Exploring the US culture of torture

The word “torture” has for the last two centuries conjured up images of medieval brutality banished by modern enlightenment. Images of dungeons, thumb-screws, straps, hot coals and dripping water, ingenious iron devices for the infliction of physical pain, are well known. As are the Spanish Inquisition under Torquemada (1483-1498), the periodic witch “crazes” facilitated by witch-hunter handbooks such as Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) of 1487, and the atrocities of individuals such as Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476) and Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614). It is generally believed that the Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason”, swept all such irrational uses of torture into the dustbins of history. However, history is never that simple.

Torture was for centuries far more systematic and widespread than the above examples reveal. What John Langbein, in his Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime (1977), called “judicial torture”, was a crucial component of all legal systems based on the Roman law inquisitorial system, as part of the process of acquiring “evidence” to satisfy the prevailing “laws of proof” used by the courts. Hence, where ordered by the Judge, “confessions” (which had to be repeated in court within 24 hours) could be obtained by authorised and regulated “torture” and used to convict the accused.

This “jurisprudence of torture” - it was carried out within elaborate rules and procedures - was distinct from the “punishments” then imposed on the “guilty”. Despite the obvious (and repeatedly enunciated) criticism that innocent people were likely to succumb to “the pain and torment” and “confess” to things they never did, this legalised violence persisted for centuries.

It began to decline in the 17th century mainly because of increasing willingness to use critical judicial evaluation of all verifiable evidence to assess innocence or guilt, and evidence gained by torture was subsequently ruled inadmissible in all legal systems genuinely based on respect for human rights.

Moreover, despite the belief in the relegation of torture to the archives, the 20th century witnessed its widespread and systematic practice. Most culpable were the totalitarian regimes between the wars - Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy - but it continued even after the creation of the United Nations and passage of the early international human rights conventions.

In 1972 Amnesty International launched a Campaign for the Abolition of Torture, and published its first Report on Torture in 1973.

By the time of its second major report, Torture in the Eighties (1984), which found that “more than a third of the world's governments have used or tolerate torture or ill-treatment of prisoners”, the UN had passed an anti-torture Declaration and was debating a draft Convention. Adopted by the General Assembly the same year, the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment came into effect over the next decade as it was signed and or ratified by the vast majority of all states on earth.

But history continues to be far from simple, as Michael Otterman reveals in American Torture: from the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (Melbourne University Press, 2007).

This is an extensively researched study of a controversial topic: the historical evolution of the justifications, research and development, and widespread practice of ill-treatment and torture by the United States and its minions from the end of World War II to the present.

Much of the initial research was done for a 30,000-word Treatise titled “Debility, Dependency and Dread: The Development, Deployment and Defense of American Torture, 1945-2005”, for a Master of Letters (Peace and Conflict Studies) at the University of Sydney. The scholarly standards which characterised the Treatise have been carried through into this book, adding to its quality and persuasiveness.

A wide range of sources has been used throughout and frequently quoted, and an Appendix consisting of the section on “Coercive Techniques” from the CIA's 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual has been included. Lengthy Notes provide chapter and verse for the material used, and a full bibliography details the range and type of sources examined. Indeed, one of the startling revelations of this study is that such a mass of evidence is actually available on “secret” projects, “covert operations” and plainly illegal activities.

It is made abundantly clear in American Torture that the origins of the coercive “preparation” and “interrogation” techniques routinely used in prisons like Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo Bay (not to mention secret CIA “black sites” around the world and the prisons of complicit allies within this “gulag”), go back to the early days of the Cold War.

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.

These dealt with key components such as the definition of “torture”, and “treatment or punishment”, the level of culpable intent, the scope and duration of the treatment, and the sending of suspects to other states. They “legalised” the current psychologically-devised torture practices based on SERE and the three Ds - “debility, dependency and dread” - and, as was intended, severely limited America's commitment to the Convention.

Since 2001 this position has been further eroded by Bush Government legal officers and department administrators, not to mention secret directives and activities.

The history of American torture after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the announcement of a “War on Terror” by President Bush, incorporated and enhanced the foundations laid during the Cold War.

Mike Otterman analyses in exhaustive detail the steps which led to the creation of a network of prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba, where the United States now holds more than 14,000 prisoners, and routinely subjects them to ill-treatment and torture (by any reasonable definition) without legal justification or international accountability.

By claiming that America is involved in yet another “new” struggle for survival, that it is justified in doing “whatever it takes”, that its detainees are “unlawful combatants” not covered by any of the laws about justice and human rights, and that SERE-based torture was simply what President Bush called an “alternative set of procedures”, the United States Government has created and defended a widespread “culture of torture”.

The prisons at Bagram, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib now represent an appalling example of inhumanity and injustice. Moreover, as Otterman reveals, a string of Department of Justice legal opinions, a series of Defense and CIA memos and regulations, a range of Government “security” legislation and frequent “opinions” by leading office-bearers, have combined to create an entirely separate sphere of “prerogative law”, within which certain Government agencies operate, quite apart from the “normative” law protected by statute and enforced by an independent judiciary.

Within this cocoon, the CIA can torture with impunity, and act as a model for others.

One striking aspect of Otterman's book is the extent to which particular themes run consistently through his analysis of American torture, linking the decades of the Cold War with the current War on Terror.

Another is the extent of the information available about the torture of a whole series of individuals, whose treatment Otterman uses to illustrate the practices being researched and put into training manuals by the “experts”.

Finally, Otterman uses the evidence to substantiate a series of hard-hitting points by way of conclusion. Torture is both immoral and illegal. Torture is self-defeating: it abandons moral authority and generates fresh enemies. Torture is unnecessary: it can never supply the vital clue in the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario. Torture does not yield reliable information: it inevitably produces confessions designed to please interrogators and stop the pain. It is worth noting that this has always been known. Torture is corruptive: it spreads beyond its confines and corrupts its users. Finally, SERE techniques constitute torture, despite all the euphemisms, and they profoundly disrupt the body and mind, leaving permanent damage.

This is an impressive book, which casts a harsh light on an area of modern conflict with critical human rights implications. It also illustrates an old adage: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Torquemada and the authors of Malleus Maleficarum would be at home in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the CIA.