CIA and psychological torture
June 8th, 2007
Mark Benjamin, in Salon, writes of the CIA’s decades long practice of psychological torture [The CIA's favorite form of torture]. He focuses upon one major component of that form of torture, sensory deprivation. He points out that, while waterboarding may be banned, sensory deprivation will almost certainly not be. the fact that it violates the War Crimes Act won’t stop them. Here is an excerpt:
If waterboarding goes the way of the Iron Maiden, what “tough” techniques will the CIA use on its high-value detainees?
The answer is most likely a measure long favored by the CIA — sensory deprivation. The benign-sounding form of psychological coercion has been considered effective for most of the life of the agency, and its slippery definition might allow it to squeeze through loopholes in a law that seeks to ban prisoner abuse. Interviews with former CIA officials and experts on interrogation suggest that it is an obvious choice for interrogators newly constrained by law. The technique has already been employed during the “war on terror,” and, Salon has learned, was apparently used on 14 high-value detainees now held at Guantánamo Bay….
Sensory deprivation, as CIA research and other agency interrogation materials demonstrate, is a remarkably simple concept. It can be inflicted by immobilizing individuals in small, soundproof rooms and fitting them with blacked-out goggles and earmuffs. “The first thing that happens is extraordinary hallucinations akin to mescaline,” explained McCoy. “I mean extreme hallucinations” of sight and sound. It is followed, in some cases within just two days, by what McCoy called a “breakdown akin to psychosis.”
It is therefore as insidious as some forms of obviously abusive coercion that are likely to be forbidden under the new CIA rules, like waterboarding, the technique of strapping a subject to a board with his feet raised and pouring water on his face to produce a sensation of imminent death. Legally, however, sensory deprivation is more nebulous than physical abuse, and that is what worries human rights advocates.
“People finally came to an understanding of what waterboarding really was, and once that happened, it was no longer sustainable,” noted Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First. Just like waterboarding, Massimino said, extreme sensory deprivation techniques “push people beyond the brink of what they can bear, physically and mentally. Once you understand that, the veneer of acceptability — the myth that ‘it’s not torture, it’s just harsh’ — completely falls apart.” But compared to the outcry over physical torture, she described a “deafening silence” about techniques like sensory deprivation.
The issue, said Massimino, is that sensory deprivation is relative — she compared it to a “rheostat.” Former CIA executive director Krongard made the same point about sensory deprivation’s variability, saying that the techniques exist on a spectrum. The term could refer to anything from being left alone in a room to being subjected to complex get-ups combining goggles, earmuffs, mittens and darkened cells that quickly drive subjects into psychotic states.
Benjamin digs into the sordid history of the CIA’s development of these techniques:
But the CIA’s reliance on sensory deprivation goes all the way back to the early days of the Cold War. It is a big part of the CIA’s 1963 “KUBARK” interrogation manual, obtained in 1997 by the Baltimore Sun. That agency manual describes sensory deprivation as a central tenet of coercive interrogations. For particularly rapid results, the manual endorses the use of a “cell which has no light (or weak artificial light which never varies), which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc.” Following that plan, the manual says, “induces stress; the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects.” The manual adds, “The subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects.”
The dark world of CIA-sponsored sensory deprivation research is plumbed in depth in the book “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation From the Cold War to the War on Terror,” written by McCoy. “They’ve been doing this for 50 years,” McCoy explained. His book discusses more CIA-sponsored research at McGill by Dr. Donald O. Hebb, who during the same era placed 22 college students in small, sound-proof cubicles, wearing translucent goggles, thick gloves and a U-shaped pillow around the head. Most subjects quit within two days and all experienced hallucinations and “deterioration in the capacity to think systematically.”
The theory behind the CIA’s fascination with sensory deprivation, McCoy said, is that subjects are so starved for stimulation that they will even crave interaction with their interrogator. “The idea is that they break down and then they cling to the interrogator, because you are hungry for stimulus,” McCoy explained.
What do you want to bet that the American Psychological Association, opposed as it claims to be to torture, will not see fit to state opposition to the CIA’s use of radical sensory deprivation? After all, they have not seen fit, as far as I’ve seen, to once even mention the government systematic program of psychological torture at Guantanamo, at the CIA black sits, or elsewhere. Being against torture is easy. Even Bush and Gonzalez are against “torture.” Condemning its actual use by our government is quite a different matter. The APA with all its pals in the military and the CIA, has never been bothered to do the latter.
Entry Filed under: APA, Guantanamo, Interrogation, Psychology, Torture, War Crimes