[Ppnews] They’re “Slow-Torturing” Bradley Manning Right Under Our Noses

[Political Prisoner News]

They're "Slow-Torturing" Bradley Manning Right Under Our Noses

Created 12/24/2010 - 17:38
by: John Grant
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/367

On December 18, David House, an MIT researcher, visited Bradley 
Manning at the Quantico, Virginia, military prison where he is being 
held in solitary confinement. Other than Manning's attorney, House is 
the rare person allowed to visit him.

<http://my.firedoglake.com/blog/2010/12/23/bradley-manning-speaks-about-his-conditions/>House's 
report [1] is quite thorough in pointing out instances where the 
military authorities are lying -- or to use philosopher Harry 
Frankfurt's formulation, "bullshitting" -- about how the 23-year-old 
Army intelligence worker is being treated.

Here's some of psychologist 
<http://my.firedoglake.com/valtin/2010/12/22/bradley-manning-and-the-torture-that-is-solitary-confinement/>Dr. 
Jeffrey Kaye's comment [2] on House's report:

"The human nervous system needs a certain amount of sensory and 
social stimulation to retain normal brain functioning. ... From what 
can be ascertained, the effects of solitary confinement are having 
some effects already on Bradley Manning. His concentration and 
thinking processes appear somewhat slowed. He avoids certain topics. 
He has little access to humor. His color is pale, and his musculature 
is starting to look soft and flabby."

There is, unfortunately, a long and sordid history behind this kind 
of "slow torture," and the use of it should be a battleground for all 
Americans still interested in compassion, fairness and justice.

(Iraq infantry veteran Josh Stieber, in the photo above, was a member 
of the ground unit shown cleaning up after the Apache strike released 
by WikiLeaks as "Collateral Murder" that showed two Reuters 
videographers being gunned down, plus two kids being wounded.)

In his book A Question Of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold 
War to the War On Terror, Alfred McCoy connects decades and billions 
of dollars of "black" US torture research with the current 
sophisticated techniques Global War On Terror jailers are using to 
torture human beings without laying a finger on them.

The key is absolute control -- and time. These are clearly the 
methods now being employed against Manning, who is accused of leaking 
the WikiLeaks material. The question is, given Manning's high-profile 
status, do his jailers at the Quantico, Virginia, military facility 
have the necessary control and time to really scramble young 
Manning's mind? And what are they after: his mental breakdown and/or 
his giving up of larger prey like Julian Assange?

House's account from his visit with Manning suggests Manning's 
jailers, within the limitations they have, are doing their best to 
break Manning psychologically, Their primary limitation is the 
publicity surrounding the Manning case and the fact he has a strong, 
and hopefully growing, support network.

Some of the restrictions House reports would be quite absurd if they 
didn't make such sense as slow torture tactics.

Guards apparently enter Manning's cell and physically prevent him 
from doing exercises, which he is permitted to do only for one hour a 
day -- and that amounts to walking around in a circle in leg irons. 
He is not permitted any personal items in his cell. His clothes are 
confiscated at night and he must sleep in boxer shorts under a very 
heavy, scratchy blanket that causes carpet burns on his skin if he 
moves too much. A light always shines brightly into his cell, and he 
is checked on periodically all night by guards, who often enter his 
cell and wake him. This is his life day-in-day-out.

The fact Manning's jailers are compelled to allow people like House 
into the prison to talk with Manning makes "slow torture" that much 
more difficult, since absolute control and the exclusion of human 
contact are the keys to effective slow torture. Strong advocacy and 
loud public support can be life-savers.

During the mid-2000s, in the case of American citizen Jose Padilla, 
an entire wing of the South Carolina military brig he was imprisoned 
in was expensively re-designed for the special requirements 
("theater") of his incarceration/interrogation. From the moment of 
his arrest for planning a "dirty bomb" attack Padilla was a pariah. 
He reportedly went three years with absolutely no contact from 
family, friends or lawyers. His only human contact was his 
interrogators. By the time of his trial for charges unrelated to 
those he was arrested for he was a walking zombie.

Here's how Alfred McCoy describes the process:

"(S)ensory deprivation has evolved into a total assault on all sense 
and sensibilities - auditory, visual, tactile, temporal, temperature, 
survival, sexual, and cultural. Refined through years of practice, 
the method relies on simple, even banal procedures -- isolation, 
standing, heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence -- for a 
systematic attack on all human senses."

Over decades, CIA research delved into the ways these techniques 
create "a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a 
hammer-blow to the fundamentals of personal identity."

McCoy quotes Otto Doerr-Zegers, a psychologist who treated torture 
victims of the regime of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet, where 
victims suffered "a loss of interest that greatly surpasses anything 
observed in anxiety disorders." The subject, Doerr-Zegers reported, 
"does not only react to torture with a tiredness of days, weeks or 
months, but remains a tired human being, relatively uninterested and 
unable to concentrate." Doerr-Zegers discovered that "the 
psychological component of torture becomes a kind of total theater, a 
constructed unreality of lies and inversion, in a plot that ends 
inexorably with the victim's self-betrayal and destruction."

Over decades, with their secret, black budget tax resources, the CIA 
contracted university professors and psychology departments in the US 
and Canada to analyze and break down the sensory deprivation process. 
The goal for the CIA was to achieve the psychic destruction 
Doerr-Zeger spoke about without resorting to the crude and atavistic 
methods of physical torture. They discovered that parrot's perches 
and thumb screws were not needed. The goal was a form of "no touch" 
psychological ju-jitsu in which the victim's own internal make-up 
could be manipulated and leveraged so that over time the victim 
effectively destroyed himself or herself.

"Once the CIA completed its research into no-touch torture," McCoy 
writes, "application of the method was codified in the curiously 
named Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual in 1963. The 
agency then set about disseminating the new practices worldwide."

McCoy quotes from the Kubark Manual that effective interrogation 
involves "methods of inducing regression of the personality to 
whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of 
resistance and the inculcation of dependence." The effort is to 
disrupt the normal psychic process. "Such confusion can best be 
effected by attacking the victim's sense of time, by scrambling the 
biorhythms fundamental to every human's daily life." The goal is the 
"creation of existential chaos."

They want "to manipulate the subject's environment, to create 
unpleasant or intolerable situations, to disrupt patterns of time, 
space and sensory perception ... to drive him deeper and deeper into 
himself, until he is no longer able to control his responses in an 
adult fashion." This last is Kubark thinking from a CIA training 
manual used in Honduras during the Contra War in the 1980s.

Kubark and this nefarious research is one of America's dirty little 
secrets. "The American public has only a vague understanding of the 
scale of the CIA's massive mind-control project," McCoy writes. 
"There is a willful blindness, a studied avoidance of this deeply 
troubling topic."

Since the 1960s when the Kubark Manual appeared and the 1980s when 
its findings surfaced in places like Central America we've had 9/11 
and its reactive Global War On Terror which led to an even wider 
dissemination of "slow torture" ideas and practices into all sorts of 
places -- to the point elements of it have been standardized and 
adapted into the day-to-day practices of prisons all over the United 
States, most especially in the notorious federal supermax prisons.

Since absolute control of inmate visitation and inmate cultural 
access is difficult in the United States, thanks to things like the 
Bill Of Rights, the process has become an imperfect back-and-forth 
struggle. In the case of Bradley Manning and his high-profile status, 
that struggle is now on-going. Contact and advocacy from outside is 
critical. In fact, it may not be excessive to say his sanity and the 
future integrity of his personal identity are at stake.

Once the fog clears, there are two sides to the Bradley 
Manning/WikiLeaks story, one legal and one moral. The United States 
government is playing the legal game because it has a lot to hide 
under its overwhelming regime of secrecy, which of course is all 
legal. Evidence suggests they are employing nefarious methods to 
crush a key voice on the moral side of the dialogue.

Concerned US citizens should do all they can to prevent the 
government from succeeding.

----------
Source URL: 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/367>http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/367

Links:
[1] 
http://my.firedoglake.com/blog/2010/12/23/bradley-manning-speaks-about-his-conditions/
[2] 
http://my.firedoglake.com/valtin/2010/12/22/bradley-manning-and-the-torture-that-is-solitary-confinement/




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