_Gravity's Rainbow_ in the news...

[pynchonoid]

...especially its interrogation, torture, mind
control, and C.I.A. elements, in the latest US torture
scandal...


"PISCES:  We want to talk some more about Boston
today, Slothrop. You recall that we were talking last
time about the Negroes, in Roxbury. Now we know it's
not all that comfortable for you, but do try, won't
you." 



Torture as Normalcy
As American  as Apple Pie
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN 
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Torture's back in the news, courtesy  of those lurid
pictures of exultant Americans laughing as they 
torture their Iraqi captives in a prison run by the US
military  outside Baghdad. Apparently it takes
electrodes and naked bodies  piled in a simulated orgy
to tickle America's moral nerve ends.  Kids maimed by
cluster bombs just don't do it any more. But torture's
 nothing new. One of the darkest threads in postwar US
imperial  history has been the CIA's involvement with
torture, as instructor,  practitioner or contractor.
Since its inception the CIA has taken  a keen interest
in torture, avidly studying Nazi techniques and 
protecting their exponents such as Klaus Barbie. The
CIA's official  line is that torture is wrong and is
ineffective. It is indeed  wrong. On countless
occasions it has been appallingly effective.

[...] 
In the months after the 9/11/01  attacks on the World
Trade Center and Pentagon, "truth drugs"  were hailed
by some columnists such as Newsweek's Jonathan Alter 
for use in the war against Al Qaeda. This was an
enthusiasm shared  by the US Navy after the war
against Hitler, when its intelligence  officers got on
the trail of Dr. Kurt Plotner's research into  "truth
serums" at Dachau. Plotner gave Jewish and Russian 
prisoners high doses of mescaline and then observed
their behavior,  in which they expressed hatred for
their guards and made confessional  statements about
their own psychological makeup.

As part of its larger MK-ULTRA  project the CIA gave
money to Dr. Ewen Cameron, at McGill University. 
Cameron was a pioneer in the sensory-deprivation
techniques.  Cameron once locked up a woman in a small
white box for thirty-five  days, deprived of light,
smell and sound. The CIA doctors were  amazed at this
dose, knowing that their own experiments with  a
sensory-deprivation tank in 1955 had induced severe
psychological  reactions in less than forty hours.
Start torturing, and it's  easy to get carried away.

Torture destroys the tortured  and corrupts the
society that sanctions it. Just like the FBI  after
9/11/01 the CIA in 1968 got frustrated by its
inability  to break suspected leaders of Vietnam's
National Liberation Front  by its usual methods of
interrogation and torture. So the agency  began more
advanced experiments, in one of which it anesthetized 
three prisoners, opened their skulls and planted
electrodes in  their brains. They were revived, put in
a room and given knives.  The CIA psychologists then
activated the electrodes, hoping the  prisoners would
attack one another. They didn't. The electrodes  were
removed, the prisoners shot and their bodies burned.
You  can read about it in our book, Whiteout.

In recent years the United  States has been charged by
the UN and also by human rights organizations  such as
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International with
tolerating  torture in US prisons, by methods ranging
from solitary, twenty-three-hour-a-day confinement in
concrete boxes for years on end, to activating
50,000-volt shocks through a mandatory belt worn by
prisoners? Many of the Military Police guards now
under investigation for abuse of Iraqis earned their
stripes working as guards in federal and state
prisons, where official abuse is a daily occurence. 
Indeed, Charles Granier, one of the abusers at Abu
Ghraib and  the lover of Linndie England the Trailer
Park Torturer, worked  as a guard at South Carolina's
notorious Greene Correctional  Unit and has since gone
back to work there.  [...] 

...read it all:
http://www.counterpunch.org/





	
		
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