IS ECT BEING USED ON TERRORIST SUSPECTS?

This past week Scott Shane, writing in the New York Times, published a shocking piece disclosing that the military trainers who came to Guantánamo in 2002 "based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false (http:truthout.org/article/china-inspired-interrogations-gauntanamo?print). This comes as no surprise to those of us who have been studying the types of torture used in the "War on Terror", all of which are derived by CIA techniques developed over the decades, which have "metastasized like an undetected cancer inside the U.S. intelligence community" (Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, p. 5) In 1947, based on such spectacles as the pathetic behavior of Hungary's Joszef Cardinal Mindszenty, once known as a "brilliant ecclesiastical orator", in a Soviet show trial, prominent Yale psychologist Irving Janis voiced his suspicion that "a series of electroshock convulsions is being administered... to reduce resistence to hypnotic suggestion." With a mix of narco-hypnosis (drug-assisted hypnosis) and electroshock, the Soviets, Janis warned, 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." In response, the CIA set about finding ways, not to protect American personnel against this mind-destroying process, but rather to duplicate it. (McCoy, pp. 22-23).

Besides the usual methods of "breaking" a subject about which we have heard so much, including humiliation, sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, stress positions, isolation and sensory deprivation, the technique developed by the CIA relied upon a two-stage process in which the subject is "depatterned" through a series of electroconvulsive treatments (ECT), then given a new identity and memory by means of narco-hypnosis. ECT must not be confused with ordinary electrical torture, which although painful, leaves no permanent damage. Because it runs an electric current through the brain, where a person's memory is stored, it often results in loss of memory. It is in effect like erasing a recorded tape. It is most familiar to people through Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but its most famous recipient was Ernest Hemingway, who committed suicide soon after receiving an ECT treatment. Concerning the treatment, he 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? (A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir; Wikipedia entry under Electroconvulsive Treatment)

According to Colin A. Ross, M.D., the CIA did extensive research on ECT, funding the brutal experiments of a psychiatrist at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Ewen Cameron. Cameron "depatterned" his human guinea pigs to an infantile state in which they were "incontinent of urine and feces, unable to feed themselves, and unable to state their name, age, location, or the current date." (Colin Ross, M.D., The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists, pp. 121-130). Ross interviewed one of Cameron's victims, Linda MacDonald, and found that she "was unable to remember anything from her birth to the time she entered the Allan Memorial Institute in 1963." (pp. 168-174) The most important thing to note about ECT is that as it produces amnesia, it has absolutely no use for interrogation aimed at obtaining "actionable intelligence" and can only be used by those who wish to spread terror or elicit false confessions.

The second stage of this implantation of a new identity involves narco-hypnosis, that is to say, hypnosis assisted by drugs. It is important to stress that hypnosis is not the main threat here, for no person can be hypnotized against his or her will, or remotely. Hypnosis can only be successful with a person who has been essentially "broken", whether through ECT or a combination of severe psychological tortures such as extreme sensory deprivation and isolation, sleep deprivation, etc. Even then, it must be assisted by the use of drugs. And in this connection, one intriguing piece of evidence has come to light recently. Mohammed Al Qahtani is one of the "Guantánamo Six" defendants who were scheduled to be placed on trial for their lives before Military Tribunals under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Unlike the others, Al Qahtani was allowed civilian attorneys-- specifically attorneys from the progressive Center for Constitutional Rights. One of the abusive methods he described being subjected to was the repeated admistration of "invasive IVs" during interrogation (CCR Newsletter, Summer, 2008), p. 1). One is bound to wonder how a grown man can be seriously distressed by simply being poked repeatedly with a hypodermic needle, and the obvious question is, "What was in those needles?" CCR has never explained this, nor described what these so-called "interrogations" were like-- i.e., were the interrogators really asking questions or were they in fact offering hypnotic suggestions, in effect, "implanting" false memories? And we will perhaps never know, because in May of this year, the government abruptly and for no apparent reason dropped its charges against Al Qahtani. Had Al Qahtani said too much? And what was it that the government was so afraid that he might reveal? Could it have had to do with those "repeated IVs"?

As for ECT, there has so far been no mention of its use on suspects in the War on Terror. The problem is, those subjected to the treatment may lose all memory of having been (Ross, p. 48). And there is one intriguing hint. José Padilla is an American citizen who was arrested in Chicago in 2002 in connection with an alleged plot to set of nuclear "dirty bombs" in the United States. He was held for three years without formal charges or access to a lawyer at a navy brig in South Carolina, where he was subjected to various abuses which many say amount to torture. When faced with a Supreme Court challenge, President Bush transferred Padilla out of military custody to face criminal charges. Although the allegations of involvement in a "dirty bomb" plot were dropped, and no evidence was produced linking Padilla to any terrorist activity, on January 22, 2008, he was sentenced to seventeen years in prison for having allegedly signed an agreement to attend an Al Qaeda training camp. Before the trial, forensic psychiatrist Angela Hegarty examined Padilla for 22 hours and found him "mentally incompetent" to stand trial. Later she gave an interview to Democracy Now concerning her examination of him. He told her that his interrogators had warned him "that if he relayed any of what had happened to him, his experiences, people would quote/unquote 'know he was crazy'" Of course ECT is commonly thought of as a treatment for mental patients, and the point could well have been that its very mention, to people who did not know of the CIA's experimentation with it, might suggest that he was mentally ill. Hegarty continued, "He was very upset by this... and his level of being disturbed suggested that there was something more, but you know, asking further questions, he wouldn't reveal it to me." Hegarty said that Padilla displays symptoms of brain damage, but attributed this to the effects of extreme isolation (http://www.democracynow.org/2007/8/16/exclusive_an_inside_look_at_how...)
But Ewen Cameron, the CIA researcher, used extreme isolation in combination with ECT (Ross, p. 124). It appears that Hegarty did not think to ask the sorts of questions which might have determined whether Padilla had been given ECT treatments, for instance concerning his long-term memory. Or perhaps she did think of doing so, and decided against it.

For it just so happens that Angela Hegarty is an employee of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Institute in Queens, New York, which has become notorious as the "Abu Ghraib" of mental institutions since a patient known as "Simone D." sued the State of New York to stop the electroconvulsive treatments she had received against her will there. Up to that point, she had received two hundred ("NY Abu Ghraib: Last Minute Forced Electroshock by New York State Office of Mental Health", http://www.mindfreedom.org/mfi-blog/archive/2007/08/30/ny-abu-ghraib-last-minute-forced...).