by W. E. Gutman
The CIA also lied through its teeth. When the agency engineered the overthrow of the popularly elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, his ouster was reported as a “popular uprising.” The U.S. government did nothing to amend the report. The CIA then shredded all evidence of its own involvement.
When President Eisenhower ordered the agency to foment a bloody coup against the leftist regime of Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, Henry Cabot Lodge, Ike’s ambassador to the U.N. dismissed the action as a “revolt of Guatemalans against Guatemalans.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who would order British, French and Israeli forces out of Egypt in 1956 for having acted “unilaterally” (translation: without America’s consent) to reopen the Suez Canal, claimed that the Guatemalans were “quietly handling the situation themselves.” Quietly indeed. Hundreds of thousands of dead and “disappeared” made very little noise.
Four years after Guatemala, CIA pilots flew missions against Indonesian President Sukarno’s forces. The agency then covertly backed a coup in Chile in 1973 and attempted to murder Fidel Castro and Congolese head of state, Patrice Lumumba. Castro survived. Lumumba didn’t.
In 1995, the CIA was forced to admit that it had hired SOA alumnus, Col. Juan Alpírez, the torturer and murderer of American lawyer Jennifer Harbury’s husband, Guatemalan freedom fighter Efrain Bámaca -- and that it had covered up the crime for months on end. It also conceded that it had authored torture manuals. The CIA officer who blew the whistle by informing U.S. Rep. (later Senator) Robert Toricelli about the incident was fired.
Since 1947, when the venerable and highly effective OSS was transformed into the present-day CIA, the agency has hired and sheltered Nazi war criminals and even brought some to work in the U.S. It subsidized and strengthened the regimes of undemocratic but submissive client states. And, in blatant violation of the law, it snooped on U.S. citizens, tampered with their mail, bugged their phones and tested mind-bending or lethal chemical and biological agents on hundreds of unwitting Americans. It also worked hand-in-glove with the U.S. Army School of the Americas in a symbiosis akin to incest that has spawned unspeakable monsters, many of whom still lurk among us, free, unhindered.
THE MANUAL
Like pus oozing from a festering sore, the CIA’s public expiation of past trespasses in Latin America may have had an emetic effect on its conscience. But it came too little, too late, couched in the clinical language of remorselessness and lacking any hint of self-prosecutorial intent.
Documents released by the CIA confirm that the agency taught mental torture and physical coercion techniques to the “security forces” of at least five Latin American states in the early 1980s. The documents also allege to have “repudiated” such training in 1985. A 1983 CIA manual teaches foreign agents the art of extracting information from people without yanking out their fingernails, burning the soles of their feet with the business end of a lit cigarette or hanging them from meat hooks. Claiming that physical torture is counterproductive, it advises against such methods. It suggests, instead, the use of fear, exhaustion, solitary confinement and other forms of psychological duress designed to induce intense anxiety and to “destroy [the subject’s] capacity to endure” long periods of interrogation.
“While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques,” the manual says, “we want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them.”
These techniques were implemented during President Ronald Reagan’s first term, when his administration’s anti-communist covert activities relied on the CIA-trained armed forces of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, Nicaraguan Contras, elements of Costa Rica’s militarized “civil guard” and, indirectly, the armies of Argentina and Panama. These forces killed, illegally detained, tortured and “disappeared” thousands of suspected “enemies,” most of them civilian, during the last decade of the cold war.
Under Congressional pressure, the CIA’s role in training its Latin American surrogates was reviewed behind closed doors. In late 1984 and early 1985 leaks to the press and signs of growing public indignation prompted the agency to rewrite the manual and excise passages dealing with coercive interrogation procedures. In October 1984, the agency was rocked by public disclosures of another CIA manual that encouraged Nicaraguan Contras to kidnap and kill elected leftist officials, blackmail citizens and raze entire villages to the ground. Nonplused, the CIA blamed the manual on an “overzealous freelancer” on its payroll. It neither apologized nor withdrew the manual from circulation.
The 1983 manual on interrogation techniques and the 1985 addendum banning coercive tactics were made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Baltimore Sun which published a series on the CIA’s relationship with Honduras’ infamous death squad, Battalion 3-16, whose ranking members were trained at the equally notorious U.S. Army School of the Americas.
The CIA public affairs office acknowledged for the first time that its manuals contained, then excluded, the protocols on psychological torture. Headed, “Coercive Techniques,” a section of the 1983 manual advised against “direct physical brutality, as is can create resentment, hostility and defiance” in some prisoners. But it added, “if a subject refuses to comply once a threat [of violence] is made, it must be carried out.” With chilling detachment, the manual further counsels:
“Torture is an external conflict, a contest between subject and tormentor. The pain which is being inflicted upon [the subject] from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist. On the other hand, pain which he feels is self-inflicted is more likely to sap his resistance.”
The manual recommends forcing the subject into rigid positions,
“… such as standing at attention or sitting on a stool for long periods of time,” adding that “the immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the subject himself.”
The manual also suggests that physical and psychological harassment be combined with
“… persistent manipulation of time -- retarding or advancing clocks, disrupting sleep,” all designed to disorient the subject and subvert his will, and to drive him deeper and deeper into himself until he no longer is able to control his responses in an adult fashion.”
Some of the passages in the 1983 manual parallel the protocols found in a 1963 CIA primer on interrogation of spies and Soviet agents. Compiled before the agency became subject to congressional oversight or public scrutiny, the work includes a clause requiring prior approval from headquarters to use physical torture, electric shocks and the use of psychotropic drugs. It is not known if such consent was ever sought. Events in Latin America suggest that they were either never denied or that the mandate was simply ignored.
In 1985 the CIA adopted a formal policy against inhumane interrogation. “Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain cooperation,” the policy statement said. It also cautioned that use of force is a poor technique, that it yields unreliable results and that adverse publicity and/or legal action were likely to ensue.
“However,” it added, “use of force is not to be confused with psychological ploys, verbal trickery and other non-violent and non-coercive ruses against reticent or uncooperative subjects.” Perhaps like waterboarding.
Designed to whitewash past transgressions and to insulate against future ones from prying eyes or accusatory fingers (such as the solitary sequestration of suspected Taliban and al-Qaida operatives), the CIA’s injunctions had little effect. Pupils did not heed the teacher’s admonitions. Atrocities committed by U.S.-trained Latin American military cadres were recorded long after they were circulated. It’s all “gringo rhetoric” based on fake empathy aroused by fear of embarrassment, not humanitarianism; a clear case of the CIA covering its backside.
Meticulous liars tell either plausible or undetectable lies. Only cynics spread preposterous lies.
*
Despite an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft to “expeditiously declassify and release to the families
” information about the fate of victims of torture, disappearances and assassination in Central America, it is unlikely that such order was ever obeyed. The mandate gave federal agencies up to four months to “find” the data, and up to three months after that to “determine” whether it should be released or not. In his order, Ashcroft also reminded the agencies of the president's authority to withhold information that “could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties.” Upheld by President Obama, this loophole dashes any hope of transparency on the matter.
RELATIVITY REVISITED
“There are generations in the world,
there are people whose faces we do not see,
who have no homes.
They wander... like crazy people.”
The Popol Vuh
Separated by three centuries, philosopher Baruch Spinoza and physicist Albert Einstein both studied relativity, the first by exploring the metaphysical realm, the second to postulate immutable cosmic laws. They reached broadly similar conclusions, among them that perception depends on vantage point.
Spinoza buoyed his argument by proposing an intriguing conundrum: Visitors from a faraway planet land on Earth: They’re taken to a magnificent palace. Ushered into the king’s chambers, they notice scores of people bowing and kneeling before the monarch. Some place their foreheads upon the king’s golden robes. Others kiss his feet. Impressed, the space travelers conclude that their host must be a great and saintly man, a benefactor of humanity, or else why would his court engage in such displays of servile adulation?
The visitors are then taken to a coal mine. There they see men with blackened faces hunched over the unyielding rock, toiling from dawn to twilight in the bowels of Earth in suffocating darkness. Surely these men must be evil, the extraterrestrials reason, or else they would have been spared such wretched existence.
Much of human consciousness is based, not on fact, Spinoza teaches, but on how we are conditioned to interpret the occurrence of being. There are no wrong answers, only divergent views blurred by conformity to a particular belief. Truth is in the mind’s eye of the beholder.
Einstein went several steps further. He suggested not only that reality is what the self perceives, but that perception can actually alter the experience of reality. I had an opportunity to test this strange concept, not in the perfect geometry of space, nor in the sterile labyrinths of Cartesian logic, but in two equally dissimilar yet contiguous regions of the human condition.
Several years ago I attended a reception at a posh hotel in Guatemala City. I crossed paths with bejeweled women, most of them painted to camouflage the ravages of time. I shook hands with sweet-smelling, self-important men in elegant double-breasted suits, silk ties and snake-skin shoes. I engaged in small talk and endured the syrupy banter between those who had come to be seen and those who insist on being heard. Wealth, influence and power all vied for attention as fragrant wines and succulent finger foods traveled on silver trays carried by white-gloved lackeys. Such ostentation, I remarked, must be evidence of great virtue, the well-deserved entitlements of the just, the righteous, the uncorrupted.
Early the next morning, on my way to Zone 3, where the uncorrupted never venture, I came upon sleepy-eyed children pulling heavy loads, sweaty campesinos packed like sardines in rickety trucks belching noxious fumes, half submerged under the provisions they’d brought to market from their distant mountain hamlets.
In the stifling shade of an abandoned hallway, young boys in tattered clothes sniffed glue -- one way to escape reality. Further on, resting on a bed of filthy rags near the gutter, a woman slept with an infant at her breast while an older child, disheveled, wiping an ever-running nose on her sleeve, begged for scraps of food. And when I entered the Basurero, the sprawling municipal garbage dump, under the limpid blue of a sky black with vultures, I found toddlers and young teens feeding on garbage. Below, knee-deep in steaming mountains of waste and competing with the odious birds of death, another group of youngsters rummaged for a meal, perhaps a discarded toy to brighten an otherwise joyless childhood.
Alien to this netherworld, I asked myself what monstrous sins its denizens had committed to be cursed with such ignominious fate. Gliding on the wings of a sudden gust, a crumpled, lipstick-smeared paper napkin landed at my feet. I recognized the gilt monogram of the hotel where the reception had been held the night before. I felt like screaming.
Back on fashionable Avenida Reforma, I met a living ghost. She had no name. Homelessness robs people of all identity. Madness, in her case, further sharpened the alienation, the anonymity. She had no name and she would pass in this dimension and from this life unnoticed. Surely, a name, a vulgar moniker, would give her substance, legitimacy. But she’d been forgotten. Insanity and amnesia had mercifully yanked her from the clutches of reality. But she was real, irritatingly so, the symbol and victim of the society that spawned her. Shunned, loathed, she inspired revulsion, not pity, for she seemed unrepentant, defiant in her grotesque cardboard palace, amid the debris, the scraps of metal, the offal on which she fed, the useless memories that haunted her still, come rain or come shine, come hell or high water.
Her partner-in-grime, ageless, toothless, feral and mad, too mad to erect her own shelter, sat by her companion’s side or stole forty winks on the naked pavement. Wielding a yard of rubber tubing, or an old broom, she chased after man and specter with equal fury, a menacing fist raised against oncoming traffic and snickering children, striking the ground with anger and bewilderment -- no, with exasperation, spitting at passers-by, pelting them with invectives. Sometimes rage crested like an open flame and a torrent of tears drenched her grand-motherly face. She then calmed down, tuned in briefly on the world around her and resumed her silent vigil, a lifeless gaze now focused on an all-consuming void.
One morning, the police came and destroyed the paper, string and plastic scaffolding her friend had erected. The woman put up a fierce battle but the cops prevailed. Trampled by uncaring feet, the decimated remains of her flimsy abode were carted away. She was allowed to bed down on the bare sidewalk and fend for herself.
Up the road, in the narrow, windswept slop-splattered alley that hugs the flanks of a church, a man writhed in drug-induced agony. Frothing at the mouth, his eyes on fire, he crumbled to the ground and let out a blood-curdling wail. Wallowing in waste, he clawed at the demons that tormented him. Thrashing about, he rolled into the gutter and narrowly missed being hit by a passing car. Safe in their pews, the faithful were being treated to the grand spectacle of a mid-day mass. Dominus vobiscum, chanted the priest. Et cum spiritu tuo, the faithful responded, unmindful of the pervading godlessness that surrounds them.
Around the corner, a group of cripples flaunted their grotesque infirmities on the very steps of City Hall. Unruffled, passers-by stepped over them like so much debris. Across the street, a young woman breast-fed her newborn as three older daughters, sired by three different men, plied the beggar’s trade.
Who are the mad, I reflected, and who are the meek who inherit the wind? As I pondered the question, I learned that the cadavers of several street children had been found, face down, in the municipal garbage dump. They’d been bound and gagged and shot, gangland-style, in the back of the head.
The only thing that separates “God” and his creation is a dissimilar perspective. Relativity prevents either from switching places. On planet Earth, where heaven and hell coexist in perilous proximity, right and wrong are less sharply defined. For the powerful, the privileged, the favored, the free, truth remains the stronger of two or more conflicting views. For the poor, the disenfranchised, the voiceless, the forgotten, the truth is a useless paradox, like relativity. Don’t look for justice, I kept telling myself. Don’t look for civility. All you will find is nature, cruel and unmoved, and the aggregate interests of the dominant power base.
*
The UNICEF Press Award ceremony at th
e Foreign Ministry in Tegucigalpa provided a surreal counterpoint to a week-long barrage of angry threats by the Honduran media against children’s rights advocates in Central America. The event also offered a stark contrast in personalities, rhetoric and relativistic justifications.
UNICEF’s exhortation that media “should focus on the positive, not on the negative,” was in keeping with the organization’s “non-confrontational” approach to human rights violations. After all UNICEF donors want to read about happy, well-fed children, not starving, abused outcasts.
Nobel Laureate, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the “autodidact peasant,” who presented the awards, spoke with the riveting eloquence accorded someone who saw half her family massacred right before her eyes by Uncle Sam’s Guatemalan pawns.
“The role of the media is to educate, inform, to shed light where there is none, or where the light is filtered. No society is safe without a passionate, incorruptible press.”
“Ms. Menchú,” I asked, “how would you react to reports that minors are illegally incarcerated with adults in virtually all of Honduras’ penal institutions?”
“I have difficulty in English but I understand what you say. Tell the world.” She squeezed my hand knowingly, smiled softly and moved on.
I later put the same question to the late President Roberto Reina’s envoy, Vice President Guadalupe Jerezano. She reacted with controlled indignation and recited the official catechism.
“This is a complex economic problem. We have repeatedly argued that we just don’t have the funds to build separate facilities for adults and for minors. At this time we face obstacles and priorities of a higher magnitude and urgency than the separation of minors and adults in jails and prisons.”