In Our Name

The invasion of Iraq is history, as well as the United States’ foray into the dark, evil world of torture.

For more than 200 years we were “torture free,” despite the wars and skirmishes” which are our history.

Unites States unwittingly elected a moron and an evil, evil bastard who introduced this country to torture.

The ugly, depraved torture images should be etched in every American mind. The ugliness, the depravity by the elected duo: one moron and one very, very sick old man altered our reputation forever.

Every American is implicated in the evil deeds of the gruesome twosome. Voting is not a sport nor must our attitude be so casual as to vote if there is time. 

Voting has become a serious business for our country, especially now that there are forces attempting to take that right away from as many Americans as can be maneuvered without detection. 

Torture committed by the United States puts it on record, never to be erased, never to be forgotten.

The 1950s appear to have been a time when the CIA put a tremendous amount of energy into perfecting the science of torture.

Although the brand of torture the CIA devised through more than a decade of trial and error may not inflict physical pain, it can still do some real damage.

There is indeed a torture manual and the CIA wrote it! In 1963, the Agency created the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual.

It was the “codification” of everything the CIA had learned from its experiments throughout the 50s.

In the KUBARK (codename for the CIA in Vietnam War [source: The Washington Post]) manual, methods for breaking detainees are based generally on psychology.

Identifying a victim’s sense of self and then stripping it away is part of the first step toward breaking him or her.

An introverted or shy detainee might be kept naked and perhaps sexually humiliated, for example.

Clothes may also be taken simply to alienate the detainee and make him or her less comfortable.

Creating a sense of unfamiliarity, disorientation and isolation seem to be the hallmarks of psychologically undermining a detainee in the purview of the KUBARK manual.*

Practices like starvation, keeping inmates in small, windowless cells with unchanging artificial light and forcing inmates to sit or stand in uncomfortable positions (stress positions) for long periods of time have since been decried or banned outright by the United States government.

Yet these techniques are part of the regimen prescribed by KUBARK. So, too, are using hypnosis and drugs to extract information.

While it doesn’t mention electric shock directly, the manual calls for interrogators to be sure that a potential safe house to be used for torture has access to electricity.

As one source told The Baltimore Sun, “The CIA has acknowledged privately and informally in the past that this referred to the application of electric shocks to interrogation suspects” [source: The Baltimore Sun].

Physical pain, however, is ultimately deemed counterproductive by the manual.

It’s a much worse experience, the guidebook concludes, for an inmate to fear that pain may be coming than to actually experience it.

The old adage that anticipation is worse than the experience appears to also have a basis in the shadowy field of torture.

A newer book, largely a revision of the KUBARK manual, draws the same foundational conclusion--that psychological torment is paramount to physical abuse.

*The Human Resource Exploitation Manual of 1983 was first publicized as the result of an investigative report into the human rights abuses in Honduras.