Professor Alfred McCoy, noted historian and expert on the CIA, on the Guantanamo suicides:
Guantanamo is not a conventional military prison. It's an ad hoc laboratory for the perfection of the CIA psychological torture. Guantanamo is a complete construction. It's a system of total psychological torture, designed to break down every detainee contained therein, designed to produce a state of hopelessness and despair that leads, tragically, sadly in this case to suicide.
Torture is a very reliable means of destroying a prisoner psychological. It is, however, a very poor means of obtaining information. Friedrich Spee wrote in 1631, "If all of us have not confessed ourself witches, that is only because we have not all been tortured." And if all of us have not confessed to being terrorists it is for the same reason.
Guantanamo is not a conventional military prison. It's an ad hoc laboratory for the perfection of the CIA psychological torture. Guantanamo is a complete construction. It's a system of total psychological torture, designed to break down every detainee contained therein, designed to produce a state of hopelessness and despair that leads, tragically, sadly in this case to suicide.
Torture is a very reliable means of destroying a prisoner psychological. It is, however, a very poor means of obtaining information. Friedrich Spee wrote in 1631, "If all of us have not confessed ourself witches, that is only because we have not all been tortured." And if all of us have not confessed to being terrorists it is for the same reason.
posted by gary at 9:28 PM
3 Comments:
thanks for reminding me about this important article that i had forgotten about. Indeed, the existence of this camp and the others no doubt like it presents the horrifying prospect that knowlege gained in the mind control techniques/chemical/etc. may find its way beyond military commanders into private neocon "left behind" types
k&y send --
indeed. excellent point. we had the pleasure of attending a real course on police questioning and can confirm partly from that that to confuse torture with a way of obtaining information is an ifnorant error on the order of confusing flapping your arms with a means of flight. as a matter of fact, the almost universal standard operating procedure for getting someone to talk is softening, not brutally reinforcing their every belief about sadistic jews and their inhuman crusader proxies.
the nazis has a castle in wwii to which american prisoners of war of the sergeant ranks were sent; it was guarded and staffed entirely by friendly german sergeants with visible reasons for rejection from the front, like peg legs or missing fingers.
for a few weeks you played ping-pong or shuffleboard there with hans (who insisted on first name basis), reassured of the low priority of this forgotten place, and if you've been in the military you see where this is going.
the most natural impulse to the military man, wound tighter into the soul than sex or love of country, is simultaneously whining and boasting about work. but interviewed decades later the former guests insisted they had never given information -- because they had never cracked under torture. and indeed there are lots of people who do not crack under this supposed informational magic bullet.
extreme isolation and sensory deprivation have only one purpose. to cause a person to become schizhoid, hallucinate and break the human mind
google research on sensory deprivation and the effects it causes over time
Post a Comment
<< Home