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

[joeallonby]

on 5/16/04 11:58 AM, pynchonoid at pynchonoid at yahoo.com wrote:

> 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/to
> rture_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.
> 
> 
> 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.

The "standing on one leg" technique was a favorite of AVO, the Hungarian
secret police. If a prisoner fell after standing on one leg for a long time,
the other prisoners present would be beaten. Thus, the prisoner was
responsible for not just his own pain, but that of his comrades.