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".