Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

Acknowledgments

x i This work is the culmination of a quarter-century of thinking about torture. Back in 1986, I happened upon this sordid topic, quite by accident, in the aftermath of the P hilippine “people power” revolution. A television producer had hired me as a consultant for a miniseries to research the back stor y behind this world-historic event. My interviews with the colonels whose coup attempt had sparked this mass uprising were intended to be informative, even laudatory. But their remarks soon struck some discordant, even disconcerting notes. Subsequent research into the records of human rights groups revealed that almost all these supposed heroes had served as torturers in the dictatorship they later fought to overthrow. How and why did these once-loyal servants of the state seek to become its master? This troubling paradox set me off on a fifteen-year search for answers that led to a conclusion stark in its simplicity yet complex in its implications. Torture, particularly the psychological variant practiced in the Philippines, was a mutually transformative experience, simultaneously impairing the victim and empowering the perpetrator. In conducting this Philippine research, first published in 1999 as a book titled Closer Than Brothers, I accrued many debts that hav e carried forward into this current project. My host in M anila, Dr. Helen Mendoza, was an unfailing source of support, with contacts that opened doors acr oss this vast city. The country’s top journalists were well informed and enormously helpful , notably Melinda de Jesus, Marites Dañguilan-Vitug, and Sheila Coronel. When this book was done, I tried to put this tr oubling topic behind me and move on to another subject—biography, photography, anything but torture . As it turned out, I may hav e been done with tor ture, but the tor ture issue was not yet done with me. At a conference on human rights violations at Capetown, South Africa, in 2000, our convener Leigh Payne asked me to turn Acknowledgments x i i A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s the analytical lens away fr om the developing world and focus on America, particularly the U.S. government’s tolerance of torture by its Cold War allies. So I drafted a paper that would become, in time, the seed for this book. Since this was a controversial topic, I was nervous about my paper’s reception before an audience of human rights exper ts gathered at historic Robben Island, the prison wher e Nelson Mandela had been held for eighteen y ears. When I finished this presentation about the CIA’s global propagation of torture techniques during the Cold War, my Wisconsin colleague Steve Stern responded: “You mean to say these dictators in Latin America and else where couldn’t even figure out how to torture on their own?” The sharpness of this response from the leading historian of human rights abuse under G eneral Pinochet gave me pause, making me realize both the significance of my argument and the need for its clarification. We are not, I replied, talking about the simple physical abuse that comes naturally to any military regime, but instead a sophisticated psychological doctrine developed by leading cognitive scientists and propagated globally by the world’s most powerful covert agency. Two other Wisconsin colleagues present, Kesenija Bilbija and Jo Ellen Fair, joined in that discussion which lies, ev en now twelve years later, at the core of the inquiry that produced this book. Yet I held back, reluctant to pursue this project. Any academic book takes a decade and I was unwilling to spend another living with and thinking about this depressing dimension of human society. After all, the Cold War was over and the CIA’s role in propagating psychological torture was fast fading into the past. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I n the months following 9/11, I was troubled to hear politicians and media commentators arguing that torture was necessary, even imperative for our nation ’s security, seemingly unaware of the lasting damage torture does to any modern society. Three years later, when CBS Television broadcast those famous photos from Abu Ghraib, I could see the telltale signs of the CIA’s basic psychological torture techniques in every frame. With knowledge comes responsibility, and I felt compelled to resume my work on this troubling topic—to trace the connections between these recent events and the history I knew...