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.