CIA: KUBARK's Very Long Shadow (Al Jazeera)
12th August 2012
KUBARKs Very Long Shadow

A recently uncovered FBI primer' document on interrogation techniques cites manuals from the CIA's dark past.

Bt Lisa Hajjar

Al Jazeera, August 10, 2012

Santa Barbara, CA A 2011 FBI "primer" on overseas interrogations, which became public on August 2, 2012, as a result of Freedom of Information Act action taken by the American Civil Liberties Union, repeatedly cites the Central Intelligence Agency's 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation. KUBARK was the code name the CIA used for itself.

The FBI briefing also cites the CIA's 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Manual (Honduras version) which was compiled by sections of KUBARK to train interrogators in the art of obtaining intelligence from "resistant sources". This was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and south-east Asia in the context of the global "war on communism". In the mid-1980s, these manuals became the subject of Congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America. Both became public in 1997 as a result of FOIA action by the Baltimore Sun.

The FBI primer favourably invokes the KUBARK manual as a resource to illustrate the value of isolation "for several days before you begin interrogation" as well as during the "multi-session, multi-day process" as a means of prolonging a prisoner's fear prior to interrogation. The encouragement of fear-production through isolation is disturbing for (at least) two reasons. First, it indicates that some elements of the CIA's psychological torture model continue to have currency, despite the scandalous record of US prisoner abuse in the "war on terror" and the Obama administration's pledge to end torture.

One of the many victims of the US extraordinary rendition programme, Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was shipped from New York to Syria in 2002, responded to the FBI primer's advocacy of isolation with the following tweets: "That's called torture. I say this from experience. Isolation 4 long time becomes worse than physical beating." "1 thing isolation inflicted on me is that my cognitive skills have been greatly & permanently diminished." And "If u want 2 know what solitary confinement does 2 humans try locking urself in the bathroom 4 only 24hrs. Please tweet about ur findings."

Arar's failed attempt to obtain justice in a US court for the abuses to which he was reportedly subjected by and at the behest of the US government is one of many markers of this nation's refusal to deal seriously with the legacy of torture. No wonder, then, that the FBI section chief in the counterterrorism division who is understood to have written the primer would feel no compulsion not to craft current policy from this unaccountable recent past.

The second disturbing element is the primer author's apparent unawareness or disregard for the ignominious history of KUBARK, and the CIA record more generally. Did he or she never read Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy, or Alfred McCoy's A Question of Torture, or Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine to name but a few of the many studies that detail and critique that history? Since KUBARK continues to be an operable model, it is worth recalling some highlights (or lowlights) of that history in order to put the 2011 primer into context.

KUBARK's shadowy past

41ERaaLvc L BO2204203200 PIsitb sticker arrow clickTopRight35 76 AA300 SH20 OU01 CIA: KUBARKs Very Long Shadow (Al Jazeera)KUBARK was the product of the CIA's "mind control" research programme, which was prompted by the terrible mistreatment of US prisoners of war during the Korean War. Many soldiers who were captured by the North Koreans were beaten, starved, put into forced labour, marched to death, or summarily executed. China, which fought alongside North Korea, also committed war crimes against POWs, but added a new tactic to their repertoire of mistreatment: after starving prisoners into a weakened state, they subjected them to communist indoctrination. That history was immortalised in John Frankenheimer's (1962) political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, which features a character who was "brainwashed" to become an assassin for an international communist conspiracy.

The CIA took a lesson from the Korean War. Fearful that a communist regime might achieve a breakthrough in the art of brainwashing, in 1953 the agency established the MK-ULTRA programme and invested in mind-control research. This began with experiments in hypnosis, electroshock, and hallucinogenic drugs including LSD. The CIA programme evolved into psychological torture, which fuses tactics of sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain (ie: stress position abuse). Unlike beatings and other tactics that violently attack the body, this combination, as McCoy explains, targets the mind and "causes victims to feel responsible for their suffering and thus capitulate more readily to their torturers". The 1963 KUBARK manual explains the purposes and uses of various combinations of tactics including isolation that systematically attack all of the human senses to produce effects of "debility, disorientation and dread".

By the late 1950s, the US viewed the conflict in Vietnam as critical to the Cold War goal of containment and rollback of communism. The US started sending forces to South Vietnam in the early 1960s. To root out Southern guerillas (Viet Cong) who were allied with the North, the CIA trained more than 85,000 South Vietnamese police, who operated a network of interrogational torture sites across the country. The CIA developed the Phoenix programme, which typified terroristic torture in its combination of brutal interrogations and extrajudicial executions. Although the Phoenix programme was an intelligence-gathering failure (and more than 26,000 prisoners were either tortured to death or summarily executed), the model lived on.

In the Western Hemisphere, US anxieties about the spread of communism spiked following Fidel Castro's 1959 victory in the Cuban revolutionary war and the installation of a communist government allied to the Soviet Union. The counter-insurgency warfare models honed in Vietnam were transported to Latin America in the 1960s through Project X, a secret training programme of Army Intelligence for militaries and police. The Phoenix programme model was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas.

Starting with Brazil in 1963, right-wing military leaders across Latin America seized power from democratically elected governments, with US encouragement and assistance. Through the School of the Americas and other US institutions (including the philanthropic Ford Foundation), regional military and political leaders were educated about the free market theories of Milton Friedman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago. Friedman and his acolytes, nicknamed the Chicago Boys, were opposed to any state involvement in the economy. They believed that for the market to be truly "free", government regulation of industry, subsidies, and social welfare programmes should end.

The shock doctrine

In The Shock Doctrine, Klein explains how Friedman's fascination with the 1950s CIA-funded research into electric shock therapy to turn individuals' minds into empty slates that could be inscribed with new information (brainwashing) inspired his theories about how whole societies could be shocked to accept (unpopular) free market policies of privatisation, deregulation, and the termination of social programmes. In 1973, Friedman advised Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who had just seized power (with US assistance) from the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, to impose economic shock therapy while Chilean society was in shock from the coup. Thus, Chile became the first place where the Chicago Boys' theories could be applied in the real world.

Those economic shock policies instituted by the Pinochet regime and emulated by other Latin American military dictatorships were a disaster. In the short term, the gutting of public services and popular social welfare programmes sparked unrest as people protested the declining standards of living. Over the longer term, national revenues diminished as multinational corporations bought up de-nationalised industries and transported profits to shareholders abroad. To defend their policies and subdue unrest, these military regimes embarked on national wars against domestic subversives and enemies, which they regarded as part of the West's war against international communism.

In these "dirty wars", the people targeted by the region's military regimes were depicted as traitors and communists, or guilty by association with leftist political movements. As Lawrence Weschler explains in A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers, the doctrine of national security guiding these military regimes was "a fearsome piece of work… The enemy the International Communist Movement is perceived as covertly operating everywhere, all the time, in all fields of human endeavour".

Although it is impossible to know exactly how many people were tortured by these military regimes from the 1960s through the 1980s, experts estimate the number between 100,000 and 150,000, tens of thousands of whom were killed. In some countries, following the collapse of these regimes, their records became the subject of investigations and published reports that took as their titles "never again". Since 1990, a number of leaders of the former military regimes have faced prosecution for torture and other crimes committed while they were in power.

The US has not had its "never again" reckoning, neither for the historic role of aiding other countries in their torture nor for our own history of torture. The FBI, which distinguished itself during the Bush years for refusing to cooperate with the CIA when illegal (and ineffective) tactics were used in the interrogation of prisoners, has now, apparently, decided to embrace some of the measures it had repudiated not long ago.

Lisa Hajjar is a professor of sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara. her research and writing focus on the laws of war and conflict, human rights, and torture. She is the author of Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza.

She is also co-editor of Jadaliyya and serves on the editorial committees of Middle East Report and Journal of Palestine Studies. Hajjar is currently working on a book about anti-torture lawyering in the US.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion...92843.html

The "primer" itself can be downloaded from http://www.aclu.org/files/fbimappingfoia...036782.pdf


From http://www.aclu.org/blog/human-rights-na...-isolation :

FBI Interrogation Primer Encourages Prisoner Isolation

By Devon Chaffee, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:31am
Today, the ACLU released a 2011 FBI "primer" on overseas interrogation that calls into question whether the FBI is adhering to its own policy prohibiting coercive techniques. The 2011 primer was obtained by the ACLU and colleague organizations through Freedom of Information Act litigation. It was written by an FBI Section Chief within the counterterrorism division, and is ironically titled "Cross Cultural, Rapport-Based Interrogation," ironic because it encourages FBI agents to request that detainees in foreign or military custody be put in isolation to prolong the detainee's fear for interrogation purposes. Isolation was a key component to many of the abusive interrogations that took place in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and in secret CIA black sites after 9/11, in some cases causing extreme psychological trauma. This morning, we wrote to the FBI Director Robert Mueller expressing their concerns with the primer.
The 2011 FBI primer recommends that FBI agents ask the detaining authority to isolate a detainee "several days before you begin interrogation" as well as during the "multi-session, multi-day [interrogation] process." The primer also repeatedly cites and encourages FBI interrogators to read the 1963 CIA KUBARK manual, a highly controversial document long disavowed and disparaged for its promotion of severe prisoner abuse, including through the use of isolation. Even the KUBARK manual explicitly recognizes the use of isolation in interrogation as a "coercive technique" with profound psychological effects, such as hallucinations and delusions.
The use of isolation as described in the 2011 FBI primer would appear to violate FBI policy. The FBI's special agents' handbook explicitly recognizes isolation for interrogation purposes as a form of coercion. During the Bush administration, when FBI agents appeared confused about whether or how isolation could be used for interrogation purposes at Guantanamo, senior FBI officials clarified that it was impermissible and that they should avoid even being consulted on such decisions. Such advice is consistent with U.S. Supreme Court precedent that identifies the use of isolation as an indicator of coercive interrogation and notes the "inevitable disquietude and fears" that isolation engenders.
FBI agents should not be asking foreign governments or other agencies to engage in conduct that FBI agents are prohibited from engaging in. This is especially true when that conductlike the use of isolation interrogationraises serious human rights concerns and could lead to violations of international and domestic law.
Recognition of the harmful impact of isolation on the physical and mental wellbeing of prisoners has recently led both the U.S. Senate and the United Nations to more carefully scrutinize the use of solitary confinement. Scientific studies demonstrate that even short-term isolation can have profound negative psychological impact, including severe anxiety, hallucinations and an inability to concentrate.
Today's letter urges Director Mueller to make clear that FBI policy does not permit the use of isolation in interrogation. The letter also urged the FBI to immediately cease using the primer, investigate how it came to be used, and to provide remedial training for any agents previously provided the primer. The FBI must send an unequivocal message to its agents and its international partners that it is committed to non-coercive interrogations and will not tolerate prisoner abuse.

Why can't we see this government document in full?

Quote:

You'll Never Guess Where This FBI Agent Left a Secret Interrogation Manual

"Security screwups are not very uncommon. But this is a first."

By Nick Baumann
| Fri Dec. 20, 2013 3:00 AM GMT


In a lapse that national security experts call baffling, a high-ranking FBI agent filed a sensitive internal manual detailing the bureau's secret interrogation procedures with the Library of Congress, where anyone with a library card can read it.
For years, the American Civil Liberties Union fought a legal battle to force the FBI to release a range of documents concerning FBI guidelines, including this one, which covers the practices agents are supposed to employ when questioning suspects. Through all this, unbeknownst to the ACLU and the FBI, the manual sat in a government archive open to the public. When the FBI finally relented and provided the ACLU a version of the interrogation guidebook last year, it was heavily redacted; entire pages were blacked out. But the version available at the Library of Congress, which a Mother Jones reporter reviewed last week, contains no redactions.
The 70-plus-page manual ended up in the Library of Congress, thanks to its author, an FBI official who made an unexplainable mistake. This FBI supervisory special agent, who once worked as a unit chief in the FBI's counterterrorism division, registered a copyright for the manual in 2010 and deposited a copy with the US Copyright Office, where members of the public can inspect it upon request. What's particularly strange about this episode is that government documents cannot be copyrighted.
"A document that has not been released does not even need a copyright," says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. "Who is going to plagiarize from it? Even if you wanted to, you couldn't violate the copyright because you don't have the document. It isn't available."
"The whole thing is a comedy of errors," he adds. "It sounds like gross incompetence and ignorance."
Julian Sanchez, a fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute who has studied copyright policy, was harsher: "Do they not cover this in orientation? [Sensitive] documents should not be placed in public repositoriesand, by the way, aren't copyrightable. How do you even get a clearance without knowing this stuff?"

The FBI agent who registered for the copyright did so under his own nameeffectively claiming the rights for himself, not the FBI. An FBI spokesman told Mother Jones the bureau has been made aware of the matter but "cannot provide any further information at this time regarding this subject."
The version of the interrogation manual the agent deposited with the copyright office is dated August 18, 2008, but it wasn't filed until January 2010. The redacted version released to the ACLU is dated February 23, 2011.
Because the two versions are similar, a side-by-side comparison allows a reader to deduce what was redacted in the later version. The copyright office does not allow readers to take pictures or notes, but during a brief inspection, a few redactions stood out.
The ACLU has previously criticized the interrogation manual for endorsing the isolation of detainees and including favorable references to the KUBARK manual, a 1963 CIA interrogation guidebook that encouraged torture methods, including electric shocks. The group has also expressed concern that the manual adopts aspects of the Reid Technique, a common law enforcement interview method that has been known to produce false confessions. A redacted sentence in the manual says the document is intended for use by the FBI's "clean" teamsinvestigators who collect information intended for use in federal prosecutions. That raises the question of whether teams collecting information that's not for use in federal courts would have to follow the manual's (already permissive) guidelines at all.
Another section, blacked out in the version provided to the ACLU, encourages FBI agents to stage a "date-stamped full-body picture" of a detainee, complete with a bottle of water, for use in refuting abuse allegations at trial.
Yet the most eyebrow-raising thing about the unredacted version may be that it was available for public consumption for years. The inadvertent release of sensitive information "is not supposed to happen but it does," Aftergood says. "Security screwups are not very uncommon. But this is a first."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013...ed-secrets