“Modern” means of coercion at Gitmo

I’ve been continuing my pre-Gitmo research. Thanks to all who have sent in suggestions for directions I can go with that. I just discovered tonight that I should be able to get some relevant books out of a nearby library, which is good.
Today, the WaPo had an excellent op-ed by Joseph Margulies, a law prof at Northwestern who was the lead counsel in Rasul, a key habeas-related case at Guantanamo. In the piece, Margulies recalls how, back during the Korean War, the North Koreans succeeded in getting 36 US airmen to falsely confess to a plot to bomb civilian targets…
How did they do this? Margulies writes:

The senior officer among them was Col. Frank Schwable, the highest-ranking Marine captured in the conflict. “I want to emphasize,” Schwable said later, “that I did not undergo physical torture. Perhaps I would have been more fortunate if I had, because people nowadays seem to understand that better. Mine was the more subtle kind of torment.”
The airmen were subjected to something new: touchless torture. They were kept isolated from all human contact, apart from their interrogators. One prisoner spent 10 months in solitary confinement, another 13. Schwable did not learn of the armistice until after he confessed.
They were made to stand or sit in awkward and painful positions for hours at a time. One prisoner had to sit at attention on the edge of a stool for 15 hours per day for 33 days. Another time he had to stand for 30 consecutive hours, until he collapsed. Schwable was required to sit at attention every day for almost 10 weeks.
They were demeaned, taunted and treated like animals. Schwable said the guards “growled” or “barked” at him, slopped food at him, and made him defecate in public. “Every effort was made to degrade and humiliate me,” he said.
And of course they were interrogated. Grueling interrogations that lasted hours and hours, repeating the same material they had gone over the day before, and the day before that, until the past became a confusing whirl of fact and fantasy suggested to them by their relentless interlocutors. At last, exhausted and demoralized, their resistance overcome, they confessed. They all confessed in the end. And they all lied…

Compare this with this account, which comes from a recent article by Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone in which Tietz describes at some length the treatment received by Omar Khadr, a young Arab-Canadian who was just 15 when he was captured by US forces after taking part in a firefight in Afghanistan:

Before boarding a C-130 transport to Guantanamo, Omar was dressed in an orange jumpsuit and hog-chained: shackled hand and foot, a waist chain cinching his hands to his stomach, another chain connecting the shackles on his hands to those on his feet. At both wrist and ankle, the shackles bit…
Just before he got on the plane, Omar was forced into sensory-deprivation gear that the military uses to disorient prisoners prior to interrogation. The guards pulled black thermal mittens onto Omar’s hands and taped them hard at the wrists. They pulled opaque goggles over his eyes and placed soundproof earphones over his ears. They put a deodorizing mask over his mouth and nose. They bolted him, fully trussed, to a backless bench. Whichever limbs hadn’t already lost sensation from the cuffs lost sensation from the high-altitude cold during the flight, which took fifteen hours…
At Guantanamo, Omar was led, his senses still blocked, onto a bus that took the prisoners to a ferry dock. Some of the buses didn’t have seats, and the prisoners usually sat cross-legged on the floor. Guards often lifted the prisoners’ earphones, told them not to move, and when they moved — helplessly, with the motion of the bus, like bowling pins — started kicking them. The repeated blows often left detainees unable to walk for weeks…
A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo Bay, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. “Get up,” the guard said. “You have a reservation.” “Reservation” is the commonly used term at Gitmo for interrogation.
In the interrogation room, Omar’s interviewer grew displeased with his level of cooperation. He summoned several MPs, who chained Omar tightly to an eye bolt in the center of the floor. Omar’s hands and feet were shackled together; the eye bolt held him at the point where his hands and feet met. Fetally positioned, he was left alone for half an hour.
Upon their return, the MPs uncuffed Omar’s arms, pulled them behind his back and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body experiences in this particular “stress position” can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete floor. The guards left.
An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of his chains and pushed him over on his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and on the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while and then poured pine-oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they’d successfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days…

How come these accounts sound so gruesomely similar? A good part of the answer is given us in Margulies’s article. He recalls how, after the 36 downed US airmen were finally returned home and started talking about their treatment in North Korea,

One institution, however, was not repelled but intrigued. The experience led the CIA to accelerate its research into the theory and science of coercive interrogation.
Between 1950 and 1962, the CIA poured millions of dollars into studies that tested different interrogation techniques, hoping to learn from and refine the lessons of Korea. The research culminated in the top-secret KUBARK manual, a 1963 primer on how to conduct coercive counterintelligence interrogations. The manual was finally disclosed in 1997 and is now available online.

That would be here. Or here.
(KUBARK, according to the National Security Archive web-page at that first link, is the CIA’s cryptonym for itself. Go figure.)
Anyway, at some later point, the basic principles in KUBARK turned up again, in the “SERE” program that the army Special Forces etc started to use. One interesting aspect of the SERE program was that it was purportedly a defensive program– i.e., it was to train these people to be able to resist various forms of coercive interrogation if they were ever captured. But in a period in which many human-rights organizations had mounted large and fairly successful campaigns against the KUBARK program– especially, in the various forms in which it was taught to repressive Latin American militaries at the School of the Americas and elsewhere– having the SERE program out there kept alive a lot of so-called specialized “know-how” in the US military about coercive interrogations. (This is parallel to what goes in in the field of, for example, bioweapons… where everyone who’s doing the research for it claims very loudly that “It’s only for defensive purposes!” — but guess what, they still end up with all those handy toxins on the shelf in case they need them.)
Anyway, despite the plethora of footnotes at the bottom of that KUBARK manual, the whole business is not so terribly arcane, “modern”, and special as you might think. In fact, it includes many techniques of coercion known throughout history, including many used by the various European colonial powers around the world throughout the past 400 years.
Back in 1992, I organized a conference of Middle Eastern human rights activists in Spain at which the main focus was on trying to build a trans-national network against torture. We had a small number of people from other regions there, too, including a great psychiatrist from the Copenhagen-based International Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims. He quoted the organization’s founder, Dr. Inge Genefke, who has famously said:

“The aim of torture is to destroy a person as a human being, to destroy their identity and soul. It is more evil than murder… Today we know that survivors of torture can be helped to regain their health and strength, and in helping them we take the weapon from their torturers. They sought the destruction of other human beings. We have proved that they have not succeeded.”

Genefke’s colleague who came to our conference went a bit further than that, too. He said that the aim of the torturer is to destroy the victim as an independent personality, and that it is the independent personality that is the basic building block of democracy. Quite true.