Stan Winer: Abu Ghraib ... Tortured fragments of history (The view from South Africa)
[South African-based writer Stan Winer is author of the book Between the Lies: Rise of the media-military-industrial complex, (London: Southern Universities Press, 2004)]
In April 2004, the world was momentarily shocked by televised photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while amused American soldiers stood by. Responsibility for these acts has largely been confined to the lower ranks and kept close to Abu Ghraib itself. Official statements attributed the practice to an unusual and temporary breakdown in "military discipline", thus diverting any suspicion that psychological torture as paraded before our eyes in the Abu Ghraib snapshots is the product of intelligence policies shaped in design and application over a long period of time.
The Abu Ghraib scandal did, however, open a floodgate of news and information leaks about the existence of a mini-gulag of prisons the CIA and US Army Intelligence had set up in Afghanistan, on aircraft carriers, in remote places like the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia, and in the prisons of torture-friendly allies.(1) An official inquiry disclosed that the US Army specifically allowed CIA to house "Ghost Detainees" who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib, thus encouraging violations of reporting and monitoring requirements under the Geneva Conventions.(2)
What the official inquiry studiously failed to disclose were the reasons why obsessive secrecy was deemed necessary in the first place. Protected by extreme secrecy, such facilities are placed outside the rule of law. They are not subject to review of the manner in which they are operated, the interrogation methods used, and the general conditions prevailing there. Representatives of the Red Cross are denied access to the facilities; nobody knows how many detainees are held there, who the detainees are or where they come from, nor would it be known which authority was responsible for the arrest and bringing them to the facility, who conducted the interrogations, or whether they were authorised to do so.
It is reasonable to assume that, once a prisoner of war is captured, the captor’s immediate short-term objective would be to obtain from the prisoner quick information for tactical operations such as strikes, counter-strikes or further arrests. The infliction of physical pain is probably the quickest method of obtaining information, the usefulness of which is usually short-lived due to the changing and changeable nature of battlefield conditions. So why any need for psychological torture, which is comparatively slower at producing results and seemingly more benign than physical methods?
The obsessive veil of secrecy surrounding such methods means that military personnel are themselves largely unaware of how their individual actions fit into the overall picture. Others know exactly what they are doing, but keep quiet because they also know that what they are doing is criminal. The Official Secrets Act also ensures that lips remain tightly sealed. Above all, a perceived need to protect "the national interest" combines with censorship to retain a wall of silence around the subject.
A notable exception occurred, however, several years ago during the long-running trial in South Africa of alleged war criminal Brigadier Wouter Basson, a South African Army chemical and biological warfare specialist. The trial provided a rare glimpse into the horrors that can and did evidently occur in circumstances of extreme secrecy and geographical isolation no less pervasive and extreme as those prevailing currently in America’s gulag of secret prisons. Evidence presented at Basson’s trial concerned, among other things, certain events taking place in the 1970s and 1980s at an airfield and forward military base named Fort Rev, situated in Ondangwa in Owamboland in the former South West Africa, (now Namibia).
Fort Rev was used by 5 Reconnaissance Regiment and the other Special Forces Regiments as an operational base for launching counter-insurgency operations into Angola and areas of Owamboland. Within the base was also a secret torture and interrogation centre where attempts, not always successful, were made to "turn" or "convert" captured guerrillas into "pseudo operators" for covert deception operations. Hence the name Fort Rev, meaning "reversal". Behavioural scientists have another phrase for it: transmarginal inhibition or TMI — a state of behavioral collapse induced by physical and emotional stress prior to inducing new patterns of actions and beliefs. Successful application of this technique, sometimes referred to pejoratively as "brain washing", requires psychological torturers to have total control of the environment. Existing mental programming can then be replaced with new patterns of thinking and behavior. The same results can be obtained in contemporary psychiatric treatment by electric shock treatments and even by purposely lowering a patient’s blood sugar level with insulin injections. (3)
The Namibian deception operations, under the tutelage of battle hardened former Rhodesian special forces operators, had to be kept secret at any cost. If the operations were successful, pseudo gangs consisting of turned guerrillas posing as genuine freedom fighters would be infiltrated back into the field of battle where they would capture insurgents. Some of the captured insurgents, so-called "high value targets", would be turned at Fort Rev, others being useful only as a source of information. But, having served that purpose they then presented a security risk due to the nature of at least some intelligence they themselves would have picked during the course of interrogation, as this could immediately compromise the secrecy of the entire pseudo operations programme. So they could not be processed through normal channels and imprisoned in a central holding facility.
The torturers and interrogators at Fort Rev got around this small problem by simply killing off survivors. "Redundant" prisoners were disposed of without trace after being drugged and their bodies dumped into the Atlantic Ocean from an aircraft. It is difficult to imagine a more horrible way of dying. The doomed prisoners, before being loaded onto an aircraft and dumped 100 miles out to sea, were first injected with powerful muscle relaxants which had the effect of paralysing the victim whilst leaving his mind fully conscious. An anaesthetic drug was also used, having the effect of causing hallucinations. (4)
In the absence of digital imaging technology of the kind evidenced at Abu Gharieb, one can only speculate about the extent to which similar methods were practised during France’s battle for Algiers in the 1950s, Britain’s suppression of independence movements in Kenya and Malaya in the 1960s, Argentina’s dirty war, Britain’s Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970 and 1980s, and countless other regional conflicts. But whatever happened then, and whatever the true activities currently taking place in America’s gulag of secret prisons, it is certainly the case that extreme secrecy provides an ideal environment for the application of psychological torture techniques aimed at brain-washing prisoners of war.
Yet there remains wide public ignorance and a studied avoidance of this unsettling subject. Few people have been able to fit together the fragments of history and grasp the larger picture. Others simply don’t want to know. The practice of psychological torture, never fully acknowledged, is thus allowed to persist inside the secret services as the product of intelligence strategies that have probably been standard practice for at least half-a-century or more. Abu Ghraib is but the tip of an iceberg.
NOTES & REFERENCES:
(1) For a list of US detention sites see http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/2004_alerts/0617.htm
(2) For many years the Israeli secret services took this one step further by actually operating a "ghost prison" for political detainees. Code-named Facility 1391, this secret prison intended for "special cases" operated in Israel for many years within the walls of a secret army base, distant from the eyes of the Press and the public, and without being declared a detention facility, as required by statute. See http://www.icj-sweden.org/Facility1391.pdf
(3) The technique was discovered by Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov (see bibliography below) who identified TMI in the early 1900’s. His work with animals opened the door to further investigations with humans. The ways to achieve conversion through TMI are many and varied, but the usual first step in brainwashing is to work on the emotions of an individual or group until they reach an abnormal level of anger, fear, excitement or nervous tension. The progressive result of this mental condition is to impair judgement and increase suggestibility. The more this condition can be maintained or intensified, the more it compounds, leading to total behavioural conversion.
(4) Wouter Basson trial records 19, 20 & 20a. The complete trial record is available at http://ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za/archive/cbw/cbw_index.html
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eysenck HJ The biological basis of personality, Springfield, IL: Thomas, (1967)
Pavlov, IP Lectures on Conditional Reflexes: The higher nervous activity (Behaviour) of animals, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1928
Sargant, W The Battle for the Mind, London: Wm Heinemann, 1957
In April 2004, the world was momentarily shocked by televised photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while amused American soldiers stood by. Responsibility for these acts has largely been confined to the lower ranks and kept close to Abu Ghraib itself. Official statements attributed the practice to an unusual and temporary breakdown in "military discipline", thus diverting any suspicion that psychological torture as paraded before our eyes in the Abu Ghraib snapshots is the product of intelligence policies shaped in design and application over a long period of time.
The Abu Ghraib scandal did, however, open a floodgate of news and information leaks about the existence of a mini-gulag of prisons the CIA and US Army Intelligence had set up in Afghanistan, on aircraft carriers, in remote places like the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia, and in the prisons of torture-friendly allies.(1) An official inquiry disclosed that the US Army specifically allowed CIA to house "Ghost Detainees" who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib, thus encouraging violations of reporting and monitoring requirements under the Geneva Conventions.(2)
What the official inquiry studiously failed to disclose were the reasons why obsessive secrecy was deemed necessary in the first place. Protected by extreme secrecy, such facilities are placed outside the rule of law. They are not subject to review of the manner in which they are operated, the interrogation methods used, and the general conditions prevailing there. Representatives of the Red Cross are denied access to the facilities; nobody knows how many detainees are held there, who the detainees are or where they come from, nor would it be known which authority was responsible for the arrest and bringing them to the facility, who conducted the interrogations, or whether they were authorised to do so.
It is reasonable to assume that, once a prisoner of war is captured, the captor’s immediate short-term objective would be to obtain from the prisoner quick information for tactical operations such as strikes, counter-strikes or further arrests. The infliction of physical pain is probably the quickest method of obtaining information, the usefulness of which is usually short-lived due to the changing and changeable nature of battlefield conditions. So why any need for psychological torture, which is comparatively slower at producing results and seemingly more benign than physical methods?
The obsessive veil of secrecy surrounding such methods means that military personnel are themselves largely unaware of how their individual actions fit into the overall picture. Others know exactly what they are doing, but keep quiet because they also know that what they are doing is criminal. The Official Secrets Act also ensures that lips remain tightly sealed. Above all, a perceived need to protect "the national interest" combines with censorship to retain a wall of silence around the subject.
A notable exception occurred, however, several years ago during the long-running trial in South Africa of alleged war criminal Brigadier Wouter Basson, a South African Army chemical and biological warfare specialist. The trial provided a rare glimpse into the horrors that can and did evidently occur in circumstances of extreme secrecy and geographical isolation no less pervasive and extreme as those prevailing currently in America’s gulag of secret prisons. Evidence presented at Basson’s trial concerned, among other things, certain events taking place in the 1970s and 1980s at an airfield and forward military base named Fort Rev, situated in Ondangwa in Owamboland in the former South West Africa, (now Namibia).
Fort Rev was used by 5 Reconnaissance Regiment and the other Special Forces Regiments as an operational base for launching counter-insurgency operations into Angola and areas of Owamboland. Within the base was also a secret torture and interrogation centre where attempts, not always successful, were made to "turn" or "convert" captured guerrillas into "pseudo operators" for covert deception operations. Hence the name Fort Rev, meaning "reversal". Behavioural scientists have another phrase for it: transmarginal inhibition or TMI — a state of behavioral collapse induced by physical and emotional stress prior to inducing new patterns of actions and beliefs. Successful application of this technique, sometimes referred to pejoratively as "brain washing", requires psychological torturers to have total control of the environment. Existing mental programming can then be replaced with new patterns of thinking and behavior. The same results can be obtained in contemporary psychiatric treatment by electric shock treatments and even by purposely lowering a patient’s blood sugar level with insulin injections. (3)
The Namibian deception operations, under the tutelage of battle hardened former Rhodesian special forces operators, had to be kept secret at any cost. If the operations were successful, pseudo gangs consisting of turned guerrillas posing as genuine freedom fighters would be infiltrated back into the field of battle where they would capture insurgents. Some of the captured insurgents, so-called "high value targets", would be turned at Fort Rev, others being useful only as a source of information. But, having served that purpose they then presented a security risk due to the nature of at least some intelligence they themselves would have picked during the course of interrogation, as this could immediately compromise the secrecy of the entire pseudo operations programme. So they could not be processed through normal channels and imprisoned in a central holding facility.
The torturers and interrogators at Fort Rev got around this small problem by simply killing off survivors. "Redundant" prisoners were disposed of without trace after being drugged and their bodies dumped into the Atlantic Ocean from an aircraft. It is difficult to imagine a more horrible way of dying. The doomed prisoners, before being loaded onto an aircraft and dumped 100 miles out to sea, were first injected with powerful muscle relaxants which had the effect of paralysing the victim whilst leaving his mind fully conscious. An anaesthetic drug was also used, having the effect of causing hallucinations. (4)
In the absence of digital imaging technology of the kind evidenced at Abu Gharieb, one can only speculate about the extent to which similar methods were practised during France’s battle for Algiers in the 1950s, Britain’s suppression of independence movements in Kenya and Malaya in the 1960s, Argentina’s dirty war, Britain’s Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970 and 1980s, and countless other regional conflicts. But whatever happened then, and whatever the true activities currently taking place in America’s gulag of secret prisons, it is certainly the case that extreme secrecy provides an ideal environment for the application of psychological torture techniques aimed at brain-washing prisoners of war.
Yet there remains wide public ignorance and a studied avoidance of this unsettling subject. Few people have been able to fit together the fragments of history and grasp the larger picture. Others simply don’t want to know. The practice of psychological torture, never fully acknowledged, is thus allowed to persist inside the secret services as the product of intelligence strategies that have probably been standard practice for at least half-a-century or more. Abu Ghraib is but the tip of an iceberg.
NOTES & REFERENCES:
(1) For a list of US detention sites see http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/2004_alerts/0617.htm
(2) For many years the Israeli secret services took this one step further by actually operating a "ghost prison" for political detainees. Code-named Facility 1391, this secret prison intended for "special cases" operated in Israel for many years within the walls of a secret army base, distant from the eyes of the Press and the public, and without being declared a detention facility, as required by statute. See http://www.icj-sweden.org/Facility1391.pdf
(3) The technique was discovered by Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov (see bibliography below) who identified TMI in the early 1900’s. His work with animals opened the door to further investigations with humans. The ways to achieve conversion through TMI are many and varied, but the usual first step in brainwashing is to work on the emotions of an individual or group until they reach an abnormal level of anger, fear, excitement or nervous tension. The progressive result of this mental condition is to impair judgement and increase suggestibility. The more this condition can be maintained or intensified, the more it compounds, leading to total behavioural conversion.
(4) Wouter Basson trial records 19, 20 & 20a. The complete trial record is available at http://ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za/archive/cbw/cbw_index.html
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eysenck HJ The biological basis of personality, Springfield, IL: Thomas, (1967)
Pavlov, IP Lectures on Conditional Reflexes: The higher nervous activity (Behaviour) of animals, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1928
Sargant, W The Battle for the Mind, London: Wm Heinemann, 1957