Globalizing CIA No-Touch Torture; Music: Mary From Guitar Reflections Vol. 2 Solos and Duets by Eric Karlstrom (5:36)
From: “Making Sense Of Mind Control and No-Touch Torture: In Contravention of Conventional Wisdom” by Cheryl Welsh,
The history of CIA torture runs parallel to CIA neuroscience-based mind control research and also CIA nonlethal weapons research. This is important because mind control allegations include descriptions of techniques that sound like all three CIA programs. It is possible that the related cold war CIA “no-touch” torture, nonlethal weapons and neuroscience-based mind control programs have co-mingled for intelligence uses.
…. “Nonlethal weapons” are another outcome of CIA behavior control research. Steven Aftergood wrote about the initial stages of nonlethal weapons in the September/October 1994 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “Details about programs to develop so called “non-lethal ” weapons are slowly emerging from the U.S. government’s secret “black budget.” … The concept of non-lethal weapons is not new; the term appears in heavily-censored CIA documents dating from the 1960s.”
Dr. Barbara Hatch-Rosenberg described nonlethal weapons on page 45, “Non-lethal” weapons may violate treaties:”
“Many of the non-lethal weapons under consideration utilize infrasound or electromagnetic energy (including lasers, microwave or radio-frequency radiation, or visible light pulsed at brain-wave frequency) for their effects. These weapons are said to cause temporary or permanent blinding, interference with mental processes, modification of behavior and emotional response, seizures, severe pain, dizziness, nausea and diarrhea, or disruption of internal organ functions in various other ways.”
In “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War On Terror,” Professor Alfred McCoy explained:
“CIA Paradigm: In its clandestine journey across continents and decades, this distinctly American form of psychological torture would prove elusive, resilient, adaptable and devastatingly destructive, attributes that have allowed it to persist up to the present and into the future. …
1) Elusive: Unlike its physical variant, psychological torture lacks clear signs of abuse and easily eludes detection, greatly complicating any investigation, prosecution, or attempt at prohibition.
2) Resilient: Psychological torture is shrouded in a scientific patina that appeals to policy makers and avoids the obvious physical brutality unpalatable to the modern public.
3) Adaptable: In forty years since its discovery, the Agency’s psychological paradigm has proved surprisingly adaptable, with each sustained application producing innovations. …
4) Destructive: Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, the CIA’s ‘no touch’ torture actually leaves searing psychological scars. Victims often need long treatment to recover from a trauma many experts consider more crippling than physical pain.”
These characteristics also apply to nonlethal weapons and neuroscience-based mind control. All three are emerging state tools of the future and can neutralize the enemy by controlling the behavior of the enemy. A 2005 book entitled, “Torture, Does it Make Us Safer? Is It Ever OK?” was co-published with Human Rights Watch. Some general reasons for why governments use torture as a state tool include the following. Governments torture because it is a way to obtain coerced confessions. The confessions can be used for propaganda purposes. Torture serves a variety of state purposes: “to terrorize certain elements of the population, to instill a climate of fear in the public more generally, and to break key leaders and members of these groups, uncovering their networks.” Another purpose of torture is to “obtain intelligence by any means,” “annihilate subversives,” and “eliminate the enemy.”
Neuroweapons include the CIA’s still classified neuroscience-based mind control research, ‘no touch’ torture and nonlethal weapons. All three are emerging state tools of the future that can reliably neutralize the enemy psychologically or without killing. All are ideal for counterinsurgency warfare, psychological operations and intelligence operations. The characteristics of ‘no touch’ torture, nonlethal weapons and neuroscience-based mind control make them more inhumane than the atomic bomb.
McCoy described the principles underlying ‘no touch’ torture:
“Through covert trial and error, the CIA, in collaboration with university researchers, slowly identified three key behavioral components integral to its emerging techniques for psychological torture.
“Discovery #1: Sensory deprivation. In the early 1950s …Dr. Donald Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in just 48 hours. …after just two to three days of such isolation as sitting in a cubicle .. goggles, gloves and ear muffs on “the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate.”
“Discovery #2. Self-inflicted pain. …Drs. Albert Biderman, Irving L. Janis, Harold Wolff, and Lawrence Hinkle, advised the agency about the role of self-inflicted pain in Communist interrogation. …During the 1950s as well, two eminent neurologists at Cornell Medical Center working for the CIA found that the KGB’s most devastating torture technique involved, not crude physical beatings, but simply forcing the victim to stand for days at a time, while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, the kidneys shut down, hallucinations began.
“Discovery #3. Anyone can torture. …Finally, a young Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, …conducted his famed obedience experiments, asking ordinary New Haven citizens to torture on command and discovering that, in contravention of conventional wisdom, anyone could be trained to torture. …[Milgram] did controversial research under a government grant showing that almost any individual is capable of torture, a critical finding for the agency as it prepared to disseminate its method worldwide.
By the project’s end in the late 1960s, this torture research had involved three of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century-Hebb, Milgram, and Janis, as well as several presidents of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association.
That notorious photo of a hooded Iraqi on a box, arms extended and wires to his hands, exposes this covert method. The hood is for sensory deprivation, and the arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. … Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, no-touch torture leaves deep psychological scars on both victims and interrogators. One British journalist who observed this method’s use in Northern Ireland called sensory deprivation “the worst form of torture” because it “provokes more anxiety among the interrogatees than more traditional tortures, leaves no visible scars and, therefore, is harder to prove, and produces longer lasting effects.”
Doerr-Zegers explained that techniques of torture work by creating deception, distrust, fear, disorientation, a “kind of total theater” that leaves the victim disoriented and “emotionally and psychological damaged.” The similarity of the explanation below to “street theater” found in mind control allegations is remarkable:
As Doerr-Zegers describes it, the psychological component of torture becomes a kind of total theater, a constructed unreality of lies and inversion, in a plot that ends inexorably with the victim’s self-betrayal and destruction.
To make their artifice of false charges, fabricated news, and mock executions convincing, interrogators often become inspired thespians. The torture chamber itself thus has the theatricality of a set with special lighting, sound effects, props, and backdrop, all designed with a perverse stagecraft to evoke an aura of fear. Both stage and cell construct their own kind of temporality. While the play both expands and collapses time to carry the audience forward toward denouement, the prison distorts time to disorientate and then entrap the victim.
As the torturer manipulates circumstances to “maximize confusion,” the victim feels “prior schemas of the self and the world … shattered” and becomes receptive to the “torturer’s construction of reality.”