Dr. CIA No-Touch Torture; Music: Fall To Earth from Guitar Reflections Volume 3: Solos and Duets CD by Eric Karlstrom (3:11)
“From 1950 to 1962, the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a billion dollars annually, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind. … If we trace a narrative thread through a maze of hundreds of experiments, the CIA research moved through two distinct phases, first an in-house exploration of exotic techniques such as hypnosis and hallucinogenic drugs, and, a later focus on behavioral experimentation by contract researchers, several of the most brilliant behavioral scientists of their generation …
“While this Agency drug testing led nowhere, CIA-funded behavioral experiments, outsourced to the country’s leading universities, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc., produced three key findings that contributed to the discovery of a new form of torture that was psychological, not physical, … perhaps best described as “no-touch torture.” (McCoy outline, 2)
“Across the span of three continents and four decades, there is a striking similarity in U.S. torture techniques, both their conceptual design and specific techniques, from the CIA’s 1963 Kubark “interrogation manual,” to the Agency’s 1983 Honduras training handbook, all the way to General Ricardo Sanchez’s 2003 orders for “enhanced interrogation” in Iraq. … Guantanamo perfected the three-phase psychological paradigm by attacking cultural identity and individual psyche.
McCoy explains what ‘no touch’ torture is:
“The CIA’s psychological paradigm for ‘no touch’ torture fused two new methods, “sensory disorientation” and “self-inflicted pain,” whose combination, in theory, would cause victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and thus capitulate more readily to their torturers. Refined through years of practice, sensory disorientation relies on a mix of sensory overload and sensory deprivation via banal procedures, isolation then intense interrogation, heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, for a systematic attack on all human stimuli. The fusion of these two techniques, sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, creates a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the existential platforms of personal identity. (McCoy outline, 4-5)