Shock Doctrine Series
Shock Doctrine by
In the fifties, the CIA became interested in Ewen Cameron’s [Scottish-born American citizen] focus on regression – the idea that by depriving people of their sense of who they are and where they are in time and space, adults can be converted into dependent children whose minds are a blank slate of suggestibility. It was the start of Cold War hysteria. There was a growing concern in the Western intelligence community that the Communists had discovered how to “brainwash” prisoners of war. The evidence was the fact that American GIs taken captive in
The agency launched a covert program devoted to researching “special interrogation techniques.” The program examined and investigated numerous unusual techniques of interrogation including psychological harassment and such matters as total isolation as well as the use of drugs and chemicals. First code-named Project Bluebird, the Project Artichoke, it was finally renamed MKUltra in 1953.
The CIA produced a handbook called Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation. The handbook is a 128-page interrogation manual for extracting information from resistant sources that is heavily based on the research commissioned by MKUltra and Ewen Cameron’s and Donald Hebb’s experiments. It was “shock and awe” warfare on the mind. It represents a new age of precise, refined torture – not the gory, inexact torment that had been the standard since the Spanish Inquisition. Prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early-morning raids, as the manual instructs. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation, and the use of electroshock.
In 1966, the CIA sent three psychiatrists to
