Some of The Program's contradictory cover stories
Topic: SRA/Prisoner abuse
"We have to work the dark side, if you will. We’re going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies." Cheney
"In late 2005, as Senator John McCain was pressing the Bush administration to ban torture techniques, one of the nation's top researchers of stress in SERE trainees claims to have received a call from Samantha Ravitch, the deputy assistant for national security in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. She wanted to know if the researcher had found any evidence that uncontrollable stress would make people more likely to talk." from Rorschach and Awe by Katherine Eban
"Reports have circulated for some time that the Red Cross examination of the CIA’s highly coercive interrogation regime—what President Bush likes to call “The Program”—concluded that it was “tantamount to torture.” But you write that the Red Cross categorically described the program as “torture.” from Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side By Scott Horton
Where there's a BS blizzard, there's something big to hide, and one of the biggest such storms I've ever seen is the one surrounding "enhanced interrogations." They're still coming up with new excuses - one of the latest I've seen is that it's secretly intended to prevent Americans from protesting, as if the typical jailhouse horror stories aren't sufficient. Some of these explanations are good-faith efforts by people who aren't aware of the existence, purpose, and methods of Satanism, and others are intended to distract us from the hideous true motives. They can say anything without evidence, and it's up to us to disprove it, which is impossible, although they often don't pass the smell test. Below, instead of torturing you with my scribbling, I'll just list some of the contradictory claims about The Program and make some comments.
I. a) The claim that EI is very effective and quick vs. the fact that "enemy combatants" are routinely abused for long periods of time
b) The fact that EI is scientific and performed precisely according to certain guidelines vs. the claim that the SRA conducted at Abu Ghraib and other "frat-house from Hell"-prisons is EI
"As the C.I.A. captured and interrogated other Al Qaeda figures, it established a protocol of psychological coercion. The program tied together many strands of the agency’s secret history of Cold War-era experiments in behavioral science. (In June, the C.I.A. declassified long-held secret documents known as the Family Jewels, which shed light on C.I.A. drug experiments on rats and monkeys, and on the infamous case of Frank R. Olson, an agency employee who leaped to his death from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after he was unwittingly drugged with LSD.) [One source I've seen, and might be included below, claims he was murdered for threatening to expose the CIA's lethal "experiments," i.e. torture-murder, an advanced form of SRA.] The C.I.A.’s most useful research focussed on the surprisingly powerful effects of psychological manipulations, such as extreme sensory deprivation [part of the 8th Sphere agenda]. According to Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, who has written a history of the C.I.A.’s experiments in coercing subjects, the agency learned that 'if subjects are confined without light, odors, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked.'
"The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.'" [I agree that actual "enhanced interrogation" (psychological torture) is effective quickly - so why have so many "enemy combatants" been "interrogated" for so long? Perhaps it's necessary to create utter hopelessness in order to have the desired effect.] from The Black Sites by Jane Mayer
"Welshofer has since used the Nuremberg defense -- THAT HE WAS JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS IN COMING UP WITH 'CREATIVE INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES' to make [Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush] talk –- to explain his subsequent actions [which killed Mowhoush]...." [emphasis added - I've often used the phrase "free-form sadism" to describe plain old SRA.] from Tomdispatch: Alfred McCoy on How Not to Ban Torture in Congress
"Instead of the 'old French [advanced SRA] methods' of crude physical torture, most evident among the Saigon police, the Vietnamese, in the words of one CIA trainer, 'had to be re-taught with more sophisticated techniques.' At the provincial enters, however, physical methods continued to prevail, including electric shock, beatings, and rape." from A Question of Torture by Alfred McCoy, p 63 [This is included to show that EI is part of a continuum of SRA, which culminates in torture-murder. However, EI is also intended to serve the 8th Sphere agenda. It's possible that those undergoing EI are forced to listen to actual torture as part of their psychological torture.]
II. EI "works" vs. "doesn't work"
"From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And what they discovered—they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentathol. None of it worked. What worked [for creating the desired form of psychological damage - not brain damage] was very simple behavioral findings...."
[...]
ALFRED McCOY: What they found time and time again is that electroshock didn’t work, and sodium pentathol didn’t work, LSD certainly didn’t work. You scramble the brain. [i.e. it causes brain damage, not the desired fear and loathing of Earth-life required to drive the higher soul into the 8th Sphere]. You got unreliable information. But what did work was the combination of these two rather boring, rather mundane behavioral techniques: sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain. [Note that he only implied that it works as an interrogation technique.] from Democracy Now interview of Prof. Alfred McCoy
However, Prof. McCoy's book A Question of Torture makes no bones about the fact that coercive methods are worse than useless for obtaining reliable information:
p 196: As noted, FBI interrogators found the military's techniques produced little real information and interfered with their own bureau's proven methods of building rapport through long, noncoercive questioning. "The torture of subjects did not lead to any useful intelligence information being extracted," reports James Corum, a professor at the Army Command and General Staff College. "The abusers couldn't even use the old 'ends justify the means' argument, because in the end there was nothing to show but a tremendous propaganda defeat for the United States."
III. The widely known fact that EI causes profound, permanent psychological damage, vs. claims by "trained interrogators" that they didn't know:
In the above-mentioned interview, Prof. McCoy stated that "... people who are involved in treatment tell us [that psychological torture is] far more destructive, [and] does far more lasting damage to the human psyche than does physical torture." His book A Question of Torture states that:
p 9: [Psychological torture is devastating, causing damage that lasts longer than the most brutal forms of physical abuse.] Psychotherapist Otto Doerr-Zegers found that victims suffer "a mistrust bordering on paranoia, and a loss of interest that greatly surpasses anything observed in anxiety disorders." The subject "does not only react to torture with a tiredness of days, weeks, or months, but REMAINS A TIRED HUMAN BEING, relatively uninterested and unable to concentrate."
p 58: [Judge Dimitrios Evrigenis of Greece stated that psychological torture can cause] "the disintegration of an individual's personality, the shattering of his mental and psychological equilibrium and the crushing of his will."
And yet, on 7/24/08, a news article entitled 2002 Justice memo OKs CIA interrogation tactics reported that "The Justice Department in 2002 told the CIA that its interrogators would be safe from prosecution for violations of anti-torture laws if they believed 'in good faith' that harsh techniques used to break prisoners' will would not cause 'prolonged mental harm.'"
IV. Does EI consist of reverse-engineered SERE techniques?
We are told that reverse-engineered SERE techniques form the basis of EI. However, in my opinion, SERE is watered-down EI. Both are mind-war, but in SERE, it's only intended to weed out those with psychological foibles who can't take the heat of Special Forces, whereas EI is intended to destroy the mind of everyone subjected to it. I understand that SERE is being used on an increasingly widespread basis throughout the military, which I think is a big mistake, and possibly part of the program to destroy the US military.
V. More information on the roots of EI
The U.S. Has a History of Using Torture
By Alfred W. McCoy
Posted by fakeapoc
at 9:21 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, July 28, 2008 8:47 AM EDT
A scathing report from the Joint Human Rights Committee (JHRC) warns that the use of "coercive interrogation techniques" may have been officially sanctioned, despite assurances that troops knew they were outlawed...