Exploring the US culture of torture

Outrage at alleged communist “brainwashing” techniques - the word was coined in 1950 by Edward Hunter of the Miami Daily News, who wrote several books on the subject, and was also on the CIA payroll - and fears that American values and interests were under severe worldwide threat, led to the conclusion at the highest levels of government that America must both imitate and excel at the “tactics” being used by her opponents in this “new” struggle for survival.

In particular, it was considered crucial to discover the best techniques for breaking resistance and extracting “confessions” from prisoners. Two distinctive but frequently intertwined programs were developed, one generated by the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (1947) and the other by US military authorities, whose ramifications and impact over more than 60 years are systematically unravelled by Otterman.

As a result of studying Nazi, Stalinist and Fascist history and post-war communist “show trials”, the CIA turned its early efforts to the possibilities of mind-controlling drugs and hypnosis. Various projects experimented for more than a decade with drugs such as mescaline, marijuana, cocaine, ether, LSD (a much-fancied possibility, which was introduced to university academics and medical researchers, and thence to the wider world, via CIA-funded studies) and heroin.

On the other hand, the military pursued a much more “physical” program, leading by 1953 to the design of the first Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training process. Its ostensible purpose was to teach soldiers to cope with the stress of torture by subjecting them to torture - hooding, near drowning, painful and explicitly sexual positioning, racial and religious abuse, lengthy solitary confinement, and the like.

Disappointed with its drug trials, the CIA turned increasingly to the SERE techniques of the military, with the addition, however, that its academic research links began to provide both a theoretical rationale for the success of such treatment and a greatly enlarged repertoire of manipulative tactics.

Willing behavioural scientists and psychologists participated in military and CIA-funded studies of “human ecology” and “sensory deprivation”, until in 1957 two authors described the state of mind induced by systematic physical and mental manipulation as the “debility, dependency and dread state”. This troika of torture, known simply a DDD, became the main focus of CIA theory and practice from then on.

From the late 1950s the CIA and US military taught SERE and DDD methods of interrogation to American Cold-War allies in South-East Asia and Latin America, and incorporated “lessons” from “experiments” carried out overseas.

According to Otterman, by 1971 more than 100,000 foreign officers had been trained in American torture techniques. A major contributor to this training, particularly of Latin Americans, was the Army's School of the Americas (SOA), created in 1948, occasionally exposed and condemned (as in 1976 and again in the late 1990s), but continuing to function at Fort Benning, Georgia, under the new label of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Moreover, the CIA and Army Special Forces interrogators (with trained Vietnamese assistance) practiced and refined SERE and DDD-style interrogation techniques in Vietnam between 1954 and 1975, where Project Phoenix “neutralised” somewhere between 22,000 and 60,000 civilians (there are few records) suspected of being Vietcong supporters. One new tactic extensively “researched” was terminal electro-shock treatment.

To facilitate such practices, and the training of overseas allies, the CIA (using an early codename for itself) in 1963 published its 128-page KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, a comprehensive handbook based on the DDD paradigm. During and after the Vietnam War, Latin American countries such as Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, Honduras and Nicaragua benefited from CIA training and assistance. To keep training up to date an anonymous CIA agent in 1983 wrote a new interrogation handbook, the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual mentioned previously.

Public exposure of the existence of the 1963 and 1983 CIA “interrogation” manuals in 1988, and the signing of the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment by President Reagan, also in 1988, might have opened a more enlightened chapter. But it was nearly a decade later, after a three-year legal battle by the Baltimore Sun, that the contents of the KUBARK and Human Resource Exploitation manuals were released, in 1997.

No one was held accountable for anything, and the brief public condemnation was easily palliated by the addition (by the CIA) of a general statement renouncing torture. Moreover, when it was finally ratified by Congress under President Clinton in 1994, the acceptance of the Convention Against Torture incorporated 19 “reservations”, “understandings” and “declarations” created by the US Department of Justice.