Sex Rituals of Abu Ghraib

[bemildred]

And now, for something really different ...

I touched a nerve when I published Sex, Drugs, Mind Control and Gitmo in July of 2005. More than anything else I've written in recent years, it was circulated and republished widely. In that article, I suggested that the goings-on at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were not just examples of bored, unsupervised soldiers gone wild, but were part of a cleverly orchestrated, historically documented program of sexual/ritualistic mind control.

Time has only added more evidence that I was correct.

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Rape. Torture. Circles of candles. Swastikas. Sexual activity among the torturers themselves, often in front of the detainees. Creation of cognitive dissonance to fracture the minds of the victims. Mutilated animals.

This is not the picture of a program designed to elicit actionable information. It is a program to shatter minds, perhaps to rebuild them as a new generation of assassins.

Professor Pan

[Canuckistanian]

1. Whoa, that's some far-out stuff there

That all this was a concerted, deliberate effort to create outrage? To create a cadre of "natural-born killers"?

All in an effort to create never-ending war.

But frighteningly, I can see it happening. These freaks have NO limits.

[Moochy]

2. A Question of Torture

I heard this on KPFA on tuesday, thought it was relevant to this editorial you posted.

Worth listening to, 31 minutes into the broadcast:

http://www.flashpoints.net/index.html#2006-02-14

31:00 On the US’ Use of Torture: http://157.22.130.4/data/20060214-Tue1700.mp3
Alfred McCoy, author, “A Question of Torture : CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror”
(Read Naomi Klein's comments about the book)
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, an examination of the CIA's alliances with drug lords, and Closer Than Brothers, a study of the impact of the CIA's psychological torture method upon the Philippine military.

[bemildred]

4. Thank you, that's fascinating.

He's wrong, it goes back much farther than WWII, it goes all the way back. It is true that it had a vogue after WWII, all the blather about "brainwashing" and Orwell's work and the "Manchurian Candidate". And it's standard police methodology in political matters anywhere you go.

[laststeamtrain]

7. Excerpts from McCoy's book here:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1795

The interview on FlashPoints was very good. Thanks for posting.

[CJCRANE]

3. IMO it's about creating enemies to fill

the vacuum left by the end of the Cold War.

I.e. the neocon's "creating reality" to suit their needs.

[madrchsod]

5. someone noticed?

it was obvious from the start.

[katty]

8. indeed, it was

[yurbud]

6. kick (too late to vote up)

[Clara T]

9. Sex Rituals at Gitmo?

Sex, Drugs, Mind Control, and Gitmo



It just gets darker every day.

According to an article in the New Yorker (one of the only major publications still gutsy enough to publish critical, investigative journalism), the ghosts of Gottlieb, Cameron, and the other architects of MKULTRA and BLUEBIRD are alive and well and continuing their devastating psychological abuse and experimentation. A new generation of psychologists and physicians are turning the Hippocratic Oath on its head in their attempts to shape and modify behavior -- much of it under the guise of "extracting information" from "terrorists" (some of whom are innocents caught up in the post-9/11 dragnet). It doesn't take much reading between-the-lines to see what is actually happening behind the scenes at Guantanamo -- and what is taking place is ugly and deeply disturbing, and all too familiar to students of the more sinister threads of history.

Many of the revelations in the New Yorker article ("The Experiment," by Jane Mayer, July 11 & 18, 2005 -- not yet available online, but here's an interview with the author) are familiar, but there are hints of techniques that mirror the most horrific (and mostly ignored) abuses at Abu Ghraib and the historical accounts of government-sponsored mind control. Baher Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School who is representing one detainee states in the article, "The whole place appears to be one giant human experiment." (p. 62)

The people behind these psychological abuses and experiments are known as Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, or BSCTs (commonly called "biscuits"). Originally, BSCTs served as therapists and dispensed psychotropic drugs to soldiers, and evaluated their combat readiness. Post 9/11, however, their mission was altered -- instead of helping soldiers, their talents were turned to interrogation and psychological torture under the umbrella of military intelligence.

Mayer also unearths the role of the military's highly classified "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape" (SERE) program, originally developed by the Air Force at the end of the Korean War (not coincidentally at the same time as the birth of U.S. mind control programs in response to the return of "brainwashed" POWs). The SERE program subjects soldiers to high-stress simulations of stressful detention and torture, in order to prepare them for the possibility of capture. In a familiar post-9/11, rabbit hole inversion, however, SERE was "reverse-engineered" to facilitate the psychological torture of GITMO prisoners. All of the data designed to aid U.S. soldiers was turned on its head and put to use -- by scientists and medical professionals -- to break open the minds of U.S. detainees. One classic example is the mistreatment of holy books. Indeed, according to Mayer, the Koran desecration incidents are a classic SERE tactic. Christian U.S. troops undergoing SERE training were forced to witness the shredding of a Bible -- a tactic long before the Rovian disinfo blitz that sent Newsweek cowering like a beaten dog for daring to comment on the practice.

Yet that tactic pales when compared to some of the other, more suggestive, techniques alleged in the article, such as: A prisoner is shown a picture of a telephone. A psychologist asks him what it is. When he answers that it's a telephone, the psychiatrist angrily responds: "It's not a telephone -- it's a bomb!" What kind of exercise is this, and what is the purpose of it? The prisoners lawyer claims it has only one goal: to make the prisoner believe he is insane. (p. 63) Induction of cognitive dissonance is a trademark technique of mind control.

http://www.charm.net/%7Eprofpan/2005/07/sex-drugs-mind-control-and-gitmo.html