The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

  Many of the most important prisoners were taken to a secured area near the Baghdad International Airport, run by a military task force and the CIA. Accessible only by special ID and kept hidden from the Red Cross, the facility was so clandestine that even high-level military officials were denied entry. To maintain its cover it repeatedly changed names—from Task Force 20 to 121 to 6-26 to Task Force 145.19

  Prisoners were held in a small generic building, designed to create the textbook Kubark conditions, including complete sensory deprivation. The building was divided into five areas: a medical exam room, a “soft room” that looked like a living room (for co-operative prisoners), a red room, a blue room and the much-feared black room—a small cell with every surface painted black and speakers in all four corners.

  The existence of the secret facility became public only when a sergeant who worked there, using the pseudonym Jeff Perry, approached Human Rights Watch to describe this strange place. Compared with the bedlam of Abu Ghraib, with its untrained guards mostly making it up as they went along, the CIA’s airport facility was spookily ordered and clinical. According to Perry, when interrogators wanted to use “harsh tactics” against prisoners in the black room, they went to a computer terminal and printed out a form that was a kind of torture menu. “It was all already typed out for you,” Perry recalled, “environmental controls, hot and cold, you know, strobe lights, music, so forth. Working dogs…you would just check what you want to use off.” When they completed the forms, the interrogators took them to a superior officer for authorization. “I never saw a sheet that wasn’t signed,” Perry said.

  He and other interrogators became concerned that the techniques violated the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition against “humiliating and degrading treatment.” Worried that they could face prosecution if their work ever became public, Perry and three others confronted their colonel and “told him we were uneasy about this type of abuse.” The secret prison was so efficient that within two hours, a team of military lawyers descended on the facility with a PowerPoint presentation on why the detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions, and why sensory deprivation—despite the CIA’s own research to the contrary—was not torture. “Oh, it was very fast,” Perry said of the response time. “It was like they were ready. I mean they had this two hour slide show all prepared.”

  There were other facilities dotted around Iraq where prisoners were subjected to the same Kubark-style sensory deprivation tactics, some even more reminiscent of the McGill experiments all those years ago. Another sergeant told of a prison on a military base called Tiger, near al Qaim, close to the Syrian border, which held twenty to forty prisoners. They were blindfolded, shackled and put in sweltering hot metal shipping containers for twenty-four hours—“no sleep, no food, no water,” the sergeant reported. After they had been softened up by the sensory deprivation box, prisoners were blasted with strobe lights and heavy-metal music.20

  Similar methods were used at a Special Operations base near Tikrit—except that prisoners there were put in boxes even smaller: four feet by four feet and twenty inches deep, too small for an adult to stand or lie down, strongly reminiscent of many of the cells described in Latin America’s Southern Cone. They were kept in that extreme sensory isolation for up to a week. At least one of the prisoners also reported being electrocuted by U.S. soldiers, though the soldiers denied it.21 There is, however, a significant and little discussed body of evidence suggesting that U.S. soldiers have indeed used electrocution as a torture technique in Iraq. On May 14, 2004, in a case that received almost no publicity, two Marines were sentenced to prison for electrocuting an Iraqi prisoner one month earlier. According to government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, one soldier “shock[ed] an Iraqi detainee with an electric transformer…held the wires against the shoulder area of the detainee” until “the detainee ‘danced’ as he was shocked.”22

  When the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs were published, including the one of a hooded prisoner standing on a box with electrical wires dangling from his arms, the military had a strange problem: “We have had several detainees claim they were the person depicted in the photograph in question,” explained the spokesperson for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, the agency charged with investigating prisoner abuse. One of those detainees was Haj Ali, a former district mayor. Ali said that he too had been hooded, made to stand on a box and had electrical wires attached to his body parts. But, contradicting the accounts of the guards at Abu Ghraib who claimed the wires were not live, Ali told PBS, “When they shocked me with electricity, it felt like my eyeballs were coming out of their sockets.”23

  Like thousands of his fellow prisoners, Ali was released from Abu Ghraib without charge, pushed off a truck after being told “You were arrested by mistake.” The Red Cross has said that U.S. military officials have admitted that somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the detentions in Iraq were “mistakes.” According to Ali, many of those human errors emerged from U.S.-run jails looking for revenge. “Abu Ghraib is a breeding ground for insurgents…. All the insults and torture make them ready to do just about anything. Who can blame them?”24

  Many U.S. soldiers understand and fear this response. “If he’s a good guy, you know, now he’s a bad guy because of the way we treated him,” said a sergeant with the 82nd Airborne, who had been stationed at a particularly brutal makeshift prison on a U.S. army base outside Fallujah, home to a battalion proudly known as the “Murderous Maniacs.”25

  The situation is far worse in jails run by Iraqis. Saddam had always relied heavily on torture to hold on to power. If torture was to recede in post-Saddam Iraq, it would have required a focused effort to repudiate such tactics on the part of a new government. Instead, the U.S. embraced torture for its own purposes, setting a degraded standard at the very time it was training and supervising the new Iraqi police force.

  In January 2005, Human Rights Watch found that torture within Iraqi-run (and U.S.-supervised) jails and detention facilities was “systematic,” including the use of electroshock. An internal report from the 1st Cavalry Division states that “electrical shock and choking” are “consistently used to achieve confessions” by Iraqi police and soldiers. Iraqi jailers were also using the ubiquitous symbol of Latin American torture, the picana, the electric cattle prod. In December 2006, The New York Times reported on the case of Faraj Mahmoud, who “was stripped and hanged from the ceiling. An electric prod applied to his genitals made his body bounce off the walls, he said.”26

  In March 2005, The New York Times Magazine reporter Peter Maass was embedded with a Special Police Commando unit that had been trained by James Steele. Maass visited a public library in Samarra that had been converted into a macabre prison. Inside, he saw blindfolded and shackled prisoners, some beaten bloody, as well as a desk with “bloodstains running down its side.” He heard vomiting and screams that he described as “chilling, like the screams of a madman, or of someone being driven mad.” He also clearly heard the sound of two gunshots “from within or behind the detention center.”27

  In El Salvador, death squads were notorious for using murder not just to get rid of political opponents but to send messages of terror to the broader public. Mutilated bodies that appeared on roadsides told the wider community that if individuals stepped out of line, they could be the next corpse. Often the tortured bodies were left with a sign bearing the signature of the death squad: Mano Blanco or Maximiliano Hernandez Brigade. By 2005, these sorts of messages had become a regular sight on roadsides in Iraq: prisoners, last seen in the custody of Iraqi commandos who were usually linked to the Ministry of Interior, found with a single bullet hole in the head, hands still cuffed behind their backs, or with holes in the skull made by electric drills. In November 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that at the Baghdad morgue, “dozens of bodies arrive at the same time on a weekly basis, including scores of corpses with wrists bound by police handcuffs.” Often the morgues kept the metal c
uffs and returned them to the police.28

  In Iraq, there are also more high-tech ways of conveying messages of terror. Terrorism in the Grip of Justice is a widely watched TV show on the U.S.-funded Al Iraqiya network. The series is produced in conjunction with the Salvadorized Iraqi commandos. Several released prisoners have explained how the show’s content is produced: detainees, often grabbed at random in neighborhood sweeps, are beaten and tortured, and threats are made against their families until they are ready to confess to any crime—even crimes that lawyers have proved never took place. Then the video cameras come out to record the prisoners “confessing” to being insurgents, as well as thieves, homosexuals and liars. Every night, Iraqis watch these confessions, coming from the bruised and swollen faces of the unmistakably tortured. “The show has a good effect on civilians,” Adnan Thabit, leader of the Salvadorized commandos, told Maass.29

  Ten months after “the Salvador option” was first mentioned in the press, its full terrifying implications became clear. The Iraqi commandos, originally trained by Steele, were officially working under Iraq’s Ministry of the Interior, which had insisted, when Maass questioned them about what he had seen in the library, that it “does not allow any human rights abuses of prisoners that are in the hands of Ministry of Interior Security Forces.” But in November 2005, 173 Iraqis were discovered in an Interior Ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off, others with drill marks in their skulls and teeth and toenails removed. The released prisoners said that not everyone made it out alive. They compiled a list of 18 people who had been tortured to death inside the ministry dungeon—Iraq’s disappeared.30

  When I was researching Ewen Cameron’s electroshock experiments in the 1950s, I came across an observation made by one of his colleagues, a psychiatrist named Fred Lowy. “The Freudians had developed all these subtle methods of peeling the onion to get at the heart of the problem,” he said. “Cameron wanted to drill right through and to hell with the layers. But, as we later discovered, the layers are all there is.”31 Cameron thought he could blast away all his patients’ layers and start again; he dreamed of creating brand-new personalities. But his patients weren’t reborn: they were confused, injured, broken.

  Iraq’s shock therapists blasted away at the layers too, seeking that elusive blank slate on which to create their new model country. They found only the piles of rubble that they themselves had created, and millions of psychologically and physically shattered people—shattered by Saddam, shattered by war, shattered by one another. Bush’s in-house disaster capitalists didn’t wipe Iraq clean, they just stirred it up. Rather than a tabula rasa, purified of history, they found ancient feuds, brought to the surface to merge with fresh vendettas from each new attack—on a mosque in Karbala, in Samarra, on a market, a ministry, a hospital. Countries, like people, don’t reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.

  Which of course requires more blasting—upping the dosage, holding down the button longer, more pain, more bombs, more torture. Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who had predicted that Iraqis would be easily marshaled from A to B, has since concluded that the real problem was that the U.S. was too soft. “The humane way in which the coalition fought the war,” he said, “actually has led to a situation where it is more difficult to get people to come together, not less. In Germany and Japan [after the Second World War], the population was exhausted and deeply shocked by what had happened, but in Iraq it’s been the opposite. A very rapid victory over enemy forces has meant we’ve not had the cowed population we had in Japan and Germany…. The US is dealing with an Iraqi population that is un-shocked and un-awed.”32 By January 2007, Bush and his advisers were still convinced that they could gain control of Iraq with one good “surge,” one that wiped out Moqtada al-Sadr—“a cancer that undermines” the Iraq government. The report on which the surge strategy was based aimed for “the successful clearing of central Baghdad” and, when al-Sadr’s forces moved to Sadr City, to “clear that Shiite stronghold by force” as well.33

  In the seventies, when the corporatist crusade began, it used tactics that courts ruled were overtly genocidal: the deliberate erasure of a segment of the population. In Iraq, something even more monstrous has happened—the erasure not of a segment of the population but of an entire country; Iraq is disappearing, disintegrating. It began, as it often does, with the disappearance of women behind veils and doors, then the children disappeared from the schools—as of 2006, two-thirds of them stayed home. Next came the professionals: doctors, professors, entrepreneurs, scientists, pharmacists, judges, lawyers. An estimated three hundred Iraqi academics have been assassinated by death squads since the U.S. invasion, including several deans of departments; thousands more have fled. Doctors have fared even worse: by February 2007, an estimated two thousand had been killed and twelve thousand had fled. In November 2006, the UN High Commission for Refugees estimated that three thousand Iraqis were fleeing the country every day. By April 2007, the organization reported that four million people had been forced to leave their homes—roughly one in seven Iraqis. Only a few hundred of those refugees had been welcomed into the United States.34

  With Iraqi industry all but collapsed, one of the only local businesses booming is kidnapping. Over just three and a half months in early 2006, nearly twenty thousand people were kidnapped in Iraq. The only time the international media pays attention is when a Westerner is taken, but the vast majority of abductions are Iraqi professionals, grabbed as they travel to and from work. Their families either come up with tens of thousands in U.S. dollars for the ransom money or identify their bodies at the morgue. Torture has also emerged as a thriving industry. Human rights groups have documented numerous cases of Iraqi police demanding thousands of dollars from the families of prisoners in exchange for a halt to torture.35 It’s Iraq’s own domestic version of disaster capitalism.

  This was not what the Bush administration intended for Iraq when it was selected as the model nation for the rest of the Arab world. The occupation had begun with cheerful talk of clean slates and fresh starts. It didn’t take long, however, for the quest for cleanliness to slip into talk of “pulling Islamism up from the root” in Sadr City or Najaf and removing “the cancer of radical Islam” from Fallujah and Ramadi—what was not clean would be scrubbed out by force.

  That is what happens with projects to build model societies in other people’s countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelgänger, the scorched earth—only then that the dream of total creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction.

  The unanticipated violence that now engulfs Iraq is the creation of the lethally optimistic architects of the war—it was preordained in that original seemingly innocuous, even idealistic phrase: “a model for a new Middle East.” The disintegration of Iraq has its roots in the ideology that demanded a tabula rasa on which to write its new story. And when no such pristine tableau presented itself, the supporters of that ideology proceeded to blast and surge and blast again in the hope of reaching that promised land.

  Failure: The New Face of Success

  On my flight leaving Baghdad, every seat was filled by a foreign contractor fleeing the violence. It was April 2004, and both Fallujah and Najaf were under siege; fifteen hundred contractors pulled out of Iraq that week alone. Many more would follow. At the time, I was convinced that we were seeing the first full-blown defeat of the corporatist crusade. Iraq had been blasted with every shock weapon short of a nuclear bomb, and yet nothing could subdue this country. The experiment, clearly, had failed.

  Now I’m not sure. On one level, there is no question that parts of the project were a disaster. Bremer was sent to Iraq to build a corporate utopia; instead, Iraq became a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple business meeting could get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded. By May 200
7, more than 900 contractors had been reported killed and “more than 12,000 wounded in battle or injured on the job,” according to a New York Times analysis. The investors Bremer had done so much to attract had never shown up—not HSBC, or Procter & Gamble, which put its joint venture on hold, as did General Motors. New Bridge Strategies, the company that had gushed about how “a Wal-Mart could take over the country,” conceded that “McDonald’s is not opening any time soon.”36 Bechtel’s reconstruction contracts did not roll easily into long-term contracts to run the water and electricity systems. And by late 2006, the privatized reconstruction efforts that were at the center of the anti–Marshall Plan had almost all been abandoned on the ground—and some rather dramatic policy reversals were in evidence.

  Stuart Bowen, U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, reported that in the few cases where contracts were awarded directly to Iraqi firms, “it was more efficient and cheaper. And it has energized the economy because it puts the Iraqis to work.” It turns out that funding Iraqis to rebuild their own country is more efficient than hiring lumbering multinationals who don’t know the country or the language, surround themselves with $900-a-day mercenaries and spend as much as 55 percent of their contract budgets on overhead.37 Jon C. Bowersox, who worked as the health adviser at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, offered this radical observation: the problem with Iraq’s reconstruction, he said, was its desire to build everything from scratch. “We could have gone in and done low-cost rehabs, and not tried to transform their health-care system in two years.”38

  An even more dramatic about-face came from the Pentagon. In December 2006, it announced a new project to get Iraq’s state-owned factories up and running—the same ones that Bremer had refused to supply with emergency generators because they were Stalinist throwbacks. Now the Pentagon realized that instead of buying cement and machine parts from Jordan and Kuwait, it could be purchasing them from languishing Iraqi factories, putting tens of thousands to work and sending revenue to surrounding communities. Paul Brinkley, U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for business transformation in Iraq, said, “We’ve looked at some of these factories more closely and found they aren’t quite the rundown Soviet-era enterprises we thought they were”—though he did admit that some of his colleagues had begun calling him a Stalinist.39