Reconstructing the conditions in a CIA secret detention cell - refining the techniques

the section of the Parliament Assembly of the Council of Europe, Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights report entitled, Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report (PDF), is excerpted in full by stephen soldz in his weblog, Psyche, Science, and Society... we - all of us - very much need to know what is being done in our name... please click over there and take the time to read it...

here's some of soldz' thoughts...

In this description we can see the results of decades of CIA study, aided by many psychologists and psychiatrists, of how to destroy human beings, the fruits of its MKULTRA program and the detailed implementation of the in the KUBARK (PDF) and other torture manuals.

One of the problems the CIA faced in conducting their research on soul-destruction was the lack of available research subjects who could be subject to the full panoply of techniques or what they called “terminal experiments.” It is thus likely that the CIA’s psychologists, like Scott Shumate (who, according to his biographical statement “has been with several of the key apprehended terrorists”), were not involved solely in the construction of this hell, but also in studying its effects so as to better refine the techniques.

curious as always, i followed soldz' link and took a look at the KUBARK (PDF) interrogation manual... what i found was a document dated july 1963 that contained 131 pages of very detailed instructions for interrogators... it's all quite interesting and, when you get to page 85, section IX entitled, The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources, it really starts to get interesting...


items... (remember, this material was published in 1963... just imagine how much more "refined" it has become since then...)

• ...it is advisable to keep the subject upset by constant disruptions of patterns

• The more complete the place of confinement eliminates sensory stimuli, the more rapidly and deeply the interrogatee will be affected. Results produced only after weeks or months in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light (or weak artifical light which never varies), which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc. An environment still more subject to control, such as a water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective.

• The available evidence suggests that resistance is sapped principally by psychological rather than physical pressures. The threat of debility - for example, a brief deprivation of food - may induce much more anxiety than prolonged hunger. ... Meals and sleep granted irregularly, in more than abundance or less than adequacy, the shifts occurring on no discernible time pattern, will normally disorient an interrogatee and sap his will to resist more effectively than a sustained deprivation leading to debility.

• [W]hereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he inflicts on himself. ... When the individual is told to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself.

• Just as the threat of pain may more effectively induce compliance than its infliction, so an interrogatee's mistaken belief that he has been drugged may make him a more useful interrogation subject than he would be under narcosis.

ok, enough of that... as i said earlier, it's important that we know what's taking place in our name...

(thanks to larisa for giving me the initial links to this expedition to the dark side...)

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