The Lineage of Bush-Cheney Torture

The Lineage of Bush-Cheney Torture
Written by Chris Floyd   
Monday, 02 October 2006

Below, Joseph Margulies delivers a devastating look at the direct lineage of the Bush-Cheney torture program from the dungeons of North Korea. What he describes of the Korean torture methods is a precise parallel to what Bush and Cheney are practicing today. It should be emphasized, however, that there is nothing new in the "enhanced interrogation techniques" now being employed by Bush's KGB, the CIA; the Agency has studied and refined these exquisite "no-touch" tortures for more than 50 years (and taught them to the "security organs" of many of our "allies.") What is new is their mass application in a worldwide gulag holding thousands of prisoners – and their open exaltation by the White House, and by Congress, which has just enshrined them officially as the law of the land.

It is obvious too from the facts related by Margulies that what the CIA was interested in – and is still interested in – was not techniques for eliciting accurate information but methods for producing confessions that would conform to whatever horrific fantasy scenario that the regime deemed politically expedient. This of course has a direct application to our political reality today. The Bush Regime relies on the manufacture and manipulation of fear in order to retain power and push its unconstitutional – and unpopular – agenda of presidental dictatorship, military aggression, war profiteering, and oligarchic plunder. Horrific scenarios are devised to foment the required level of fear and bloodlust – the "imminent threat" of Saddam Hussein's WMD and his "connections" to al Qaeda, etc. – and then "justified" by false confessions coerced by CIA captives. This pattern has been repeated over and over.

These are rank and filthy times, and the United States of America is being led by rank and filthy people.

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Between 1950 and 1962, the CIA poured millions of dollars into studies that tested different interrogation techniques, hoping to learn from and refine the lessons of Korea. The research culminated in the top-secret KUBARK manual, a 1963 primer on how to conduct coercive counterintelligence interrogations. The manual was finally disclosed in 1997 and is now available online. Interrogators must create a menacing and ominous environment that destroys the prisoner's capacity to function as a "civilized man." Prisoners should be kept disoriented because "the capacity for resistance is diminished by disorientation."

The prisoner's environment must be manipulated to produce a "regression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance." This usually doesn't take much. "Relatively small degrees of homeostatic derangement, fatigue, pain, sleep loss, or anxiety" are generally sufficient….

Will mild "homeostatic derangement" be deemed acceptable under the legislation just passed by Congress -- a little sleep deprivation here, some extended standing there, perhaps a few more hours in the cold room, a wee drop of solitary confinement now and again, extended isolation from the outside world? Nothing like "real" torture, since everyone knows that's unreliable.

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