Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
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Today's
Stories
May
20, 2004
Andrew
Cockburn
The Truth About Chalabi
Kathy
Kelly
A Visit from the FBI
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Brown and Bored of Education in India
Tom
Stephens & John Philo
The War Crimes of Bush, Cheney & Co.
Sam
Bahour / Michael Dahan
Genocide by Public Policy
Robert
Ovetz
Ending the Race for the Last Turtle
Billy
Wilson
The Most Important Thing I Learned at School This Year
Website
of the Day
Rafah Today
May
19, 2004
Elizabeth
W. Corrie
Caterpillar Should Do the Right Thing,
Now
Bill
and Kathleen Christison
The US Can't Win
Vijay
Prashad
For Whom the Polls Toll: the Indian Elections of 2004
Ray
Hanania
Israeli War Crimes: Who to Believe, AIPAC or Amnesty Intl.?
Greg
Moses
Man President Kisses Up at AIPAC
Michael
Gillespie
Who is Kenneth deGraffenried?
Josh
Frank
Homes Destroyed; Death Toll Mounts: But Where's John Kerry?
Gary
Corseri
Out of Iraq and Plato's Cave
Kevin
Alexander Gray
If Malcolm Were Alive
May
18, 2004
Neve
Gordon
The Gaza Debacle
Doug
Stokes
Imperial Policing: Why Abu Ghraib
Shouldn't Surprise Us
Bob
Wing
The Color of Abu Ghraib
Vanessa
Jones
Man on a Leash
Thomas
P. Healy
Chemical Trespass: the Body Burden
Zeynep
Toufe
Torture and Moral Agency: the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
Kenneth
Roth
Mistreatment of Detainees in US Custody: a Letter to Bush
Elaine
Cassel
Pre-empting the Bill of Rights: The Other War, One Year Later
Website
of the Day
Truth Against Truth
May
17, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
The John-John Ticket: Kerry Woos McCain
Laura
Santina
Military Conditioning and Abu Ghraib
Mickey
Z.
With Friends Like These: More Election 2004 Madness
Frederick
B. Hudson
Police Terror: Three Mothers Search for Justice
Shakirah
Esmail-Hudani
Inside Abu Ghraib: the Violence of the Camera
Boris
Leonardo Caro
The Revelations of Mr. W.
Alex
Dawoody
Iraq: From Saddam to Occupation
Victor
Kattan
On Watching the Execution of Nick Berg
Ron
Jacobs
Rumsfeld's Sovereignty Shell Game
May
15 / 16, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Green Lights for Torture
Douglas
Valentine
ABCs of American Interrogation: Phoenix Program, Revisited
John
Stanton
Kings of Pain: UK, US and Israel
Ben
Tripp
Torture: a Fond Reminiscence
Brian
Cloughley
Where are You Heading, America? Taking a Closer Look at the Patriot
Act
Justin
E. H. Smith
Islam and Democracy: the Lesson from Turkey
Brandy
Baker
Equal Opportunity Torture: Lynddie England, the Right and Feminism
John
Chuckman
Peep Show on Capitol Hill: Sex, Lies and Videotape
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Goon Squad
John
Holt
Fencing the Sky
Ron
Jacobs
The Power of Patti Smith
Brian
J. Foley
Why the Outrage Over Abu Ghraib?
Robin
Philpot
Re-writing the History of the Rwandan Genocide
Eric
Leser
The Carlyle Empire
Ray
Hanania
From Abu Ghraib to Nick Berg: There's No Such Thing as a Good
War Crime
Jeff
Halper
Dozers of Mass Destruction
Joe
Surkiewicz
Inside the Baltimore Detention Center
John
Whitlow
Iraq Goddamn
Michael
Leon
Invitation to a Beheading: Why Bush Should Watch the Berg Video
Poets'
Basement
Krieger, Ford, LaMorticella, Smith and Albert
May
14, 2004
Dr.
Susan Block
Bush's POW Porn
Ron
Jacobs
Secret History of the War on Drugs
William
Blum
God, Country and Torture
Michael
Donnelly
The People v. Corporate Greed: A Victory on the North Coast
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
India Shines
Stephen
Gowans
Building Democracy in Iraq and Other
Absurdities
May
13, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Where is Kerry?
Colm
O'Laithian
Torture and Degradation: Revenge American Style?
Saul
Landau and Farrah Hassan
Wal-Mart: Scrooge with Hi-Tech Accounting
Practices
Ralph
Nader
An Open Letter to Bush on the Inhumane Treatment of Iraqi Prisoners
Willliam
James Martin
Deir Yassin Massacre Recalled
Marc
Salomon
Reality TV Bites
Forrest
Hylton
Law 'n Order in La Paz: All Quiet
on the Southern Front?
May
12, 2004
Blanton
/ Kornbluh
Prisoner Abuse: Cheney Warned in
1992
Virginia
Tilley
So, Who's to Blame?
Bruce
Jackson
James Inhofe, the Dumbest Senator
of Them All
Thomas
P. Healy
No Enemies: Making Peace with Bert Sacks
Linda
S. Heard
Racism and Ignorance: a Lethal Cocktail in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
Spinning Torturegate
Lisa
Viscidi
The People's Voice: Community Radio in Guatemala
Jack
Heyman
View from the Bay Bridge: Longshoremen Plan Mass Workers March
on DC
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Rummy's Reprieve
CounterPunch
Wire
Teamsters Corruption Scandal: Hoffa Exec. Assistant Alleged to
Have Quashed Investigation into Mob Influence
Christopher
Brauchli
Detention Camp, USA
William
S. Lind
Bush's Waterloo?
May 11, 2004
Mark
Engler
On the "Necessity" of Torture
Ray
McGovern
More Troops? A March of Folly
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Nukes and Jefferson's Grand Experiment
Mickey
Z.
Less Than Hero
Christopher
Reed
Torture on the Homefront: America's Long History of Prison Abuse
Dennis
Hans
When John Negroponte was Mullah Omar
Bruce
Jackson
Pete Seeger at 85
Mike
Whitney
Killing al Sadr
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Shrinking the Guatemalan Military
William
A. Cook
The Unconscious Country: Righteous Indignation,
Nakedly Displayed
May
10, 2004
Robert
Fisk
From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib: Racism
and Torture as Entertainment
Wayne
Madsen
The Israeli Torture Template: Rape,
Feces and Urine-Soaked Cloth Sacks
Col.
Dan Smith
The Shame of Abu Ghraib
Joe
Bageant
John Ashcroft, Keep Your Mouth Off My Wife!
Ron
Jacobs
Rummy's Prisongate Blues: Don't Leave Mad; Just Leave
Ben
Tripp
Getting in Touch with Your Inner Savage
Ray
Hanania
Why They Hate Us: Racism, Bigotry and Abuse
Reza
Fiyouzat
"Mishandled" Invasions
Diane
Christian
Images & Abstractions &
Genitals
Website
of the Day
Crushing Iraqi Skulls with Tanks for Sport?
May
8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
Adam
Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated
and Shot at Kunduz?
Douglas
Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press
Kurt
Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib
Brian
Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling
Lucia
Dailey
Forbidden Games
Joanne
Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui
Mickey
Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
Doug
Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs
Norm
Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11
Sam
Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah
Susan
Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art
Dave
Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing
Laura
Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne
Dave
Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base
Carolyn
Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004
Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"
Dr.
Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska
May
7, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention
Facilities in Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So
Robert
Fisk
An Illegal and Immoral War
Ahmad
Faruqui
The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien
Phu
Alexander
Zaitchik
From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison)
Bell?
Mike
Whitney
The Price of Victory
Norman
Solomon
This War, Racism and Media Denial
M.
Shahid Alam
A Comic Apology
May
6, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with
Shit; Kicked to Death
Kathy
Kelly
May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor
for the War Machine
Werther
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas
Casino Game
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
Totalitarian Democracy
Robert
Fisk
"Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded
Men Being Shot by US Helicopter
John
Janney
Torturing the Way to Freedom?
Christopher
Ketcham
Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now!
Alan
Farago
Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish
Sam
Hamod
Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning
James
Brooks
Sullen Spring
William
S. Lind
On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq
May
5, 2004
Maj.
Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Complete US Army Report on Abuse of
Iraqi Prisoners
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives?
Will
Youmans
Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian
Zionist and the End of the World
Patrick
B. Barr
Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label
Lawrence
Magnuson
Nightline's All-American Morgue
Greg
Moses
Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing
Truth
Lee
Ballinger
Cinco de Mayo and Unity
Gilbert
Achcar
Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire
Website
of the Day
Operation Phoenix & Iraq
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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May
21, 2004
My Journey to
Caxias
How the CIA
Taught the Portuguese to Torture
By CHRISTOPHER REED
For several days in the early summer
of 1974, I had open access to a strange and terrible prison near
Lisbon, then empty because of the coup that April which ended
48 years of fascist dictatorship in Portugal. My prison time
in Caxias was a never forgotten experience, but I did not expect
the memories to return so vividly today -- at the instigation
of the United States.
My recollections pose the question
of whether Caxias was a beginning of the American prison gulag,
the lawless penal control stretching today from Guantanamo in
Cuba, to the Middle East, Afghanistan and clandestine activities
in Colombia, the Philippines, and other places unknown, as well
as the suspected proxy torture havens like Syria. When did political
prisoners across the world begin to answer not to their peers,
but to Uncle Sam?
The prison of Caxias (Cuh-SHI-ash
in Portuguese) was run by the secret police, the Pide (International
Police for the Defence of the State), who were so feared by the
Portuguese, pedestrians would cross to the opposite side of the
street to pass its unmarked offices in Lisbon. Caxias was an
old fortress near the sea, but inside was a modern torture chamber
using the latest coercion techniques -- devised by the US Central
Intelligence Agency.
For decades in Caxias, thousands
of political prisoners, mostly communists and socialists, were
admitted for systematic torture and then released. Why were these
known subversives, who had dedicated their lives to destroying
the dictatorship, allowed to return to freedom? Because the success
of the Pide's state-of-the-art imported torture techniques meant
that their previous lives were now irrelevant. In the Pide's
words, they had been "taken off the chess board". Their
lives, old and new, were destroyed.
My guide to Caxias was an Edinburgh-trained
Portuguese psychiatrist, who for a mercifully short time had
been a prisoner there himself. He told me that released prisoners,
especially the communists -- regarded as the toughest ones to
crack -- would often not go home. They would instead travel in
the opposite direction from their families, take a simple job,
or fall into alcoholism, even change their names; such were their
new lives as mental zombies, created by coercion. (This was confirmed
by another psychiatrist I interviewed who treated Caxias victims.)
Central to the torture was
sleep deprivation, a newish discovery enshrined in a 128-page
secret manual produced by the CIA in July 1963 called Kubark
Counterintelligence Interrogation. I was told several times at
Caxias that the Pide's methods came from the CIA, although I
did not knowingly see a copy of Kubark (the word is a code name
for the agency itself). However, Portugal is and was a member
of Nato, and as its secretive communist party was regarded as
the nation's most dangerous security threat, and the Cold War
rumbled on, there seems no doubt that the US intelligence agency,
ordered to fight communism everywhere, was the source. It also
had the latest information on "coercive interrogation."
This becomes plainer on perusal
of the Kubark manual, which was declassified in 1997 when the
Baltimore Sun threatened a suit under the US Freedom of Information
Act. It clearly describes what I saw as the methods at Caxias,
and read about in the Pide's internal reports during my 1974
prison visits.
In chapter nine of Kubark,
titled Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant
Sources, it recommends sleep and sensory deprivation to produce
the "DDD syndrome" of "debility, dependence, and
dread" in "interrogatees." (Note the dehumanisation
of that word.) Victims could be reduced to compliance in a matter
of hours or days, it said, but then warned against "applying
duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage."
This sentence confirms what the Pide were doing.
The objective of CIA interrogation,
as Kubark repeatedly emphasises, was information, hence the warning.
But how conveniently this assisted the Pide, who were less interested
in their victims' information, than in their destruction. Caxias
adopted Kubark, but deliberately took its methods to the extreme
it warned against. But as the mind torturers' manifesto carefully
remarks: "The validity of the ethical arguments about coercion
exceeds the scope of this paper."
Complying with the manual's
recommendations, the sound-proofed Caxias cells contained no
distractions. Walls and ceilings were white but scuff marks remained
-- they were excellent sources to stimulate the hallucinations
that prisoners experienced after the first few days of sleeplessness.
The light, as Kubark urges, was weak, artificial, and its source
invisible. Huge concealed air-conditioner-heaters could turn
the room in minutes from icy cold to a desert scorch.
Such furniture as there was,
mostly a table and a few chairs, was rounded at the edges to
prevent a prisoner trying to kill himself by running his head
into them, as some had tried. Cell ceilings contained speakers
which broadcast loud and terrifying sounds, or sometimes the
cries and sobs of their wives or children. The Pide had recorded
these and played them from a central "studio" which
I saw.
Meals came at random, deliberately.
An apparent breakfast might arrive at 4 pm; dinner in the middle
of the night. No clocks or watches were allowed. Oh yes -- and
cells had no beds. The record for prisoner sleeplessness was
a young engineer, a communist, kept awake for a full month. He
committed suicide upon his release.
How can you keep someone awake
for weeks? My psychiatrist friend sat me at the plastic-topped
table and asked me to pretend to nod off. I closed my eyes --
to be jerked out of it by a sharp but penetrating metallic series
of sounds. He had taken out an escudo coin and simply rapped
it on the table top. Astonishingly, this was usually sufficient,
and guards took turns through the endless hours. Another method
was to throw a mug of icy water in a prisoner's face. And of
course the tape recordings were always available.
In former times the Pide was
notorious for brutal torture. But it mellowed under its benevolent
CIA guides; violence was eschewed. I saw a report on a Pide officer
demoted for striking a prisoner, thus renewing his resistance.
As Kubark-CIA says: "Direct physical brutality creates only
resentment, hostility, and further defiance." The report
on the Pide officer complained that his violence had "set
back the treatment." Caxias prisoners were not left naked
and suffered no systematic sex coercion. That came years later
-- in 1983 when the CIA updated Kubark and recommended stripping
prisoners and keeping them blindfolded. Presumably the additon
of sexual manipulation is the latest thinking among US torture
intellectuals.
The 1983 manual, enthusiastically
used by CIA clients in the vicious "contra" war against
Central American leftist nationalists in President Reagan's years,
was changed in 1985 after unfavourable publicity. An inserted
page stated: "The use of force, mental torture, threats,
insults, or exposure to inhumane treatment of any kind as an
aid to interrogation is prohibited by law both internationally
and domestically; it is neither authorised nor condoned."
But as they say, what goes around, comes around.
Christopher Reed was a correspondent for the London
Guardian in Portugal from 1974-76. He now writes for the London
Observer and other papers. He can be reached at: christopherreed@earthlink.net.
Weekend
Edition Features for May 15 / 16, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Green Lights for Torture
Douglas
Valentine
ABCs of American Interrogation: Phoenix Program, Revisited
John
Stanton
Kings of Pain: UK, US and Israel
Ben
Tripp
Torture: a Fond Reminiscence
Brian
Cloughley
Where are You Heading, America? Taking a Closer Look at the Patriot
Act
Justin
E. H. Smith
Islam and Democracy: the Lesson from Turkey
Brandy
Baker
Equal Opportunity Torture: Lynddie England, the Right and Feminism
John
Chuckman
Peep Show on Capitol Hill: Sex, Lies and Videotape
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Goon Squad
John
Holt
Fencing the Sky
Ron
Jacobs
The Power of Patti Smith
Brian
J. Foley
Why the Outrage Over Abu Ghraib?
Robin
Philpot
Re-writing the History of the Rwandan Genocide
Eric
Leser
The Carlyle Empire
Ray
Hanania
From Abu Ghraib to Nick Berg: There's No Such Thing as a Good
War Crime
Jeff
Halper
Dozers of Mass Destruction
Joe
Surkiewicz
Inside the Baltimore Detention Center
John
Whitlow
Iraq Goddamn
Michael
Leon
Invitation to a Beheading: Why Bush Should Watch the Berg Video
Poets'
Basement
Krieger, Ford, LaMorticella, Smith and Albert
|