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The Birth of Soft Torture
CIA interrogation techniques—a history.
By Rebecca Lemov
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 5:07 PM ET
In 1949, Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty appeared before the world's
cameras to mumble his confession to treasonous crimes against the
Hungarian church and state. For resisting communism, the World War II
hero had been subjected for 39 days to sleep deprivation and
humiliation, alternating with long hours of interrogation, by
Russian-trained Hungarian police. His staged confession riveted the
Central Intelligence Agency, which theorized in a security memorandum
that Soviet-trained experts were controlling Mindszenty by "some
unknown force." If the Communists had interrogation weapons that were
evidently more subtle and effective than brute physical torture, the
CIA decided, then it needed such weapons, too.
Illustration of an experiment run by Hull at Yale on university
students in 1937.
Months later, the agency began a program to explore "avenues to the
control of human behavior." During the next decade and a half, CIA
experts honed the use of "chemical and biological materials capable of
producing human behavioral and physiological changes" according to a
retrospective CIA catalog written in 1963. And thus soft torture in
the United States was born.
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In short order, CIA experts attempted to induce Mindszenty-like
effects. An interrogation team consisting of a psychiatrist, a
lie-detector expert, and a hypnotist went to work using combinations
of the depressant Sodium Amytal and certain stimulants. Tests on four
suspected double agents in Tokyo in July 1950 and on 25 North Korean
prisoners of war three months later yielded more noteworthy results.
(Relevant CIA documents do not specify exactly what, but reports later
claimed that the special interrogation teams could hold a subject in a
"controlled state" for a long period.) Meanwhile, the CIA opened the
door to pre-emptive psychosurgery: In a doctor's office in Washington,
D.C., one unfortunate man, his name deleted from documents, was
lobotomized against his will during an interrogation. By the
mid-to-late 1950s, experiments using "black techniques," as the agency
called them, moved to prisons, hospitals, and other field-testing
sites with funding and encouragement from the CIA's Technology and
Science Directorate.
One of the most extreme 1950s experiments that the CIA sponsored was
conducted at a McGill University hospital, where the world-renowned
psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron had been pioneering a technique he
called "psychic driving." Dr. Cameron was widely considered the most
able psychiatrist in Canada—his honors included the presidency of the
World Psychiatric Association—and his patients were referred to him
from all over. A disaffected housewife, a rebellious youth, a
struggling starlet, and the wife of a Canadian member of Parliament
were a few of the more than 100 patients who became uninformed,
nonconsenting experimental subjects. Many were diagnosed as
schizophrenic (a diagnosis since contested in many of the cases).
Cameron's goal was to wipe out the stable "self," eliminating
deep-seated psychological problems in order to rebuild it. He
grandiosely hoped to transform human existence by opening a new
gateway to the understanding of consciousness. The CIA wanted to know
what his experiments suggested about interrogating people with the
help of sensory deprivation, environmental manipulation, and psychic
disorientation.
Cameron's technique was to expose a patient to tape-recorded messages
or sounds that were played back or repeated for long periods. The goal
was a condition Cameron dubbed "penetration": The patient experienced
an escalating state of distress that often caused him or her to reveal
long-buried past experiences or disturbing events. At that point, the
doctor would offer "healing" suggestions. Frequently, his patients
didn't want to listen and would attack their analyst or try to leave
the room. In the 1956 American Journal of Psychiatry, Cameron
explained that he broke down their resistance by continually repeating
his message using "pillow and ceiling microphones" and different
voices; by imposing periods of prolonged sleep; and by giving patients
drugs like Sodium Amytal, Desoxyn, and LSD-25, which "disorganized"
thought patterns.
To further disorganize his patients, Cameron isolated them in a
sensory deprivation chamber. In a dark room, a patient would sit in
silence with his eyes covered with goggles, prevented "from touching
his body—thus interfering with his self image." Finally "attempts were
made to cut down on his expressive output"—he was restrained or
bandaged so he could not scream. Cameron combined these tactics with
extended periods of forced listening to taped messages for up to 20
hours per day, for 10 or 15 days at a stretch.
In 1958 and 1959, Cameron went further. With new CIA money behind him,
he tried to completely "depattern" 53 patients by combining psychic
driving with electroshock therapy and a long-term, drug-induced coma.
At the most intensive stage of the treatment, many subjects were no
longer able to perform even basic functions. They needed training to
eat, use the toilet, or speak. Once the doctor allowed the drugs to
wear off and ceased shock treatments, patients slowly relearned how to
take care of themselves—and their pretreatment symptoms were said to
have disappeared.
So had much of their personalities. Patients emerged from Cameron's
ward walking differently, talking differently, acting differently.
Wives were more docile, daughters less inclined to histrionics, sons
better-behaved. Most had no memory of their treatment or of their
previous lives. Sometimes, they forgot they had children. At first,
they were grateful to their doctor for his help. Several Cameron
patients, however, later said they had severe recurrences of their
pretreatment problems and traumatic memories of the treatment itself
and together sued the doctor as well as the U.S. and Canadian
governments. Their case was quietly settled out of court.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, CIA experts thought they understood
the techniques necessary for "breaking" a person. Under a strict
regime of behavioral conditioning, "the possibility of resistance over
a very long period may be vanishingly small," several researchers
concluded in an analysis used in the CIA's 1963 manual
Counterintelligence Interrogation. At the agency, pressure increased
to field-test coercive interrogation tools. The task, as CIA
second-in-command Richard Helms urged, was to test the agency's
techniques on "normal" people. At times, this imperative made the
agency reckless. As part of the now notorious MK-ULTRA program—"one of
the seamiest episodes in American intelligence," according to
journalist Seymour Hersh—the CIA set up a safe house in San Francisco
where its agents could observe the effects of various drug
combinations on human behavior. They were in search of a "truth serum"
and thought LSD might be it. Prostitutes were hired to bring unwitting
johns back to the house, where the women slipped acid and other strong
psychoactive substances into the men's drinks. From behind a one-way
mirror, investigators watched, notebooks and martinis in hand.
Sometimes the men took the drugs and managed to carry on. Sometimes
they babbled or cried. An internal CIA review condemned these high
jinks in 1963, but Congress didn't investigate them until 1977, after
a post-Watergate crisis of confidence in the agency.
At least officially, the CIA ended its behavioral science program in
the mid-1960s, before scientists and operatives achieved total control
over a subject. "All experiments beyond a certain point always
failed," an operative veteran of the program said, "because the
subject jerked himself back for some reason or the subject got
amnesiac or catatonic." In other words, you could create a vegetable
or a zombie, but not a robot who would obey you against his will.
Still, the CIA had gained reliable information about how to derange
and disorient a person who was reluctant to cooperate. An enemy could
quickly be made into a confused and desperate human being.
Since 9/11, as government documents and news reports have made clear,
the CIA's experimental approach to coercive interrogation has been
revived. Last week, as the Washington Post revealed the existence of
secret CIA-run prisons—"black sites"—in Eastern Europe, Vice President
***** Cheney continued to campaign to ensure that the agency will not
be prevented from using "cruel, inhumane, and degrading" methods to
elicit intelligence from detainees. The operatives of the 1940s would
approve.
© 2005 Slate
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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