Everything I have written in the last two blogs should be of the most urgent concern to American citizens. It's not just a matter of giving prisoners more humane treatment: the whole point is that what is being done to them can be done to us. After all, José Padilla is an American citizen! The three years he spent in the brig without formal charges or access to a lawyer-- three years which destroyed his life-- were completely uncalled for. Under the Military Commissions Act, the president and his chosen henchmen can at will do the same to any citizen. The recent Supreme Court ruling in Boumediène v. Bush states that detainees in the so-called "War on Terror" have the right to a writ of habeas corpus, but it is almost certain that the executive branch will refuse to abide by it. The intention of the MCA is clear: American citizens are unambiguously included among those who are liable to be arrested as Unlawful Enemy Combatants (UECs)-- just read the law! The fact that they may not be terrorists at all means nothing so long as they have no way of proving that they are not. The situation created by the Military Commissions Act is a Catch-22: the provision denying habeas corpus to UECs has been ruled to be unconstitutional, but if you or I are arrested under its provisions tomorrow, we shall have no way of challenging our imprisonment because we will be denied access to a lawyer. After all, the judicial system is essentially passive-- it cannot rule upon a case until it is brought before it, and if the executive chooses to ignore its rulings and deny people their right to due process, there will be no way that they can bring their case before it. If tortures such as ECT (electroconvulsive treatment) are being used to destroy the minds of people classified as UECs right now, they can be used against us. We are in imminent danger not only of suffering hideous tortures, but of losing both our identities and our minds.
The danger to American democracy exactly parallels that which our present government presents to the individual. For what it means to be an American is eing re-defined: instead of fierce love of freedom and independence, patriotism today means being willing to go off to fight senseless wars at the whim of an all-powerful "commander-in-chief". The version of "Americanism" taught to José Padilla in the brig is one which sets President Bush in the position of Hitler or Stalin. Orwell said that someday the entire Declaration of Independence may be impossible to convey except by the term "Crimethink", and we are closer to that day than most people realize. Already schools are stressing practical skills such as computer science (which incidentally, through the internet, presents all the more opportunity for government spying) at the expense of the study of history. It is clearly the government's intention to cut us off not only from the knowledge of our own ethnic roots, which is essential to our identities, but most especially, from the history of democracy. What can be more dangerous to them than a study of fifth-century Athens, or the events which led to the signing of Magna Carta in the thirteenth century, or indeed of the Age of Enlightenment which gave birth to our own republic? No doubt the teaching of history will eventually be banned. In order to acquire absolute power, our government must erase all memory of America's past just as it has erased the memory of their own past from the minds of ECT victims. What Orwells' O'Brien says to Winston holds true for nations as well as individuals: "He who controls the past controls the future."
How could a nation which was once the freest on earth have taken such a path? The most immediate answer is the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. But as Montesquieu would have said, that was only the occasion, not the underlying cause. Surely the failure of the Founding Fathers to include the Right to Revolution, which is invoked in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, in the Constitution was a mistake. But it is not at all clear that the majority of Americans would revolt even if they believed that they had the right to. Many intellectuals would say that the thirst of Americans for material gain is the root of the problem, and they have a point. Certainly the notion that "the business of America is business" has been very bad for democracy, which demands a vigilant and politically aware citizenry. In connection with the subject of my last two blogs, it is interesting to note that two major advocates of ECT, Harold Sackheim of Columbia University and psychiatrist Richard Abrams, who wrote the only medical school textbook on ECT, have long had a financial interest in companies which manufacture ECT devices (Sackheim was a consultant to Mecta Corporation, and Abrams owned Somatics Inc.; see ect.org). But I think that by far the most dangerous tendency in American life is the fascination with technology, a technology which is now destroying the environment as well as threatening our liberty.
I have written before about the theories of James Burnham and Karl Wittfogel, the first of whom exercised a decisive influence upon Orwell (see "The Bell Telephone Hour", http://tortureandtotalitarianism.blogspot.com). It is difficult not to conclude that the increasing complexity of modern technology is the underlying factor which is facilitating the growth of an all-powerful executive in the same way that irrigation agriculture furthered the development of Oriental Despotism. But no society is doomed to tyranny by mere physical factors alone. No, it is an attitude characteristic of all too many Americans (and as the whole world becomes Americanized, of people in general) which is at fault here: the conviction that technology can solve every problem ("better living through chemistry") and the constant search for a "quick fix". I first became concerned about this tendency in the early nineteen-seventies, when B.F. Skinner's behaviorist theories became an object of controversy. Skinner, a psychologist who wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity, believed that people with psychological problems could be spared years of psychotherapy through his system of rewards and punishments, which treated only symptoms and ignored the causes of the mental illness. Although he personally stressed rewards over punishments, I feared at the time that his mechanistic approach to human behavior would be misused in a most inhumane way and I was right. Today young people at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Massachusetts-- some autistic, some mentally disturbed-- are given painful electric shocks to correct even such minor infractions as yelling or cursing. One mother sent her troubled son there in the expectation that in addition to the immediate modification of his destructive behavior, he would receive psychotherapy to determine its underlying causes. The director, Mathew Israel, told her that if she wanted psychotherapy for her son, she should take him home (http/www.caica.org/Shock_tactics_10-28-07.htm) The victims of Israel's "school for shock" remain in a hellish situation from which no amount of negative publicity has been able to save them (one can only hope for a rebellion such as is portrayed in the British film If!)
When Senator Thomas Eagleton had ECT in 1960 and 1966, he no doubt was looking for a "quick fix" which would end his depression and still enable him to continue his political career without the embarrassment of having to admit that he had emotinal problems. In fact, the ECT effectively ended his career when Senator George McGovern was forced to reject him as his running mate because of revelations that he had received this treatment. At the time, I felt rather sorry for him, and considered his removal from the ticket as an indication of the widespread and unfounded prejudice against mental patients. As my local Congressman Ron Dellums said, "Eagleton on the couch is better than Spiro Agnew standing up!" Today, when the negative effects of ECT are better known, I would not want anyone who was so unwise as to have chosen it as a presidential or vice-presidential candidate. I would have more faith in someone who was truly "on the couch"-- that is to say, in long-term therapy-- than someone who had voluntarily submitted his brain to such a dangerous procedure. Little did I know then that we would someday all be faced with the possibility that we might be imprisoned without access to a lawyer and forced to endure such tortures. It is quite conceivable that our government, which is displaying a sudden and sinister concern for the mental health of its citizens, will follow the lead of the Soviet Union and start sending dissidents to mental hospitals, where they will be treated as badly as if they were in prison. We are seeing the beginnings of a new kind of holocaust, in which the goal is not the extermination of the body but of the spirit.
The only long-term answer to this situation is to reduce our dependence upon technology. If we do not return to a simpler way of life that is more in harmony with the Earth, Mother Nature may force us to, for a rupture of the Cascadian Fault in the Northwest Pacific, another major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault, or worse yet, an eruption of the Long Valley or Yellowstone Supervolcanoes is a distinct possibility. With all the tragedy that such events would entail, they seem easier to face than the prospect of being ruled by an Orwellian, unassailable totalitarian state.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
THE MEMORY HOLE: ECT and the "War on Terror"
In George Orwell's 1984 there is a passage in which the protagonist, imprisoned and tortured in the "Ministry of Love" for his dissident views, receives ECT or electroconvulsive treatment. It is important to remember, before reading this passage, that Oceania's constantly shifting wars with now Eurasia, now Eastasia, have been discussed throughout the book, and were much on Winston's mind, as indeed they had to be, for it was vital that a citizen of Oceania know which of the other two totalitarian giants it was currently at war with, so as to be "politically correct". The passage reads as follows:
"Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston's temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O'Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his. 'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes fixed on mine.' At this moment there was a devastating explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position. A terrific, painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own, but somewhere or other there was a great patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain. 'It will not last," O'Brien said. 'Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?' Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania, and that he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war." (Signet edition, p. 212, emphasis mine)
In comparison with the tortures Winston undergoes before and after this passage, this treatment seems innocuous. But it is in fact the most irreversibly damaging thing that is done to him at the "Ministry of Love". Everything else, no matter how horrible, could conceivably have been undone had Winston been so fortunate as to have been rescued from the clutches of Big Brother. But not ECT, because it results in permanent and irreversible brain damage-- a loss of the memory upon which one's sense of personal identity is based. And O'Brien, Winston's torturer, provides the perfect rationale for its use: "Who controls the past controls the future."
Unfortunately, 1984 is not just a nightmarish vision of the future. It is already coming into being. Since its inception in 1947, the CIA has been hard at work on developing methods which have no use to the acquisition of intelligence-- indeed, they are antithetical to it-- but which are rather aimed at the destruction of a prisoner's sense of personal identity so that he may become what his torturer wants him to be. I have termed the results of the Agency's efforts to exercise this God-like power "the Memory Hole", after the tubes in Orwell's 1984 into which documents which are inconvenient to the Party can be thrown and destroyed forever. (Signet edition, p. 204) When the CIA first witnessed the Soviet Show Trials, it was impressed and envious. Watching the transformation of Hungary's Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty, known for his "intransigent moral stamina" from a "brilliant ecclesiastical orator" to a man who spoke to the court in a "kind of monotonous chant," made Yale psychologist Irvin Janis suspect that "a series of electroshock convulsions is being administered to reduce resistence to hypnotic suggestion." With this combination of ECT and hynosis, Janis warned, "The Soviets may have discovered techniques to induce a somnambulistic trance... in perhaps 90 per cent or more of all defendants from whom they might wish to elicit a public confession." (Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, p. 22) With all the evidence we have at our disposal, we may likewise hypothesize, on far more solid grounds, that all branches of the American intelligence community, to which CIA methods have "metastasized" (McCoy p. 5), are now using a similar combination of methods in order to produce "phony terrorists".
We know what harm ECT can do from the accounts of psychiatric patients, some of them famous. Most people are familiar with Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Ernest Hemingway committed suicide shortly after being given ECT at the Menninger Clinic in 1961. He is reported to have said to his biographer, "Well, what is this sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient." In 2005, Peggy Salters sued Palmetto Baptist Medical Center in Columbia for the ECT she had received there, claiming that it had "robbed her of "all memories of the past 30 years of her life, including all memories of her husband of three decades, now deceased, and the births of her three children." Registered nurse Barbara C. Cody reported in a letter to the Washington Post that her life was forever changed by thirteen outpatient ECTs that she received in 1983. "Fifteen to twenty years of my life were simply erased; only small bits and pieces have returned... I call ECT a rape of the soul." In an interview with the Houston Chronicle in 1996, Melissa Holliday, a former model for Playboy, stated that the ECT treatment she received in 1995 had ruined her life. She went on to state, "I've been through a rape, and electroshock therapy is worse." (all quotations from Wikipedia entry under "Electroconvulsive Treatment"). A New Zealand woman said, "The first time I got it I didn't know what was going on... When it was all over, I lay in the ward and looked out the window and saw a graveyard. That's where I thought I'd end up... I went back to my abusers because I'd forgotten what they'd done. And I put up with abusive relationships because I was a robot. I didn't know how to stand up for myself. I knew there was something wrong with me, but I didn't know what it was." ("Ex-patients Want to End Shock Treatment" ConcernedCounseling.com) In 2006-7, a patient referred to only as Simone D. became a cause célèbre in the mental health activist community when she sought through her lawyer to end the regime of shock treatment she had been subjected to at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. (Mind Freedom.org) These are only a few among numerous complaints.
Yet the CIA has pursued the use of ECT, not because it does not know what it can do, but precisely because it does, and believes that such damage can be useful to its purposes. Colin Ross, M.D., author of The CIA Doctors, quotes a recently declassified document dated to 1951, when the CIA was doing experiments under code-name ARTICHOKE: "[Whited-out] explained that he felt that electric shock might be of considerable interest to the "Artichoke" type of work. He stated that the standard electric shock machine (Reiter) could be used in two ways. One setting of this machine produced the normal electric-shock treatment (including convulsion) with amnesia after a number of treatments. He stated that he could guarantee amnesia for certain periods of time and particularly he could guarantee amnesia for any knowledge of the use of the convulsive shock..."[emphasis mine] "[Whited-out]was of the opinion that an individual could be gradually reduced through the use of electro-shock treatment to the vegetable level. He stated that, whereas amnesia could be guaranteed relative to the actual use of the shock and the time element surrounding it, it would obtain perfect amnesia for periods further back. He stated that people who had been given electro-shock remembered some details of certain things and complete blanks in other ways... [Whited-out] said that the standard electro-shock machine is a very common machine in medical offices and in the major cities there must be several hundred of them in use at all times." (Ross, pp. 52-3)
One can easily guess whom the doctor whose name is concealed in this document is: Ewen Cameron, a Canadian psychiatrist with the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. In the nineteen-seventies he began doing highly unethical experiments on human subjects. "These human guinea pigs were never told that they were subjects in military and CIA mind control experiments, and they never gave informed consent. They received no systematic follow-up to document the harm done to them. The welfare of the 'human subjects' was not a relevant variable in the academic equation. What counted most for these psychiatrists, I think, was money, power, perks, and academic advancement with the thrill of being a spy doctor." (Ross, p. 122). Though Ross seems to accept the CIA's cover story that ECT was used to create master spies, the manner in which Cameron used the procedure is not something that any self-respecting intelligence officer would volunteer for. It was the first stage in a two-staged process, termed depatterning. By means of ECT, patients were reduced to what he called a "vegetable level", but which might better be termed "infantile". Although they retained their native intelligence, they had amnesia back to the time when they were infants, and forgot literally everything they had learned since they were born. "When fully depatterned, patients were incontinent of urine and feces, unable to feed themselves, and unable to state their name, age, location, or the current date." (p. 124) The program's tragic "success" is shown by one of Cameron's victims, Linda MacDonald, who was interviewed extensively by Ross. "In Linda's case, depatterning was achieved through 102 electroconvulsive treatments given to her between May 1 and September 12, 1963... Dr. Cameron used a technique called the Page-Russell in which the button on the ECT machine is pushed six times per treatment instead of the usual one... the amount of electricity introduced into Linda's brain exceeded by 76.5 times the maximum amount recommended in the ECT guidelines of the American Psychiatric Institute." (pp. 168-9)
Knowing what harm even the standard ECT procedure can do, it is not surprising to find that the treatments received by Linda MacDonald produced "permanent and total amnesia". "To this day, Linda MacDonald is unable to remember anything from her birth to the time she entered the Allan Memorial Institute in 1963... The Linda MacDonald who was born in Vancouver in 1937 is not the Linda MacDonald I interviewed. The Linda I talked to is a new and separate identity that was created by Linda herself, after her discharge from the Allan Memorial Institute. Linda referred to herself before age 26 as if she were talking about another person, whm she referred to several times as 'Little Lindy'. She said that it now seemed to her that her original self was another person, not her." (p. 169)
Why did the CIA experiment with such a technique, which is so obviously useless for interrogation? Ross thinks that it was trying to create what used to be called, using Cold War terminology, "Manchurian Candidates"-- that is to say, individuals with multiple identities. But as the old identity was irretrievably lost in the process, it is clear that this procedure was not designed to be used on volunteers-- indeed it could only be used on people against their will. Since these would most likely be prisoners, they would not be allowed to invent their own new identity, but would have one implanted by their captors, with the aid of narco-hypnosis. Note that hypnosis is not the danger here, for no one can be hypnotized against his will (or remotely). What is at issue is the total breakdown of memory and hence identity which would make a person so confused and disoriented that he would submit to any regime which would enable him to once again make sense out of his world. The only conceivable purpose for such a technique is the same as the one which the Soviets used it for: the eliciting of false confessions. To this end, it would not be necessary to reduce subjects completely to an infantile state, from which it would be excessively time-consuming to retrain them. All that would be necessary is to create "memory holes". This would be done only on those prisoners who are to be tried, whether before a civilian court or a military tribunal: the rest could just be left to go insane.
How would such a system work? Take a hypothetical subject, named Muhammed, an Afghan who was tending his goats near the cave from which Osama bin Laden is supposed to have directed the attacks of 9/11. He is intelligent-- an advantage, for the ideal subject must be able to memorize a complicated "confession"-- but not well-educated. His son, however, has gone far, and indeed was given a scholarship to study in the U.S. Since 9/11 he has mysteriously disappeared. When he was taken captive during the war in Afghanistan, Muhammed knew about the attacks of 9/11 and deplored them. Furthermore, he knew that he had done nothing to aid bin Laden, for he was simply tending his goats that day and was unaware that there would be a terrorist attack, which he only learned of later. Nonetheless, he was taken prisoner and held first at a secret CIA prison. He is among the fourteen prisoners whom President Bush transferred from such prisons to Guantánamo to stand trial in the wake of the passage of the Military Commissions Act. After capture, he was subjected to the usual tortures in order to terrorize, disorient and humiliate him. Then ECT was administered repeatedly. Now Muhammed can't recall what he was doing on 9/11. His interrogator, who knows Arabic, Persian and Pashto (the last being the native language of Afghanistan) begins the process of implanting a false memory. He knows Muhammed is ready when his answer to the question, "What were you doing on 9/11?" becomes "What is 9/11?" The interrogator explains, "9/11 was a series of terrorist attacks... Nearly 3,000 innocent American civilians were killed in it, and you, Muhammed, were involved in its planning and execution. Furthermore, at your urging, your son became one of the suicide bombers designated to carry out the attacks." Muhammed is dumbfounded. "How can this be? I was raised by the Qu'ran, and the Qu'ran forbids the killing of innocents."
The interrogator, having been trained by the CIA, is far more sophisticated than the military intelligence people at Abu Ghraib and knows better than to mock Muhammed's religion, which can be used against him. He says, "You know what it says in the Qu'ran. Sometimes Satan tempts us, and you, Muhammed, gave in to that temptation. Worse yet, you incited your son to follow in Satan's footsteps. Now both you and he are facing eternal damnation." Muhammed thinks of his son. He cannot remember the young adult at all, only the joy he felt when the midwife handed him the baby to which his wife had just given birth, saying "It's a boy." He doesn't have any other sons. How could he have done this to his only son? He is distraught. But there is also a feeling of relief. For although he has forgotten many years of his life, he does remember that for the past year he has been going through hell. He has been tortured and humiliated by foreigners, for reasons which have never been clear to him. Now at last everything makes sense. God is punishing him for a heinous crime. He breaks down and weeps. "Please," he begs the interrogator, who now reminds him of the old mullah in his native village-- or as Christians would say, a father confessor-- "Please tell me how I can obtain God's forgiveness!" The interrogator says with a sly smile, "Just confess at the trial, Muhammed. God will forgive you if you confess." And then, with the aid of drugs and hypnosis, he gradually completes the process of implanting the story to which Muhammed is supposed to confess.
Is this actually happening? Although every other form of torture experimented with by the CIA has been reported being used against "detainees" in the "War on Terror", there have to my knowledge been no reports of the use of ECT. The problem is, as the doctor in the ARTICHOKE document pointed out, if it had been, the subject might well not remember that it had. If he was lucky enough to have a lawyer and to be examined by a forensic psychiatrist, that psychiatrist might not know what questions to ask. He or she would naturally ask about the treatment the defendant had received, not knowing that the real clue to what had been done to him lay not in his immediate memories, but in the absence of any memory surrounding the terrorist act with which he had been charged. Take for instance José Padilla. He was examined by forensic psychologists Angela Hegarty and Patricia Zapf. Hegarty later gave an interview to Democracy Now about her 22 hours of talking with Padilla. She described his state of anxiety and the anguish he felt in connection with his treatment at the South Carolina naval brig where he was held for three years without formal charges. She said she felt that there was something else, but she could not get him to reveal it. She noted some problems he had with memory-- he couldn't recount logically and chronologically what had happened to him at the brig, which she attributed to the stress of being kept in total isolation. But Dr. Cameron used isolation and sensory deprivation in addition to ECT, and considered the first inadequate to his purposes, probably because extreme isolation for long periods of time drives a person insane, and a person has to be sane to be tried. I have been trying to reach Hegarty, so far without success, but it appears that she did not think to ask him such questions as, for instance, "What first attracted you to Islam?" This would be crucial, because although his memories of what happened at the brig (with some carefully selected deletions) might be fairly intact-- indeed, his captors would want them to be-- his memories of what happened before he was arrested might not be. And there is one very telling clue in the interview Hegarty gave to Democracy Now.
José Padilla expressed an identification with his captors, and particularly President Bush, so strong that Hegarty diagnosed it as Stockholm Syndrome. For instance, he was very angry about the civil proceedings against him, because in his words they "were unfair to the commander-in-chief". When his mother visited him, he begged her to contact President Bush to help him, being convinced that he would if he was "good". In Islam, it is forbidden to place any human being on a pedestal from which he might seem to be competing with God. An exception can be made for religious leaders, like the Prophet Muhammed himself and his successors, but President Bush hardly fits this description. Furthermore, under his leadership countless Muslims have been killed. In the eyes of even a nominal Muslim, not to mention a devout or fanatical one, Padilla's veneration for Bush would seem un-Islamic or even idolatrous. No wonder his family found him "wierd" and "a different man" when they came to visit him. For it seems that the convicted Muslim terrorist is no longer a Muslim. Only ECT could have changed him so profoundly, while leaving his sanity and intelligence intact so that he could stand trial.
"Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston's temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O'Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his. 'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes fixed on mine.' At this moment there was a devastating explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position. A terrific, painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own, but somewhere or other there was a great patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain. 'It will not last," O'Brien said. 'Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?' Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania, and that he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war." (Signet edition, p. 212, emphasis mine)
In comparison with the tortures Winston undergoes before and after this passage, this treatment seems innocuous. But it is in fact the most irreversibly damaging thing that is done to him at the "Ministry of Love". Everything else, no matter how horrible, could conceivably have been undone had Winston been so fortunate as to have been rescued from the clutches of Big Brother. But not ECT, because it results in permanent and irreversible brain damage-- a loss of the memory upon which one's sense of personal identity is based. And O'Brien, Winston's torturer, provides the perfect rationale for its use: "Who controls the past controls the future."
Unfortunately, 1984 is not just a nightmarish vision of the future. It is already coming into being. Since its inception in 1947, the CIA has been hard at work on developing methods which have no use to the acquisition of intelligence-- indeed, they are antithetical to it-- but which are rather aimed at the destruction of a prisoner's sense of personal identity so that he may become what his torturer wants him to be. I have termed the results of the Agency's efforts to exercise this God-like power "the Memory Hole", after the tubes in Orwell's 1984 into which documents which are inconvenient to the Party can be thrown and destroyed forever. (Signet edition, p. 204) When the CIA first witnessed the Soviet Show Trials, it was impressed and envious. Watching the transformation of Hungary's Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty, known for his "intransigent moral stamina" from a "brilliant ecclesiastical orator" to a man who spoke to the court in a "kind of monotonous chant," made Yale psychologist Irvin Janis suspect that "a series of electroshock convulsions is being administered to reduce resistence to hypnotic suggestion." With this combination of ECT and hynosis, Janis warned, "The Soviets may have discovered techniques to induce a somnambulistic trance... in perhaps 90 per cent or more of all defendants from whom they might wish to elicit a public confession." (Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, p. 22) With all the evidence we have at our disposal, we may likewise hypothesize, on far more solid grounds, that all branches of the American intelligence community, to which CIA methods have "metastasized" (McCoy p. 5), are now using a similar combination of methods in order to produce "phony terrorists".
We know what harm ECT can do from the accounts of psychiatric patients, some of them famous. Most people are familiar with Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Ernest Hemingway committed suicide shortly after being given ECT at the Menninger Clinic in 1961. He is reported to have said to his biographer, "Well, what is this sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient." In 2005, Peggy Salters sued Palmetto Baptist Medical Center in Columbia for the ECT she had received there, claiming that it had "robbed her of "all memories of the past 30 years of her life, including all memories of her husband of three decades, now deceased, and the births of her three children." Registered nurse Barbara C. Cody reported in a letter to the Washington Post that her life was forever changed by thirteen outpatient ECTs that she received in 1983. "Fifteen to twenty years of my life were simply erased; only small bits and pieces have returned... I call ECT a rape of the soul." In an interview with the Houston Chronicle in 1996, Melissa Holliday, a former model for Playboy, stated that the ECT treatment she received in 1995 had ruined her life. She went on to state, "I've been through a rape, and electroshock therapy is worse." (all quotations from Wikipedia entry under "Electroconvulsive Treatment"). A New Zealand woman said, "The first time I got it I didn't know what was going on... When it was all over, I lay in the ward and looked out the window and saw a graveyard. That's where I thought I'd end up... I went back to my abusers because I'd forgotten what they'd done. And I put up with abusive relationships because I was a robot. I didn't know how to stand up for myself. I knew there was something wrong with me, but I didn't know what it was." ("Ex-patients Want to End Shock Treatment" ConcernedCounseling.com) In 2006-7, a patient referred to only as Simone D. became a cause célèbre in the mental health activist community when she sought through her lawyer to end the regime of shock treatment she had been subjected to at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. (Mind Freedom.org) These are only a few among numerous complaints.
Yet the CIA has pursued the use of ECT, not because it does not know what it can do, but precisely because it does, and believes that such damage can be useful to its purposes. Colin Ross, M.D., author of The CIA Doctors, quotes a recently declassified document dated to 1951, when the CIA was doing experiments under code-name ARTICHOKE: "[Whited-out] explained that he felt that electric shock might be of considerable interest to the "Artichoke" type of work. He stated that the standard electric shock machine (Reiter) could be used in two ways. One setting of this machine produced the normal electric-shock treatment (including convulsion) with amnesia after a number of treatments. He stated that he could guarantee amnesia for certain periods of time and particularly he could guarantee amnesia for any knowledge of the use of the convulsive shock..."[emphasis mine] "[Whited-out]was of the opinion that an individual could be gradually reduced through the use of electro-shock treatment to the vegetable level. He stated that, whereas amnesia could be guaranteed relative to the actual use of the shock and the time element surrounding it, it would obtain perfect amnesia for periods further back. He stated that people who had been given electro-shock remembered some details of certain things and complete blanks in other ways... [Whited-out] said that the standard electro-shock machine is a very common machine in medical offices and in the major cities there must be several hundred of them in use at all times." (Ross, pp. 52-3)
One can easily guess whom the doctor whose name is concealed in this document is: Ewen Cameron, a Canadian psychiatrist with the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. In the nineteen-seventies he began doing highly unethical experiments on human subjects. "These human guinea pigs were never told that they were subjects in military and CIA mind control experiments, and they never gave informed consent. They received no systematic follow-up to document the harm done to them. The welfare of the 'human subjects' was not a relevant variable in the academic equation. What counted most for these psychiatrists, I think, was money, power, perks, and academic advancement with the thrill of being a spy doctor." (Ross, p. 122). Though Ross seems to accept the CIA's cover story that ECT was used to create master spies, the manner in which Cameron used the procedure is not something that any self-respecting intelligence officer would volunteer for. It was the first stage in a two-staged process, termed depatterning. By means of ECT, patients were reduced to what he called a "vegetable level", but which might better be termed "infantile". Although they retained their native intelligence, they had amnesia back to the time when they were infants, and forgot literally everything they had learned since they were born. "When fully depatterned, patients were incontinent of urine and feces, unable to feed themselves, and unable to state their name, age, location, or the current date." (p. 124) The program's tragic "success" is shown by one of Cameron's victims, Linda MacDonald, who was interviewed extensively by Ross. "In Linda's case, depatterning was achieved through 102 electroconvulsive treatments given to her between May 1 and September 12, 1963... Dr. Cameron used a technique called the Page-Russell in which the button on the ECT machine is pushed six times per treatment instead of the usual one... the amount of electricity introduced into Linda's brain exceeded by 76.5 times the maximum amount recommended in the ECT guidelines of the American Psychiatric Institute." (pp. 168-9)
Knowing what harm even the standard ECT procedure can do, it is not surprising to find that the treatments received by Linda MacDonald produced "permanent and total amnesia". "To this day, Linda MacDonald is unable to remember anything from her birth to the time she entered the Allan Memorial Institute in 1963... The Linda MacDonald who was born in Vancouver in 1937 is not the Linda MacDonald I interviewed. The Linda I talked to is a new and separate identity that was created by Linda herself, after her discharge from the Allan Memorial Institute. Linda referred to herself before age 26 as if she were talking about another person, whm she referred to several times as 'Little Lindy'. She said that it now seemed to her that her original self was another person, not her." (p. 169)
Why did the CIA experiment with such a technique, which is so obviously useless for interrogation? Ross thinks that it was trying to create what used to be called, using Cold War terminology, "Manchurian Candidates"-- that is to say, individuals with multiple identities. But as the old identity was irretrievably lost in the process, it is clear that this procedure was not designed to be used on volunteers-- indeed it could only be used on people against their will. Since these would most likely be prisoners, they would not be allowed to invent their own new identity, but would have one implanted by their captors, with the aid of narco-hypnosis. Note that hypnosis is not the danger here, for no one can be hypnotized against his will (or remotely). What is at issue is the total breakdown of memory and hence identity which would make a person so confused and disoriented that he would submit to any regime which would enable him to once again make sense out of his world. The only conceivable purpose for such a technique is the same as the one which the Soviets used it for: the eliciting of false confessions. To this end, it would not be necessary to reduce subjects completely to an infantile state, from which it would be excessively time-consuming to retrain them. All that would be necessary is to create "memory holes". This would be done only on those prisoners who are to be tried, whether before a civilian court or a military tribunal: the rest could just be left to go insane.
How would such a system work? Take a hypothetical subject, named Muhammed, an Afghan who was tending his goats near the cave from which Osama bin Laden is supposed to have directed the attacks of 9/11. He is intelligent-- an advantage, for the ideal subject must be able to memorize a complicated "confession"-- but not well-educated. His son, however, has gone far, and indeed was given a scholarship to study in the U.S. Since 9/11 he has mysteriously disappeared. When he was taken captive during the war in Afghanistan, Muhammed knew about the attacks of 9/11 and deplored them. Furthermore, he knew that he had done nothing to aid bin Laden, for he was simply tending his goats that day and was unaware that there would be a terrorist attack, which he only learned of later. Nonetheless, he was taken prisoner and held first at a secret CIA prison. He is among the fourteen prisoners whom President Bush transferred from such prisons to Guantánamo to stand trial in the wake of the passage of the Military Commissions Act. After capture, he was subjected to the usual tortures in order to terrorize, disorient and humiliate him. Then ECT was administered repeatedly. Now Muhammed can't recall what he was doing on 9/11. His interrogator, who knows Arabic, Persian and Pashto (the last being the native language of Afghanistan) begins the process of implanting a false memory. He knows Muhammed is ready when his answer to the question, "What were you doing on 9/11?" becomes "What is 9/11?" The interrogator explains, "9/11 was a series of terrorist attacks... Nearly 3,000 innocent American civilians were killed in it, and you, Muhammed, were involved in its planning and execution. Furthermore, at your urging, your son became one of the suicide bombers designated to carry out the attacks." Muhammed is dumbfounded. "How can this be? I was raised by the Qu'ran, and the Qu'ran forbids the killing of innocents."
The interrogator, having been trained by the CIA, is far more sophisticated than the military intelligence people at Abu Ghraib and knows better than to mock Muhammed's religion, which can be used against him. He says, "You know what it says in the Qu'ran. Sometimes Satan tempts us, and you, Muhammed, gave in to that temptation. Worse yet, you incited your son to follow in Satan's footsteps. Now both you and he are facing eternal damnation." Muhammed thinks of his son. He cannot remember the young adult at all, only the joy he felt when the midwife handed him the baby to which his wife had just given birth, saying "It's a boy." He doesn't have any other sons. How could he have done this to his only son? He is distraught. But there is also a feeling of relief. For although he has forgotten many years of his life, he does remember that for the past year he has been going through hell. He has been tortured and humiliated by foreigners, for reasons which have never been clear to him. Now at last everything makes sense. God is punishing him for a heinous crime. He breaks down and weeps. "Please," he begs the interrogator, who now reminds him of the old mullah in his native village-- or as Christians would say, a father confessor-- "Please tell me how I can obtain God's forgiveness!" The interrogator says with a sly smile, "Just confess at the trial, Muhammed. God will forgive you if you confess." And then, with the aid of drugs and hypnosis, he gradually completes the process of implanting the story to which Muhammed is supposed to confess.
Is this actually happening? Although every other form of torture experimented with by the CIA has been reported being used against "detainees" in the "War on Terror", there have to my knowledge been no reports of the use of ECT. The problem is, as the doctor in the ARTICHOKE document pointed out, if it had been, the subject might well not remember that it had. If he was lucky enough to have a lawyer and to be examined by a forensic psychiatrist, that psychiatrist might not know what questions to ask. He or she would naturally ask about the treatment the defendant had received, not knowing that the real clue to what had been done to him lay not in his immediate memories, but in the absence of any memory surrounding the terrorist act with which he had been charged. Take for instance José Padilla. He was examined by forensic psychologists Angela Hegarty and Patricia Zapf. Hegarty later gave an interview to Democracy Now about her 22 hours of talking with Padilla. She described his state of anxiety and the anguish he felt in connection with his treatment at the South Carolina naval brig where he was held for three years without formal charges. She said she felt that there was something else, but she could not get him to reveal it. She noted some problems he had with memory-- he couldn't recount logically and chronologically what had happened to him at the brig, which she attributed to the stress of being kept in total isolation. But Dr. Cameron used isolation and sensory deprivation in addition to ECT, and considered the first inadequate to his purposes, probably because extreme isolation for long periods of time drives a person insane, and a person has to be sane to be tried. I have been trying to reach Hegarty, so far without success, but it appears that she did not think to ask him such questions as, for instance, "What first attracted you to Islam?" This would be crucial, because although his memories of what happened at the brig (with some carefully selected deletions) might be fairly intact-- indeed, his captors would want them to be-- his memories of what happened before he was arrested might not be. And there is one very telling clue in the interview Hegarty gave to Democracy Now.
José Padilla expressed an identification with his captors, and particularly President Bush, so strong that Hegarty diagnosed it as Stockholm Syndrome. For instance, he was very angry about the civil proceedings against him, because in his words they "were unfair to the commander-in-chief". When his mother visited him, he begged her to contact President Bush to help him, being convinced that he would if he was "good". In Islam, it is forbidden to place any human being on a pedestal from which he might seem to be competing with God. An exception can be made for religious leaders, like the Prophet Muhammed himself and his successors, but President Bush hardly fits this description. Furthermore, under his leadership countless Muslims have been killed. In the eyes of even a nominal Muslim, not to mention a devout or fanatical one, Padilla's veneration for Bush would seem un-Islamic or even idolatrous. No wonder his family found him "wierd" and "a different man" when they came to visit him. For it seems that the convicted Muslim terrorist is no longer a Muslim. Only ECT could have changed him so profoundly, while leaving his sanity and intelligence intact so that he could stand trial.
Friday, June 20, 2008
THE MAN IN THE WHITE COAT
I recently re-read Orwell's 1984 for the first time in many years (I had read it once in high school and then again in the early nineteen-seventies). Two things struck me forcefully. The first is how similar the tortures the protagonist, Winston, undergoes in the "Ministry of Love" are to CIA techniques of torture which have been developed over decades, and are now being used against suspects in the so-called "War on Terror". Indeed, one would think that the CIA had used the book as a manual! That is interesting, because of course nothing is done to Winston for the sake of eliciting information. Of course the representatives of "Big Brother" want confessions, and he gives them a host of wildly implausible ones. But these, like his ultimate betrayal of Julia-- are primarily elicited in order to further his moral degradation. In a prolonged segment in which O'Brien personally tortures Winston with electricity, he explains to his victim why he is doing so:
"You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out... We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we can never destroy him. We convert him, we reshape him... In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out... No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us... We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, even if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then fill you with ourselves." (Signet edition, pp.210-211, emphasis mine)
A perfect description of the CIA's mission, I thought. And there is one other similarity. When Winston first comes to in the room where he is to be personally tortured by O'Brien, he sees "a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe", standing at O'Brien's side. That man is there throughout the segment, and is absolutely crucial to the transformation of Winston from a normal, feeling human being into an automaton, a mere tool of Big Brother. He is of course a medical doctor.
As Alfred McCoy says in his scholarly study, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, the CIA was from the first intensely interested in methods which the totalitarian giants it had fought and was still fighting had used to control the human mind. It was inspired by the experiments of Dr. Kurt Plotner, a Nazi doctor who had tested mescaline on Jewish prisoners, and more still (since Nazi methods of torture were on the whole fairly crude) by the ways in which the Soviets had elicited clearly false confessions for the sake of their "show trials". The prominent Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis told the CIA that he suspected that the Soviets broke down their subjects' resistence by a powerful series of electroshock convulsions (that is to say, ECT, the same procedure which Simone D.'s lawyers fought so valiently), and then used hypnosis to induce a "somnambulistic trance... in perhaps 90 per cent of all defendents from whom they might wish to elicit a public confession." (p. 22) Tellingly, the CIA set about trying to find ways not to combat these methods, but rather to copy them, giving the premier U.S. intelligence agency an edge in the effort to control the individual human mind which surpassed that of any previous totalitarian regime.
From the first, the CIA observed that it was not the most brutal physical methods used by torturers throughout history which could best produce the robot-like individual they sought. Physical torture was indeed used by the CIA, but it was inflicted in measured proportions, and always combined with psychological techniques which required the participation of psychologists and medical doctors. This was a tremendous boon for the medical profession. Specialists in human psychology who had no scruples-- be they psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, or brain surgeons-- suddenly found that they were greatly in demand for the development of CIA programs under such code-names as MK-ULTRA, BLUEBIRD, AND ARTICHOKE. The removal of congressional oversight of the CIA made possible experiments which would have been illegal if performed by any other agency. It was through the CIA that LSD was first introduced to the United States, for the Agency took a keen interest in this and other hallucinogens. Under Project ARTICHOKE, seven patients at the drug-treatment facility in Lexington, Kentucky, were kept on dangerous doses of LSD for seventy-seven days straight. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the technical services division organized this research under the direction of Richard Helms, with the full approval of Allan Dulles and a budget of some $25 million dollars. "Seeking unwitting subjects, the CIA injected not only North Korean prisoners, but also spiked drinks at a New York City party, paid prostitutes to slip LSD to their customers for agency cameras at a San Francisco 'safe house', pumped hallucinogens into children at a summer camp, attempted behavior modification on inmates at California's Vacaville Prison... and trolled Europe for dubious defectors or double agents deemed 'expendable'." The result was at least one death, as one of the CIA scientists, Dr. Frank Olson, suffered a mental breakdown and "jumped or was pushed from the tenth floor of New York's Statler Hotel, where the Agency had confined him for observation." In 1975, an investigation of this death by Vice President Rockefeller found that it was drug-induced. (p. 30)
In addition to its experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, the CIA made use of research into extreme sensory deprivation under Dr. Donald Hebb, head of the psychology department at Canada's McGill University. Let us be clear what we are talking about here: it is not mere "solitary confinement", and many terrorist suspects who are described as having been subjected to "isolation" have probably in reality been subjected to a regime similar to Hebb's. Using his own students as guinea pigs, he constructed a "black box" where they were cut off from all sensory stimuli, light diffused by translucent goggles, auditory stimuli limited by soundproofing and constant low noise, and tactual perception blocked by thick gloves and a U-shaped foam pillow about the head. "According to a later report in The Guardian, early photographs show volunteers goggled and muffled, looking eerily similar to prisoners arriving at Guantánamo." Most students quit after two or three days, although they were paid what amounted to twice the average daily wage of the time for participation. All the students suffered "hallucinations akin to mescaline use as well as a deterioration of the ability to think systematically", developments of dubious value to the quest for intelligence. The conclusion: "just a few simple tools-- goggles, gloves, and a foam pillow-- could induce a state akin to acute psychosis in many subjects within just forty-eight hours." (pp. 36-7) When the Canadian government cut off funding for Hebb's work, it was continued by the CIA in the U.S. under the direction of Dr. Maitland Baldwin, a brain surgeon at the National Institute of Mental Health. "After forty hours inside a specially constructed sensory deprivation box, an army volunteer began an hour of crying and sobbing in a most heartrending fashion before kicking his way out." (p. 38)
Another form of psychological torture crucial to the CIA's development of a distinctive method-- one which, to use McCoy's word, has "metastasized" to the U.S. military and other government agencies-- was "self-inflicted pain". Two respected neurologists at Cornell Medical Center, Lawrence Hinkle and Harold Wolff, offered to do the CIA's dirty work in this area. The Agency responded positively, giving them five million dollars for just three years of experiments. Taking their cue from the KGB, these medical professionals proposed making subjects stand still for eighteen to twenty-four hours-- producing "excruciating pain as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen." (p. 46) According to the Agency's KUBARK Manual of Interrogation, compiled in 1963 ("KUBARK" was the CIA's cryptonym for its own headquarters), the most important element of this routine was to make the subject feel responsible for his own suffering. The subject is prepared by hooding and sleep deprivation in order to disorient him. To intensify his confusion, his sense of identity is attacked with personal and sexual humiliation. Explaining the destructive force of self-inflicted pain, KUBARK states, "It has been plausibly suggested that whereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistence is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to have inflicted on himself." (p. 52) This assertion seems completely contrary to common sense, in that the fear of being shamed before his comrades would seem to be the most serious obstacle to a subject's willingness to cooperate, and could best be overcome by shifting the blame to the interrogator rather than himself (i.e., "Just tell your comrades that we made you do it--you had no choice.") But it is questionable that intelligence was what the Agency was after. No doubt the use of self-inflicted pain made the CIA interrogator feel better, in that he could delude himself into thinking that he was not responsible for it. (p. 42) And how much better if he could have a "man in a white coat" standing by his side!
The real goal of such CIA experiments is suggested by Colin Ross, M.D., in his book The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists. Ross' book is all the more persuasive in that he claims to have no animus against the CIA: it is the violation of their Hippocratic Oath by so many of his colleagues which troubles him. And he has hit upon what is probably the most plausible rationale for all the CIA experiments in psychological torture. Using the dated terminology of the Cold War, he calls it the creation of "Manchurian Candidates". Central to this effort was the research conducted by Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist at Brandon Mental Hospital in Manitoba (despite its title, Ross' book shows that Canadian medical personnel were as involved in this sort of research as American). Dr. Cameron developed a two-stage procedure for the production of "Manchurian Candidates". In the first, subjects were depatterned, reduced to an infantile state through a combination of massive amounts of electroconvulsive shock, drug-induced sleep and sensory deprivation and isolation. "When fully depatterned, subjects were incontinent of urine and feces, unable to feed themselves, and unable to state their name, age, location, or the current date." (p. 124). In the second stage, psychic driving was introduced. "This consisted of hundreds of hours of tape loops being played to the patient through earphones, special helmets or speakers in the sensory isolation room. The tape loops repeated statements of supposed psychological significance." (p. 125) One of Cameron's experimental victims, Linda MacDonald, was interviewed extensively by Ross. In her case, depatterning was achieved through 102 electroconvulsive treatments. The amount of electricity introduced into MacDonald's brain exceeded by 76.5 times the maximum amount recommended in the ECT Guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association. The result was predictable, given what we know about even the lower amounts of ECT administered to hospital patients: she developed permanent and complete amnesia. "To this day, Linda MacDonald is unable to remember anything from her birth to the time she entered the Allan Memorial Institute." (p. 169)
Ross thinks that what doctors like Cameron were after was the creation of multiple personalities, similar to what happens naturally in many cases of individuals who have suffered traumas in their early childhood (as is portrayed most famously in The Three Faces of Eve). This requires the depatterning described above, as well as one further device-- hypnosis. G.H. Estabrooks, a distinguished Canadian psychologist, made a proposal to the CIA for the deliberate creation of mulitiple personality. He justified it in the following manner: "The key to creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man's personality, or creating multipersonality, with the aid of hypnotism... This is not science fiction. This has and is being done. I have done it." (p. 151) The problem with this justification is the obviously repellent nature of the regime. Linda MacDonald, like most subjects experimented on by CIA doctors, entered Ewin Cameron's program not knowing what she was in for. What self-respecting intelligence officer would agree to be reduced to a state in which he would be "incontinent of urine and feces, unable to state his own name..." etc.? Indeed, even if he had wanted to, no intelligence officer could be allowed to, given the negative use to which evidence of this self-abasement could be put if known to the enemy. No, it is quite obvious that such methods were designed to be used on subjects against their will. The most important secret weapons in this regime are ECT and hypnosis. The connection between the two is brought to light in a CIA document quoted by Ross: "Quite often amnesia occurs for events just prior to the convulsion [resulting from ECT] and during the post seizure state. It is possible that hypnosis or hypnotic activity induced during the post-seizure state would be lost in amnesia. This would be very valuable." (pp. 48-49)
Almost every technique described by McCoy and Ross is being used in the so-called "War on Terror". For instance, the Center for Constitutional Rights recently reported that many of the detainees at Guantánamo "have been in isolation for so long that they are losing their minds." And of course we have all heard accounts of prisoners being forced to stand in stress positions, self-inflicted pain, personal and sexual humiliation. Most telling in this connection is the case of Jose Padilla, the American citizen who was held for three years in a South Carolina navy brig without being formally charged. In an interview with forensic psychologist Angela Hegarty, Padilla spoke of his fear of something he called "the cage", clearly the same device as Hebb's "black box". He recounted being given LSD and PCP. But his memories were confused. Hegarty had the impression that there was "something more", but she could not get him to reveal what it was. I have a suspicion that it is ECT. The problem is, a person subjected to ECT may very well not remember that he had been. One wonders when one reads of the destruction of Interrogation tapes by the CIA (USA Today, Friday, December 7, 2007, p. 4A) Human rights activists believe that the CIA destroyed these tapes because they portrayed tortures such as waterboarding. Perhaps that is what the CIA wants us to think. For after all, even the most severe interrogation techniques could be reconciled with the quest for "actionable intelligence", and thus forgiven by the majority of Americans. It would not matter that human rights groups maintain that "torture does not work" for the purpose of acquiring intelligence-- the CIA would still appear to be following its mandated mission, no matter how ineptly. The situation would be quite different if the tapes portrayed the administration of ECT, for it is manifestly obvious that nothing is more antithetical to the quest for intelligence than amnesia-- if Linda MacDonald had been a terrorist, what sort of information could she convey?
That was the other thing I noticed when I recently re-read 1984. For buried deep in the segment in which O'Brien personally tortures Winston was something that I had never noticed until after I read Ross: a brief and innocuous-seeming episode in which O'Brien directs the "man in the white coat" to perform the most destructive of all the tortures inflicted upon Winston-- ECT. The "invisibility" of this episode is helped by the fact that Orwell was obviously only aware of what was then a new technique from accounts of its use in hospitals, and therefore believed that its administration was painless. In fact, as administered without anaesthesia by the CIA, it causes excruciating pain. But Orwell was prescient as always in predicting that the totalitarian states of the future-- of which, as is now apparent, America will be the leader-- will make extensive use of this memory-killing procedure. There is no better way to "squeeze a person empty" so that he can be filled with whatever his captors want to fill him with. Thus we must be alert to any evidence of its use against terrorist suspects. No doubt the CIA will do everything in its power to conceal its use, just as it has practically advertised its waterboarding and other tortures. For nothing could prove more conclusively that what our government is trying to do is not obtain information from these people in order to save American lives, but rather to create--to bring Ross' language up to date-- "phony terrorists".
"You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out... We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we can never destroy him. We convert him, we reshape him... In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out... No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us... We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, even if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then fill you with ourselves." (Signet edition, pp.210-211, emphasis mine)
A perfect description of the CIA's mission, I thought. And there is one other similarity. When Winston first comes to in the room where he is to be personally tortured by O'Brien, he sees "a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe", standing at O'Brien's side. That man is there throughout the segment, and is absolutely crucial to the transformation of Winston from a normal, feeling human being into an automaton, a mere tool of Big Brother. He is of course a medical doctor.
As Alfred McCoy says in his scholarly study, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, the CIA was from the first intensely interested in methods which the totalitarian giants it had fought and was still fighting had used to control the human mind. It was inspired by the experiments of Dr. Kurt Plotner, a Nazi doctor who had tested mescaline on Jewish prisoners, and more still (since Nazi methods of torture were on the whole fairly crude) by the ways in which the Soviets had elicited clearly false confessions for the sake of their "show trials". The prominent Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis told the CIA that he suspected that the Soviets broke down their subjects' resistence by a powerful series of electroshock convulsions (that is to say, ECT, the same procedure which Simone D.'s lawyers fought so valiently), and then used hypnosis to induce a "somnambulistic trance... in perhaps 90 per cent of all defendents from whom they might wish to elicit a public confession." (p. 22) Tellingly, the CIA set about trying to find ways not to combat these methods, but rather to copy them, giving the premier U.S. intelligence agency an edge in the effort to control the individual human mind which surpassed that of any previous totalitarian regime.
From the first, the CIA observed that it was not the most brutal physical methods used by torturers throughout history which could best produce the robot-like individual they sought. Physical torture was indeed used by the CIA, but it was inflicted in measured proportions, and always combined with psychological techniques which required the participation of psychologists and medical doctors. This was a tremendous boon for the medical profession. Specialists in human psychology who had no scruples-- be they psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, or brain surgeons-- suddenly found that they were greatly in demand for the development of CIA programs under such code-names as MK-ULTRA, BLUEBIRD, AND ARTICHOKE. The removal of congressional oversight of the CIA made possible experiments which would have been illegal if performed by any other agency. It was through the CIA that LSD was first introduced to the United States, for the Agency took a keen interest in this and other hallucinogens. Under Project ARTICHOKE, seven patients at the drug-treatment facility in Lexington, Kentucky, were kept on dangerous doses of LSD for seventy-seven days straight. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the technical services division organized this research under the direction of Richard Helms, with the full approval of Allan Dulles and a budget of some $25 million dollars. "Seeking unwitting subjects, the CIA injected not only North Korean prisoners, but also spiked drinks at a New York City party, paid prostitutes to slip LSD to their customers for agency cameras at a San Francisco 'safe house', pumped hallucinogens into children at a summer camp, attempted behavior modification on inmates at California's Vacaville Prison... and trolled Europe for dubious defectors or double agents deemed 'expendable'." The result was at least one death, as one of the CIA scientists, Dr. Frank Olson, suffered a mental breakdown and "jumped or was pushed from the tenth floor of New York's Statler Hotel, where the Agency had confined him for observation." In 1975, an investigation of this death by Vice President Rockefeller found that it was drug-induced. (p. 30)
In addition to its experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, the CIA made use of research into extreme sensory deprivation under Dr. Donald Hebb, head of the psychology department at Canada's McGill University. Let us be clear what we are talking about here: it is not mere "solitary confinement", and many terrorist suspects who are described as having been subjected to "isolation" have probably in reality been subjected to a regime similar to Hebb's. Using his own students as guinea pigs, he constructed a "black box" where they were cut off from all sensory stimuli, light diffused by translucent goggles, auditory stimuli limited by soundproofing and constant low noise, and tactual perception blocked by thick gloves and a U-shaped foam pillow about the head. "According to a later report in The Guardian, early photographs show volunteers goggled and muffled, looking eerily similar to prisoners arriving at Guantánamo." Most students quit after two or three days, although they were paid what amounted to twice the average daily wage of the time for participation. All the students suffered "hallucinations akin to mescaline use as well as a deterioration of the ability to think systematically", developments of dubious value to the quest for intelligence. The conclusion: "just a few simple tools-- goggles, gloves, and a foam pillow-- could induce a state akin to acute psychosis in many subjects within just forty-eight hours." (pp. 36-7) When the Canadian government cut off funding for Hebb's work, it was continued by the CIA in the U.S. under the direction of Dr. Maitland Baldwin, a brain surgeon at the National Institute of Mental Health. "After forty hours inside a specially constructed sensory deprivation box, an army volunteer began an hour of crying and sobbing in a most heartrending fashion before kicking his way out." (p. 38)
Another form of psychological torture crucial to the CIA's development of a distinctive method-- one which, to use McCoy's word, has "metastasized" to the U.S. military and other government agencies-- was "self-inflicted pain". Two respected neurologists at Cornell Medical Center, Lawrence Hinkle and Harold Wolff, offered to do the CIA's dirty work in this area. The Agency responded positively, giving them five million dollars for just three years of experiments. Taking their cue from the KGB, these medical professionals proposed making subjects stand still for eighteen to twenty-four hours-- producing "excruciating pain as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen." (p. 46) According to the Agency's KUBARK Manual of Interrogation, compiled in 1963 ("KUBARK" was the CIA's cryptonym for its own headquarters), the most important element of this routine was to make the subject feel responsible for his own suffering. The subject is prepared by hooding and sleep deprivation in order to disorient him. To intensify his confusion, his sense of identity is attacked with personal and sexual humiliation. Explaining the destructive force of self-inflicted pain, KUBARK states, "It has been plausibly suggested that whereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistence is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to have inflicted on himself." (p. 52) This assertion seems completely contrary to common sense, in that the fear of being shamed before his comrades would seem to be the most serious obstacle to a subject's willingness to cooperate, and could best be overcome by shifting the blame to the interrogator rather than himself (i.e., "Just tell your comrades that we made you do it--you had no choice.") But it is questionable that intelligence was what the Agency was after. No doubt the use of self-inflicted pain made the CIA interrogator feel better, in that he could delude himself into thinking that he was not responsible for it. (p. 42) And how much better if he could have a "man in a white coat" standing by his side!
The real goal of such CIA experiments is suggested by Colin Ross, M.D., in his book The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists. Ross' book is all the more persuasive in that he claims to have no animus against the CIA: it is the violation of their Hippocratic Oath by so many of his colleagues which troubles him. And he has hit upon what is probably the most plausible rationale for all the CIA experiments in psychological torture. Using the dated terminology of the Cold War, he calls it the creation of "Manchurian Candidates". Central to this effort was the research conducted by Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist at Brandon Mental Hospital in Manitoba (despite its title, Ross' book shows that Canadian medical personnel were as involved in this sort of research as American). Dr. Cameron developed a two-stage procedure for the production of "Manchurian Candidates". In the first, subjects were depatterned, reduced to an infantile state through a combination of massive amounts of electroconvulsive shock, drug-induced sleep and sensory deprivation and isolation. "When fully depatterned, subjects were incontinent of urine and feces, unable to feed themselves, and unable to state their name, age, location, or the current date." (p. 124). In the second stage, psychic driving was introduced. "This consisted of hundreds of hours of tape loops being played to the patient through earphones, special helmets or speakers in the sensory isolation room. The tape loops repeated statements of supposed psychological significance." (p. 125) One of Cameron's experimental victims, Linda MacDonald, was interviewed extensively by Ross. In her case, depatterning was achieved through 102 electroconvulsive treatments. The amount of electricity introduced into MacDonald's brain exceeded by 76.5 times the maximum amount recommended in the ECT Guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association. The result was predictable, given what we know about even the lower amounts of ECT administered to hospital patients: she developed permanent and complete amnesia. "To this day, Linda MacDonald is unable to remember anything from her birth to the time she entered the Allan Memorial Institute." (p. 169)
Ross thinks that what doctors like Cameron were after was the creation of multiple personalities, similar to what happens naturally in many cases of individuals who have suffered traumas in their early childhood (as is portrayed most famously in The Three Faces of Eve). This requires the depatterning described above, as well as one further device-- hypnosis. G.H. Estabrooks, a distinguished Canadian psychologist, made a proposal to the CIA for the deliberate creation of mulitiple personality. He justified it in the following manner: "The key to creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man's personality, or creating multipersonality, with the aid of hypnotism... This is not science fiction. This has and is being done. I have done it." (p. 151) The problem with this justification is the obviously repellent nature of the regime. Linda MacDonald, like most subjects experimented on by CIA doctors, entered Ewin Cameron's program not knowing what she was in for. What self-respecting intelligence officer would agree to be reduced to a state in which he would be "incontinent of urine and feces, unable to state his own name..." etc.? Indeed, even if he had wanted to, no intelligence officer could be allowed to, given the negative use to which evidence of this self-abasement could be put if known to the enemy. No, it is quite obvious that such methods were designed to be used on subjects against their will. The most important secret weapons in this regime are ECT and hypnosis. The connection between the two is brought to light in a CIA document quoted by Ross: "Quite often amnesia occurs for events just prior to the convulsion [resulting from ECT] and during the post seizure state. It is possible that hypnosis or hypnotic activity induced during the post-seizure state would be lost in amnesia. This would be very valuable." (pp. 48-49)
Almost every technique described by McCoy and Ross is being used in the so-called "War on Terror". For instance, the Center for Constitutional Rights recently reported that many of the detainees at Guantánamo "have been in isolation for so long that they are losing their minds." And of course we have all heard accounts of prisoners being forced to stand in stress positions, self-inflicted pain, personal and sexual humiliation. Most telling in this connection is the case of Jose Padilla, the American citizen who was held for three years in a South Carolina navy brig without being formally charged. In an interview with forensic psychologist Angela Hegarty, Padilla spoke of his fear of something he called "the cage", clearly the same device as Hebb's "black box". He recounted being given LSD and PCP. But his memories were confused. Hegarty had the impression that there was "something more", but she could not get him to reveal what it was. I have a suspicion that it is ECT. The problem is, a person subjected to ECT may very well not remember that he had been. One wonders when one reads of the destruction of Interrogation tapes by the CIA (USA Today, Friday, December 7, 2007, p. 4A) Human rights activists believe that the CIA destroyed these tapes because they portrayed tortures such as waterboarding. Perhaps that is what the CIA wants us to think. For after all, even the most severe interrogation techniques could be reconciled with the quest for "actionable intelligence", and thus forgiven by the majority of Americans. It would not matter that human rights groups maintain that "torture does not work" for the purpose of acquiring intelligence-- the CIA would still appear to be following its mandated mission, no matter how ineptly. The situation would be quite different if the tapes portrayed the administration of ECT, for it is manifestly obvious that nothing is more antithetical to the quest for intelligence than amnesia-- if Linda MacDonald had been a terrorist, what sort of information could she convey?
That was the other thing I noticed when I recently re-read 1984. For buried deep in the segment in which O'Brien personally tortures Winston was something that I had never noticed until after I read Ross: a brief and innocuous-seeming episode in which O'Brien directs the "man in the white coat" to perform the most destructive of all the tortures inflicted upon Winston-- ECT. The "invisibility" of this episode is helped by the fact that Orwell was obviously only aware of what was then a new technique from accounts of its use in hospitals, and therefore believed that its administration was painless. In fact, as administered without anaesthesia by the CIA, it causes excruciating pain. But Orwell was prescient as always in predicting that the totalitarian states of the future-- of which, as is now apparent, America will be the leader-- will make extensive use of this memory-killing procedure. There is no better way to "squeeze a person empty" so that he can be filled with whatever his captors want to fill him with. Thus we must be alert to any evidence of its use against terrorist suspects. No doubt the CIA will do everything in its power to conceal its use, just as it has practically advertised its waterboarding and other tortures. For nothing could prove more conclusively that what our government is trying to do is not obtain information from these people in order to save American lives, but rather to create--to bring Ross' language up to date-- "phony terrorists".
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