Top US Psychologist: Isolation Research Meant to Study Brainwashing

Donald O. Hebb was a pioneer American psychologist. His paper "Drives and the CNS (Conceptual Nervous System)" was one of the most quoted academic papers of his time, garnering 232 academic citations even in a period from 14-22 years after its publication.

Hebb was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1960.

But Hebb was also a major researcher for the U.S. MK-ULTRA mind-control and coercive interrogation program. His primary interest was in the study of how isolation and sensory deprivation affects mind and behavior. An excellent essay on Hebb's career in this regard is Alfred McCoy's 2007 article for the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, "Science in Dachau's Shadow: Hebb, Beecher, and the Development of CIA Psychological Torture and Modern Medical Ethics" (PDF).

But while secondary source material, and especially that of a first-class historian-researcher like McCoy, is important to get the overall context of the history, original documents can also be extremely illuminating. One such document is Hebb's 1958 American Psychologist article, "The Motivating Effects of Exteroceptive Stimulation."

The essay is a transcription of a speech Hebb gave as Chairman of a symposium held at the 1957 APA convention. The symposium on "Control of Behavior through Motivation and Reward." It is fascinating how unguarded this chief MK-ULTRA researcher could be when he was speaking in a forum of peers.

In his speech, Hebb asserted that "brainwashing," i.e., personality change or deformation, can occur "simply" -- and this "simply" is huge -- the "perceptual environment is "changed" or manipulated. By the time he gave his speech, the CIA and Pentagon were very far along their path of establishing a torture program. The "survival schools", where US soldiers were trained to endure and resist torture (later known as "SERE school"), became laboratories for the study of environmental manipulation and the application of "uncontrollable stress," the latter being the second pillar of US torture policy.

Embedded in Hebb's talk is an irony so deep, it is the Mariana Trench of irony: the Chinese did not practice "brainwashing." The term was created by a CIA-linked journalist because the U.S. was conducting psychological warfare to discredit confessions by U.S. airmen to the effect the U.S. had conducted biological warfare against the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War. The U.S. was also covering up the crimes of the Imperial Japanese biological human experimentation program at the same time because they had actually pardoned and brought war criminals like Ishii Shiro into the U.S. biological warfare program. The deal was made because the Japanese promised to give the U.S. the data garnered from their deadly experiments, which had killed thousands, including U.S. POWs.

As one reads the following, reflect upon the fact that this speech was given now two generations ago. It represents a portion of the history of my field -- psychology -- and of US history that is little reflected in the modern discourse on the controversies surrounding torture and interrogation. But history does not go away, and sooner or later the epigones of Hebb, Harlow, West and others must face the evaluations and attendant obloquies that will come from their failure to break from their attachment and collaboration with a torturing State.

One final word: for those who have been fighting to change the inhumane policy of use of isolation and solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, take note that in the pages of the foremost journal of the American Psychological Association over fifty years ago there were discussions about how isolation was used to break down prisoners.

From "The Motivating Effects of Exteroceptive Stimulation":

The infant-environment work shows that the adult is a product both of his heredity and physical environment (as necessary for growth) and of his perceptual experience during the growth period. Once development is complete, does the organism then become less dependent psychologically on sensory stimulation? When a man's or a woman's character is formed, his or her motivations and personality pattern established, is character or personality an entity that exists so to speak in its own right, no matter where or in what circumstances (assuming physical health and reasonable bodily welfare)?

In the Korean war the Chinese Communists gave us a shocking answer: in the form of brainwashing. The answer is No. Without physical pain, without drugs, the personality can be badly deformed simply by modifying the perceptual environment. It becomes evident that the adult is still a function of his sensory environment in a very general sense, as the child is.

I am not going to ask you to listen again to all the details of the experiments that have been done and are still being done in this country and Canada (though the Canadian experiments are over) to investigate the problem. The work of Heron, Bexton,
Scott, and Doane (2, 9, 10) began when the Defence Research Board of Canada asked us in 1952 to find out what we could about the basic phenomena, with the hope that some possibilities for protection against brainwashing might turn up. Now brainwashing, as you know, takes different forms and can involve lack of sleep, fatigue, and hunger; and it makes a lot of use of having the subject write out "confessions" (or whatever you want to call them). Only one aspect was picked out for study: isolation from the environment....

As a postscript, here is a link to the statement of Colonel Frank H. Schwable, Chinese-held POW during the Korean War, charging "U.S. Wages Germ Warfare in Korea". This is the primary example (as Schwable was the highest ranking prisoner to "confess") of the so-called "brainwashing" confessions. I doubt anyone involved in these controversies has ever read Schwable's document before. I find it quite convincing. I believe the breakdown of the prisoner was to get him to cooperate and be used for propaganda purposes. That doesn't mean the propaganda itself wasn't true in its particulars, or largely true. Read it and see what you think.

The Most Secret Place on Earth: the CIA's Covert War on Laos (video)

The following is an amazing must-see documentary by German documentary film-maker Marc Eberle. It was released in 2008, but I don't believe it got much attention, certainly not in the U.S. (According to one source, the film was "screened at ten international film festivals and in German cinemas early 2009 and was nominated for the Golden Panda at Sichuan intl. Film Festival, China, the History Makers’ Award, New York, the Banff World Television Award, Canada, and the North German Film Award." It's currently posted on YouTube. Hopefully it stays up there. (H/T Doug Valentine)



From a review of the film by Andrew Nette:

PHNOM PENH, Aug 22, 2008 (IPS) - It was known as the ‘secret war’, a covert operation waged by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) throughout the sixties and early seventies against communist guerrillas in Laos.

And the most secret location in this clandestine war was the former CIA air base of Long Chen, in central Laos, a place that remain off limits even today.

A new film, ‘The Most Secret Place on Earth’, to be released in cinemas across Europe later this year, explores this little known conflict.

The film, which previewed for the first time in Phnom Penh in mid-August, includes images of Long Chen shot by the first Western camera crew to enter the base since the communists took control of the country in 1975.

"I first got the idea to do the film when I visited the Plain of Jars in Laos in 2002," recalled Marc Eberle,36, the German director in an interview with IPS.

"You could still see the craters from the air bombing and unexploded ordnance was everywhere."

"Then I heard about Long Chen and the fact that no one had got there since the war and I thought, how do I visit and how do I make a film about it?"

Little is known about the Lao conflict despite the fact that it remains the largest and most expensive paramilitary operation ever run by the U.S.

It was completely run by the CIA using largely civilian pilots from the agency’s own airline, Air America, and mercenaries recruited from the Hmong, an ethnic tribe living in mountainous areas in central and northern Laos.

Despite being the centre of the covert operation and, at its peak, one of the world’s busiest airports with a population of 50,000 people, Long Chen’s location was never marked on any map.

"I found it bizarre that at one time this was the second biggest city in Laos and it was completely secret," Eberle says.

Long Chen remains off limits to foreigners and most Lao due to clashes with remnants of the CIA’s Hmong army. Until recently it formed part of a special administrative zone under the direct control of the Lao army.

Renewed interest in the Laos’ secret war was briefly rekindled in 2003 when two Western journalists made contact with members of the Hmong resistance, the first white people they had seen since the CIA abandoned them 27 years ago.

Although pictures from the encounter were printed in Time Asia and won a world press award, U.S. media failed to pick up the story and it died....

"Laos was the progenitor of the way America fights wars in the 21st century," [Eberle] says.

"Outsourcing the war to private companies, gathering public support by falsifying intelligence and documents, embedded journalism and automated warfare including the use of so-called ‘smart weapons’, all these methods were first tested in Laos."

The conflict began in the late fifties, as Washington sought to counter communist Pathet Lao forces and their North Vietnamese allies who had began building the Ho Chi Minh trail through the jungles running down the eastern border of Laos.

The operation was placed under CIA control to get around Laos’ supposed political neutrality and the conditions set by the Geneva Accords.

Vang Pao, then an officer in the Royal Lao Army, was recruited in 1960 to lead the Hmong troops drafted to fight the communists, which at the peak of the fighting numbered up to 30,000.

The largest of hundreds of airstrips built by the CIA throughout Laos, Long Chen was established soon after.

The Most Secret Place examines the conflict through the stories of players involved in the covert, diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, including former diplomats, CIA officers and Air America pilots.

It also draws on critics such as Alfred McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade and a reporter in Laos at the time, and Fred Branfman, an aid worker turned anti-war activist who worked to expose the conflict.

Ordinary Lao people at the receiving end of the world’s most technologically sophisticated military machine get a chance to tell their story....

This film’s analysis sets it apart from other books and documentaries on the subject, most of which justify the conflict, lauding the CIA operatives and their Air America pilots as heroes.

The reality, as Alfred McCoy says towards the end of the film, was very different. "We destroyed a whole civilisation, we wiped it off the map. We incinerated, atomised human remains in this air war and what happened in the end? We lost."

The covert nature of the conflict meant that U.S. forces were able to ignore virtually all the rules of engagement operating in Vietnam. Every building was a potential target and the civilian toll was huge.

The situation grew worse in 1970 when U.S. President Nixon authorised massive B-52 bombing strikes on Laos, which remained classified information until many years later.

American planes dropped an average of one planeload of bombs on targets in Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years, making it the most heavily bombed country on earth per capita in the history of warfare....

"Marc Eberle has previously directed award-winning documentaries for ARTE, Discovery Channel, NDR, WDR, SWR, BR, MDR and ZDF in Oman, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. He holds an MA in Film and TV from Royal Holloway, University of London." (Link)

Starvation, Suicide, Torture, Not Terrorism, Is the Legacy of Guantanamo

From almost the moment that Camp X-Ray opened, prisoners embarked on hunger strikes as the only means available to protest about the conditions of their detention: specifically, their day-to-day treatment, the treatment of the Koran, and the crushing uncertainty of their fate, as they remained imprisoned without charge and without trial, with the ever-present possibility that they would be held for the rest of their lives.

Andy Worthington has released the results of an important investigation he undertook on treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, Guantanamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics Of Starvation (his article introducing it is here).

Worthington shows how the ban on pictures of Guantanamo prisoners, many of them "from January 2002, when the prison opened, until February 2007, when these particular records came to an end, one in ten of the total population — 80 prisoners in total — weighed, at some point, less than 112 pounds (eight stone, or 50 kg), and 20 of these prisoners weighed less than 98 pounds (seven stone, or 44 kg)." Andy believes that if the world had clear evidence of the pain and suffering these men have endured by their illegal imprisonment and torture, the calls to shut down Gitmo would have prevailed long ago. -- It's hard to say, the world has become so brutalized, the American population so numbed. But I think Worthington makes a powerful point.

The report comes on the heels of the first death at the prison camp under President Obama's watch:

A military statement said 31-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, also known as Al Hanashi, "died of an apparent suicide" on Monday night, but did not say specifically how he died.

Human rights groups condemned the death and said it underlined the need to end the system of "indefinite detention" at the prison camp that opened in 2002 under the Bush administration to hold terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that killed 3,000 people.

Salih's death comes two years after the death of Saudi prisoner and another hunger-striker, Abdul Rahman al-Amri.

Salih's death coincides also with the retraction by the New York Times of their “1 In 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds” article, which fueled the right-wing assertion that closing Guantanamo or freeing prisoners, even sending them to trial in the U.S., would somehow be like sending legions of terrorists to join anti-American jihad. Even though the recidivism rate from Guantanamo is something closer to 4% (not 14%), the Times didn't get around to setting the story straight until last week.

Of course the whole Pentagon study upon which the Times reporter relied is bogus. As Bill Van Auken noted the other day, that in an earlier, similar study by the Pentagon "eight of the 15 described as resuming terrorism were accused of nothing more than condemning their treatment at Guantánamo, an act that the Pentagon portrayed as terrorist propaganda."

Also included were five Uighurs -— ethnic Chinese Muslims -— who were released in 2006 after three years in Guantánamo and sent to a refugee camp in Albania. The Pentagon itself acknowledged that they had been improperly classified as "enemy combatants" and there is no evidence whatsoever that they engaged in terrorist activity either before or after their incarceration at Guantánamo. The reason they were included among those accused of carrying out "anti-coalition militant activity" is that one of them wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times urging the US Congress to protect habeas corpus.

Btw, the follow-up to the tragicomedy of the NY Times semi-retraction concers the Uighurs, with a report that Obama is paying the small South Seas island country Palau $200 million dollars to settle these stateless people. While the Uighurs settle on their putative St. Helena, I suppose the citizens of Peoria (symbolically speaking) can sleep better in their beds tonight.

Beyond this latest circus, the only image left from the U.S. experiment of opening a gulag at Guantanamo is one of tragedy and human misery. If Obama gets his way, it will be closed. But the show will only move even further off-shore, to Bagram prison in Afghanistan, or other foreign prisons, where now the U.S. says it will send more and more of its "War on Terror" prisoners -- just like "the good old days," as Alfred McCoy points out in an excellent article over at TomDispatch, "Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze":

In retrospect, it may become ever more apparent that the real aberration of the Bush years lay not in torture policies per se, but in the President's order that the CIA should operate its own torture prisons. The advantage of the bipartisan torture consensus of the Cold War era was, of course, that it did a remarkably good job most of the time of insulating Washington from the taint of torture, which was sometimes remarkably widely practiced.

There are already some clear signs of a policy shift in this direction in the Obama era. Since mid-2008, U.S. intelligence has captured a half-dozen al-Qaeda suspects and, instead of shipping them to Guantanamo or to CIA secret prisons, has had them interrogated by allied Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. Showing that this policy is again bipartisan, Obama's new CIA director Leon Panetta announced that the Agency would continue to engage in the rendition of terror suspects to allies like Libya, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia where we can, as he put it, "rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment." Showing the quality of such treatment, Time magazine reported on May 24th that Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who famously confessed under torture that Saddam Hussein had provided al-Qaeda with chemical weapons and later admitted his lie to Senate investigators, had committed "suicide" in a Libyan cell....

This time around, however, a long-distance torture policy may not provide the same insulation as in the past for Washington. Any retreat into torture by remote-control is, in fact, only likely to produce the next scandal that will do yet more damage to America's international standing.

AIG Scandal: America Wakes Up To Extent of Capitalist Thievery

The news that AIG executives were to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses (maybe as high as $450 million!), even after a $170 billion dollar bailout, has fueled a populist revolt not seen since the initial shock of the economic crisis hit Americans last October. When Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told American Insurance Group CEO, Edward M. Liddy, that government loans to AIG might be renegotiated as a result, Liddy responded with "grave concern" over the firm's ability to retain "talented staff."

Talented in rip-off, that is. But former New York governor and supposed scourge of Wall Street, Elliot Spitzer, is reporting over at Slate that the outrage in the media over the bonuses is a diversion. (H/T Inky99 at Daily Kos.) Not that they aren't an outrage, the scandal misses the larger crime: the siphoning off of billions of taxpayer dollars to a handful of companies, who insured their highly risky investments with AIG. These companies have received hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money. Now they are to receive 100% on the dollar reimbursement for their losses from AIG. Spitzer comments:

The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.

But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash?....

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

No reason? No explanation? But there is always a reason. Always an explanation, though Spitzer may not want to go there.

Private ownership of the wealth and capital, freed of most regulatory restraints, is the distal cause, while the proprietors of this capital have gone on an orgy of thievery that may have never been seen in the history of civilization, outside of a world war.

Consider the new TALP plan ("Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility"), which bobswern has dissected so well over at Daily Kos (bold in original).

1.) $2 trillion in taxpayer funds with no salary restrictions to recipients....
2.) Shadow Bankers get almost all of their investment money for free, from you. [Shadow bankers consist of "non-bank financial institutions that, like banks, borrow short, and in liquid forms, and lend or invest long in less liquid assets... via the use of credit derivative instruments which allow them to evade normal banking regulations," e.g., hedge funds, investment banks, "structured investment vehicles," etc.]
3.) Shadow bankers will skim administrative fees off the top of $2 trillion, first.
4.) Government has virtually no say in terms of regulating what these entities must do with the money once they give it to them. [And on and on...]

Congress has responded to constituent anger, and hearings are being held even today (see liveblogging of those hearings by Emptywheel over at FDL). But while more details will leak out, it's unlikely we will see much more than the spectacle of what Chris Floyd describes as "faux shock in the Beltway over Wall Street fat cats paying themselves big bonuses with the free money that Washington knowingly gave them."

The following points will never be mentioned:

... the capitalist class is a definite concrete group composed of those who own and have a monopoly over the means of production (including loanable capital). The capitalist class is bound together by innumerable personal, familial and organizational filiations; the atomized non-capitalist entrepreneur -—the central figure of bourgeois economic theory -— is a fiction. The capacity to borrow is strictly limited by one’s ownership of the capital assets required for security against loans. In reality, credit under capitalism is always rationed, on the basis of specific monopoly complexes involving financial, industrial and commercial capitalists.

The ingrown nature of the capitalist class, who has united to unleash a frenzy of greed and stealing, is no better illustrated than by the biography of Obama's Treasury Secretary Geithner. Born to a scion of the capitalist class -- his father was a prominent leader of the Ford Foundation -- Geithner's early career (after attending the best Ivy League schools) was working for Kissinger and Associates in Washington, D.C. He began working for various divisions of the Treasury Department as early as 1988, when he was 27 years old. He was close to two former Treasury secretaries, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. During the George W years he worked at the Council of Foreign Relations and the International Monetary Fund. In October 2003, he became president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a few years later joined the elite, Rockefeller Foundation organized "Group of Thirty."

In March 2008, he arranged the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns... in the same year, he is believed to have played a pivotal role in both the decision to bail out AIG as well as the government decision not to save Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy.

Hmmm... the same guy who organized the AIG bailout, with its non-regulation of monies, including millions for "bonuses" to the same execs who helped manufacture the crisis... naw, that can't be true, can it? (It is.)

Oh, and he "forgot" to pay $35,000 in self-employment taxes over several years.

AIG and the CIA

Another strange aspect of the AIG affair, and one with which to end this post, concerns AIG's links to the CIA, another aspect of the entire scandal that seems to have escaped the mainstream press, if not the bulk of the blogosphere.

From CorpWatch:

Though it is an American company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, AIG makes extensive use of offshore jurisdictions such as Barbados, Bermuda and Luxembourg that are immune from U.S. regulatory and tax scrutiny. They help the company launder profits to evade U.S. taxes and hide insider connections in supposedly "arms-length" deals. This is especially important as the company has moved into financial services and asset management, handling the wealth of “high net-worth” clients -- the mega-rich.

[Board Chairman Maurice] Greenberg has enviable political clout, never so much in evidence as when, with the help of Henry Kissinger -- chair of AIG's international advisory committee and a paid consultant via Kissinger Associates – AIG became in 1995, the first company licensed to sell insurance in China. AIG was the only foreign firm that owned 100 percent of its license there.

The American International Group at its origins was linked to the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) the forerunner of the CIA. It grew from the Asia Life/C. V. Starr companies founded by Cornelius Starr who started his insurance empire in Shanghai in 1919, the first westerner to market insurance in China.

Some of the links between AIG and the CIA can take us to some pretty heady conspiracy territory, as in this link from a Ron Paul website:

Since 1997, Frank G. Wisner, Jr., has been a board member of Kroll , and is currently Greenberg's Deputy Chairman for External Affairs. Wisner's father was a founder of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, who killed himself over the scandal from his being duped by British-Soviet masterspy Kim Philby. Frank Wisner, Jr., is a director of the George Bush-linked energy giant Enron (a client for whom AIG negotiated payments from Peru over nationalization of Enron operations).

Of course, nothing in this quote above is wrong, but whether these dots connect or not is another matter. Still, the connections between AIG and U.S. government operations is a shadowy land that is worth investigating. Wisner, by the way, stepped left AIG late last year.

Michael Ruppert made an impressive case regarding the intelligence connections of AIG in an article back in 2001. He quotes a September 22, 2000 L.A. Times article by Mark Fritz, the text of which is worth considering as the AIG scandal unfolds.

Newly declassified U.S. intelligence files tell the remarkable story of the ultra-secret Insurance Intelligence Unit, a component of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, and its elite counterintelligence branch X-2.

Though rarely numbering more than a half dozen agents, the unit gathered intelligence on the enemy's insurance industry, Nazi insurance titans and suspected collaborators in the insurance business. But, more significantly, the unit mined standard insurance records for blueprints of bomb plants, timetables of tide changes and thousands of other details about targets, from a brewery in Bangkok to a candy company in Bergedorf.

"They used insurance information as a weapon of war," said Greg Bradsher, a historian and National Archives expert on the declassified records....

The men behind the insurance unit were OSS head William "Wild Bill" Donovan and California-born insurance magnate Cornelius V. Starr.

Starr had started out selling insurance to Chinese in Shanghai in 1919 and, over the next 50 years, would build what is now American International Group, one of the biggest insurance companies in the world.

Ruppert, seven years prior to the current economic meltdown, highlighted the uses of reinsurance for national security purposes. From Fritz's article (emphases added):

"Stiefel mapped the entire system," said Naftali, a historian at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. "Each time I take a piece of your risk, you've got to give me information. I am not going to reinsure your company unless you give me all the documents. That's great intelligence information"....

With the Axis defeat imminent, U.S. intelligence officials focused greater attention on ways the Nazis would try to use insurance to hide and launder their assets so they could be used to rebuild the war machine. It's a task that continues today.

It's no secret that the CIA needs to launder vast amounts of money to fund its secret wars around the world. That's a good deal of what the Iran-Contra affair was about. Alfred McCoy also plumbed these depths in his classic work, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. According to the Wikipedia article on McCoy, in his work just cited:

He also uncovered money laundering activities by banks controlled by the CIA, first the Castle Bank which was then replaced by the Nugan Hand Bank, who had as legal council William Colby, retired head of the CIA [3]. He also alludes to the BCCI, which seems to have played the same role as the Nugan Hand Bank after its collapse in the early 1980s, claiming that "the boom in the Pakistan drug trade was financed by BCCI." [3].

There's a lot that is horrifically dirty in the entrails of American capitalism. Why is this huge outflow of capital happening at this time? Where is money going, exactly? Why are the same people who engineered the bailout now in charge of policing it?

Standing outside the intricacies of this scandal, whatever they may be, as uncovered, stand two unassailable facts. One, this breakdown of the capitalist system is causing untold suffering for billions of people around the world. Two, the causes of the economic collapse are complex, and rooted first of all in the inadequacies of the capitalist system -- a system that argues it needs an influx of public monies in the trillions of dollars every fifty to seventy years or so or it will implode. Great system!

But further questions remain: how was this collapse handled? Who benefited? What was the role of secretive government agencies that use sophisticated schemes of investment and money laundering in all this? I don't trust the U.S. government to reveal this to us. The failure of public oversight and the need to preserve a crooked system at all costs led to the downfall of the Stalinist Soviet empire. It seems likely to do the same to the American empire as well, if not now, then someday soon.

More Musings on Those Missing Gitmo Files

In an earlier posting, I surmised that the "disarray" of files discovered at Guantanamo were due to conflicts over documentation with the CIA (per a Washington Post suggestion), or because there was a cover-up of certain operations within Guantanamo, also related, at least in part, to CIA activity. I also wondered if some documentation hadn't been in fact destroyed.

The excerpt below from an excellent article by Alfred McCoy on the CIA at Abu Ghraib points, I believe, to the answer to a lot of questions. I'm thinking Guantanamo... Abu Ghraib... was the CIA standard operating procedure in these cases very different?

Few in the press have followed up on McCoy's excellent analysis. How well I understand that problem. Anyway, this is from his 2004 article, "The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib" (bold emphases added are mine):

With the controversy over Abu Ghraib, incidents that once seemed but fragments should now be coming together to form a mosaic of a clandestine agency manipulating its government and deceiving its citizens to probe the cruel underside of human consciousness, and then propagating its discoveries throughout the Third World.

Strong democracies have difficulty dealing with torture. In the months following the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the United States moved quickly through the same stages (as defined by author John Conroy) that the United Kingdom experienced after revelations of British army torture in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s -- first, minimizing the torture with euphemisms such as "interrogation in depth"; next, justifying it on grounds that it was necessary or effective; and finally, attempting to bury the issue by blaming "a few bad apples."

Indeed, since last April, the Bush administration and much of the media have studiously avoided the word "torture" and instead blamed our own bad apples, those seven Military Police....

In August [2004], Major General George R. Fay released his report on the role of Military Intelligence at Abu Ghraib. Its stunning revelations about the reasons for this torture were, however, obscured in opaque military prose. After interviewing 170 personnel and reviewing 9,000 documents, the general intimated that this abuse was the product of an interrogation policy shaped, in both design and application, by the CIA.

Significantly, General Fay blamed not the "seven bad apples," but the Abu Ghraib interrogation procedures themselves. Of the 44 verifiable incidents of abuse, one-third occurred during actual interrogation. Moreover, these "routine" interrogation procedures "contributed to an escalating 'de-humanization' of the detainees and set the stage for additional and severe abuses to occur."

After finding standard Army interrogation doctrine sound, General Fay was forced to confront a single, central, uncomfortable question: what was the source of the aberrant, "non-doctrinal" practices that led to torture during interrogation at Abu Ghraib? Scattered throughout his report are the dots, politely unconnected, that lead from the White House to the Iraqi prison cell block: President Bush gave his defense secretary broad powers over prisoners in November 2001; Secretary Rumsfeld authorized harsh "Counter-Resistance Techniques" for Afghanistan and Guantanamo in December 2002; hardened Military Intelligence units brought these methods to Iraq in July 2003; and General Ricardo Sanchez in Baghdad authorized these extreme measures for Abu Ghraib in September 2003.

In its short answer to this uncomfortable question, General Fay's report, when read closely, traced the source of these harsh "non-doctrinal methods" at Abu Ghraib to the CIA. He charged that a flouting of military procedures by CIA interrogators "eroded the necessity in the minds of soldiers and civilians for them to follow Army rules." Specifically, the Army "allowed CIA to house 'Ghost Detainees' who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib," thus encouraging violations of "reporting requirements under the Geneva Conventions." Moreover, the interrogation of CIA detainees "occurred under different practices and procedures which were absent any DoD visibility, control, or oversight and created a perception that OGA [CIA] techniques and practices were suitable and authorized for DoD operations." With their exemption from military regulations, CIA interrogators moved about Abu Ghraib with a corrupting "mystique" and extreme methods that "fascinated" some Army interrogators. In sum, General Fay seems to say that the CIA has compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the U.S. military.

Some Thoughts on Utilitarian Arguments Against Torture

The following represent some preliminary thoughts I have had on the question often asked, does torture work?

It depends what you are trying to accomplish with it.

Does it yield reliable information? No.

Does it ever give anything other than desperate fictions from the tortured? Yes

Historian Alfred McCoy explains how torture used on the individual is unreliable, yet perpetrated upon thousands it can supply a small amount of real information. (In my work with torture victims, I certainly have personal knowledge of individuals who have broken under torture and revealed information or given up names to their captors.) But the latter technique is very expensive, especially from a moral/political point of view. It turns the population against you, and degrades the country that uses it. The use of torture always blows back into the society that uses it.

Torture is effective -- short-term only -- in terrorizing a society, as a form of mass societal terror and repression. This is why the U.S. uses it... make no mistake. But long-term... as pointed out just above, it turns the victims and their families against you. You can, as in Algeria, win the battle of Algiers, so to speak, and still lose the entire war and be driven out of the country, as happened to the French.

I don't like the "torture is ineffective" argument, personally. I find it is a utilitarian argument, not a moral argument. The truth is more nuanced than a simple yes or no, so susceptible to the passions of the moment (as after 9/11). Would torture be okay if it did reliably produce good intelligence? This is really the internal logic of the "ticking bomb" scenario writ large.

Would we allow cannibalism if we found it could help feed the poor and hungry around the world? We could just allow cannibalism upon the very old and the terminally ill. Why is this unacceptable to us?

Would slavery be tolerable if it produced an efficient economic system? (The latter was truly argued for some time in U.S. historical circles. See this link.)

If we argue the merits of torture upon utilitarian lines, we end up in endless debates while those being tortured continue to suffer an unending hell, while the powerful parties of the imperial land contend over whether or not their suffering is palatable enough for them.

We must end torture now. Not because it doesn't work, and not because it may, someday, backfire upon the society that conducts it. Torture must end because in the collective consciousness of humanity it is seen as evil, as destructive of common human bonds, a universal anti-moralism that eats into the very core of spirit and soul, and antithetical to the communalistic ethos of men and women striving together to survive in the world.

It must become part of a categorical imperative beyond the vicissitudes of socioeconomic or national struggle. It is anathema. It is like murder, the murder of mankind.

Historian Alfred McCoy Speaks on U.S. Torture Program

Alfred McCoy, a professor of history at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, spoke on the history of torture at The Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA on March 10, 2007. The event was co-sponsored by Survivors International, a torture treatment center in San Francisco.

Also invited to the event, and formally participating in the discussion in the second half, was Stephen Behnke, Director of the Ethics Office for the American Psychological Association (APA). Behnke has garnered a reputation as an apologist-defender of the official APA position on psychologist participation in national security interrogations. As I've written elsewhere, the APA defends using psychologists in "war on terror" torture interrogations (of course, they deny the "torture" part), which include the use of sensory deprivation, isolation, induction of fear, humiliation, sleep deprivation, and manipulation of temperature, time, light, etc., among other abusive practices.

In his presentation, Professor Mc Coy concentrated on research he has conducted that implicates major figures in the history of medicine and psychology in the research program undertaken by British, Canadian, and U.S. militaries and secret services on mind control and torture interrogation. He also discussed the development of so-called ethics policies as they intersect this history. His entire lecture, as well as much of the discussion, has been posted via YouTube on a webpage at Survivors Internation. It is comprehensive in scope and riveting to watch. I highly recommend viewing the entire thing.

According to Stephen Soldz, an APA opponent of torture collaboration who is helping lead the fight against the APA leadership on this question, Dr. Behnke has refused to allow any video of his participation to be posted. This is in line with the secrecy with which the APA has generally opposed openness on questions of APA decision-making, choosing to make certain things public, and hide others as it sees fit.

Along these lines, during the discussion period, I asked Dr. Behnke if he would support a call for the U.S. to declassify all materials related to research on interrogations and torture that was conducted during the 1950s and 1960s. I emphasized that psychological knowledge itself is eviscerated by withholding the results of research into coercive interrogations, making it difficult to ascertain just what effects various forms of interrogation have on individuals. It also hides the history of a major project in American medicine, psychiatry and psychology from the American people, not to mention non-military researchers. -- Dr. Behnke never addressed my question.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of Professor McCoy's presentation. This is the history that we must know, that we need to know. The leadership of American medicine and psychology, and a good portion of academia, was purchased, and mostly willingly collaborated, for a period of 20 years or more in a scientific program aimed at destroying human minds and controlling human behavior -- even to the point of inducing individuals to betray their beliefs, their friends, their countries, even to commit murder. We don't know how many thousands of people were destroyed by this inhuman, Nazi-like program. We do know that the technques developed are being used today in the U.S.-run prisons holding "enemy combatants" in Iraq, at the Guantanamo Naval Base, in "black prisons" in secret locations, and even in the U.S. -- most recently at the the Naval Consoldidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where Jose Padilla was tortured.

The fight against torture is a litmus test for progressive forces that would fight the reactionary slide into barbarism and aggressive war, as prosecuted by the Bush Administration, and only mildly opposed by their Democratic opponents. We are failing to meet this litmus test, as the issue is blanketed by others that do not challenge the central entitlements granted to itself by the military-industrial state, that do not challenge its power to destroy any individual it wants. Even the tools whereby they do this are to be kept secret.

After you've watched McCoy's presentation, you might want to donate some money to those who work with the tortured, like Survivors International, those who fight U.S. torture policies, like Physicians for Human Rights, and those who bring the issues around torture to the Internet on a daily basis, like NeverInOurNames.com.

For those who would rather read, don't miss McCoy's excellent 2004 essay, The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research.

Frankenstein's Children: Modern Torture's Scientific Bible

I wrote this piece over at Daily Kos in September 2006. I am reposting it here because it is an important piece of historical analysis, in the form of a book review, regarding the participation of psychologists and psychiatrists in the construction of the U.S. government's torture program.

* * * *

What if there was a book that dispassionately looked at the history and methodology of torture? What if this book looked at human physiology and psychology and tried to scientifically establish how to best break another human being and bend him or her to your will? What if this book were written by top behavioral scientists and published in the United States? And, finally, what if the studies published in this book were financed by the U.S. government?

Look no farther, there is, or rather was, such a book. Published in 1961 by John Wiley & Sons, The Manipulation of Human Behavior was edited by psychologists Albert D. Biderman and Herbert Zimmer. This book, unfortunately, cannot be found online, nor was a second edition or printing ever made (not surprisingly). But I will provide a review here, and an introduction into the nightmare world of science, torture, and politics that helped shape our modern world and today's news.

This book represents a critical examination of some of the conjectures about the application of scientific knowledge to the manipulation of human behavior. The problem is explored within a particular frame of reference: the interrogation of an unwilling subject....

Much of the work in this book was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force...(p. 1)

Albert Biderman had researched the so-called brainwashing of American POWs during the Korean War. He worked as Principal Investigator of an Air Force Office of Scientific Research contract studying stresses associated with captivity. Biderman was also Senior Research Associate at the Bureau of Social Science Research.

...the U.S. Air Force provided at least half of the budget of the Bureau of Social Science Research in the 1950s. Military contracts supported studies at this Bureau such as the vulnerabilities of Eastern European peoples for the purposes of psychological warfare and comparisons of the effectiveness of "drugs, electroshock, violence, and other coercive techniques during interrogation of prisoners." (from a review of Chistopher Simpson's Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare,1945-1960)

His associate, Herbert Zimmer, was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, and also worked at times as a consultant for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. When you read their book, The Manipulation of Human Behavior (MHB), the various essays by other authors include statements crediting research to grants from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology and the Office of Naval Research.

The titles of the book's essays are bone-chilling in their scientific bland exactitude. Here they are, with authors, for the record:

1. The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject as it Affects Brain Function, by Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr., Assoc. Professor of Clinical Medicine in Psychiatry, New York Hospital
[I have come to see over the past months of research that this essay by Hinkle is often referenced, and is key in understanding later methods of psychological and modern torture.]

2. The Effects of Reduced Environmental Stimulation on Human Behavior: A Review, by Phillip E. Kubazansky, Chief Psychologist, Boston City Hospital

3. The Use of Drugs in Interrogation, by Louis A. Gottschalk, Assoc. Professor of Psychiatry and Research Coordinator, Cincinnati General Hospital

And because you probably can't wait, and to juice up this account, I'll admit, yes, this is the chapter that goes into LSD, mescaline use and all that. Gottschalk found enough data in the research literature to find that LSD-25 might have "possible applications... to interrogation techniques".

The conclusions reached on mescaline hold equally for the possible applications of this drug to interrogation. As a tool in the advancement of knowledge of psychopharmacology, LSD-25 is a drug on which clinical and experimental research is likely to continue. (pp. 123-124)

Likely to continue..." An ironic understatement?

4. Physiological Responses as a Means of Evaluating Information, by R. C. Davis, Professor of Psychology, Indiana University

5. The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation, by Martin T. Orne, Teaching Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard University Medical School

An aside: Some of you may recognize Martin Orne as the psychiatrist of the famous poet Anne Sexton, who in the early 1990s released the tapes of her psychotherapy sessions with him to a biographer, precipitating a storm of controversy.

6. The Experimental Investigation of Interpersonal Influence, by Robert R. Blake and Jane S. Mouton, Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, and Social Science Research Associate, University of Texas, respectively

7. Countermanipulation Through Malingering, by Malcolm L. Meltzer, Staff Psychologist, District of Columbia General Hospital

Six of the essay contributors were psychologists; two were psychiatrists.

Cui bono?

I cannot give a full review here of all the research and conclusions derived herein. The significance of the book itself is hard to gauge, because nothing of its like was ever published again. We can assume that the government agencies that financed the research passed along the results to those who could use it. Biderman himself in his introduction to MHB put it this way:

In assuming the attitude of the "hard-headed" scientist toward the problem, there is a danger in falling into an equivalent misuse of science....

The conclusions reached do in fact show that many developments can compound tremendously the already almost insuperable difficulties confronting the individual who seeks to resist an interrogator unrestrained by moral or legal scruples....

Several scientists have reported on the possible applications of scientific knowledge that might be made by the most callous interrogator or power. The results of their thinking are available here for anyone to use, including the unscrupulous. (pp. 6, 9) (emphasis mine)

Spine feeling the shivers yet? When I first read the above, I thought I had stumbled into a fascist nightmare out of Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors. But then, I read on:

The alternative is to confer on the would-be interrogator a monopoly of knowledge by default. His success, as the various chapters of this book illustrate, depends heavily on the ignorance of his victims. [B. F.] Skinner has argued that those who are most concerned with restricting the vulnerability of men to control others have the most to gain from a clear understanding of the techniques employed. (p. 9)

Was Biderman saying that publishing this material publicly was an oblique attempt to expose what was going on? Was there a twinge of guilt in these men and women, working for the military under the guise of medical and university establishments? I don't know. But Biderman had a few other psychological observations about torture worth quoting (and think about President Bush as you read this, as he said the other day that he has spent a significant amount of time studying the issue of interrogations, torture, etc.):

The profound fascination of the topic under consideration may stem from the primitive, unconscious, and extreme responses to these problems, which gain expression in myth, dreams, drama, and literature. On the one hand, there is the dream-wish for omnipotence, on the other, the wish and fear of the loss of self through its capture by another. The current interest in problems of manipulation of behavior involves basic ambivalence over omnipotence and dependency, which, if projected, find a ready target in the "omniscient" scientist....

Conjectures concerning the prospects of "total annihilation of the human will" appear almost as frequently as those regarding the threat of mankind's total destruction by thermonuclear of similar weapons.....

Viewing the problem in magical or diabolical terms is not an altogether irrational analogy, given the existence of those who simultaneously practice and seek perfection of the means for controlling behavior and conceive their efforts as directed toward
"possessing the will" of their victims....

Thus, magical thinking and projections, as has been indicated, pervade prevalent judgments regarding the significance of the behavioral alterations that interrogators can effect. (pp. 4-6)

No matter whatever qualms these researchers had, they were sure of two things: "that some potentialities of interrogation have been overestimated", particularly those that relied on old methods (extreme violence); and

There is no question that it is possible for men to alter, impair, or even to destroy the effective psychological functioning of others over whom they exercise power. (p. 10)

The problem for the torturers, though, was the "elicitation of guarded factual information". For this, something more scientific was needed, something better than the old, unreliable techniques. -- In many ways, the disputes over interrogation now embroiling Washington are about the utility of methods, with Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney representing the old (omnipotence-craving) school, and McCain, Powell, and the military representing those who understand that psychological manipulation (often amounting to torture itself) gets them what they want, without the international treaty entanglements. The CIA is itself split within by a similar two wings.

The Experiments

The basic conclusions of the authors of MHB is that drug and hypnosis in interrogations is often not useful, and that while deserving more study (from their 1961 standpoint), the most promising research was in the area of sensory deprivation and a study of personality and identity formation and interpersonal methods of control.

More than one MHB author pointed to the work of Donald O. Hebb, McGill University, also a President of the American Psychological Association, whose 1954 presidential address to the APA, Drives and the Conceptual Nervous System, is considered a classic psychology text. Hebb focused on the effects of isolation and sensory deprivation upon the human organism. Such isolation, in combination with sleep deprivation and self-induced fatigue (through stress positions, etc.) formed the new torture paradigm, producing what they called "disordered brain syndrome."

From Hinkle's chapter:

The experiments of Hebb and others... who have concerned themselves with "sensory deprivation," have consisted of putting men into situations where they received no patterned input from their eyes and ears, and as little patterned input as possible from their skin receptors.... The subjects were deprived of opportunity for purposeful activity. All of their bodily needs were taken care of -- food, fluids, rest, etc. Yet after a few hours the mental capacities of the participants began to go awry. (pp. 28-29)

Alfred McCoy, author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and Professor of History at University of Wisconsin, Madison, gave an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Company, linking the torture of David Hicks in Guantanamo prison with the CIA-researched, Hebbsian torture paradigm MHB explores.

Dr Donald O. Hebb at McGill University found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in a subject within 48 hours. Now, what had the doctor done? Hypnosis, electroshock, LSD, drugs? No. None of the above. All Dr Hebb did was take student volunteers at McGill University where he was head of Psychology, put them in comfortable airconditioned cubicles and put goggles, gloves and ear muffs on them. In 24 hours the hallucinations started. In 48 hours they suffered a complete breakdown. Dr. Hebb noted they suffered a disintegration of personality. Just goggles, gloves and ear muffs and this discovered the foundation, or the key technique which has been applied under extreme conditions at Guantanamo. The technique of sensory disorientation. I've tracked down some of the original subjects in Dr Hebb's experiments of 1952 and men now in their 70s still suffer psychological damage from just two days of isolation with goggles, gloves and ear muffs. David Hicks was subjected at peak to 244 days of isolation, the most extreme isolation in the 50-year history of these CIA psychological torture techniques. David Hicks has suffered untold psychological damage that will take a great deal of care, a great deal of treatment and probably the rest of his life to move beyond.

Kubazansky, 45 years before Prof. McCoy spoke on Australian TV, more dryly summarized the effects of isolation and sensory deprivation in his MHB essay:

The boredom, restlessness, irritability, and other mood changes observed also may well apply. The stimulus-hunger and increased suggestibility which have been observed may make an individual more vulnerable to revealing information he might otherwise withhold, particularly when accompanied by the social uncertainty induced in the interrogation situation. Unprepared for these consequences of isolation and deprivation, like many experimental subjects, an individual may become apprehensive and indeed panicked by his reactions. The appearance of hallucinatory-like phenomena and their emotional accompaniments have often been quite anxiety provoking. (p. 90)

Then Kubazansky gave some unsolicited advice for those who could, very unfortunately, find themselves in such tortuous circumstances:

Knowledge of the importance of retaining spatial and time orientation, and self-stimulation in concrete tasks, are two examples of techniques for reducing stress by increasing psychological structure. (p. 90)

There is so much more I could write here, but I'm aware this diary has already approached the limits of most people's attention, at least to material presented in this format. I hope that in providing this information I am providing a public service by widening our knowledge of the history of the subject, by showing the breadth and depth of the subject, and giving substance to the sometimes trivial or cursory examination of the issues that drive the most important political battles of our day.

If this diary gets an appropriate response, and there is demand, I'll take up a second diary in the future examining the research from the rest of the book.