Well, isn't this deeply disturbing?

[kandrathe]

When I was at University as a part of my Latin American studies courses I read some materials of the CIA and DIA on interrogation (torture) techniques. This is one American who believes that it is time for us to walk the talk that Bush proclaims for what "American" means in the way we treat other human beings. It's just some of the things I've heard about the treatment at Abu Ghraib rang true to what I've read. There are whole chapters devoted to the psychology of nudity and sexual abuse in interrogation.

School of the America's Watch

I'm not saying that we definately have a policy of torture, just that we do not distance ourselves from it enough, or clearly condemn it enough.

Excerpt describing subsequent reworks of the CIA's KUBARK manual;

The two recently declassified CIA manuals make even more chilling reading. The CIA had written KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation in 1963 for use by US agents against perceived Soviet subversion. (KUBARK was the CIA's code name for itself. ) While it was not intended to train foreign military services, its successor, Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual --- 1983, which drew heavily on material in KUBARK, was used in at least seven US training courses conducted in Latin American countries between 1982 and 1987, according to a June 1988 memo placed inside the manual. This 1983 manual originally surfaced in response to a June 1988 congressional hearing which was prompted by allegations by the New York Times that the US had taught Honduran military officers who used torture. The 1988 hearing was not the first time such manuals had surfaced. In 1984, a CIA manual for training the Nicaraguan Contras in psychological operations created a considerable scandal.

These two CIA textbooks deal exclusively with interrogation and devote an entire chapter each to "coercive techniques." Human Resource Exploitation recommends surprising suspects in the predawn hours, arresting, blindfolding, and stripping them naked. Suspects should be held incommunicado, it advises, and deprived of normal routines in eating and sleeping. Interrogation rooms should be windowless, sound proof, dark, and without toilets. The manuals do admonish that torture techniques can backfire and that the threat of pain is often more effective than pain itself. However, they then go on to describe coercive techniques ''to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist.'' These techniques include prolonged constraint, prolonged exertion, extremes of heat, cold, or moisture, deprivation of food or sleep, disrupting routines, solitary confinement, threats of pain, deprivation of sensory stimuli, hypnosis, and use of drugs or placebos.