Jeff Stein reports: “The CIA,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, had “historical experience using coercive forms of interrogation.” Indeed, it had plenty, said the committee’s report released Tuesday: about 50 years’ worth. Deep in the committee’s 500-page summary of a still-classified 6,700-page report on the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” after 9/11 there is a brief reference to KUBARK, the code name for a 1963 instruction manual on interrogation, which was used on subjects ranging from suspected Soviet double agents to Latin American dissidents and guerrillas.
The techniques will sound familiar to anybody who has followed the raging debate over interrogation techniques adopted by the CIA to break Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons around the world. When the going got tough, the CIA got rough.
The 1963 KUBARK manual included the “principal coercive techniques of interrogation: arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis and induced regression,” the committee wrote. [Continue reading…]
I was in the Royal Air Force in 1962 and took part in escape and evasion exercises with the USAF. If captured, the enhanced interrogations resembles what later happened in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other dark sites. It seemed fun at the time, because it was staged, however “real,” but this pseudo science became rehashed later by the Cheney deep administration as appropriate and legal. According to the Feinstein report, it is neither, nor was it effective, other than to besmirch America’s standing for moral decency.
The adolescent crew that cooked up this rehash of Cold War “preparation for Soviet interrogation techniques” but who had reversed it to rack out the truth need to be separated from the intelligence heart of this nation. Eichman’s defence is not enough for them. Their legal advisors and instigators are another issue. They should do time.