WARNING: THIS REPORT CONTAINS GRAPHIC MATERIAL. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture is "nothing" compared to the Panetta Review by Wayne Madsen

WARNING: THIS REPORT CONTAINS GRAPHIC MATERIAL. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture is "nothing" compared to the Panetta Review

The word out of Langley, Virginia is that although the Central Intelligence Agency fought hard against the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of its report on the agency's torture or "enhanced interrogation" operations against "high-value detainees," it is said to be mild compared to the internal review of such practices ordered by CIA director Leon Panetta after he assumed control of the agency in 2009. Although the CIA went as far as hacking into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computers to ascertain what information it possessed on CIA torture tactics and operations under the agency's "rendition and interrogation" program, the Panetta Review contains much more lurid details of the torture tactics employed by the CIA. Among the 870 pages removed from the Senate Intelligence Committee's computers were several containing classified information from the Panetta Review.

As shocking as were the tactics of "rectal rehydration," i.e., forcing food and water into the rectums and colons of detainees who were said to have gone on hunger strikes, and threatening to sexually mutilate the children of detainees, including crushing the testicles of young boys, the Panetta Review goes even further in describing what torture tactics were employed. The torture sessions were carried out by foreign security agencies employed by the CIA to interrogate prisoners renditioned by the agency from third countries. For example, the torture tactics employed by the security services of Syria, Kenya, and Ethiopia are, according to the Panetta Review, even worse than the tactics used by U.S. Army jailers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and the CIA tactics used at several "black sites."

The tactics, described in the Taguba Report prepared by Army General Antonio Taguba, describe prisoners being sodomized by plastic glow sticks, male guards raping female and male prisoners, prisoners being forced to roll around in human feces, and male prisoners being forced to masturbate in front of guards. WMR has learned from senior officers present at Abu Ghraib that some of this torture was not only observed but directed by Israeli intelligence personnel.

In June 2013, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Philip Goldberg sent a classified letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee warning it that disclosure of third party detention and interrogation details "could endanger American diplomats and harm foreign relations." Obviously, Goldberg was not so concerned about disclosing Syria's role in the CIA's torture program since he and other neo-cons in the administration were actively supporting Syrian rebels attempting to depose the Assad government.

In January 2014, CIA director John Brennan, an architect of the CIA rendition and interrogation program during the George W. Bush administration, warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that its staffers were believed to have "illegally" obtained copies of the Panetta Review. Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein warned Brennan to cease investigating her committee for allegedly obtaining classified information on the agency's torture program because it violated the separation of powers clause in the U.S. Constitution. Brennan ignored Feinstein and ordered his acting Inspector General, Robert Eatinger, to file a criminal report with the Department of Justice regarding the Senate's spying on the CIA!

On March 11, 2014, Feinstein accused the CIA of violating "the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or surveillance." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ordered the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms to investigate the CIA's espionage on the Intelligence Committee's computers. On July 31, 2014, Brennan, worried that the Panetta Review details might leak, admitted to the CIA's spying on the Senate committee's computers. The Department of Justice has failed to bring any of the CIA officials, including Brennan, who lied to Congress and covered up details of the agency's torture program.

WMR has reported in the past that the sexual torture and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib; Guantanamo Bay; Afghanistan's "Salt Pit" or Detention Site COBALT, north of Kabul; Stare Kiejkuty or Detention Site BLUE in northeastern Poland; and Detention Site BLACK at the Mihail Kogalniceanu airbase in Romania were video-streamed via an encrypted link to Vice President Dick Cheney's office in the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House, where Cheney and selected individuals amused themselves by watching live torture sessions, including sexual abuse. Some of the video-streaming of torture was, according to our sources, viewed not only by Cheney but by his close friend and confidante Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice Presidential chief of staff David Addington, and Vice Presidential counsel I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

A fire that broke out inside an "electrical closet" on December 19, 2007, destroyed the live streaming black boxes used to pipe the torture sessions into the Vice President's office. The fire, which was reportedly caused by arson ordered by Cheney's staff, destroyed all evidence of the video-streaming of the torture sessions.

 
Army Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England forcing hooded prisoner to masturbate [left]. England and guard Charles Graner force naked male detainees into a human pyramid [right].
 
Further abuse of naked male prisoners at Abu Ghraib [left]. Male prisoner forced at gunpoint to masturbate [right].


Abu Ghraib detainee covered in human feces after being forced to roll in it by U.S. Army guards.
As shocking as the revelations were in the Senate Intelligence Committee and Taguba reports about U.S. sexual and other humiliation torture practices, the Panetta Review contains details of the practices used by the security services of third countries like Syria. One of the reasons why the CIA is intent on overthrowing the Bashar al-Assad government is the techniques its security service employed against prisoners delivered for interrogation by the CIA. These include the use of ancient Arab torture methods, most notably the "Black Slave" or al 'Abd al-Aswad. The technique employs a metal chair in which the torture victim is strapped naked to a chair and a red-hot metal skewer is inserted into the anus. Another technique used the medieval "Solomon's Chair," where a torture victim is seated on a chair fitted with metal spikes.

On behalf of the CIA, Kenyan, Ugandan, Malawian, and Rwandan interrogators in their home countries employed the standard East African "three-piece tie" measure, which entails tying a detainee's arms behind his or her back until the elbows meet. The technique results in not only extreme pain but can lead to death from gangrene, rupture of the breastbone, and asphyxiation. Many of the torture sessions were carried out in interrogation facilities in Addis Ababa and Nairobi. The Ethiopians used an apartment in Addis Ababa as one torture facility.

The security services of Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Jordan were also used to torture renditioned CIA detainees. Some of the practices employed by these agencies included electric nodes placed on a victim's genitals, nipples, and feet.

WMR has learned that some of the third party torture sessions, while not video-streamed to the United States, were taped and many of the tapes were later illegally destroyed by the CIA. The tapes, said to number at least 150, included torture sessions conducted at Detention Center GREEN in Thailand. Justice Department special prosecutor John Durham, tasked with investigating the 2005 destruction of the torture tapes, declined to prosecute anyone in the CIA for their destruction. Shortly after becoming president, Barack Obama visited Langley and told as assembly of CIA employees that they need not fear any prosecutions by his administration for torture.

Although the Panetta Review is highly critical of waterboarding, which was advocated by the CIA's "Torture Queen," Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, it is the condemnation of third party torture techniques that has the agency determined to keep the review from being publicly disclosed "at all costs."

Time for another look at that White House fire near Cheney's office

On December 22, 2008, WMR reported on the high-tech support provided the Bush-Cheney White House by Mike Connell's GovTech Solutions and his close colleague Jeff Averbeck's firm SmarTech. Connell died last December when the plane he was piloting crashed short of landing in Akron, Ohio.

WMR's report stated: "We have now learned that Connell and Averbeck may have been behind the installation of live streaming black boxes in the White House and the Eisenhower Old Executive Office Building used to stream live video of torture sessions in Guantanamo, Cuba and Abu Ghraib to the Old Executive Office Building office of Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief Counsel David Addington and into the White House, itself.

Media reports of torture sessions being taped may have been planted by the White House to deter investigators away from looking at live streaming capabilities in the offices of Cheney and President Bush.

The fire that broke out in an 'electrical closet' in the Old Executive Office Building on December 19, 2007, near Cheney's ceremonial office likely contained the live streaming boxes used to stream torture sessions from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, according to our sources who added that SmartTech and Airnet have been in the live streaming video business since 2002."

With the recent statement of retired U.S. Army General Antonio Taguba that rape and other sexual molestation sessions were prevalent at Abu Ghraib and that they were photographed, the stories of the suspicious death of Connell and the White House fire have taken on new relevancy. As reported by WMR on January 10, 2008: "Army Major General Antonio Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse stated that the abuse included 'A male MP guard 'having sex' with a female detainee.' 'Having sex' was an obvious attempt to avoid the use of the word "rape." It is obvious that Taguba's report was either altered or some evidence was not shared with him and his investigators . . . Another investigation conducted by Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones and Maj. Gen. George Fay of Abu Ghraib reported male homosexual rape of prisoners but not the rape of female prisoners."

War Psychiatry and Iraq Atrocities: How Killing Becomes a Reflex By Penny Coleman

In 1971, Lt. William Calley was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the massacre of some 500 civilians in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. In response to Calley's conviction, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) convened the "Winter Soldier Investigation." Over a three-day period, more than a hundred veterans testified to atrocities they had witnessed committed by U.S. troops against Vietnamese civilians. Their expressed intention was to demonstrate that My Lai was not unique, that it was instead the inevitable result of U.S. policy. It was a travesty of justice, they claimed, to focus blame on the soldiers when it was the policy makers, McNamara, Bundy, Rostow, Johnson, LeMay, Nixon and the others who were truly responsible for the war crimes that had been committed.

In 2004, the release of the Abu Grahib photographs broke the unforgivable silence in the mainstream press about atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq. Haditha followed, then Mahmoudiyah, Ishaqi, and at this writing, countless other instances of savage, homicidal violence directed at civilians have been reported. The July 30 issue of the Nation included an article, "The Other War," by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, which used interviews with 50 combat veterans to make the case that American soldiers are using indiscriminate and often lethal force in their dealings with Iraqi civilians. These veterans, the authors report, have "returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the U.S. government and American media." I would wager that they are more deeply disturbed by the reality itself than the way the media reports it, but certainly government and media distortions are another layer of betrayal. In a letter protesting that article, Paul Rieckhoff, president of the anti-war organization Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, made an argument parallel to that of VVAW, namely that "(a)nyone who wants to write a serious piece about the ethical lapses of the U.S. troops should start and end the article by putting blame where it belongs -- on the politicians who sent our troops to war unprepared and without a clear mission" (the Nation, 7/13/07).

I'm not suggesting that American soldiers take no responsibility for their actions. Like Rieckhoff, I would argue that we must balance outrage at criminal and sadistic acts with the insistence that we "guard against blaming this new generation of veterans for the terrible and tragic circumstances" that led to those acts. And I agree that, once again, the architects have been given a free pass and that the soldiers, who are doing exactly what they have been trained to do, are taking the blame. But I want to focus on an aspect of the situation that is never addressed in the mainstream media, and not often enough elsewhere: specifically that American troops are trained to act in criminal and sadistic ways.

Military training has been part of the experience of millions of young American men since the Revolutionary War. Prior to the Vietnam era, however, that training consisted largely of practicing military skills and learning to manage military equipment. It is only in the last half century that training has evolved into an entirely new phenomenon that makes use of the principles of operant conditioning to overcome what studies done over the last century have consistently demonstrated, namely, that healthy human beings have an inherent aversion to killing others of their own species.

Operant conditioning holds that organisms, including human beings, move through their environment rather haphazardly until they encounter a reinforcing stimulus. The experience of that stimulus becomes associated in memory with the behavior that immediately preceded it. In other words, a behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence, reward or punishment, modifies the organism's tendency to repeat the behavior. Today's recruits are intentionally and methodically subjected to a training regimen that is explicitly designed to turn them into reflexive killers. And it is very effective. It is also carefully concealed. The military would prefer to keep their methods out of sight because of the moral and ethical discussions, not to mention the legal restraints, which public scrutiny and constitutional debate might impose. Or so I would like to believe.

War Psychiatry, the army's textbook on combat trauma, notes that "pseudospeciation, the ability of humans and some other primates to classify certain members of their own species as 'other,' can neutralize the threshold of inhibition so they can kill conspecifics." Modern military training has developed carefully sequenced and choreographed elements of what many would call brainwashing to disconnect recruits from their civilian identities. The values, standards and behaviors they have absorbed over a lifetime from their families, schools, religions and communities are scorned and punished. Using cruelty, humiliation, degradation and cognitive disorientation, recruits are reprogrammed with an entirely new set of learned responses. Every aspect of combat behavior is rehearsed until response becomes reflexive. Operant conditioning has vastly improved the efficacy of American soldiers, at least by military standards. It has proven to be a reliable way to turn off the switch that controls a soldier's inherent aversion to killing. American soldiers do kill more often and more efficiently. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing, calls this form of training "psychological warfare, [but] psychological warfare conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one's own troops."

The psychological warfare that is being conducted on today's recruits is a truly disturbing indication of the worldview of our leadership, both military and political. The group identity they are drilling into these kids, the "insider" identity, is based on explicit contempt not only for the declared enemy of the week, but for the entire civilian population, with a special emphasis on women and homosexuals. In an army that is now 15 percent female and who knows (don't ask, don't tell) what percentage gay, drill instructors still rely on labels like "girl" or "pussy," "lady" or "fairy" to humiliate, degrade and ultimately exact conformity. Recruits are drilled with marching chants that privilege their relationships with their weapons over their relationships with women ("you used to be my beauty queen, now I love my M-16"), or that overtly conflate sex and violence ("this is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun."). Aside from teaching these kids to quash their innate feelings about killing in general, they are being programmed with a distorted version of not only what it means to be a man, but of what it means to be a citizen. To ascend to the warrior class, one must learn to despise and distrust all that is not military. Chaim Shatan, a psychiatrist who worked with Vietnam-era veterans, described this transformative process as deliberate, as opposed to capricious, sadism, "whose purpose is to inculcate obedience to command."

There are any number of ways that modern training methods both support violence, aggression and obedience and help to disconnect a reflex action from its moral, ethical, spiritual or social implications, but one of the best illustrations of this process is the marching chants, or "jodies," as they are known in the services. "Jody" is the derivative of an African-American work song about Joe de Grinder, a devilish ladies' man who is at home making time with the soldier's girlfriend while the soldier is stuck in the war ("ain't no use in going home; Jody's on your telephone"). According to the military, jodies build morale while distracting attention from monotonous, often strenuous, exertion. The following, originally a product of the Vietnam era, has been resurrected for training purposes in every war since and is an example of the kind of morale building that has been judged appropriate to the formation of an American soldier:

Shell the town and kill the people.
Drop the napalm in the square.
Do it on a Sunday morning
While they're on their way to prayer.

Aim your missiles at the schoolhouse.
See the teacher ring the bell.
See the children's smiling faces
As their schoolhouse burns to hell

Throw some candy to the children.
Wait till they all gather round.
Then you take your M-16 now
And mow the little fuckers down.

Thankfully, the brainwashing has not yet been developed that will override the humanity of most American soldiers. According to the troops interviewed in the Nation, the kind of psychotic brutality described in the marching cadence above is indulged by only a minority. Still, they described atrocities committed against civilians as "common" -- and almost never punished. As multiple deployments become the norm, however, and as more scrambled psyches are sent back into combat instead of into treatment, it is frightening to consider that the brainwashing may yet prevail. Given the training to which these soldiers have been subjected and the chaotic conditions in which they find themselves, it is inevitable that more will succumb to fear and rage and frustration. They will inevitably be overwhelmed by cumulative doses of horror, and they will lose control of their judgment and their compassion. Thirty-six years ago, American veterans tried to cut through the smoke and mirrors of the official response to civilian atrocities, the version that scapegoated soldiers and ignored those who gave the orders. As then Lt. John Kerry put it, "We could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel (that it is) not reds, and not redcoats (that threaten this country), but the crimes which we are committing." The soldiers who, following orders, have run over children in the road rather than slow down their convoy will never be the same again, regardless of whether government and the media tell the truth. Nor will the soldiers manning checkpoints who shoot, as ordered, and kill entire families who failed to stop, only to learn later that no one had bothered to share with them that the American signal to stop -- a hand held up, palm towards the oncoming vehicle -- to an Iraqi means, "Hello, come here." I have heard a number of the men cited in the Nation article speak about their combat experiences, and they are tormented by what they saw and did. They want to tell their stories, not because they are looking for absolution, but because they want to believe that Americans want to know. But neither are they willing to take the blame.

They have already carried home the psychic wounds and the dangerous reflexive habits of violence that will always diminish their lives and their relationships. In return, they are hoping we will listen to them this time when they ask us to look a little harder, dig a little deeper, use a little more discernment. Or have we already arrived at a point in our collective moral development when, as Shatan predicted, "Like Eichmann, we … consider evil to be banal and routine?"

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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