The manuals often describe the techniques with an absolute lack of attention to morality and humanity (and of course the same can be said for many manuals for teachers, bosses, cops, politicians, and [abusive] parents), as though they’re talking not about the destruction of human psyches (and bodies), but about how best to get to the grocery store: “Drugs are no more the answer to the interrogator’s prayer than the polygraph, hypnosis, or other aids.” Or this: Techniques are designed “to confound the expectations and conditioned reactions of the interrogatee,” and “not only to obliterate the familiar but to replace it with the weird.” When victims have been hammered with “double-talk questions” and “illogical” statements long enough, all sensible points of reference begin to blur, and “as the process continues, day after day if necessary, the subject begins to try to make sense of the situation, which becomes mentally intolerable. Now he is likely to make significant admissions, or even to pour out his whole story, just to stop the flow of babble which assails him.” Or this: “The manner and timing of arrest can contribute substantially to the interrogator’s purposes. What we aim to do is to ensure that the manner of arrest achieves, if possible, surprise, and the maximum amount of mental discomfort in order to catch the suspect off balance and to deprive him of the initiative. One should therefore arrest him at a moment when he least expects it and when his mental and physical resistance is at its lowest. The ideal time at which to arrest a person is in the early hours of the morning because surprise is achieved then, and because a person’s resistance physiologically as well as psychologically is at its lowest.” Or this: “The effectiveness of a threat depends not only on what sort of person the interrogatee is and whether he believes that his questioner can and will carry the threat out but also on the interrogator’s reasons for threatening. If the interrogator threatens because he is angry, the subject frequently senses the fear of failure underlying the anger and is strengthened in his own resolve to resist. Threats delivered coldly are more effective than those shouted in rage. It is especially important that a threat not be uttered in response to the interrogatee’s own expressions of hostility. These, if ignored, can induce feelings of guilt, whereas retorts in kind relieve the subject’s feelings. Another reason why threats induce compliance not evoked by the inflection of duress is that the threat grants the interrogatee time for compliance. It is not enough that a resistant source should be placed under the tension of fear; he must also discern an acceptable escape route.” Or this: “1. The more completely the place of confinement eliminates sensory stimuli, the more rapidly and deeply will the interrogatee be affected. Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light (or weak artificial light which never varies), which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc. An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective. 2. An early effect of such an environment is anxiety. How soon it appears and how strong it is depends upon the psychological characteristics of the individual. 3. The interrogator can benefit from the subject’s anxiety. As the interrogator becomes linked in the subject’s mind with the reward of lessened anxiety, human contact, and meaningful activity, and thus with providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role. 4. The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject’s mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father figure. The result, normally, is a strengthening of the subject’s tendencies toward compliance.” Or this, “It has been plausibly suggested that, whereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself. In the simple torture situation the contest is one between the individual and his tormentor. . . . When the individual is told to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself. The motivational strength of the individual is likely to exhaust itself in this internal encounter. . . . As long as the subject remains standing, he is attributing to his captor the power to do something worse to him, but there is actually no showdown of the ability of the interrogator to do so.”181
We need to bring this discussion to the real world. Twenty-four-year-old Ines Murillo was a prisoner in a secret army jail in Honduras, where she was interrogated by soldiers trained by these manuals, who gave reports on their interrogations to CIA officials who visited the prisons. For eighty days she was beaten, electrically shocked, burned, starved, exposed, threatened, stripped naked, and sexually molested. Her interrogators fed her raw dead birds and rats. To keep her from sleeping, they poured freezing water on her head every ten minutes. They made her stand for hours without sleep and without being allowed to urinate.182
She was not alone: just one of her captors has acknowledged that he himself tortured and murdered one hundred and twenty people.183
The CIA has aided torturers the world over. Indeed, the torturers and the CIA often work together (indeed, the torturers are often CIA “assets”). In the late 1940s, the CIA was central to creating Greece’s secret police, the KYP, which soon began systematically torturing people. By the 1960s torturers were telling prisoners their equipment—such as a special “thick white double cable” whip that was “scientific, making their work easier,” and the “iron wreath,” a head screw progressively tightened around the head or ears—came as U.S. military aid.184
The CIA set up Iran’s notorious SAVAK secret police, and instructed them in torture methods, with, for example, films on such topics as how to most effectively torture women.185
In 1950s Germany the CIA not only used normal methods to torture immigrants they suspected of being Soviet plants but they also used esoteric methods, such as applying turpentine to a man’s testicles or sealing someone in a room and playing Indonesian music at deafening levels until he cracked.186
In Vietnam, the CIA set up its notorious Operation Phoenix, a systematic program of assassination, terror, and torture. It condoned confining prisoners in “tiger cages,” five-by-nine-by-six-foot stone compartments, where three to five men would be shackled to the floor, beaten, mutilated. Their legs would wither, and they would become paralyzed, or at best reduced for the rest of their miserable lives to scuttling like crabs. Buckets of lime were emptied upon them. Elsewhere in Vietnam, CIA assets applied electric shocks to victims’ genitals, tapped six-inch dowels through victims’ ears and into their brains, and threw victims out of helicopters in order to force their associates to talk.187 More recently in Afghanistan, U.S.-backed troops loaded 3,000 prisoners into container trucks, sealed the doors, and left these to stand for days in the sun. A U.S. commander ordered an Afghan soldier to shoot bullets through the containers’ walls to provide air holes. Soon enough, blood began to stream from the containers’ bottoms. Those victims who survived so far were dumped in the desert and shot by Afghans who were watched over by thirty to forty U.S. soldiers. Often the Americans took more direct roles: as one Afghan soldier stated, “I was a witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner’s neck. The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no power to stop them.” The bodies of their victims were left to be eaten by dogs.188
Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America. There we find CIA-associated torture. Literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of human beings have been tortured or killed by people taught by these manuals.
Even The Washington Post has commented that CIA and U.S. Army Special Forces interrogators routinely beat prisoners. They hood them, deprive them of sleep, bombard them with light, bind them in painful positions with duct tape. As one agent put it: “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing
your job.”189
This “doing their job” of course includes torturing children. In the same article where a CIA-agent spoke glibly of “playing smackyface” with victims, it was revealed that if “smackyface” doesn’t work—and prisoners have died from what even a military coroner acknowledges is “blunt force injury”—the CIA has at its disposal other means to make victims “regress,” or talk: the agent stated explicitly—and I have to say the capitalist journalist expressed no disapproval of the agent’s stated option—that he had access to victims’ young children. Surely their “regression”—the exploitation of these “human resources”—would make their father talk.
We all know that agents of the United States government torture prisoners. We all know that this has been happening for a very long time. Part of the most recent response by those in power to this widespread understanding has been to redefine torture. A Department of Justice memo defined torture only as the intentional infliction of pain associated with “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” The President of the United States has insisted that the United States does not torture. In the process of not torturing, U.S. agents and their allies cuff prisoners’ hands behind their backs, suspend them by these cuffs, and beat them with iron rods. They effectively liquefy their kneecaps. They force them to stand naked in freezing cells and douse them with water. They drown them time and again in a process used frequently enough to have a name: waterboarding, where “the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.”190 They smother them to death inside of sleeping bags. They and their allies use electric drills to bore into their kneecaps, shoulders, skulls.
I wonder how the authors of that memo would define torture if they were not defining it in the abstract, if Premise Four did not reign supreme in this culture, if they knew that they and those they love could possibly receive the treatment they so blithely order.
When are we going to acknowledge that those in power will scruple at nothing—have already scrupled at nothing—to increase their power? There is no limit to their obsession to control. This won’t change because we ask nicely. It won’t change because we live peaceably (just ask the indigenous).
What are you going to do about it?
For years now I’ve been talking about blowing up dams to help salmon, but suddenly today I realized I’ve been all wrong.
This understanding came as I read a description of attempts by ancient Egyptians to dam the Nile, and the Nile’s resistance to these attempts. It was all a pretty straightforward process. The Egyptians would erect a dam, and the river would shrug it off, probably with as little effort as a horse quivering the skin of its shoulder to get rid of a fly.
By now, however, the concrete straitjackets have become massive enough that rivers have a harder time sloughing them off, the equivalent, to extend the above simile, to encasing a horse in concrete, then leaving holes at the head and tail to allow food and water to pass. The rivers need our help. (I first wrote “They may need our help,” but, even without my asking, a couple of rivers strongly requested I remove the qualifier.) They can’t do it themselves, at least in the short or medium run.
I’ve always wanted to blow up dams in order to save salmon, sturgeon, and other creatures whose lives depend on wild and living rivers. But that’s not right. We need to blow up dams for the rivers themselves, so they can again be the rivers they once were forever, the rivers they still want to be, the rivers they themselves are struggling and fighting to once again become.
Liberating rivers, blowing up dams. The difference may seem semantic to you—like liberating versus invading Iraq, like “creating temporary meadows” versus clearcutting—but it doesn’t to me, for a number of reasons.
The first, and probably most important, has to do with everything I’ve been talking about in this book. Rhetoric aside, both invading Iraq and clearcutting are motivated by the culture’s obsession to control and exploit. The primary reason is to gain, maintain, and use resources—oil in the first case (as well as to provide a staging area for further invasions), trees in the second. Further, both invading and clearcutting damage landscapes, damage our habitat. They further enchain the natural world.
The primary motivation for liberating a river, on the other hand, isn’t selfish, except insofar as it benefits oneself to live in an intact, functioning natural community (duh!), and insofar as doing good feels good.
This all leads to probably the most important question of this book so far: with whom or what do you primarily identify? A way to get at that question is to ask: whom or what do your actions primarily benefit? Whom or what do you primarily serve?
Who or what primarily benefits from the invasion of Iraq? Let me put this more directly: who/what benefits from U.S. access to Iraqi oil fields?
The U.S. industrial economy, of course. If you care more about and identify more closely with the U.S. industrial economy than you care about or identify with people killed by U.S. bombs or bullets (or by the “blunt force trauma” of smackyface)—people under whose land the oil resides—then you may support the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
I’m taking bets as to who’s next on the list to be invaded. Smart money says Syria, but Lebanon and Iran aren’t far behind. Here are the current odds, if you’d like to jump into the pool: Syria, 1:1; Lebanon, 3:1; Iran, 4:1; North Korea, 15:1 (North Korea actually having the ability to fight back reduces the odds tremendously); other 25:1; invade nobody 10,000:1 (and Colombia doesn’t count, since the U.S. has already invaded [oh, sorry, is “advising”]; the same is true for the Philippines, and about a hundred and twenty other countries).
Similarly, if you identify more strongly with Weyerhaeuser or MAXXAM, or more broadly the industrial economy than you do with forests, you may support clearcutting.
Just today I saw an article in the local newspaper saying that local shrimp trawlers are complaining (accurately enough) about regulations California is (finally) putting in place to curtail the (extraordinary) damage done by trawling. Shrimp trawls are designed to maximize contact with the sea floor. They scrape away everything in their path, the undersea equivalent of clearcutting, picking up every living thing as they go. In some places 80 percent of the catch is “bycatch,” that is, creatures the trawlers can’t sell, and who are merely thrown overboard dead or dying.
Local trawlers say the regulations will force them out of business. Politicians say the regulations will hurt the local economy. This amounts to an explicit acknowledgment on both their parts that shrimping, and more broadly the local economy (and more broadly still the entire industrial economy) is predicated on harming and eventually destroying the landbase.
If you identify more closely with the local economy than the local landbase, it may make sense to you to support an economy that damages this landbase, your own habitat.
If, on the other hand, you identify more strongly with your landbase than with the economy, it may make sense to you to protect your landbase, your habitat. And since the industrial economy is poisoning us all, the same would be true for those who identify more closely with their own bodies and their own survival (and the survival of those they purport to love) than they do the industrial economy.
Who benefits from the removal of dams?
If you identify more closely with the Klamath River and its salmon, steelhead, lamprey, and other residents than you do with the agricorporations which primarily benefit from taking the river’s water, it may make sense to you to help the river return to running free, to liberate it from its concrete cage, or rather, to help it liberate itself. The same would be true for the Columbia, Colorado, Mississippi, Missouri, Sacramento, Nile, and all other rivers who would be better off without dams.
With what/whom do you most closely identify? Where i
s your primary allegiance? Where does your sense of skin extend, and what does it encompass? Does it include ExxonMobil, Monsanto, Microsoft? Do you give them fealty? Do you give them time, money? Do you serve them? Does it include the U.S. government? Do you pledge it allegiance? Do you serve it? Does it include the land where you live? Do you act in its best interests?
I still haven’t really gotten to the difference between liberating rivers and blowing up dams. It’s one of focus and intent. I’ve written elsewhere that if I were once again a child faced only with the options of a child (i.e., no running away), but having the understanding I do now of the intractability of my father’s violence, I would have killed him. But the point would not have been to kill him. The point would have been to liberate me and my family from the rapes and beatings, to stop the horrors.
Similarly, I don’t have a thing for explosives. If I took out a dam, it wouldn’t be so I could get off on the big kaboom. I’m not even sure it would be to help the salmon (although yesterday I saw seven baby coho in the stream behind my home, and fell in love with them all over again). It would be to help the river, which in turn would help the salmon. It would be to stop the horrors.
WHYCIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE THREE. British scientists have at last discovered that fish do indeed feel pain.
Whether they admit it or not, everyone who has ever gone fishing knows this is the case. But for years an intense (and intensely stupid) debate has been carried on in all seriousness in scientific and fishing circles. In order to end the debate once and for all, scientists jabbed fish in the face with hot probes, and provided “mechanical” and “chemical stimuli” to the fish’s faces as well. Sure enough, the fish “seemed” to feel pain.
Endgame Vol.1 Page 25
