by Naomi Klein
For U.S. intelligence officials, that kind of hands-on approach was rare. From the seventies on, the role favored by American agents was that of mentor or trainer—not direct interrogator. Testimony from Central American torture survivors in the seventies and eighties is littered with references to mysterious English-speaking men walking in and out of cells, proposing questions or offering tips. Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was abducted and jailed in Guatemala in 1989, has testified that the men who raped and burned her with cigarettes deferred to a man who spoke Spanish with a heavy American accent, whom they referred to as their “boss.”61 Jennifer Harbury, whose husband was tortured and killed by a Guatemalan officer on the CIA payroll, has documented many of these cases in her important book, Truth, Torture and the American Way.62
Though sanctioned by successive administrations in Washington, the U.S. role in these dirty wars had to be covert, for obvious reasons. Torture, whether physical or psychological, clearly violates the Geneva Conventions’ blanket ban on “any form of torture or cruelty,” as well as the U.S. Army’s own Uniform Code of Military Justice barring “cruelty” and “oppression” of prisoners.63 The Kubark manual warns readers on page 2 that its techniques carry “the grave risk of later lawsuits,” and the 1983 version is even more blunt: “Use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation is prohibited by law, both international and domestic.”64 Simply put, what they were teaching was illegal, covert by its very nature. If anyone asked, U.S. agents were tutoring their developing-world students in modern, professional policing methods—they couldn’t be responsible for “excesses” that happened outside their classes.
On September 11, 2001, that longtime insistence on plausible deniability went out the window. The terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was a different kind of shock from the ones imagined in the pages of the Kubark manual, but its effects were remarkably similar: profound disorientation, extreme fear and anxiety, and collective regression. Like the Kubark interrogator posing as a “father figure,” the Bush administration promptly used that fear to play the role of the all-protective parent, ready to defend “the homeland” and its vulnerable people by any means necessary. The shift in U.S. policy encapsulated by Vice President Dick Cheney’s infamous statement about working “the dark side” did not mark an embrace by this administration of tactics that would have repelled its more humane predecessors (as too many Democrats have claimed, invoking what the historian Garry Wills calls the particular American myth of “original sinlessness”65). Rather, the significant shift was that what had previously been performed by proxy, with enough distance to deny knowledge, would now be performed directly and openly defended.
Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the Bush administration’s real innovation has been its in-sourcing, with prisoners being tortured by U.S. citizens in U.S.-run prisons or directly transported, through “extraordinary rendition,” to third countries on U.S. planes. That is what makes the Bush regime different: after the attacks of September 11, it dared to demand the right to torture without shame. That left the administration subject to criminal prosecution—a problem it dealt with by changing the laws. The chain of events is well known: then–secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, empowered by George W. Bush, decreed that prisoners captured in Afghanistan were not covered by the Geneva Conventions because they were “enemy combatants,” not POWs, a view confirmed by the White House legal counsel at the time, Alberto Gonzales (subsequently U.S. attorney general).66 Next, Rumsfeld approved a series of special interrogation practices for use in the War on Terror. These included the methods laid out in the CIA manuals: “use of isolation facility for up to 30 days,” “deprivation of light and auditory stimuli,” “the detainee may also have a hood placed over his head during transportation and questioning,” “removal of clothing” and “using detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress.”67 According to the White House, torture was still banned—but now to qualify as torture, the pain inflicted had to “be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure.”*68 According to these new rules, the U.S. government was free to use the methods it had developed in the 1950s under layers of secrecy and deniability—only now it was out in the open, without fear of prosecution…. According to these new rules, the U.S. government was free to use the methods it had developed in the 1950s under layers of secrecy and deniability—only now it was out in the open, without fear of prosecution. So in February 2006, the Intelligence Sciences Board, an advisory arm of the CIA, published a report written by a veteran Defense Department interrogator. It stated openly that “a careful reading of the Kubark manual is essential for anyone involved in interrogation.”69
One of the first people to come face-to-face with the new order was the U.S. citizen and former gang member José Padilla. Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, he was accused of intending to build a “dirty bomb.” Rather than being charged and taken through the court system, Padilla was classified as an enemy combatant, which stripped him of all rights. Taken to a U.S. Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina, Padilla says he was injected with a drug that he believes was either LSD or PCP and subjected to intense sensory deprivation: he was kept in a tiny cell with the windows blacked out and forbidden to have a clock or a calendar. Whenever he left the cell he was shackled, his eyes were covered with blackout goggles and sound was blocked with heavy headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days and forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who, when they questioned him, blasted his starved senses with lights and pounding sounds.70
Padilla was granted a court hearing in December 2006, although the dirty-bomb allegations for which he had been arrested were dropped. He was accused of having terrorist contacts, but there was little he could do to defend himself: according to expert testimony, the Cameron-style regression techniques had completely succeeded in destroying the adult he once was, which is precisely what they were designed to do. “The extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged, both mentally and physically,” his lawyer told the court. “The government’s treatment of Mr. Padilla has robbed him of his personhood.” A psychiatrist who assessed him concluded that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.”71 The Bush-appointed judge insisted that Padilla was fit to stand trial, however. The fact that he even had a public trial makes Padilla’s case extraordinary. Thousands of other prisoners being held in U.S.-run prisons—who, unlike Padilla, are not U.S. citizens—have been put through a similar torture regimen, with none of the public accountability of a civilian trial.
Many languish in Guantánamo. Mamdouh Habib, an Australian who was incarcerated there, has said that “Guantánamo Bay is an experiment…and what they experiment in is brainwashing.”72 Indeed, in the testimonies, reports and photographs that have come out of Guantánamo, it is as if the Allan Memorial Institute of the 1950s had been transported to Cuba. When first detained, prisoners are put into intense sensory deprivation, with hoods, blackout goggles and heavy headphones to block out all sound. They are left in isolation cells for months, taken out only to have their senses bombarded with barking dogs, strobe lights and endless tape loops of babies crying, music blaring and cats meowing.
For many prisoners, the effects of these techniques have been much the same as they were at the Allan in the fifties: total regression. One released prisoner, a British citizen, told his lawyers that there is now an entire section of the prison, Delta Block, reserved for “at least fifty” detainees who are in permanently delusional states.73 A declassified letter from the FBI to the Pentagon described one high-value prisoner who had been “subjected to intense isolation for over three months” and “was evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to nonexistent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in a cell covered with a sheet for hours on en
d).”74 James Yee, a former U.S. Army Muslim chaplain who worked at Guantánamo, has described the prisoners on Delta Block as exhibiting the classic symptoms of extreme regression. “I’d stop to talk to them, and they would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over. Some would stand on top of their steel bed frames and act out childishly, reminding me of the King of the Mountain game I played with my brothers when we were young.” The situation worsened markedly in January 2007, when 165 prisoners were moved into a new wing of the prison, known as Camp Six, where the steel isolation cells allowed for no human contact. Sabin Willett, a lawyer who represents several Guantánamo prisoners, warned that if the situation continued, “You’re going to have an insane asylum.”75
Human rights groups point out that Guantánamo, horrifying as it is, is actually the best of the U.S.-run offshore interrogation operations, since it is open to limited monitoring by the Red Cross and lawyers. Unknown numbers of prisoners have disappeared into the network of so-called black sites around the world or been shipped by U.S. agents to foreign-run jails through extraordinary rendition. Prisoners who have emerged from these nightmares testify to having faced the full arsenal of Cameron-style shock tactics.
The Italian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr was kidnapped off the streets of Milan by a group of CIA agents and Italian secret police. “I didn’t understand anything about what was going on,” he later wrote. “They began to punch me in the stomach and all over my body. They wrapped my entire head and face with wide tape, and cut holes over my nose and face so I could breathe.” They rushed him to Egypt, where he lived in a cell with no light, where “roaches and rats walked across my body” for fourteen months. Nasr remained in jail in Egypt until February 2007 but managed to smuggle out an eleven-page handwritten letter detailing his abuse.76
He wrote that he repeatedly faced torture by electroshock. According to the Washington Post account, he was “strapped to an iron rack nicknamed ‘the Bride’ and zapped with electric stun guns” as well as “tied to a wet mattress on the floor. While one interrogator sat on a wooden chair perched on the prisoner’s shoulders, another interrogator would flip a switch, sending jolts of electricity into the mattress coils.”77 He also had electroshock applied to his testicles, according to Amnesty International.78
There is reason to believe that this use of electrical torture on U.S.-captured prisoners is not isolated, a fact overlooked in almost all the discussions about whether the U.S. is actually practicing torture or merely “creative interrogation.” Jumah al-Dossari, a Guantánamo prisoner who has tried to commit suicide more than a dozen times, gave written testimoney to his lawyer that while he was in U.S. custody in Kandahar, “the investigator brought a small device like a mobile phone but it was an electric shock device. He started shocking my face, my back, my limbs and my genitals.”79 And Murat Kurnaz, originally from Germany, faced similar treatment in a U.S.-run prison in Kandahar. “It was the beginning, so there were absolutely no rules. They had the right to do anything. They used to beat us every time. They did use electroshocks. They dived my head in the water.”80
The Failure to Reconstruct
Near the end of our first meeting, I asked Gail Kastner to tell me more about her “electric dreams.” She told me that she often dreams of rows of patients slipping in and out of drug-induced sleep. “I hear people screaming, moaning, groaning, people saying no, no, no. I remember what it was like to wake up in that room, I was covered in sweat, nauseated, vomiting—and I had a very peculiar feeling in the head. Like I had a blob, not a head.” Describing this, Gail seemed suddenly far away, slumped in her blue chair, her breath turning into a wheeze. She lowered her eyelids, and beneath them I could see her eyes fluttering rapidly. She put her hand to her right temple and said in a voice that sounded thick and drugged, “I’m having a flashback. You have to distract me. Tell me about Iraq—tell me how bad it was.”
I racked my brain for a suitable war story for this strange circumstance and came up with something relatively benign about life in the Green Zone. Gail’s face slowly relaxed, and her breathing deepened. Her blue eyes once again fixed on mine. “Thank you,” she said. “I was having a flashback.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you told me.”
She leaned over and wrote something down on a scrap of paper.
After leaving Gail that evening, I kept thinking about what I hadn’t said when she’d asked me to tell her about Iraq. What I had wanted to tell her but couldn’t was that she reminded me of Iraq; that I couldn’t help feeling that what happened to her, a shocked person, and what happened to it, a shocked country, were somehow connected, different manifestations of the same terrifying logic.
Cameron’s theories were based on the idea that shocking his patients into a chaotic regressed state would create the preconditions for him to “rebirth” healthy model citizens. It’s little comfort to Gail, with her fractured spine and shattered memories, but in his own writings Cameron envisioned his acts of destruction as creation, a gift to his fortunate patients who were, under his relentless repatterning, going to be born again.
On this front Cameron was a spectacular failure. No matter how fully he regressed his patients, they never absorbed or accepted the endlessly repeated messages on his tapes. Though he was a genius at destroying people, he could not remake them. A follow-up study conducted after Cameron left the Allan Memorial Institute found that 75 percent of his former patients were worse off after treatment than before they were admitted. Of his patients who held down full-time jobs before hospitalization, more than half were no longer able to, and many, like Gail, suffered from a host of new physical and psychological ailments. “Psychic driving” did not work, not even a little, and the Allan Memorial Institute eventually banned the practice.81
The problem, obvious in retrospect, was the premise on which his entire theory rested: the idea that before healing can happen, everything that existed before needs to be wiped out. Cameron was sure that if he blasted away at the habits, patterns and memories of his patients, he would eventually arrive at that pristine blank slate. But no matter how doggedly he shocked, drugged and disoriented, he never got there. The opposite proved true: the more he blasted, the more shattered his patients became. Their minds weren’t “clean”; rather, they were a mess, their memories fractured, their trust betrayed.
Disaster capitalists share this same inability to distinguish between destruction and creation, between hurting and healing. It’s a feeling I had frequently when I was in Iraq, nervously scanning the scarred landscape for the next explosion. Fervent believers in the redemptive powers of shock, the architects of the American-British invasion imagined that their use of force would be so stunning, so overwhelming, that Iraqis would go into a kind of suspended animation, much like the one described in the Kubark manual. In that window of opportunity, Iraq’s invaders would slip in another set of shocks—these ones economic—which would create a model free-market democracy on the blank slate that was post-invasion Iraq.
But there was no blank slate, only rubble and shattered, angry people—who, when they resisted, were blasted with more shocks, some of them based on those experiments performed on Gail Kastner all those years ago. “We’re really good at going out and breaking things. But the day I get to spend more time here working on construction rather than combat, that will be a very good day,” General Peter W. Chiarelli, commander of the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division, observed a year and half after the official end of the war.82 That day never came. Like Cameron, Iraq’s shock doctors can destroy, but they can’t seem to rebuild.
CHAPTER 2
THE OTHER DOCTOR SHOCK
MILTON FRIEDMAN AND THE SEARCH FOR A LAISSEZ-FAIRE LABORATORY
Economic technocrats may be able to structure a tax reform here, a new social security law there, or a modified exchange rate regime somewh
ere else, but they really never have the luxury of a clean state on which to set up, in full flower as it were, their complete preferred economic policy framework.
—Arnold Harberger, University of Chicago economics professor, 19981
There are few academic environments as heavily mythologized as the University of Chicago’s Economics Department in the 1950s, a place intensely conscious of itself not just as a school but as a School of Thought. It was not just training students; it was building and strengthening the Chicago School of economics, the brainchild of a coterie of conservative academics whose ideas represented a revolutionary bulwark against the dominant “statist” thinking of the day. To step through the doors of the Social Science Building, under the sign reading “Science Is Measurement,” and into the legendary lunchroom, where students tested their intellectual mettle by daring to challenge their titanic professors, was to seek nothing so prosaic as a degree. It was to enlist in battle. As Gary Becker, the conservative economist and Nobel Prize winner, put it, “We were warriors in combat with most of the rest of the profession.”2
