re context for Slothrop's interrogation, sexual/racial fears, etc.

[pynchonoid]

The history of CIA interrogation and US government
black ops can be traced in Pynchon's novels.  You've
got Dr. Hilarious, the Nazi doctor who experiments on
his patients with LSD (recalling the historical Nazi
doctors who conducted medical aviation research with
mescaline -- research that the US is said to have
picked up when it was gleaning Nazi technology in the
Zone).  The conditioning of Slothrop, as Yuri notes,
and the truth serum interrogation of Slothrop to
understand more about deep-seated racial and sexual
fears. The sexual message communicated to Pirate
Prentice based on an intimate knowledge of his
personal sexual history. And so on. Pynchon returns to
the subject again, post-9/11, in his introduction to
_1984_.  Seems to me this is an issue that has
interested Pynchon throughout his writing career.


Yuri:
[...] It is curious how many familiar overtones this
whole prison
abuse story carries. [...]

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact

A nice counterpoint to Hersh's New Yorker piece is an
article published the other day by the Boston Globe,
by Alfred M. McCoy, perhaps best known for his book
_The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia_  (a book
that provides much insight into the development of the
CIA's relationship with illegal drugs traffickers
during the Cold War period -- another story that runs
through Pynchon's novels, highly visible in the Nazi
Karl Bopp leading the CAMP team in the Reagan-Bush
so-called "war on drugs" and the reference to Bush and
the CIA and drugs), tracing the history of the CIA's
research and  development of interrogation techniques.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/05/14/torture_at_abu_ghraib_followed_cias_manual/


ALFRED W. MCCOY

Torture at Abu Ghraib followed CIA's manual

By Alfred W. McCoy  |  May 14, 2004

THE PHOTOS from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots
not of simple brutality or a breakdown in discipline
but of CIA torture techniques that have metastasized
over the past 50 years like an undetected cancer
inside the US intelligence community. From 1950 to
1962, the CIA led secret research into coercion and
consciousness that reached a billion dollars at peak.
After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric
shocks, and sensory deprivation, this CIA research
produced a new method of torture that was
psychological, not physical -- best described as "no
touch" torture.

The CIA's discovery of psychological torture was a
counterintuitive breakthrough -- indeed, the first
real revolution in this cruel science since the 17th
century. The old physical approach required
interrogators to inflict pain, usually by crude
beatings that often produced heightened resistance or
unreliable information. Under the CIA's new
psychological paradigm, however, interrogators used
two essential methods to achieve their goals.

In the first stage, interrogators employ the simple,
nonviolent techniques of hooding or sleep deprivation
to disorient the subject; sometimes sexual humiliation
is used as well.

Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on
to a second stage with simple, self-inflicted
discomfort such as standing for hours with arms
extended. In this phase, the idea is to make victims
feel responsible for their own pain and thus induce
them to alleviate it by capitulating to the
interrogator's power. In his statement on reforms at
Abu Ghraib last week, General Geoffrey Miller, former
chief of the Guantanamo detention center and now
prison commander in Iraq, offered an unwitting summary
of this two-phase torture. "We will no longer, in any
circumstances, hood any of the detainees," the general
said. "We will no longer use stress positions in any
of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep
deprivation in any of our interrogations."

Although seemingly less brutal, no-touch torture
leaves deep psychological scars. The victims often
need long treatment to recover from trauma far more
crippling than physical pain. The perpetrators can
suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to
cruelty and lasting emotional problems.

After codification in the CIA's "Kubark
Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual in 1963, the
new method was disseminated globally to police in Asia
and Latin America through USAID's Office of Public
Safety. Following allegations of torture by USAID's
police trainees in Brazil, the US Senate closed down
the office in 1975.

After it was abolished, the agency continued to
disseminate its torture methods through the US Army's
Mobile Training Teams, which were active in Central
America during the 1980s. In 1997, the Baltimore Sun
published chilling extracts of the "Human Resource
Exploitation Training Manual" that had been
distributed to allied militaries for 20 years. In the
10 years between the last known use of these manuals
in the early 1990s and the arrest of Al Qaeda suspects
since September 2001, torture was maintained as a US
intelligence practice by delivering suspects to
foreign agencies, including the Philippine National
Police, who broke a bomb plot in 1995.

Once the war on terror started, however, the US use of
no-touch torture resumed, first surfacing at Bagram
Air Base near Kabul in early 2002, where Pentagon
investigators found two Afghans had died during
interrogation. In reports from Iraq, the methods are
strikingly similar to those detailed in the Kubark
manual.

Following the CIA's two-part technique, last September
General Miller instructed US military police at Abu
Ghraib to soften up high-priority detainees in the
initial disorientation phase for later "successful
interrogation and exploitation" by CIA and military
intelligence. As often happens in no-touch torture
sessions, this process soon moved beyond sleep and
sensory deprivation to sexual humiliation. The
question, in the second, still unexamined phase, is
whether US Army intelligence and CIA operatives
administered the prescribed mix of interrogation and
self-inflicted pain -- but outside the frame of these
photographs. If so, the soldiers now facing
courts-martial would have been following standard
interrogation procedure.

For more than 50 years, the CIA's no-touch methods
have become so widely accepted that US interrogators
seem unaware that they are, in fact, engaged in
systematic torture. But now, through these photographs
from Abu Ghraib, we can see the reality of these
techniques. We have a chance to join fully with the
international community in repudiating a practice
that, more than any other, represents a denial of
democracy.

 Alfred W. McCoy, professor of history at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of
"Closer Than Brothers," a study of the impact of
torture upon the Philippine armed forces. 
© Copyright  2004 The New York Times Company



	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! - Internet access at a great low price.
http://promo.yahoo.com/sbc/