In the course of researching ECT (electroconvulsive treatment), I naturally come across many articles concerning electrical torture and the abuse of electro-shock-producing devices on humans, including children. ECT is not in the same category as these latter abuses: as a procedure aimed at the destruction of the most important part of the body, the brain, it deserves rather to be placed alongside electrocution and those who use it against the will of their victims, whether these be mental patients or prisoners, classed with murderers. But simple electrical torture, even if it does no permanent physical damage, is not something to be taken lightly. Its routine infliction basis can leave lasting psychological scars, and I believe it should be subject to criminal prosecution, if lesser penalties than the use of ECT. As I have found a pattern of official, professional and corporate deception in this area which is similar to what one finds in connection with ECT, I thought it was worth taking the time to write a piece about it.
In contrast to ECT, which can only be administered under the direction of psychiatrists, electrical torture is most closely associated with psychologists. In the early seventies, I was greatly alarmed by the popularity of psychologist B.F. Skinner's radical behaviorism. Although Skinner himself advocated using positive reinforcement whenever possible, I was afraid that his methods of behavior modification would lead to a resurgence of emphasis upon negative reinforcement, or to put it in layman's terms, punishment. Well do I recall that article in Psychology Today entitled, "Let's Take Another Look at Punishment". Muttering to myself, "Yeah, let's take another look at Hitler while we're at it," I cancelled my subscription to that magazine. And now I find that my fears have proven all too well-founded. The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Massachusetts routinely uses what its director, a Skinnerian psychologist named Mathew Israel, calls "aversive therapy" on students. The original rationale for its use was the tendency of some autistic children to engage in irrational, extremely violent and destructive behaviors against themselves or others. An electric shock was said to stop these children from activities such as chewing off a piece of their tongue or banging their head repeatedly on a wall to the point that they developed bruises. Why such children should react to an electric shock when they have no hesitation about inflicting such pain on themselves, I don't know, but if the shock works for that purpose, it seems reasonable to use it. The problem is, since its founding in 1971, the Rotenberg Center has taken in an increasing number of children who do not have such severe behavior problems and there are numerous reports of electric shock being used on them excessively or for such trivial misconduct as yelling or cursing. Recently, responding to a prankster who was posing as an administrator, school officials at the center awakened two students in the middle of the night, one of them 16 and the other 19, and gave them respectively 77 and 22 shocks. Although the school later admitted its error, one has to wonder about people who would obey a command even from a bonafide superior to do such a thing.
Mike Adams of Natural News has, I think correctly, associated this with the abuse of political prisoners in the so-called "War on Terror". In his article "Gitmo for Children," he says, "I suppose it's not surprising to learn that a nation now engaged in the routine torture of war prisoners-- in direct violation of the very U.N. treaties which our veterans fought so hard to defend-- would also invoke electric shocks on mentally retarded children. There is no longer any respect for the value of a human being by our nation's leaders, and it appears that some institutions disappointingly agree with that assessment." (http://www.naturalnews.com/z023494.html) And it is not only institutions. There is evidence that many parents are following Rotenberg's example on their own initiative. In August of 2007, a Chicago judge ruled that it is illegal for a group home to use electric shocks from a cattle prod on a 48-year-old autistic man (it had been using them for years previously with official approval). The ruling angered his parents, who maintain that the shocks are the only thing which can keep him from doing serious damage to himself. But it's not only serious damage that's at issue. In Montcalm County, Michigan, Oliver Braman and his wife were found dead in an apparent suicide after being charged with the routine use of a cattle prod on their two teenage sons, who ran away from home and reported the abuse to the police. The prod was used when they did not finish their chores. Braman at first used a belt, but stopped when the sons threatened to go to the authorities. Like those who use it on political prisoners, Braman found in electricity the perfect way to inflict pain without leaving tell-tale marks. (http://blog/mlive.com/grprss/2007/10/report_braman_said_cattle_prod.html)
As most of us have never experienced a really painful electric shock (the ones I've received from, say, the wet switch to an indoor fountain have been more frightening than painful), the question is, what do these shocks feel like? After all, if they are no worse than a pinch, they may not be such a big issue (but then, why would a pinch not suffice?) The Rotenberg School claims that they are no worse than a bee sting, as do the parents of the 48-year-old autistic man. Jennifer Gonnerman, who wrote an article for Times Online about the school, tried its shock-producing device, the GED or Graduated Electronic Decelerator on herself and found that the resultant jolt was more "like a horde of wasps attacking all at once. Two seconds never felt so long." (http://www.caica.org/Shock_tactics_10-28-7.htm) SHARK, an animal-rights organization which monitors, among other things, the abusive use of electric stock prods on animals forced to perform at rodeos, quotes a radio talk show host in Las Vegas who tried a prod on himself and found it to be like "a thousand white hot needles going in and out of me." (http://www.sharkonline.org/P=0000000511) It is interesting that one manufacturer of stock prods, which in this case produce a varying strength of shock to take into account the varying sensitivities of the animals upon which it is to be used, has taken the wasp as its trademark symbol-- indeed the company calls its prod "the WASP". (http://andytek.com/Prodders.htm)
What is impossible to obtain from any source is the voltage level of these shocks, which would be the best indication of the severity of the pain. To be sure, I am not an electrician, but it is my understanding that using normal household current, the maximum safe voltage is 50. Of course an electric shock may become acutely painful long before it becomes dangerous. And one must take into account amperage as well. Voltage is the strength of the current, amperage its volume. As high amperage can kill, it goes without saying that all instruments designed to inflict pain alone without doing visible damage-- including those used in electrical torture-- use low amperage. If they did not, the torturer would risk what the notorious torture expert Dan Mitrione (the "Santore" of the film State of Siege) called "a premature death". But the amperage of a battery-operated device such as a prod can be so low that the voltage can be increased to over a thousand without doing visible damage, and household current can likewise be reduced by a current limiter to achieve a similar effect. If we had data on both the voltage and the amperage of the devices now in use we would better be able to ascertain how much pain they cause. The only article I know of which discusses the strength of the shocks administered by the Judge Rotenberg Center measures it in terms of amperage alone. Tom Benner of The Patriot Ledger not only gives the strength of the GED in milliamps but also, for comparison, that of an electric dog collar, ECT, nerve stimulation therapy, a taser pistol and a heart defibrillator. But these statistics, omitting as they do the esssential issue of voltage, tell us absolutely nothing. (http://ledger.southofboston.com/articles/2006/07/29/news/news02.txt)
To be sure, evaluating electric torture devices on the basis of voltage alone can also be a mistake. An example is Darius Rejali's "Electricity: The Global History of a Torture Technology". Rejali says falsely that torturers have chosen not to use ECT because "the machines don't deliver the necessary voltage." This is facile. For one thing, ECT machines deliver a jolt of between 109 and 135 volts. When used with the amperage available in standard household current (or more to the point, that available in hospitals and prisons) that is a very high voltage indeed. If used on any part of the body other than the brain, it would be extremely painful and under certain conditions (like say if the victim had heart problems) fatal. When used on the brain, it causes irreparable damage. Rejali's favorite torture device (meaning the one he likes to talk about the most) is the Argentine picana electica. It had a strength of between 12,000 and 16,000 volts, which would be capable of killing someone if used with the amperage available in the average household, 15-20 amps. But this is not so impressive as it seems, because the device limited the current to only one milliamp. Comparing the voltage of an ECT machine to that of a picana electrica is therefore like comparing apples and oranges.
With this in mind, I began to investigate the electric stock or cattle prod business. This is the one potential torture device which is available to the public, some for as little as sixty dollars. Although stock prods were designed for cattle and other large animals, and can be used humanely and with restraint, there is no doubt that some people have taken to using them on their children, household pets, and other helpless victims (of course, they may have been doing this all along, and we are only now finding out). The most widely used brand is Hot Shot, produced by Miller Manufacturing. I wrote a retail company which carries it, asking for the voltage, and they said that the manufacturer did not give out the voltage. So I wrote directly to Miller Manufacturing. It refused to give me the voltage ouptput of any of its stock prods but said it would be only too happy to give me the amperage if I told it what model I had-- which of course is useless information without the voltage. Then it confirmed what I had read on the webpage of another retail company which carries its products, and was taken from the warning that Miller places on them. That warning asserts that the prod should not be used on people. And then it tells the prospective customer what it would feel like if it were used on people: like a bee sting.
Like a bee sting. I thought, "Where have I heard this before?" And then, why do they tell you not to use it on people, and then tell you how it feels if you do? Is Miller Manufacturing, despite its disclaimers, selling Hot Shot cattle prods in full knowledge that they will be used on children and perhaps other helpless individuals as instruments of torture? Has the assertion that it "feels like a bee sting" been inserted in their warning in order to salve the consciences of people who are planning to use their prods in an inappropriate or inhumane manner? In any case, it has become clear that in our world, where electrical torture of both humans and animals is so common, "voltage" has become an unmentionable subject, like sex was to the Victorians. And I would go so far as to say that concealing the voltage of a low-amperage device, as both the Rotenberg Center and Miller Manufacturing do, is an announcement of one's intention to torture or to sell to torturers.
Is the answer to ban all electroshock devices? Not necessarily. I would suggest three rules for their use. First of all, try the device on yourself. If you cannot stand to do so, even for one second, then you have no business using it on other human beings or animals of comparable size and sensitivity. Secondly, ask yourself if the purpose is justifiable. Moving cattle may be (if all other methods fail); preventing autistic children from engaging in irrational, destructive behavior may be, but listen to the testimony of this mother, one of all too many parents who support the torture that goes on at Rotenberg: "All I have to do is show [the control] to my son and... he'll automatically comply with whatever my signal command may be, whether it is "Put on your seatbelt," or "Hand me that apple," or "Sit appropriately and eat your food." It's made him a human being, a cvilized human being." (Wikipedia article on Rotenberg) And rendered false any claim the mother might make to be a "civilized human being." If she herself has used the device on him, she should be charged with assault on a minor, as should the authorities at Rotenberg. Finally, ask yourself if there are other methods which would work just as well. To use the simplest and most basic example, as many stock breeders are now realizing, it is not justifiable to shock an animal if a tap or prod with the switched-off device would suffice. (http://www.cal.net/~pamgreen/cattle_schuman.html
Of course, none of the outrages I have dealt with in this article can compare to the horrors being perpetrated against political prisoners in the so-called "War on Terror". Fortunately, it looks as if the state of Massachusetts is taking steps to subject Judge Rotenberg Educational Center to stringent controls. Because the abuse of minors, like the abuse of mental patients and animals, takes place under public scrutiny, it can be stopped if people will only make an effort to do so. It is quite otherwise with those prisoners who are being held under conditions which remain classified. The CIA has been using electrical torture on political prisoners for decades, as in Vietnam, where it was called "The Bell Telephone Hour" (Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program, p. 85). U.S. AID official Dan Mitrione personally shocked four beggars to death in a torture demonstration for repressive Latin American police (A. J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors, 311-313). One of the critics of Rotenberg claims quite falsely that if such abuses went on at Guantánamo, there would be a public outcry. In fact, it is going on at Guantanamo. The organization Physicians for Human Rights conducted medical examinations on eleven people who had been held at Guantanamo. All reported torture, and one, identified only as Yasser, reported being subjected specifically to electric shocks (http://broken lives.info/?tag=guantanamo). A 48-year-old citizen of Australia, Mamdouh Habib, also reported torture at Guantanamo, including electric shocks. (http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4262095...) The most damning report of all is from a German-born Turk and former Guantanamo detainee, Murat Kumaz, who not only reported electrical torture but made it clear that the torture was used to elicit not information but a false confession: "They tell you 'you are from Al Qaed' and when you say 'no' they give the electric current to your feet... as you keep saying 'no' this goes on for two or three hours." During the course of this torture, he several times lost consciousness. ("Former Prisoner Tells of Torture at Guantanamo," (http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines061116-02.htm) And in contrast to the well-justified outrage over Rotenberg, in this case the majority of Americans just don't give a damn, although these inmates were never tried and indeed, were ultimately released for lack of evidence.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
McMURPHY AS A METAPHOR FOR THE TERRORIST SUSPECT: A REVIEW
As I have recently begun research toward a book on the use of ECT against political prisoners, I naturally felt that the first thing I should do was acquaint myself with the work which contains the most famous depiction of ECT in literature: Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (unfortunately, the fact that ECT is also depicted in Orwell's even more famous 1984 is usually overlooked). I have now, for the first time, both seen the film (directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson) and read the book. They are not all that different in the message they convey, but the book is more, well, verbal about that message. And the message is extremely relevant to what is perhaps the greatest outrage of our era, the treatment of suspects in the so-called "War on Terror". The hero, McMurphy, is the perfect metaphor for the terrorist suspect. Note that all members of the staff of the insane asylum are afraid of him, except for Nurse Ratched, who, as Chief Bromden says, is "just an official of the Combine" (p. 192, Signet edition). The doctors conclude that he is dangerous: as one says, "imagine what will happen to one of us when we're alone in Individual Therapy with Mr. McMurphy. Imagine you are approaching a particularly painful breakthrough and he decides he's had all he can take... and here he comes, all two hundred and ten redheaded Irishman pounds of him, right across the interview table at you." (p. 155) Nurse Ratched responds, "I don't agree that he is some sort of extraordinary being-- some sort of 'super' psychopath... If he were sent to Disturbed now it would be exactly what the patients would expect. He would be a martyr to them. They would never be given the opportunity to see that this man is not an-- as you put it, Mr. Gideon-- 'extraordinary person'" (p. 157). One thinks of Zacarious Moussaoui, the wanna-be terrorist, boasting of his impossible involvement in 9/11 in the hope that the jury would give him a glorious death, and the jury's vindictive condemnation of him to a no doubt more agonizing life imprisonment. Like that jury, Nurse Ratched knows that McMurphy is not sick, and she does not want to "cure" him-- she wants to break him.
That process is made more easy by the fact that McMurphy, as a convict, has been committed to the insane asylum. As another inmate who is committed explains to him, his choice to pretend that he's crazy so that he could leave the work farm for the "comparative luxury" of the asylum was a mistake: "being committed ain't like being sentenced. You're sentenced in a jail, and you got a date ahead of you when you know you're gonna be turned loose." Not so in the asylum: one leaves when the doctors and nurses decide that one is "ready", and that may be never. (pp. 170-171) Note that all terrorist suspects, with the exception of the three who were given highly unjust trials-- José Padilla, David Hicks and Zacarious Moussaoui-- have been similarly committed-- not to an insane asylum but to prisons not subject to any law, which make ample use of psychiatric techniques to "break" them, just as Nurse Ratched does with McMurphy. One of the techniques Ratched uses is ECT, or electroconvulsive treatment (which when the book was written was called electroshock treatment, or EST). ECT is described to McMurphy by a fellow patient, Harding, in a largely realistic manner. At first he says jokingly, "You pay for the service with brain cells, and everyone has simply billions of brain cells on deposit. You won't miss a few." But then, more seriously, "You... change. You forget things." But Harding is wrong about one thing. As he says, "We are witnessing the sunset of EST... it's almost out of vogue and only used in extreme cases that nothing else seems to reach, like lobotomy." (pp. 180-191) Unfortunately he's wrong. ECT has made a comeback. It is being actively promoted by the American Psychiatric Association and by others such as the sadistic Dr. Gary Aden's Association for Convulsive Therapy (ACT). Already in 1979, when ECT was just coming back into fashion, some 100,000 people a year were given the treatment. Today the number is undoubtedly far higher (see Peter Breggin, M.D., Toxic Psychiatry, p. 194)This is of course only to speak of bona fide mental patients: who knows about the thousands of unfortunates who have "disappeared" into the gulag-like network of CIA prisons?
When Nurse Ratched threatens McMurphy with ECT for his rebellious behavior ("just admit you were wrong"), he responds as if he is being asked to give a phony confession, as many terrorist suspects have indeed been: "You got a paper I can sign? And why don't you add some other things while you're at it and get them out of the way-- things like, oh, me being part of a plot to overthrow the government and how I think life on your ward is the sweetest goddamned life this side of Hawaii-- you know, that sort of crap... Then, after I sign, bring me a blanket and a package of Red Cross cigarettes. Hooee, those Chinese Commies could have learned a few things from you, lady." (p. 280-281). How timely, when the New York Times has just reported that the interrogation techniques in use at Guantánamo were drawn directly from a Chinese Communist manual designed to elicit false confessions. (Scott Shane, July 2). There is however a problem with Keseys' depiction of ECT. Nurse Ratched says that it is having no effect on McMurphy, and although there are hints that it has (pp. 291, 307, 318), the point that ECT causes permanent brain damage is not driven home hard enough. There is one spot in the film which might be considered suggestive of memory loss: at the crucial moment McMurphy, who has brought two prostitutes into the ward at night to celebrate his imminent escape to Canada, suddenly looks disturbed and turns away from the action, as if he has forgotten his planned escape route. This leads to a fatal delay in his plans, so that Nurse Ratched ultimately discovers the drunken inmates and poor young Billy, whom she so humiliates for sleeping with a prostitute that the boy slits his own throat, leading directly to McMurphy's avenging assault on her and thus to his lobotomy. In fact, if Nurse Ratched had known all that ECT was capable of doing, whe would never have stopped shocking McMurphy. She would have followed the example of Ewen Cameron, who was doing experiments with ECT on human guinea pigs at about the time that Kesey's book was written. Those experiments, supported by the CIA, showed that ECT is indeed the best means of breaking a person-- not so as to elicit intelligence (how indeed can a procedure that causes amnesia do that?) but to make them into exactly the person one wants them to be.
For unlike the victim of lobotomy, who is permanently infantilized or robbed of the ability to feel, the ECT victim can be re-programmed to be a docile and obedient adult, as a number of husbands have had ECT administered to their wives in order to make them more tractable (Breggin, pp. 200-201) Furthermore, while brain surgery has always been an expensive, long and difficult procedure, even in the nineteen-sixties, when ECT was in decline, one doctor told the CIA that "the standard electroshock 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." (Colin Ross, the CIA Doctors, p. 53) It is so common that brain surgeon Walter Freeman rcommended that state mental hospitals which do not have the funds to be able to put a patient under total anaesthesia for a lobotomy first use ECT to knock him out (Wikipedia entry under lobotomy). Best of all, unlike brain surgery, it leaves no visible traces, and hence the victim can be trotted out to testify in a show trial, admitting to all kinds of crimes that he didn't commit, and no one will be the wiser. Wouldn't Nurse Ratched have preferred to have a re-programmed McMurphy grovelling before her to someone who looks-- to quote Chief Bromden-- like a "store dummy" (p. 321)? Leaving aside the issue of gender, which pales in importance alongside the threat posed by ECT, how many "Nurse Ratcheds" must there be in the secret prisons? And are they administering ECT to terrorist suspects? A possible answer may be found in the words of patient Harding to McMurphy when he compares ECT quite aptly to electrocution and wonders out loud why the public doesn't "raise Cain" about it. Harding responds: "I don't think you fully understand the [American] public, my friend: in this country, when something is out of order, the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way." (p. 190, italics mine)
That process is made more easy by the fact that McMurphy, as a convict, has been committed to the insane asylum. As another inmate who is committed explains to him, his choice to pretend that he's crazy so that he could leave the work farm for the "comparative luxury" of the asylum was a mistake: "being committed ain't like being sentenced. You're sentenced in a jail, and you got a date ahead of you when you know you're gonna be turned loose." Not so in the asylum: one leaves when the doctors and nurses decide that one is "ready", and that may be never. (pp. 170-171) Note that all terrorist suspects, with the exception of the three who were given highly unjust trials-- José Padilla, David Hicks and Zacarious Moussaoui-- have been similarly committed-- not to an insane asylum but to prisons not subject to any law, which make ample use of psychiatric techniques to "break" them, just as Nurse Ratched does with McMurphy. One of the techniques Ratched uses is ECT, or electroconvulsive treatment (which when the book was written was called electroshock treatment, or EST). ECT is described to McMurphy by a fellow patient, Harding, in a largely realistic manner. At first he says jokingly, "You pay for the service with brain cells, and everyone has simply billions of brain cells on deposit. You won't miss a few." But then, more seriously, "You... change. You forget things." But Harding is wrong about one thing. As he says, "We are witnessing the sunset of EST... it's almost out of vogue and only used in extreme cases that nothing else seems to reach, like lobotomy." (pp. 180-191) Unfortunately he's wrong. ECT has made a comeback. It is being actively promoted by the American Psychiatric Association and by others such as the sadistic Dr. Gary Aden's Association for Convulsive Therapy (ACT). Already in 1979, when ECT was just coming back into fashion, some 100,000 people a year were given the treatment. Today the number is undoubtedly far higher (see Peter Breggin, M.D., Toxic Psychiatry, p. 194)This is of course only to speak of bona fide mental patients: who knows about the thousands of unfortunates who have "disappeared" into the gulag-like network of CIA prisons?
When Nurse Ratched threatens McMurphy with ECT for his rebellious behavior ("just admit you were wrong"), he responds as if he is being asked to give a phony confession, as many terrorist suspects have indeed been: "You got a paper I can sign? And why don't you add some other things while you're at it and get them out of the way-- things like, oh, me being part of a plot to overthrow the government and how I think life on your ward is the sweetest goddamned life this side of Hawaii-- you know, that sort of crap... Then, after I sign, bring me a blanket and a package of Red Cross cigarettes. Hooee, those Chinese Commies could have learned a few things from you, lady." (p. 280-281). How timely, when the New York Times has just reported that the interrogation techniques in use at Guantánamo were drawn directly from a Chinese Communist manual designed to elicit false confessions. (Scott Shane, July 2). There is however a problem with Keseys' depiction of ECT. Nurse Ratched says that it is having no effect on McMurphy, and although there are hints that it has (pp. 291, 307, 318), the point that ECT causes permanent brain damage is not driven home hard enough. There is one spot in the film which might be considered suggestive of memory loss: at the crucial moment McMurphy, who has brought two prostitutes into the ward at night to celebrate his imminent escape to Canada, suddenly looks disturbed and turns away from the action, as if he has forgotten his planned escape route. This leads to a fatal delay in his plans, so that Nurse Ratched ultimately discovers the drunken inmates and poor young Billy, whom she so humiliates for sleeping with a prostitute that the boy slits his own throat, leading directly to McMurphy's avenging assault on her and thus to his lobotomy. In fact, if Nurse Ratched had known all that ECT was capable of doing, whe would never have stopped shocking McMurphy. She would have followed the example of Ewen Cameron, who was doing experiments with ECT on human guinea pigs at about the time that Kesey's book was written. Those experiments, supported by the CIA, showed that ECT is indeed the best means of breaking a person-- not so as to elicit intelligence (how indeed can a procedure that causes amnesia do that?) but to make them into exactly the person one wants them to be.
For unlike the victim of lobotomy, who is permanently infantilized or robbed of the ability to feel, the ECT victim can be re-programmed to be a docile and obedient adult, as a number of husbands have had ECT administered to their wives in order to make them more tractable (Breggin, pp. 200-201) Furthermore, while brain surgery has always been an expensive, long and difficult procedure, even in the nineteen-sixties, when ECT was in decline, one doctor told the CIA that "the standard electroshock 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." (Colin Ross, the CIA Doctors, p. 53) It is so common that brain surgeon Walter Freeman rcommended that state mental hospitals which do not have the funds to be able to put a patient under total anaesthesia for a lobotomy first use ECT to knock him out (Wikipedia entry under lobotomy). Best of all, unlike brain surgery, it leaves no visible traces, and hence the victim can be trotted out to testify in a show trial, admitting to all kinds of crimes that he didn't commit, and no one will be the wiser. Wouldn't Nurse Ratched have preferred to have a re-programmed McMurphy grovelling before her to someone who looks-- to quote Chief Bromden-- like a "store dummy" (p. 321)? Leaving aside the issue of gender, which pales in importance alongside the threat posed by ECT, how many "Nurse Ratcheds" must there be in the secret prisons? And are they administering ECT to terrorist suspects? A possible answer may be found in the words of patient Harding to McMurphy when he compares ECT quite aptly to electrocution and wonders out loud why the public doesn't "raise Cain" about it. Harding responds: "I don't think you fully understand the [American] public, my friend: in this country, when something is out of order, the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way." (p. 190, italics mine)
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
ECT AS AN INSTRUMENT OF REPRESSION: A Review
I recently bought Peter Breggin's Toxic Psychiatry for its chapter on ECT, and must state that the book is worth buying for this one alone. Let me first say that I think Breggin exaggerates a bit in a good cause. That is to say, he describes victims of ECT as having such severe brain damage that they could be described as severely retarded. My impression from the research I have done so far is that most people subjected to this procedure retain their previous intelligence level and personality characteristics-- it is their memory alone which is damaged. But this is precisely what makes ECT so dangerous, as we shall see. In any case, I cannot go along with Breggin in wanting to ban a procedure that works for some people-- who is he to say that Kitty Dukakis, for example, must not have ECT because he believes that it is bad for her? What needs to be done is to increase awareness of the dangers of ECT and to ban involuntary use of it absolutely, so that it will be used only on people who have given informed consent. That said, I must assert that Breggin is right on target in his views on ECT. While some psychiatrists deny that it erases memory to any significant extent, others maintain that it "works" precisely because it damages the brain. For instance, Max Fink, the "grandfather of ECT", acknowledges that "denial and euphoria are directly correlated to the degree of brain damage, as is demonstrated by abnormal brain patterns and other signs of dysfunction: brain disfunction is not, in Fink's own words, a "complication" but the sine qua non of the mode of action." The newer methods of ECT, which sedate the patient heavily before treatment, or direct the current only through the nondominant lobe of the brain, are no better than the old, according to Breggin, for the first requires a higher intensity of current, and the second has a "lobotomizing" effect. (pp. 208-209)
Perhaps the most damning section of this chapter concerns the motives of shock doctors. The profit motive is quite repulsively illustrated by Max Fink, who invites reporters to witness the administration of shock treatments for free, but will not let them see the patients after they have received a full course of shocks, unless they shell out some $25,000 to himself and $15,000 to the patient (the second request being an obvious ploy to deceive people into thinking that he cares about his patients). Not surprisingly, no one has taken up his offer (p. 188) although many ECT survivors have testified without charge concerning the way it has ruined their lives. Secondly Breggin sees a pattern of hatred and repression on the part of many shock doctors. He quotes a 1956 article in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases by researchers who found that these individuals expressed hostility and a desire to punish toward their patients. They made revealing jokes such as, "Let's give him the works," "Let's hit him with all we've got", or, "Why don't we throw the book at him." The frequent jests were viewed as the therapists' reaction to the sadistic implications of shock treatment." (p. 212). And at least one prominent psychiatrist took this sadism to its logical conclusion.
Gary Carl Aden was once the leading advocate of ECT in California. He got a law placing limits on its use overturned in 1976, and founded an organization to promote it. But all that ended in 1989. According to the San Diego Union, which Breggin quotes: "Dr. Gary Carl Aden, 53, of La Jolla, gave up his medical license effective September 8 after allegations that he had sex with patients, beat them and branded two of them with heated metal devices, including an iron which bore his own initials." I have since accessed the articles in question and know that Aden also hypnotized his patients and injected them with unknown drugs, perhaps to aid the hypnosis. As the technique developed by the CIA for "breaking" prisoners and turning them into "Manchurian Candidates" or today, phony terrorists utilizes a combination of ECT and narco-hypnosis, I have a strong suspicion that Aden once worked for the CIA. I am also astounded that he was not, according to Breggin, convicted of a criminal offense. Indeed, he was not even charged with one. Was this because he had damaged his victims' brains so profoundly that they could not be counted on to maintain a straight story in court, or because he had official protection? Anyone who has information regarding this is invited to write to me-- not to this website, because for some unknown reason I am not receiving any comments (not even hate mail!) but to my e-mail address.
Perhaps the most damning section of this chapter concerns the motives of shock doctors. The profit motive is quite repulsively illustrated by Max Fink, who invites reporters to witness the administration of shock treatments for free, but will not let them see the patients after they have received a full course of shocks, unless they shell out some $25,000 to himself and $15,000 to the patient (the second request being an obvious ploy to deceive people into thinking that he cares about his patients). Not surprisingly, no one has taken up his offer (p. 188) although many ECT survivors have testified without charge concerning the way it has ruined their lives. Secondly Breggin sees a pattern of hatred and repression on the part of many shock doctors. He quotes a 1956 article in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases by researchers who found that these individuals expressed hostility and a desire to punish toward their patients. They made revealing jokes such as, "Let's give him the works," "Let's hit him with all we've got", or, "Why don't we throw the book at him." The frequent jests were viewed as the therapists' reaction to the sadistic implications of shock treatment." (p. 212). And at least one prominent psychiatrist took this sadism to its logical conclusion.
Gary Carl Aden was once the leading advocate of ECT in California. He got a law placing limits on its use overturned in 1976, and founded an organization to promote it. But all that ended in 1989. According to the San Diego Union, which Breggin quotes: "Dr. Gary Carl Aden, 53, of La Jolla, gave up his medical license effective September 8 after allegations that he had sex with patients, beat them and branded two of them with heated metal devices, including an iron which bore his own initials." I have since accessed the articles in question and know that Aden also hypnotized his patients and injected them with unknown drugs, perhaps to aid the hypnosis. As the technique developed by the CIA for "breaking" prisoners and turning them into "Manchurian Candidates" or today, phony terrorists utilizes a combination of ECT and narco-hypnosis, I have a strong suspicion that Aden once worked for the CIA. I am also astounded that he was not, according to Breggin, convicted of a criminal offense. Indeed, he was not even charged with one. Was this because he had damaged his victims' brains so profoundly that they could not be counted on to maintain a straight story in court, or because he had official protection? Anyone who has information regarding this is invited to write to me-- not to this website, because for some unknown reason I am not receiving any comments (not even hate mail!) but to my e-mail address.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
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...).
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...).
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
IS OUR GOVERNMENT FACILITATING ANOTHER 9/11?
I have recently read three articles sent me through e-mail by Truthout, which suggest that another 9/11 is in the works and that our government is behind it. The first, "Preparing the Battlefield", but noted journalist Seymour Hersh, was re-printed from the New Yorker. It describes the preparations for war with Iran being made by the Bush Administration, including congressional approval of covert operations within that country. Although the select members of the House and Senate intelligence Committees who are alone privileged to know about these things resisted the Administration's request for full-scale covert operations, which would have involved combat, they did approve so-called "intelligence-seeking" activities within Iran, including the enlistment of dissident groups within that country, some of whom are Sunni fundamentalists who oppose the Shi'ite government of Iran. These militants are little different from Al Qaeda, and indeed, for all I know they may include Al Qaeda, whom of course the U.S. has backed before. Naturally the CIA is playing a major role in all this, and the "intelligence-seeking" activities remind me very much of the PHOENIX program in Vietnam, which tortured and killed so many innocent Vietnamese civilians. This will mean still more prisoners in secret CIA prisons, to be subjected to the sort of treatment I have previously described and shall be describing further in my next blog, which is not directed at acquiring intelligence and goes much further than simple torture, usually ending in brain damage and/or death for the victim. Ex-DCIA and current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates "warned" that "We'll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America," (emphasis mine), but one is left wondering if this is perhaps exactly what they want (and if Gates opposes the policy, why doesn't he resign?)
A second article was written by Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde for the New York Times, and is entitled, "Amid Policy Disputes, Qaeda Growns in Pakistan." It describes how Arab extremists including Al Qaeda have, from 2001 on, been re-grouping in remote tribal areas of that country. "In many ways, the foreigners were returning to their home base. In the 1980s, Mr. bin Laden and hundreds of Arab and foreign fighters backed by the United States and Pakistan used the tribal areas as a staging area for cross-border attacks on Soviet forces in Afghanistan." The article bemoans the failure of the Pakistani government to do anything about the problem, and quotes two unnamed U.S. government officials who were "surprised and frustrated" when President Bush called the Pakistani Prime Minister and instead of demanding action, "repeatedly thanked him for his contributions to the War on Terrorism." The article blames intragovernmental and intra-agency (CIA) disputes for the failure to act against the militants, but above all the war in Iraq. "By 2006 the Iraq War had drained away most of the CIA officers with field experience in the Islamic world... these people all went to Iraq. We were huring because of Iraq." Iran's nuclear program, Iraq's chimerical weapons of mass destruction-- what do these have to do with the elimination of the threat that most Americans presume is still posed by Al Qaeda? Note that the government of Iran, which is Shi'ite, cannot possibly be planning to give nukes to the Sunni Al Qaeda militants. Why has our government consistently gotten itself involved in tangential battles while allowing the enemy which is presumed to be responsible for the attacks of 9/11 to re-group to the point where, as Pentagon consultant and terrorism expert says, "The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today which is comparable to what it faced on September 11, 2001"? Is this sheer stupidity on our government's part?
A third article, "Will Terrorists Rock the Vote in 2008?' written by Frank Rich for the New York Times, offers another possible explanation. It notes that Charles Black, advisor to presidential candidate John McCain, has publicly come out and said that a domestic terrorist attack "would be a big advantage" to the GOP. Then he speculates that Black is privately gaming this out further: "What would be the optimum timing, from the campaign's perpective, for this terrorist attack-- before or after the convention? Would the attack be most useful if it took place in a red state, blue state or swing state? How much would it 'help' if the next assassinated foreign leader had a higher name recognition in American households than Benazir Bhutto?" Then on to the facts: " Terrorism is the one major issue where Mr. McCain soundly vanquishes his Democratic opponent in the polls. Since 2002, it's been a Beltway axiom akin to E= mc2 that Bomb in an American city =GOP landslide." Unfortunately for the GOP, seven years of the War on Terrorism, just like the decades of the War on Communism, have left Americans "more frightened of losing jobs, homes and savings" than of a domestic attack. Even rising gas prices might not be sufficient to persuade them to support continuing war in the Middle East, although it will probably win public approval for the destruction of Alaska and the coasts of the lower 48 through off-shore oil drilling. Something dramatic is needed, something like the fictitious warnings of Soviet military advantage which helped bring Ronald Reagan to power in 1980. And the Bush Administration already knows what that something is, and how effective it can be, not only for bringing the GOP victory but for laying the groundwork of a totalitarian state in the U.S.
The United States government virtually created Al Qaeda (see Joseph Trento's Prelude to Terror for the links between the Bush family and bin Laden). It has been coddling it since the attacks of 9/11, and allowing it to regroup while it fights wars which have taken the lives of American servicemen while doing nothing to protect American civilians.Note that even if Iran gets the Bomb, it will hardly be likely to use it against the U.S., in view of our overwhelming nuclear superiority-- even the Russians, who had and still have the second largest arsenal in the world, have never dared to attack us for fear of retaliation. As a threat, Iran is hardly comparable to the Soviet Union. In fact, there is no overwhelming threat to American lives today save for terrorism, and the American government seems intent upon allowing the terrorists to regroup in order to stage another attack. But how can it persuade Muslim extremists to give up their lives in suicide attacks against the U.S.? It doesn't have to. Why not simply offer them a technology well-known through use of the CIA Predator drone, of remotely-controlled aircraft? As Webster Griffin Tarpley has said, such technology may have been secretly installed on every commercial aircraft, ready to use if the government fears a hijacking-- or simply wants the public to believe that a plane was hijacked. Al Qaeda does not have to sacrifice a single member-- all it has to do is be there to take the blame. There is good reason to believe that if Obama continues to make gains in the polls, there will be a second 9/11 before election day. And then there will be still more innocent people in mind-destroying CIA prisons-- but they will be American citizens.
A second article was written by Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde for the New York Times, and is entitled, "Amid Policy Disputes, Qaeda Growns in Pakistan." It describes how Arab extremists including Al Qaeda have, from 2001 on, been re-grouping in remote tribal areas of that country. "In many ways, the foreigners were returning to their home base. In the 1980s, Mr. bin Laden and hundreds of Arab and foreign fighters backed by the United States and Pakistan used the tribal areas as a staging area for cross-border attacks on Soviet forces in Afghanistan." The article bemoans the failure of the Pakistani government to do anything about the problem, and quotes two unnamed U.S. government officials who were "surprised and frustrated" when President Bush called the Pakistani Prime Minister and instead of demanding action, "repeatedly thanked him for his contributions to the War on Terrorism." The article blames intragovernmental and intra-agency (CIA) disputes for the failure to act against the militants, but above all the war in Iraq. "By 2006 the Iraq War had drained away most of the CIA officers with field experience in the Islamic world... these people all went to Iraq. We were huring because of Iraq." Iran's nuclear program, Iraq's chimerical weapons of mass destruction-- what do these have to do with the elimination of the threat that most Americans presume is still posed by Al Qaeda? Note that the government of Iran, which is Shi'ite, cannot possibly be planning to give nukes to the Sunni Al Qaeda militants. Why has our government consistently gotten itself involved in tangential battles while allowing the enemy which is presumed to be responsible for the attacks of 9/11 to re-group to the point where, as Pentagon consultant and terrorism expert says, "The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today which is comparable to what it faced on September 11, 2001"? Is this sheer stupidity on our government's part?
A third article, "Will Terrorists Rock the Vote in 2008?' written by Frank Rich for the New York Times, offers another possible explanation. It notes that Charles Black, advisor to presidential candidate John McCain, has publicly come out and said that a domestic terrorist attack "would be a big advantage" to the GOP. Then he speculates that Black is privately gaming this out further: "What would be the optimum timing, from the campaign's perpective, for this terrorist attack-- before or after the convention? Would the attack be most useful if it took place in a red state, blue state or swing state? How much would it 'help' if the next assassinated foreign leader had a higher name recognition in American households than Benazir Bhutto?" Then on to the facts: " Terrorism is the one major issue where Mr. McCain soundly vanquishes his Democratic opponent in the polls. Since 2002, it's been a Beltway axiom akin to E= mc2 that Bomb in an American city =GOP landslide." Unfortunately for the GOP, seven years of the War on Terrorism, just like the decades of the War on Communism, have left Americans "more frightened of losing jobs, homes and savings" than of a domestic attack. Even rising gas prices might not be sufficient to persuade them to support continuing war in the Middle East, although it will probably win public approval for the destruction of Alaska and the coasts of the lower 48 through off-shore oil drilling. Something dramatic is needed, something like the fictitious warnings of Soviet military advantage which helped bring Ronald Reagan to power in 1980. And the Bush Administration already knows what that something is, and how effective it can be, not only for bringing the GOP victory but for laying the groundwork of a totalitarian state in the U.S.
The United States government virtually created Al Qaeda (see Joseph Trento's Prelude to Terror for the links between the Bush family and bin Laden). It has been coddling it since the attacks of 9/11, and allowing it to regroup while it fights wars which have taken the lives of American servicemen while doing nothing to protect American civilians.Note that even if Iran gets the Bomb, it will hardly be likely to use it against the U.S., in view of our overwhelming nuclear superiority-- even the Russians, who had and still have the second largest arsenal in the world, have never dared to attack us for fear of retaliation. As a threat, Iran is hardly comparable to the Soviet Union. In fact, there is no overwhelming threat to American lives today save for terrorism, and the American government seems intent upon allowing the terrorists to regroup in order to stage another attack. But how can it persuade Muslim extremists to give up their lives in suicide attacks against the U.S.? It doesn't have to. Why not simply offer them a technology well-known through use of the CIA Predator drone, of remotely-controlled aircraft? As Webster Griffin Tarpley has said, such technology may have been secretly installed on every commercial aircraft, ready to use if the government fears a hijacking-- or simply wants the public to believe that a plane was hijacked. Al Qaeda does not have to sacrifice a single member-- all it has to do is be there to take the blame. There is good reason to believe that if Obama continues to make gains in the polls, there will be a second 9/11 before election day. And then there will be still more innocent people in mind-destroying CIA prisons-- but they will be American citizens.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
ASSAULT ON THE PAST
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.
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.
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.
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