Shock Doctrine Series

Rumsfeld approved a series of special interrogation practices for use in the War on Terror. The Intelligence Services Board, an advisory arm of the CIA, stated openly that “a careful reading of the Kubark manual is essential for anyone involved in interrogation.” 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.” According to the White House, torture was still banned – but now to qualify as torture, the pain inflicted had to be “equivalent to the intensity of the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure.” 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.

The thousands of prisoners rounded up in the raids were brought to CIA agents, U.S. soldiers and private contractors who conducted aggressive interrogations to find out whatever they could about the resistance. The Green Zone now became a magnet for a different breed of shock experts, those specializing in the darker arts of suppressing resistance movements. The private security companies padded their ranks with veterans of the dirty wars in Columbia, South Africa and Nepal. Blackwater and other private security firms hired more than seven hundred Chilean troops for Iraq deployment, some of whom had trained and served under Pinochet.

One of the highest-ranking shock specialists was the U.S. Commander James Steele, who arrived in Iraq in May 2003. Steele had been a key figure in Central America’s right-wing crusades, where he had served as chief U.S. advisor to several Salvadorian army battalions accused of being death squads. More recently he had been a vice president at Enron and had originally gone to Iraq as an energy consultant. When the resistance rose up, became Bremer’s chief security advisor. Steele was directed to bring to Iraq what was chillingly called “the Salvador Option.”

As resistance mounted, the occupation forces fought back with escalating shock tactics. These came late at night or very early in the morning, with soldiers bursting through doors, shining flashlights into darkened homes, shouting in English, men’s heads were forcibly bagged before they were thrown into army trucks and sped to prisons and holding camps. In the first three and half years of occupation, an estimated 61,500 Iraqis were captured and imprisoned by U.S. forces, usually with methods designed to “maximize capture shock.” Inside the prisons, more shocks followed: buckets of freezing water; snarling, teeth-baring German shepherds; punching and kicking; and sometimes the shock of electrical currents funning from live wires, incidents documented in the infamous Abu Ghraid photographs. Another Sergeant told of a prison on a military base called Tiger, near al Qaim, close to the Syrian border.

Congress approved the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Although the White House used the new bill to claim that it had renounced all use of torture, it left huge holes allowing CIA agents and contractors to continue to use Kubark-style sensory deprivation and overload, as well as other “creative” techniques including simulated drowning [‘water-boarding”].

Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006, Edited Excerpts

Philippine War, 1901: Newspaper reporters sought out returned veterans and from their accounts learned that American soldiers in the Philippines had resorted to all manner of torture. The most notorious was the “water cure,” in which sections of bamboo were forced down the throats of prisoners and then used to fill the prisoners’ stomachs with dirty water until they swelled in torment. Soldiers would jump on the prisoner’s stomach to force the water out, often repeating the process until the victim either informed or died.

Abu Ghraid: Google it.

Waterboarding Instructions:  Youtube it. 

Medieval Waterboarding – Tormento del Agua

Medieval Torture in Art

http://www.romeartlover.it/Torture.html