The Shock of It All — Part I
By admin | July 15, 2008
I’m going to try to tell a story. It is a very scary story. Indeed, I recall reading Dracula by Bram Stoker when I was a teenager in the attic room of my parents’ very old house in Detroit. My room was complete with all of the shadows and creaks that every good old house has. Reading that book under those conditions and at that age scarred me half to death every night. Nothing has scarred me that much since until I came across this story. This is a complex story and it will take more than one post. Actually, it will take three if my plan works out. This is the story of the dark side of the United States of America over the course of the past 50-60 years. It is the story of what Naomi Klein has termed The Shock Doctrine which is the title of her recent book, The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Part I for my purpose is the history of how the Central Intelligence Agency in a blind effort to fight Communism after WW II did everything it could to learn the secrets of modern torture and then put what it learned into practice beginning with Iran in 1953 and up to the present in Iraq. This is what Americans should really fear today. No external enemy can defeat a country as quickly and cleanly as an internal enemy. This has been said before by wiser men than me, but there has never been a time in which it was truer. In the case of Part I of this story, one of these enemies is the C.I.A. In Part II I will introduce the second enemy, the Chicago Boys. So, let us begin the first stage of the story of how the CIA made the secrets of torture a major part of its war against the so-called enemies of America.
In the Lord of the Rings the great half-elven leader Elrond makes a comment that has always resonated with me. He says to the Council members, “it is perilous to study to deeply the arts of the enemy, for good or for ill.” (p. 278) This is what happened with the CIA and its study of torture. They exported torture from many years. It is out in the open in this post 911 world and will only be a matter of time before it is used at home especially in light of the Military Commission Act of 2006 which gave the President the power to designate someone as an alien enemy combatant and strip this person of a right to trial or habeus corpus.
When I first heard of this book, I assumed that the central dynamic had to do with modern multi-national corporations that used disasters as an excuse to expand their holdings, etc. Not even close Charley. This book tells two stories that at times coexist and at many other times work together toward a common goal. In effect, it is the story of two shock doctors, Ewen Cameron and Milton Friedman. In an excellent review in the New York Times, Joseph Stiglitz makes the following critical comment.
The connection with a rogue C.I.A. scientist is overdramatic and unconvincing, but for Klein the larger lessons are clear: “Countries are shocked — by wars, terror attacks, coups d’état and natural disasters.” Then “they are shocked again — by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy.” People who “dare to resist” are shocked for a third time, “by police, soldiers and prison interrogators.” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Stiglitz-t.html
I disagree with him only on the point of the CIA’s involvement. This out of control agency helped numerous dictatorships pursue their regimes so long as they were willing to be staunch anti-Communists back in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. In this quest, the CIA learned the tools of WW II Fascism and reapplied then for their own purposes.
I cannot recommend this book strongly enough or the author’s web site for ongoing information regarding the shock doctrine. If you want an in depth understanding of what is happening in the world today and why it is happening, then you need to read Naomi Klein’s book. In fact if you are not sure if you want to invest the money in buying the book, then I can make two suggestions. Number one, borrow the book from your public library. I love libraries. Who would have guessed that in this time of controversy and endangered civil liberties, that it would be librarians who have most often stood up to the powers of tyranny and defended the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Number two, visit Naomi Klein’s web site. She offers her own comments on the book as well as a number of videos of her discussing the book’s central tenets, including one in which she actually debates Milton Friedman. She also has numerous articles written by her that she has reprinted from publication in major public periodicals. Of particular interest to me is a short documentary (6minutes and 47 seconds) directed and produced by Mexican movie director Alfonso Cuaron who has made such films as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and The Children of Men. The film Shock Doctrine has received praise and was the “official selection” of both the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival.
So let’s begin. Klein summarizes one of the book’s central ideas by quoting Milton Friedman’s thesis on how best to produce change that would be most beneficial for the free market.
It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” (p. 140—or Milton Friedman, Preface, Capitalism and Freedom (1962, repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Pross, 1982), ix.)
Shock! What does shock mean? The normal answer would be to look at a dictionary and tell me to quit being so obvious. Sadly, Klein’s analysis takes us to a dark and very sinister locus of meaning. The core concepts of the shock doctrine include shock that produces a process of de-patterning that permits rewriting of the personality or of the state. On the state level, the result is all too often corporatism/fascism or unfettered capitalism. I realize that that explanation is quite a mouthful. That is why this will be a 2 or 3 part posting for this blog. For now, I will focus on the first installment of the shock doctrine, shock, de-patterning, and CIA sponsored torture.
Allow me to introduce Dr. Ewen Cameron, a psychologist at McGill University in Toronto. For Cameron shock meant using electro-shock as a means to de-pattern or erase the current personality of a patient so that a new one could be put in its place. This theory was supposed to help those with severe psychiatric problems find a cure. Instead, he left his patients with bodies torn apart and with horrific mental issues. No shred of evidence was ever found to support the theory, but the most heinous part is that his work was funded in part by the CIA starting in 1951 (p. 31). Klein introduces the work and the results of Cameron’s work with an interview of one of his patients, Gail Kastner. Klein reports Cameron’s assessment of his patient Gail Kastner:
The file begins with Dr. Cameron’s assessment of Gail on her admittance; she is a McGill nursing student, excelling in her studies, whom Cameron describes as “a hitherto reasonably well balanced individual.” She is however, suffering from anxiety, caused, Cameron plainly notes, by her abusive father, an “intensely disturbing” man who made “repeated psychological assaults” on his daughter. (p. 29)
Gail was clearly not someone who needed to have her personality erased so that a totally new one could be put in its place. Tragically, such was not Cameron’s treatment plan. He subjected her to numerous applications of electro-shock therapy that devastated her mind and her body.
Gail had told me she would leave the door unlocked because standing is difficult for her. It’s the tiny fractures down her spine that grow more painful as arthritis sets in. Her back pain is just one reminder of the sixty-three times that 150 to 200 volts of electricity penetrated the frontal lobes of her brain, while her body convulsed violently on the table, causing fractures, sprains, bloody lips, broken teeth. (p. 26)
Cameron’s use of electro-shock was an attempt to de-pattern his patients as Klein describes it. Such de-patterning was supposed to make it possible for the patient to rid herself of her previous troubled personhood and replace it with a totally new and functional one. In this quest, he employed a device named “the Page-Russell, which administered up to six consecutive jolts instead of a single one.” (p. 32)
Frustrated that his patients still seemed to be clinging to remnants of their personalities, he further disoriented them with uppers, downers and hallucinogens: cholorpromazine, barbiturates, sodium amytal, nitrous oxide, desoxyn, Seconal, Nembutal, Veronal, Melicone, Thorazine, largactil and insulin. (p. 32)
Despite the that his research never produced the desired result and never resulted in legitimate findings, it got the attention of the CIA. In 1951 the CIA was in the early stages of the Cold War when the West feared that the Communist bloc had discovered the secrets of brainwashing. The powerful film The Manchurian Candidate was based on this premise. The CIA wanted to learn the secrets of such mental conditioning as well as how to gain information from those captured as prisoners of war. So in 1957 the Agency gave Cameron his first grant, as Klein puts it, “laundered through a front organization called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.” (p. 35) The funding went on until 1961. It was not until the seventies and eighties that Senate oversight committees brought out the CIA’s activities in this area. As Klein notes, by then everyone knew that brainwashing was just a Cold War myth. However, the CIA had amassed quite a bit of information on the “science” of human exploitation, interrogation, and/or torture which it offered to other countries via a course.
After a lengthy effort to gain access to the CIA’s involvement in torture, the New York Times gained access to the Agency’s handbook entitled Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation. Klein offers this description of this “textbook” in extracting information from resistant sources.
The handbook is a 128-page secret manual on the “interrogation of resistant sources” that is heavily based on the research commissioned by MKUltra—and Ewen Cameron’s and Donald Hebb’s experiments have left their marks all over it. Methods range from sensory deprivation to stress positions, from hooding to pain. (The manual acknowledges early on that many of these tactics are illegal and instructs interrogators to seek “prior Headquarters approval . . . under any of the following circumstances: 1. If bodily harm is to be inflicted. 2. If medical, chemical, or electrical methosds or materials art to be used to induce acquiescence.”) p. 39
The following videos offer more detail on this sordid story than I can offer in this blog, and Klein’s book goes into both considerable description and documentation on the Agency’s research and distribution of techniques in the art of interrogation through the use of torture.
CIA Secret Experiments video
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7593041103799709699
Code Name Artichoke ((CIA Secret Experiments On Humans) Pt 1 of 5
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1096268711730730953&q=&hl=en Naomi Klein—93 minutes
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4231109320246838401
While the Agency might be said to have encouraged the use of torture in its early Cold War victories in Iran and Guatemala, it was not until its sponsored overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile that it clearly brought torture to the Southern Cone of South America. Such covert intervention was to spread to Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay
Part Two of this presentation will focus on the other side of the shock doctrine, namely, the belief in radical free market economic theory and its crusade to impose this ideology on every vulnerable country.
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