark recesses of human consciousness.
He started talking about how when the
[Marcos] regime took power, they would
have public summary executions in
order to inflict terror. His personal statement was that if pushed in confrontations, he would move to cutting up children. We sort of descended into this
reverie of blood and terror. I emerged
from that shaken.”
Long after that miniseries, A Dangerous Life, had been relegated to a trivia
question, McCoy remained haunted. “I
spent 15 years on these guys,” says
McCoy, whose 1999 book on the Philippine military academy is called Closer
Than Brothers. “I went out and found
their victims. Torture victims. I tried to
find those who had actually been tortured by these officers. I tried to find
records, statements they had made or
the victims themselves. What I found
was that these torturers were using a
distinctive form of torture that was
counterintuitive.”
Counterintuitive because it tormented the victim’s mind more than his body.
Digging deeper, McCoy learned that
the “distinctive form” of torture he
found in the Philippines was not a Filipino invention, but an American one.
“We had just shattered one very
important moral restraint by building
and using a nuclear bomb,” McCoy says.
“Governments [embraced] the idea that
you had to use the weapons available
and set aside moral questions.”
As the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe
and the Iron Curtain fell, fears of Communism in general and the Soviets in particular intensified. The
arms race was on, and, in
the late 1940s and early
1950s, rumors began to
swirl that the Communists
had mastered mind control.
From its founding in
1947, the CIA was irked by
the Soviets’ ability to get
public confessions. In 1950, one psychologist claimed he could hypnotize a man,
“without his knowledge or consent, into
committing treason against the United
States.” If he could do it, so could the
Communists — and they probably
already had. Edward Hunter, a “freelance journalist” who turned out to be
a CIA propagandist, coined the term
“brainwashing.”
McCoy says this is typical. “The government, through the executive or some
executive agency, ratchets up the fear,”
he explains. “The public becomes enormously concerned, and is convinced that
when weighing personal morality
against national security, personal
morality is an indulgence, a mere vanity that has to be set aside in order to protect everyone from these dark, demonic
forces.”
McCoy’s book documents a number
of instances in which governments battling the scourge of communism perfected a new weapon, with CIA training and
U.S. approval. That weapon was psychological torture.
‘It’s an uncommon
topic. It’s not
something you can
write about easily.’
Setting morality aside
The CIA did not invent torture, of course.
The practice of coercing confessions by
inflicting pain and instilling fear goes
back at least to the Roman Empire. Even
then, its efficacy was questioned; the
Roman legal scholar Ulpian wrote 2,000
years ago that “the strong will resist and
the weak will say anything to end the
pain.” If torture does elicit a confession,
it’s as likely as not a false one.
Still, the practice of torture kept hold
in Europe until the 18th century. Thereafter, says McCoy, “the Enlightenment
spent the better part of a century fighting against torture and effecting its abolition across Europe. Simultaneously,
Great Britain was very proud of the fact
that torture had no place in British common law.”
Then came World War II, and all bets
were off.
A loss of reason
The first thing Al McCoy will tell you
about psychological torture is that it’s
torture. In fact, he thinks psychological
torture is often more insidious than
physical torture, both
for the tortured and
the torturer:
“Torture as practiced in the Philippines, particularly the
psychological form,
was a transactional
experience that inflated the egos of the torturers, emboldened them not to be the
servants and protectors of the state but
to be its destroyer, its rebuilder and its
master. It damaged the victims, sometimes for the rest of their lives.”
The methods of modern psychological torture include sensory deprivation,
mock executions, simulated drowning
and self-inflicted pain. McCoy calls the
process “theatrical,” a twisted drama in
which the victim is an unwilling player
and the torturer the deus ex machina
savior. The victim feels near death,
delirious, with little or no sense of the
passage of time. He or she finally begs
for mercy, which the torturer grants in
exchange for information.
The effect on the tortured is lifelong.
Doug Johnson, head of the Center for
Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, says
half a million victims of torture have
sought refuge in the United States, most
of them victims of “modern” torture.
In his testimony on the nomination of
Alberto Gonzales (who famously dubbed
the Geneva Conventions against torture
as “quaint”) for attorney general, Johnson gave a partial list of torture’s effects.
Among them: re-experiencing the trauma, avoidance and emotional numbing,
depression, damaged self-concept,
impulse-control problems and high-risk
behavior, sexual dysfunction, psychosis,
substance abuse, memory loss and the
inability to concentrate.
As for the torturers, McCoy says
their ego is inflated so profoundly that
they are unable to make rational judgments. In the Philippines, several coup
attempts failed miserably because the
colonels “thought the awesome majesty
of their clanking tank treads, their
pounding boots, their aura would just
sweep everybody before them.”
The events of Sept. 11, 2001, gave new
reason to set aside personal morality in
favor of public safety.
At Guantanamo, the CIA’s torture
methods were dusted off and applied
with vigor to suspected terrorists,
backed by bizarre legal briefs. One, written in February 2002 by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, maintained
that neither the Federal War Crimes Act
nor the Geneva Convention applied to
al-Qaida suspects, and that torture is
okay as long as inflicting pain isn’t the
only goal. In other words, if pain is a
means to an end, well, torture away.
But McCoy is not persuaded by these
and other arguments in favor of torture.
“For any modern state, particularly
one which purports to be a leader, to
practice torture has enormous consequence” in international politics, he says.
“Look at it this way:
We can dominate the
world for a short time
with our sheer military power. But we
can’t lead the world
effectively without
moral power. We cannot practice torture in any form and
expect to exercise moral authority.”
In most of the modern world, coerced
confessions don’t stand up in court.
States that torture, McCoy says, end up
“stuck with people they believe to be
guilty, but who they can’t prosecute.”
Finally, there is overwhelming evidence that torture is not as effective as
other methods of gaining information.
During World War II, U.S. Marines
interrogated Japanese prisoners using
‘We cannot practice
torture in any form
and expect to exercise
moral authority.’
How to Torture: A Primer
standard law-enforcement techniques: build
up rapport, inspire trust and intimacy.
“They were getting complete order-of-battle
intelligence on the enemy array, the enemy
defenses, within 24 hours,” McCoy says.
“That’s the hardest kind of intelligence to
get, not only to get it accurate but to get it
quick.”
The FBI has also used those methods,
with apparent success. In fact, early in the
war on terror, the FBI had al-Qaida training
camp leader Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi in custody
in Kabul, and were in the process of extracting a confession that would stand up in court
— that is, one that hadn’t been coerced. But,
on orders from the White House, the CIA
took over.
“Al-Libi, once he was rendered to Egypt
and brutally tortured, gave false information that Colin Powell used in his famous
U.N. address, to his discredit,” relates McCoy.
This false information helped lead the U.S.
into war in Iraq. McCoy calls it an
“unplanned consequence.”
Getting back to the subject
Throughout his career, McCoy says he’s
immersed himself in the language and
psychosis of torture much as “a literary
scholar might analyze a piece of poetry.
Just as the immersion in poetry uplifts
one, to go into this realm had the exact
opposite effect. It was utterly demoralizing.”
In 2000, McCoy attended a conference at
which he connected torture in the Philippines and elsewhere to the CIA.
“What I found ranged from disinterest to
disapproval...even sharp disapproval of
doing this kind of work,” he says. This reaction combined with own his disgust: “I don’t
want to overstate it, but it’s horribly unpleasant to immerse yourself in this immoral universe without redemption.”
And so, after that talk, McCoy tried to set
aside the topic. “I said, ‘I’m not going to do
this again. My next project should really be
a study of children’s literature or something.’”
But then Abu Ghraib happened, and
McCoy found himself pulled back into the
issue, due in part to his relationship with
Madison, where he’s lived with his wife
Mary since 1989.
First, he was invited to give a lecture at
the Sequoya Branch of the Madison Public
Library. Two hundred people crammed into
the little room for two solid hours. “As I started writing the book, I gave lectures around
town,” McCoy says. “Chapter Six was actually written as a dialog with a seminar of
retirees. We got into a real bang, bang, bang,
back-and-forth debate over the need to torture.”
At the same time, McCoy was also teaching a seminar on the history of CIA covert
warfare. “I had graduates and extraordinarily bright undergraduates,” he says. “Best
seminar I’ve ever taught. While they were
writing their seminar papers for me, I was
writing the book for them. In the context of
this university and this city, I found a dialog partner that wasn’t available anywhere
else.”
Beyond blame
Don’t beat your prisoner. “The pain
which is being inflicted upon him from
outside himself may actually intensify
his will to resist.... [P]ain which he feels
he is inflicting upon himself is more likely
to sap his resistance.”
Disrupt your subject’s routine and sense of time. “The ‘questioner’
should be careful to manipulate the subject’s environment to disrupt patterns, not to create them. Meals and sleep should be
granted irregularly, in more than abundance or less than adequacy, on no discernable pattern. This is done to disorient the subject
and destroy his capacity to resist.”
For torture to end, McCoy says
the general public must accept
that psychological torture is
torture, and Congress must
“rescind our reservations to
Isolate your subject. “Solitary confineMake empty threats. “A threat is basically a means for estabthe U.N. anti-torture convenment acts on most persons as a powerful
lishing a bargaining position by inducing fear in the subject....
tion and fully join the internastress.... The symptoms most commonly
It should always be implied that the subject himself is to
tional community.”
produced by solitary confinement are
blame by using words such as, ‘You leave me no other choice
The first step may be the
superstition, intense love of any other
but to....”
hardest, thanks to popular culliving thing, perceiving inanimate objects
— From the CIA’s Human Resources Manual, 1983,
ture. “My most articulate and
as alive, hallucinations and delusions.”
as quoted in A Question of Torture
difficult opponent is Det. Andy
by Alfred W. McCoy
Sipowicz of ‘NYPD Blue,’”
McCoy says. “He is the most
articulate exponent of the idea that you gotNonetheless, in all probability, the CIA Hanoi: “He knows what torture can and canta do it. The ‘tune-up’ in the pokey is neces- would have been given instructions to revive
not do. He doesn’t think it works because
sary. You gotta slap the guy up the side of its techniques. {And] once those techniques he’s been tortured, and he didn’t cooperate,
the head. [And] we know he’s right, because
are unleashed, once the genie is out of the
and he can imagine that any al-Qaida leader
he’s our hero, and it always comes out right.” bottle, because of the particular, perverse
who is as committed to his cause as McCain
Another obstacle is the partisan blamepsychopathology of torture, it would have
was to his own will behave similarly. He’s a
game that defines much of U.S. politics. spread.”
smart fellow.”
McCoy notes that Clinton allowed illegal renFor this reason, McCoy is troubled that
McCoy calls McCain’s anti-torture advodition and speculates that something like “the debate over Abu Ghraib, at least as it
cacy “a good downpayment, but nothing
Abu Ghraib could have happened even in a was initially structured, was essentially par- more than a downpayment.” Much more
Gore administration.
tisan. It was criticism of the Bush adminis- needs to be done.
“It may not have been quite to the same
tration’s giving these orders, and the Bush
“As a society we have not reformed,”
degree,” he says. “It may not have proliferat- administration’s defense of it was inherent- McCoy says. “In the past, the public resoed quite as rapidly. I don’t think in a Gore
ly partisan.”
nance has been dead. The public just has not
administration anyone would have written,
Against this “partisan divide,” says
responded.” But this time, there’s a healthy
for example, the 2002 Bybee memo. There
McCoy, stands Republican Sen. John
amount of outrage — enough, McCoy hopes,
would not have been express orders.
McCain, formerly a prisoner of war in
to start “a very long debate.”◆
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