[NYTr] Bush Reich Has Globalized CIA's Formerly Latin-American Torture Practices

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Toms Dispatch.com - Dec 11, 2007
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174873/greg_grandin_on_the_torturable_and_the_untorturable


Greg Grandin, On the Torturable and the Untorturable

Introduction by Tom Englehardt

In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, reporter Siobhan Gorman offered a
striking little portrait of Jose A. Rodriguez, who, in 2005, as chief
of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, ordered the destruction of
those "hundreds of hours" of CIA videotapes of the…

Now, what do we want to call it? Gorman refers to "extreme techniques"
of interrogation (putting the two words in quotes), then repeats the
phrase a second time later in the piece without the quotes: "…
[Rodriguez] took a careful approach to controversial practices such as
renditions -- sending detainees to countries that use more extreme
interrogation methods…"). In this mini-portrait of Rodriguez, as
painted by his colleagues, and of the disappeared videos, the word
"torture" is never used, but don't blame Gorman. As Greg Mitchell of
Editor & Publisher pointed out recently, she's hardly alone.

    "One Associated Press article referred simply to 'interrogation' on
the tapes, at one point putting 'enhanced interrogation' in quotes.
Another AP article called it 'harsh interrogation.' Mark Mazzeti in The
New York Times used 'severe interrogation methods.' Eric Lichtblau in
the same paper chose the same phrase. David Johnston, in a Saturday
article for [the] paper's Web site, referred to 'aggressive
interrogations' and 'coercive techniques.' Reuters, in its lead, relied
on 'severe interrogation techniques.' Dan Eggen and Joby Warrick in The
Washington Post on Saturday opted for 'harsh interrogation tactics.'"

Whatever is on those tapes, we've come a long way, baby, since, in
Medieval Times in Europe, waterboarding was crudely known as "the water
torture."

In any case, Rodriguez, according to his colleagues, turns out to be
for the little guy -- or the little torturer, anyway. He supposedly
destroyed those videos so that "lower-level officers would[n't] take
the fall" for the high-level ones who dished out the orders. But
there's a slight catch in the text. What if some higher-level ones
might have been in danger of taking the fall as well?

Here's Gorman's money passage, just dropped into the middle of the
piece without further explanation or discussion: "One former official
said interrogators' faces were visible on at least one video, as were
those of more senior officers who happened to be visiting." Happened?
Visiting? Keep in mind that we're talking about CIA officials in a
torture chamber, not tourists at a local landmark.

Then again, for background, Gorman offers this on Rodriguez: He is, she
writes, "a product of what one former agency colleague called ‘the
rough-and-tumble' Latin American division" of the CIA from the 1980s.
"Rough and tumble"? You won't find out what that means from her column,
but just keep reading this post. In our period, men like Rodriguez,
under the leadership of George W. Bush, have essentially globalized
those "rough and tumble" methods of the CIA's Latin American division.
As Greg Grandin -- whose superb book, "Empire's Workshop: Latin America,
the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism," nails those
"rough-and-tumble" years -- points out, they have turned the "unholy
trinity" that the U.S. developed in Latin America into a global
operation. -Tom

                           ***

The Unholy Trinity

Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture -- from Latin America to
Iraq 

By Greg Grandin

    The world is made up, as Captain Segura in Graham Greene's 1958
novel Our Man in Havana put it, of two classes: the torturable and the
untorturable. "There are people," Segura explained, "who expect to be
tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea."

    Then -- so Greene thought -- Catholics, particularly Latin American
Catholics, were more torturable than Protestants. Now, of course,
Muslims hold that distinction, victims of a globalized network of
offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by Washington and
knitted together by secret flights, concentration camps, and black-site
detention centers. The CIA's deployment of Orwellian "Special Removal
Units" to kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the Middle East,
and elsewhere and the whisking of these "ghost prisoners" off to Third
World countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term "extraordinary
rendition," a hauntingly apt phrase. "To render" means not just to hand
over, but to extract the essence of a thing, as well as to hand out a
verdict and "give in return or retribution" -- good descriptions of
what happens during torture sessions.

    In the decades after Greene wrote Our Man in Havana, Latin
Americans coined an equally resonant word to describe the terror that
had come to reign over most of the continent. Throughout the second
half of the Cold War, Washington's anti-communist allies killed more
than 300,000 civilians, many of whom were simply desaparecido --
"disappeared." The expression was already well known in Latin America
when, on accepting his 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature in Sweden,
Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez reported that the region's
"disappeared number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as
if suddenly no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala."

    When Latin Americans used the word as a verb, they usually did so
in a way considered grammatically incorrect -- in the transitive form
and often in the passive voice, as in "she was disappeared." The
implied (but absent) actor/subject signaled that everybody knew the
government was responsible, even while investing that government with
unspeakable, omnipotent power. The disappeared left behind families and
friends who spent their energies dealing with labyrinthine
bureaucracies, only to be met with silence or told that their missing
relative probably went to Cuba, joined the guerrillas, or ran away with
a lover. The victims were often not the most politically active, but
the most popular, and were generally chosen to ensure that their sudden
absence would generate a chilling ripple-effect.

    An Unholy Trinity

    Like rendition, disappearances can't be carried out without a
synchronized, sophisticated, and increasingly transnational
infrastructure, which, back in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States
was instrumental in creating. In fact, it was in Latin America that the
CIA and U.S. military intelligence agents, working closely with local
allies, first helped put into place the unholy trinity of
government-sponsored terrorism now on display in Iraq and elsewhere:
death squads, disappearances, and torture.

    Death Squads: Clandestine paramilitary units, nominally independent
from established security agencies yet able to draw on the intelligence
and logistical capabilities of those agencies, are the building blocks
for any effective system of state terror. In Latin America, Washington
supported the assassination of suspected Leftists at least as early as
1954, when the CIA successfully carried out a coup in Guatemala, which
ousted a democratically elected president. But its first sustained
sponsorship of death squads started in 1962 in Colombia, a country
which then vied with Vietnam for Washington's attention.

    Having just ended a brutal 10-year civil war, its newly
consolidated political leadership, facing a still unruly peasantry,
turned to the U.S. for help. In 1962, the Kennedy White House sent
General William Yarborough, later better known for being the "Father of
the Green Berets" (as well as for directing domestic military
surveillance of prominent civil-rights activists, including Martin
Luther King Jr.). Yarborough advised the Colombian government to set up
an irregular unit to "execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist
activities against known communist proponents" -- as good a description
of a death squad as any.

    As historian Michael McClintock puts it in his indispensable book
Instruments of Statecraft, Yarborough left behind a "virtual blueprint"
for creating military-directed death squads. This was, thanks to U.S.
aid and training, immediately implemented. The use of such death squads
would become part of what the counterinsurgency theorists of the era
liked to call "counter-terror" -- a concept hard to define since it so
closely mirrored the practices it sought to contest.

    Throughout the 1960s, Latin America and Southeast Asia functioned
as the two primary laboratories for U.S. counterinsurgents, who moved
back and forth between the regions, applying insights and fine-tuning
tactics. By the early 1960s, death-squad executions were a standard
feature of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam, soon to be
consolidated into the infamous Phoenix Program, which between 1968 and
1972 "neutralized" more than 80,000 Vietnamese -- 26,369 of whom were
"permanently eliminated."

    As in Latin America, so too in Vietnam, the point of death squads
was not just to eliminate those thought to be working with the enemy,
but to keep potential rebel sympathizers in a state of fear and
anxiety. To do so, the U.S. Information Service in Saigon provided
thousands of copies of a flyer printed with a ghostly looking eye. The
"terror squads" then deposited that eye on the corpses of those they
murdered or pinned it "on the doors of houses suspected of occasionally
harboring Viet Cong agents." The technique was called "phrasing the
threat" -- a way to generate a word-of-mouth terror buzz.

    In Guatemala, such a tactic started up at roughly the same time.
There, a "white hand" was left on the body of a victim or the door of a
potential one.

    Disappearances: Next up on the counterinsurgency curriculum was
Central America, where, in the 1960s, U.S. advisors helped put into
place the infrastructure needed not just to murder but "disappear"
large numbers of civilians. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution,
Washington had set out to "professionalize" Latin America's security
agencies -- much in the way the Bush administration now works to
"modernize" the intelligence systems of its allies in the President's
"Global War on Terror."

    Then, as now, the goal was to turn lethargic, untrained
intelligence units of limited range into an international network
capable of gathering, analyzing, sharing, and acting on information in
a quick and efficient manner. American advisors helped coordinate the
work of the competing branches of a country's security forces, urging
military men and police officers to overcome differences and cooperate.
Washington supplied phones, teletype machines, radios, cars, guns,
ammunition, surveillance equipment, explosives, cattle prods, cameras,
typewriters, carbon paper, and filing cabinets, while instructing its
apprentices in the latest riot control, record keeping, surveillance,
and mass-arrest techniques.

    In neither El Salvador, nor Guatemala was there even a whiff of
serious rural insurrection when the Green Berets, the CIA, and the U.S.
Agency for International Development began organizing the first
security units that would metastasize into a dense, Central
American-wide network of death-squad paramilitaries.

    Once created, death squads operated under their own colorful names
-- an Eye for an Eye, the Secret Anticommunist Army, the White Hand --
yet were essentially appendages of the very intelligence systems that
Washington either helped create or fortified. As in Vietnam, care was
taken to make sure that paramilitaries appeared to be unaffiliated with
regular forces. To allow for a plausible degree of deniability, the
"elimination of the [enemy] agents must be achieved quickly and
decisively" -- instructs a classic 1964 textbook Counter-Insurgency
Warfare -- "by an organization that must in no way be confused with the
counterinsurgent personnel working to win the support of the
population." But in Central America, by the end of the 1960s, the
bodies were piling so high that even State Department embassy
officials, often kept out of the loop on what their counterparts in the
CIA and the Pentagon were up to, had to admit to the obvious links
between US-backed intelligence services and the death squads.

    Washington, of course, publicly denied its support for
paramilitarism, but the practice of political disappearances took a
great leap forward in Guatemala in 1966 with the birth of a death squad
created, and directly supervised, by U.S. security advisors. Throughout
the first two months of 1966, a combined black-ops unit made up of
police and military officers working under the name "Operation
Clean-Up" -- a term US counterinsurgents would recycle elsewhere in
Latin America -- carried out a number of extrajudicial executions.

    Between March 3rd and 5th of that year, the unit netted its largest
catch. More than 30 Leftists were captured, interrogated, tortured, and
executed. Their bodies were then placed in sacks and dropped into the
Pacific Ocean from U.S.-supplied helicopters. Despite pleas from
Guatemala's archbishop and more than 500 petitions of habeas corpus
filed by relatives, the Guatemalan government and the American Embassy
remained silent on the fate of the executed.

    Over the next two and a half decades, U.S.-funded and trained
Central American security forces would disappear tens of thousands of
citizens and execute hundreds of thousands more. When supporters of the
"War on Terror" advocated the exercise of the "Salvador Option," it was
this slaughter they were talking about.

    Following U.S.-backed coups in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and
Argentina, death squads not only became institutionalized in South
America, they became transnational. Throughout the late 1970s and
1980s, the CIA supported Operation Condor -- an intelligence consortium
established by Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet that
synchronized the activities of many of the continent's security
agencies and orchestrated an international campaign of terror and
murder.

    According to Washington's ambassador to Paraguay, the heads of
these agencies kept "in touch with one another through a U.S.
communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covers all
of Latin America." This allowed them to "co-ordinate intelligence
information among the southern cone countries." Just this month,
Pinochet's security chief General Manuel Contreras, who is serving a
240-year prison term in Chile for a wide-range of human rights
violations, gave a TV interview in which he confirmed that the CIA's
then-Deputy Director, General Vernon Walters (who served under director
George H.W. Bush), was fully informed of the "international activities"
of Condor.

    Torture: Torture is the animating spirit of this triad, the
unholiest of this unholy trinity. In Chile, Pinochet's henchmen killed
or disappeared thousands -- but they tortured tens of thousands. In
Uruguay and Brazil, the state only disappeared a few hundred, but fear
of torture and rape became a way of life, particularly for the
politically engaged. Torture, even more than the disappearances, was
meant not so much to get one person to talk as to get everybody else to
shut up.

    At this point, Washington can no longer deny that its agents in
Latin America facilitated, condoned, and practiced torture. Defectors
from death squads have described the instruction given by their U.S.
tutors, and survivors have testified to the presence of Americans in
their torture sessions. One Pentagon "torture manual" distributed in at
least five Latin American countries described at length "coercive"
procedures designed to "destroy [the] capacity to resist."

    As Naomi Klein and Alfred McCoy have documented in their recent
books, these field manuals were compiled using information gathered
from CIA-commissioned mind control and electric-shock experiments
conducted in the 1950s. Just as the "torture memos" of today's war on
terror parse the difference between "pain" and "severe pain,"
"psychological harm" and "lasting psychological harm," these manuals
went to great lengths to regulate the application of suffering. "The
threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the
immediate sensation of pain," one handbook read.

    "Before all else, you must be efficient," said U.S. police advisor
Dan Mitrione, assassinated by Uruguay's revolutionary Tupamaros in 1970
for training security forces in the finer points of torture. "You must
cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more."
Mitrione taught by demonstration, reportedly torturing to death a
number of homeless people kidnapped off the streets of Montevideo. "We
must control our tempers in any case," he said. "You have to act with
the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of
an artist."

    Florencio Caballero, having escaped from Honduras's notorious
Battalion 316 into exile in Canada in 1986, testified that U.S.
instructors urged him to inflict psychological, not "physical," pain
"to study the fears and weakness of a prisoner." Force the victim to
"stand up," the Americans taught Caballero, "don't let him sleep, keep
him naked and in isolation, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give
him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change
the temperature." Sound familiar?

    Yet, as Abu Ghraib demonstrated so clearly and the destroyed CIA
interrogation videos would undoubtedly have made no less clear,
maintaining a distinction between psychological and physical torture is
not always possible. As one manual conceded, if a suspect does not
respond, then the threat of direct pain "must be carried out." One of
Caballero's victims, Inés Murillo, testified that her captors,
including at least one CIA agent -- his involvement was confirmed in
Senate testimony by the CIA's deputy director -- hung her from the
ceiling naked, forced her to eat dead birds and rats raw, made her
stand for hours without sleep and without being allowed to urinate,
poured freezing water over her at regular intervals for extended
periods, beat her bloody, and applied electric shocks to her body,
including her genitals.

    Anything Goes

    Inés Murillo was definitely a member of Greene's torturable class.
Yet Greene was writing in a more genteel time, when to torture the
wrong person would be, as he put it, as cheeky as a "chauffeur"
sleeping with a "peeress." Today, when it comes to torture, anything
goes.

    Ideologues in the war on terror, like Berkeley law professor John
Yoo, have worked mightily to narrow the definition of what torture is,
thereby expanding possibilities for its application. They have worked
no less hard to increase the number of people throughout the world who
could be subjected to torture -- by defining anyone they cared to
choose as a stateless "enemy combatant," and therefore not protected by
national and international laws banning cruel and inhumane treatment.
Even former Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared himself
potentially torturable, telling a University of Colorado audience
recently that he would be willing to submit to waterboarding "if it
were necessary."

    Things are so freewheeling that Harvard law professor Alan
Dershowitz -- who, at his perch at Harvard would undoubtedly be
outraged if he were to be tortured -- thinks that the practice needs to
be regulated, as if it were a routine medical act. He has suggested
empowering judges to issue "warrants" that would allow interrogators to
insert "sterile needles" underneath finger nails to "to cause
excruciating pain without endangering life."

    Pinochet, who didn't shy away from justifying his actions in the
name of Western Civilization, would never have dreamed of defending
torture as brazenly as has Dick Cheney, backed up by legal theorists
like Yoo. At the same time, revisionist historians, like Max Boot, and
pundits, like the Atlantic Monthly's Robert Kaplan, rewrite history,
claiming that operations like the Phoenix Program in Vietnam or the
death squads in El Salvador were effective, morally acceptable tactics
and should be emulated in fighting today's "War on Terror."

    But this kind of promiscuity has its risks. In Latin America, the
word "disappeared" came to denote not just victimization but moral
repudiation, as the mothers and children of the disappeared led a
continental movement to restore the rule of law. They provide hope that
one day the world-wide network of repression assembled by the Bush
administration will be as discredited as Operation Condor is today in
Latin America. As Greene wrote half a century ago, on the eve of the
fall of another famous torturer, Cuba's Fulgencio Batista, "it is a
real danger for everyone when what is shocking changes."


[Greg Grandin is the author of a number of books, most recently
Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of
the New Imperialism. He teaches history at NYU.]

Copyright 2007 Greg Grandin