Jeffrey A. Lockwood: So should we be surprised by the news that the C.I.A. considered using insects to instill fear in Abu Zubaydah? Yes.
[Jeffrey A. Lockwood, a professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming, is the author of “Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War.”]
... The ancient Persians developed a gruesome practice called scaphism, which involved force-feeding a person milk and honey, lashing him to a boat or hollow tree trunk, and then allowing flies to infest the victim’s anus and increasingly gangrenous flesh. Siberian tribes simply tied a naked prisoner to a tree and allowed mosquitoes and other biting flies to deliver as many as 9,000 bites per minute — a rate sufficient to drain a person’s blood by half in about two hours. And the stories of Apaches staking captives on anthills to ensure lingering and painful deaths are not merely the stuff of Hollywood westerns.
The epitome of insectan torture was developed by a 19th-century emir of Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan. He threw political enemies into a bug pit, a deep hole covered with an iron grille and stocked with sheep ticks and assassin bugs. The bite of the latter has been compared to being pierced with a hot needle, and the injected saliva digested the victims’ tissues until, in the words of the emir’s jailer, “masses of their flesh had been gnawed off their bones.”
So what’s surprising about the United States exploiting a prisoner’s entomophobia? This appears to be the first case in which insects would have been used to inflict psychological terror. Solzhenitsyn described the use of bedbug-infested boxes in the Soviet gulags, but it seems that these were intended to cause physical suffering — and the Central Intelligence Agency operatives evidently planned to use a physically harmless insect. (A caterpillar was mentioned.)
After having seemingly exhausted the nefarious uses of insects as unwitting agents in human conflict, the United States managed to find a new way — 100,000 or so years after humans first inflicted pain on one another with bees and wasps — to exploit the natural world as a means of creating suffering....
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... The ancient Persians developed a gruesome practice called scaphism, which involved force-feeding a person milk and honey, lashing him to a boat or hollow tree trunk, and then allowing flies to infest the victim’s anus and increasingly gangrenous flesh. Siberian tribes simply tied a naked prisoner to a tree and allowed mosquitoes and other biting flies to deliver as many as 9,000 bites per minute — a rate sufficient to drain a person’s blood by half in about two hours. And the stories of Apaches staking captives on anthills to ensure lingering and painful deaths are not merely the stuff of Hollywood westerns.
The epitome of insectan torture was developed by a 19th-century emir of Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan. He threw political enemies into a bug pit, a deep hole covered with an iron grille and stocked with sheep ticks and assassin bugs. The bite of the latter has been compared to being pierced with a hot needle, and the injected saliva digested the victims’ tissues until, in the words of the emir’s jailer, “masses of their flesh had been gnawed off their bones.”
So what’s surprising about the United States exploiting a prisoner’s entomophobia? This appears to be the first case in which insects would have been used to inflict psychological terror. Solzhenitsyn described the use of bedbug-infested boxes in the Soviet gulags, but it seems that these were intended to cause physical suffering — and the Central Intelligence Agency operatives evidently planned to use a physically harmless insect. (A caterpillar was mentioned.)
After having seemingly exhausted the nefarious uses of insects as unwitting agents in human conflict, the United States managed to find a new way — 100,000 or so years after humans first inflicted pain on one another with bees and wasps — to exploit the natural world as a means of creating suffering....