WHY SUCH SURPRISE? ABU GHRAIB IS NOT AN ABERRATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Uruguay 1964-1970

Torture - as American as apple pie

excerpted from the book

Killing Hope
by William Blum



"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.''

The words of an instructor in the art of torture. The words of Dan Mitrione, the head of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Montevideo.

Officially, OPS was a division of the Agency for International Development, but the director of OPS in Washington, Byron Engle, was an old CIA hand. His organization maintained a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under OPS cover, although Mitrione was not one of them.

OPS had been operating formally in Uruguay since 1965, supplying the police with the equipment, the arms, and the training it was created to do. Four years later, when Mitrione arrived, the Uruguayans had a special need for OPS services. The country was in the midst of a long-running economic decline, its once-heralded prosperity and democracy sinking fast toward the level of its South American neighbors. Labor strikes, student demonstrations, and militant street violence had become normal events during the past year, and, most worrisome to the Uruguayan authorities, there were the revolutionaries who called themselves Tupamaros. Perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful and most sophisticated urban guerrillas the world has ever seen, the Tupamaros had a deft touch for capturing the public's imagination with outrageous actions, and winning sympathizers with their Robin Hood philosophy. Their members and secret partisans held key positions in the government, banks, universities, and the professions, as well as in the military and police.

...

Back in Mitrione's home town of Richmond, Indiana, Secretary of State William Rogers and President Nixon's son-in-law David Eisenhower attended the funeral for Mitrione, the city's former police chief. Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis came to town to stage a benefit show for Mitrione's family.

And White House spokesman, Ron Ziegler, solemnly stated that "Mr. Mitrione's devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere.''

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Uruguay_KH.html

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons

Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?

By Deborah Davies

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.

The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. ‘Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.’

If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.

...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm

Routine and systematic torture is at the heart of America's war on terror

That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its "war on terror" can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human-rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay. This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain "stress positions", and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions. Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: "stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation". The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position - maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.

In the fight against cruelty, barbarism and extremism, America has embraced the very evils it claims to confront

George Monbiot
Tuesday December 12, 2006
The Guardian

After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.



Last week, defence lawyers acting for José Padilla, a US citizen detained as an "enemy combatant", released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk - taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0%2C%2C1970086%2C00.html


Water torture being used by USA personell in the Vietnam war.

Photo from the War Remnants Museum, Saigon, Vietnam

[xchrom]

1. america has issues with selective memory. nt

[JohnyCanuck]

2. Vets Tell True Stories of the Terror War

Three-Stomp Blues: Vets Tell True Stories of the Terror War
Written by Chris Floyd
Monday, 03 March 2008

I. Absence of Evidence
There are many things that the American people are forbidden to know by the immensely profitable organizations that control the dispensing of information in the United States. Some things will simply not be reported, others will be distorted or sugar-coated or shellacked with fabrications until they bear only the most tangential connection to the actual events being "reported."

One of the most forbidden topics of all, of course, is the savage reality of the conflicts being fought in the name of the so-called "War on Terror." This global war – launched solely to advance a long-held, openly acknowledged militarist agenda of global domination by an authoritarian, lawless elite – has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent people, while corrupting and brutalizing the soldiers ordered, under knowingly false pretenses, to carry out the Dominators' sinister agenda. But the full story – and full force – of the crimes being committed every day in America's name, by American forces, at the command of America's leaders, are hidden from the American public by the American media. It is entirely possible to live your entire life as an active, engaged member of American society, diligently keeping up with the latest news from the most respectable sources, and never once have to confront this horrifying truth. The information-dispensers will not provide it for you; you have to seek it out yourself.

Fortunately, British newspapers still retain vestiges of a more active, unblinking journalism. (Although these remnants are fast disappearing, as Nick Davies notes in his grim but accurate survey of the UK press, Flat Earth News.) This week the Sunday Times gave a display of this dying art, in a remarkable report about the Iraq Veterans Against the War, and their preparations for another "Winter Soldier" gathering next week, echoing the landmark 1971 conference of disillusioned Vietnam Veterans. As the paper notes, veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan will hold a four-day conference in Washington, beginning on March 13, where they "will testify about their experiences…. present photographs and videos, recorded with mobile phones and digital cameras, to back up their allegations – of brutality, torture and murder."

SNIP

Jason Washburn…fought in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 where, he says, he met little resistance. Most people were surrendering. "There were massive amounts of artillery strikes before we even invaded. We saw the results of that. Streets full of bodies – women and children – body parts, extremely indiscriminate. I’m talking about rolling through villages here, not military encampments."

He was told there was a military structure in one village. “I didn’t see it. I didn’t see any army uniforms. Or weapons. All I saw were civilians.”

http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1446/135/

[gmudem]

3. Naomi Klein talks about Mitrione in The Shock Doctrine

She only talks about him briefly, but I can't imagine how much shit this guy was involved in.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

4. Here's an intro

....

Remember Dan Mitrione, kidnapped and killed by Uruguay's Tupamaros and
portrayed by Yves Montand in Costa-Gavras's film State of Siege? In
the late 1960s Mitrione worked for the US Office of Public Safety,
part of the Agency for International Development. In Brazil, so A.J.
Langguth (a former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon) related in
his book Hidden Terrors, Mitrione was among the US advisers teaching
Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply to prisoners without
killing them. In Uruguay, according to the former chief of police
intelligence, Mitrione helped "professionalize" torture as a routine
measure and advised on psychological techniques such as playing tapes
of women and children screaming that the prisoner's family was being
tortured.

In the months after the 9/11/01 attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon, "truth drugs" were hailed by some columnists such as
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter for use in the war against Al Qaeda. This
was an enthusiasm shared by the US Navy after the war against Hitler,
when its intelligence officers got on the trail of Dr. Kurt Plotner's
research into "truth serums" at Dachau. Plotner gave Jewish and
Russian prisoners high doses of mescaline and then observed their
behavior, in which they expressed hatred for their guards and made
confessional statements about their own psychological makeup.

As part of its larger MK-ULTRA project the CIA gave money to Dr. Ewen
Cameron, at McGill University. Cameron was a pioneer in the
sensory-deprivation techniques. Cameron once locked up a woman in a
small white box for thirty-five days, deprived of light, smell and
sound. The CIA doctors were amazed at this dose, knowing that their
own experiments with a sensory-deprivation tank in 1955 had induced
severe psychological reactions in less than forty hours. Start
torturing, and it's easy to get carried away.

...

http://an-archos.com/pipermail/heidegger_an-archos.com/2004-May/022167.html">LINK

[madrchsod]

5. water torture was used in the Philippine war....

[bobthedrummer]

6. "ARTICHOKE is the Agency cryptonym for the study and/or use of

'special' interrogation methods and techniques. These 'special' interrogation methods have been known to include the use of drugs and chemicals, hypnosis, and 'total isolation' a form of psychological harassment."

That is the opening paragraph of an internal CIA memo dated January 31, 1975. Project ARTICHOKE was one of many mind control projects that morphed into the militarization of neuroscience and is torture.

This internal CIA memo is a good starting point about the rich history of a lot of subjects that have been denied because everyone knows that we don't torture, only lunatics believe in mind control and the professions/technology involved in the neurosciences were never militarized.

Below is the pdf of the January 31, 1975 ARTICHOKE memo retained by The National Security Archive as Electronic Briefing Book 54

"MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD Subject: Project ARTICHOKE"
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB54/st02.pdf

As these early mind control projects continued forms of torture were developed that did not involve the use of physical violence.

I started a still active thread in Editorials and Other Articles based on a Cheryl Welsh article published in January that documents some of the torture techniques and tactics that came from ARTICHOKE and other mind control programs-techniques used in the world-wide secret prisons of those who are extraordinarily rendered as well as at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and Bagram. Some of these techniques are used in and on America's prison population of 2.3 million and in many private facilities.

Below is the link to that active thread.

"In Contravention of Conventional Wisdom: CIA 'no touch' torture" (started 1-24-2008)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x333974

We don't torture, only paranoid nuts talk about mind control, there never has been any US military interest in the neurosciences-such talk comes from those that hate HOMELAND (tm) and its Decider.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

7. Kicking