Looks like there are some MTHRFCKRS in CUBA worse than late revolutionary Fidel Castro...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Torture Techniques used in Guantanamo
Why Torture Techniques Were Used
Many Guantanamo interrogators (including psychologists and psychiatrists) were trained by Survival-Evasion-Resistance-Escape (SERE) instructors, or had experience in the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), which oversaw SERE training. SERE was a program designed to train military personnel who had been caught as Prisoners Of War to withstand torture during interrogation if they were to be caught by a ‘dishonourable enemy’. Military personnel went through a program of beatings, starvation, stress positions, being stripped naked and thrown into small cages for days. The SERE program was established after years of experimentation by the CIA and the other four branches of the U.S. military. Jane Mayer points out that the SERE program was a strange way to try and obtain the ‘truth’ from detainees because it was founded during the Cold War when 36 US air men gave false confessions during the Korean War. Ideas for interrogation also came from the television series ‘24’, which depicted a fictional character torturing detainees to get information about a terrorist plot.
The Senate Armed Services Committee Report outlines how the harsh interrogation techniques came about. See,
‘Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody’; and, Jane Mayer,
‘The Dark Side’, Scribe Publications, Victoria, 2008, p.158; Philippe Sands,
‘Torture Team’, Penguin Books, London, 2008, p.73; and
former soldier put through SERE training, David J. Morris, Empires of the Mind: ‘SERE, Guantánamo, and the Legacies of Torture’, Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2009.
Abu Ghraib- The Connection to Guantanamo
The techniques used at Abu Ghraib were first used at Guantanamo. General Geoffrey Miller was sent to Abu Ghraib to ‘gitmo-ise’ it. The Taguba report found the intentional abuse of detainees by; forcing groups of males to masturbate, forcing male and female detainees into sexually explicit poses for photographing, punching, slapping and kicking detainees, arranging naked male detainees in a pile, a male guard raping a female detainee, writing ‘i am a rapest’ (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have raped a 15 year old fellow detainee then photographing him naked and positioning a naked detainee on an MRE box with a sandbag on his head and attaching wires to his fingers, penis and toes to simulate electric shock, and taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees. See, The Taguba report, ‘Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade’, 2004. Redacted version available from
http://www.npr.org/iraq/2004/prison_abuse_report.pdf; and, Seymour Hersh,
‘Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib’, HarperCollins, New York, 2004; and, David Rose,
‘Guantanamo: America’s War on Human Rights’, Faber & Faber Ltd., London, 2004, p. 82.
The Torture Memos
The memos authorised interrogation techniques that included Attention Grasp, Walling, Facial Hold, Facial Slap (Insult Slap), Cramped Confinement, Wall Standing, Stress Positions, Sleep Deprivation, Insects Placed in Confinement Box; and Waterboarding. These techniques were discussed in the recently leaked International Committee of the Red Cross report which outlined the treatment of 14 ‘high value detainees’.
In one of the memos Steven Bradbury explores the psychological tool of ‘learned helplessness’ and how it is employed to condition detainees through techniques such as ‘nudity’, ‘dietary manipulation’ and ‘sleep deprivation’. This results in a total reliance on their captors for meeting basic human needs. Bradbury noted that sleep deprivation could consist of shackling the prisoner naked and in a ‘diaper’, as long as the diaper is ‘checked regularly’ and that this would not cause “severe physical suffering”.
Read the memos here (46 pages)
http://stream.luxmedia501.com/?file=clients/aclu/olc_05102005_bradbury46pg.pdf&method, here (20 pages)
http://stream.luxmedia501.com/?file=clients/aclu/olc_05102005_bradbury_20pg.pdf&, and here (40 pages)
http://stream.luxmedia501.com/?file=clients/aclu/olc_05302005_bradbury.pdf&method
For a good summary of the memos, see Amnesty International, The ‘Torture Memos’, 4th May, 2009. Available at
http://www.amnesty.org.au/hrs/comments/20923/. The ‘ICRC report on the treatment of fourteen ‘high value detainees in CIA custody’ is available at,
http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf; also see Mark Danner, ‘US Torture: Voices From the Black Sites,
New York Review of Books, 9th April, 2009. Available at,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530. The CIA Inspector General’s Report is available at,
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/documents/cia_oig_report.pdf; or a summary is available here,
http://www.amnesty.org.au/hrs/comments/21585/.