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This article only came up in cached form after a google search so I am archiving it here.



With the release of the interrogation manual, it is now the CIA's turn to answer a few questions.



The Terror Trade

The CIA was loath to release its manuals to the American public, but the agency has readily shared its expert opinions on interrogation with military and intelligence forces around the world. In numerous cases both the CIA and the Defense Department have been implicated in the international dissemination of torture and other political terror tactics. The tricks of the trade were often exported to governments who turned the brutal methods against their own civilians. There are too many cases on record to recount them all here, but a review of some frequently cited examples suggests that U.S. involvement in this terror trade has been so widespread that its effects can accurately be described as global in scope.

Most recently the CIA has come under scrutiny for its training of abusive officers in Guatemala and Honduras. These cases are but a sampling of the agency's experience in promoting the use of political terror in Central America. During the 1980s one of the agency's major covert operations, the contra war against Nicaragua, was repeatedly plunged into scandal due to its reliance on tactics that blatantly contradicted President Reagan's public praise of the contra guerrillas, whom he described as a force of "freedom fighters." A CIA-produced manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, schooled the contras on the use of "implicit terror," kidnapping and assassinations. (21)

U.S. Army instruction programs that spread similar methods in the region are also attracting criticism. According to declassified documents and recently issued Defense Department reports, the Army's "Project X," a set of intelligence courses taught since the 1960s in countries throughout Central and South America, included instruction on how to surveil, infiltrate, and undermine dissident groups. The training covered the use of kidnapping, blackmail, and executions. The materials were later consulted in the preparation of manuals used at the Army's School of the Americas (SOA), a Ft. Benning, Georgia, facility that trains Latin American military officers. Among the objectionable tactics later found in the SOA manuals were instructions on the use of hypnotism and "truth serum" drugs in interrogation. (22)

Representative Joseph Kennedy, a longtime congressional critic of the SOA, remarked that the manuals "taught tactics that come right out of a Soviet gulag and have no place in civilized society -- they certainly have no place in any course taught with taxpayer dollars on U.S. soil by the members of our own military." (23) Amnesty International issued a statement calling for full disclosure of the history of Project X and commenting that "it seems highly unlikely that it is merely a coincidence that some of the most widespread and systematic human rights violations have taken place in precisely those countries, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru, where these materials were most widely used." (24)

By virtue of their proximity to the United States, these countries bore the brunt of the abuses that accompanied U.S. counterinsurgency aid -- but the manuals and lesson plans that shared such tactics were extensively distributed outside this hemisphere as well. In March 1997 the Washington Post reported that according to Army documents and former Pentagon officials, the Project X materials "were used much more widely, by U.S. personnel working in a variety of countries," including Vietnam, Japan and Iran. (25)

CIA ties to torturers have likewise reached to every corner of the globe. The agency created and guided oppressive security programs in several Southeast Asian countries, most notably Vietnam, where the United States ran its most intensive counterinsurgency campaign. During the late 1960s, in South Vietnam the CIA set up the infamous Phoenix Program, an effort to eradicate the Viet Cong infrastructure. Phoenix is largely remembered as an assassination program (at least 20,000 suspects were murdered), but the operation also established a network of "Provincial Interrogation Centers" that often served as torture chambers. (26)

In the years that followed, the advanced counterinsurgency tactics of Phoenix were shared with thousands of foreign police officers trained by CIA instructors in various programs run by the State Department's Agency for International Development, including the Office of Public Safety and the International Police Academy. (27)

The CIA has also been directly linked to torture training in the Middle East, where the agency for two and a half decades reinforced the repressive state of Shah Mohammed Pahlevi, the dictator of Iran. Shortly before the Shah's overthrow in 1979, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh reported that "a senior CIA official was involved in instructing officials in the Savak [the Iranian secret police] on torture techniques." Jesse J. Leaf, a former head Iran analyst for the CIA, told Hersh, "I do remember seeing and being told of [CIA personnel] who were there seeing the rooms and being told of torture. And I know that the torture rooms were toured and it was all paid for by the U.S.A." (28)

The human rights abuses promoted by the Pentagon and CIA are compounded by the abuses of government secrecy that continue to conceal many important records on these operations from public scrutiny. In the case of the Project X program, the Defense Department says it has destroyed almost all of the original documentation, purportedly to prevent further dissemination of such unacceptable tactics.

When such crucial records are wiped out of existence, our ability to document the history of U.S. military assistance and training programs is seriously impaired. Fragmentary media reports based on the recollections of former Pentagon officials are no substitute for a complete accounting of Project X. Likewise, neither the CIA's declassification of a couple incriminating manuals nor its "scrub" of its motley band of foreign assets is a substitute for a comprehensive congressional investigation of CIA cooperation with regimes that regularly employed terror tactics.

Currently there is little determination on Capitol Hill to unearth this disturbing history. For the time being, if the facts on the U.S. role in developing and exporting these tactics are to be established, they will be extracted from documents such as this interrogation manual. The document joins the steadily growing stack of declassified records that offer clues on the nature and extent of the CIA's complicity with state terror in other countries. Though much of the documentary evidence on the terror trade remains shielded by official secrecy, a close reading of this manual reveals the value of the pieces of the paper trail that we can currently examine.

Sources

(1) Intelligence Oversight Board, "Report on the Guatemala Review," June 28, 1996, p. 3.

(2) Associated Press, "Report Says CIA Guatemala Contacts Violated Human Rights," March 18, 1997.

(3) Tim Weiner, "For the U.S., a Bad Bedfellow in Guatemala," New York Times, May 12, 1996, p. E4.

(4) Frank Smyth, "The Nun Who Knew Too Much," Washington Post, May 12, 1996, p. C1.

(5) Allan Nairn, "CIA Death Squad," The Nation, April 17, 1995, p. 511. In another article two months later, Nairn identified the names and years of service for the CIA's station chiefs in Guatemala from 1977 to 1995. See "The Country Team," The Nation, June 5, 1995, p. 780.

(6) George Gedda, "Official Says CIA Hounds Him," Associated Press, November 16, 1996.

(7) George Gedda, "Ex-Clinton Aide Quits, Reams CIA," Associated Press, February 25, 1997.

(8) R. Jeffrey Smith, "CIA Drops Over 100 Informants," Washington Post, March 2, 1997, p. A1.

(9) The Baltimore Sun's four-part series on Honduras, which ran in the newspaper from June 11 to 18, 1995, is available on the Internet at http://www.sunspot.net/sunspot/crabhouse/channel/cia/honduras1.html. A reprint of the series can be purchased for $6.95 from the Baltimore Sun, 501 N. Calvert St., Baltimore, MD, 21278.

(10) Telephone interview with Gary Cohn, February 28, 1997.

(11) Daniel Schorr, National Public Radio, February 16, 1997, transcript #97021609-215.

(12) For a detailed account of Nosenko's detention, including his remarks on the interrogations and druggings, see Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's Master Spy Hunter (Simon & Schuster, 1991), pp. 160-207.

(13) Ellen Herman, "The Career of Cold War Psychology," Radical History Review, Fall 1995, pp. 53-85. This article is drawn from Herman's book The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (University of California Press, 1995).

(14) For numerous examples, see Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare 1945-1960 (Oxford University Press, 1994). Further insights and arguments about government attempts to harness social science expertise for national security purposes can be found in Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot (M.I.T. Press, 1967).

(15) In one of his last acts as Director of Central Intelligence, in early 1973 Richard Helms ordered the destruction of the MKULTRA files (though some records survived, some of which were later declassified). See Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 272. Concerning still-classified records, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy recently noted: "In 1995, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments called for the expeditious declassification of all surviving classified records from MKULTRA and more than half a dozen related CIA human experimentation programs from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. To date, the CIA has not complied with this recommendation." See Steven Aftergood, "Secrecy and Accountability in U.S. Intelligence," paper presented at Center for International Policy seminar on intelligence reform, October 9, 1996, note 2. (Available on the Internet at http://www.fas.org/sgp/cipsecr.html).

(16) John Marks, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control (Times Books, 1979), p. 128.

(17) Ibid., p. 161.

(18) Simpson, p. 186 n117.

(19) Marks, p. 143.

(20) Ibid., pp. 164-181; pp. Orrin DeForest and David Chanoff, Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam (Simon & Schuster, 1990), 63-66.

(21) Peter Kornbluh, Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention (Institute for Policy Studies, 1987), pp. 43-45.

(22) Dana Priest, "Army's Project X Had Wider Audience," Washington Post, March 6, 1997, p. A1.

(23) Office of Representative Joseph P. Kennedy, Press Release, "Kennedy Responds to Pentagon Report on 'Torture' Manuals," February 21, 1997.

(24) Amnesty International USA, Statement on United States Army Training Manuals Containing Materials Inconsistent With U.S. Policy, October 4, 1996.

(25) Priest, "Army's Project X Had Wider Audience."

(26) See Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (William Morrow and Company, 1990), pp. 73-88.

(27) See Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990 (Pantheon Books, 1992), pp. 188-196.

(28) Seymour M. Hersh, "Ex-Analyst Says CIA Rejected Warning on Shah," New York Times, January 7, 1979, p. A3.