Excerpts from the net -
"But the U.S. government continues to conceal its complicity in these crimes, as well as its role in the decades long orgy of murder, torture and rape against hundreds of thousands of civilians who perished in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration even supported the Argentine military as it trained the Nicaraguan contra rebels in Honduras.
Over the past year, however, evidence has dribbled out that the CIA and the Pentagon contributed directly to these and other human rights violations. In January, The Baltimore Sun discovered a 1983 CIA manual that taught psychological torture techniques to five Latin American security forces. "While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them," the manual coyly advised.
Yet, in the major U.S. media, the CIA's torture manual did not rate as front-page news. The Washington Post stuck its pick-up of the story on A9 and the New York Times ran its version on Al l. Both newspapers played up the fact, too, that the CIA had revised the manual in 1985 to discourage use of these "coercive techniques," although the methods were still described, including how to induce "physical weakness" by subjecting the victim to extremes of heat and cold and deprivation of food and sleep.
But the manual was only watered down in 1985 be cause of a controversy that erupted in October 1984 around stories that I wrote for The Associated Press on the CLA's so-called "assassination" manual for the contras. That "psychological operations" manual advocated "selective use of violence" to "neutralize" civilian opponents and arranging other deaths for political advantage.
The Baltimore Sun's new torture disclosures also follow the Pentagon's admission last year that the U.S. Army's School of the Americas used manuals that advocated torture, murder and coercion. Those Pentagon manuals were prepared in 1982 for training of Latin American officers at the school which has graduated some of the Hemisphere's worst human rights abusers, including El Salvador's "death squad" commander Roberto D'Aubuisson and Panama's Manuel Noriega. Clearly, these manuals were not isolated incidents, or simple "mistakes."
Indeed, the evidence points to conscious U.S. complicity in widespread human rights violations. Yet not a single U.S. official has been held to account for involving the United States in these serious offenses against humanity.
Ronald Reagan remains a Republican political icon, whose name will be affixed to a major new trade building in Washington. Yet, even before his election, Reagan was defending the Argentine military and minimizing its bloody reign. He declared in one radio commentary that President Carter's human rights coordinator, Patricia Derian, "should walk a mile in the moccasins" of Argentina's generals before criticizing them.
Once in office, Reagan dispatched senior advisers to coordinate strategies with the Argentine dictators and South Africa's apartheid regime."
From: Time for a U.S. Truth Commission by Robert Parry from The Consortium Magazine, February 17, 1997
Or, try this -
"The Central Intelligence Agency taught techniques of mental torture and coercion to at least five Latin American security forces in the early 1980's, but repudiated the interrogation methods in 1985, according to documents and statements the agency made public today.
The 1983 manual on interrogation and the 1985 prohibition against coercive methods were made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Baltimore Sun for a series on the C.I.A.'s relationship with a Honduran military battalion. The C.I.A.'s office of public affairs acknowledged for the first time today the agency's prior teaching and subsequent repudiation of psychological torture.
The 1983 manual, under the heading "Coercive Techniques," advised against "direct physical brutality," which it said "creates only resentment, hostility and further defiance" in a prisoner. But, it said, "if a subject refuses to comply once a threat has been made, it must be carried out."
"The torture situation is an external conflict, a contest between the subject and his tormentor," the manual said. "The pain which is being inflicted upon him from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist. On the other hand, pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance."
So if a subject is "required to maintain rigid positions such as standing at attention or sitting on a stool for long periods of time," the manual said, "the immediate source of pain is not the 'questioner' but the subject himself."
This kind of physical and psychological harassment could be combined with "persistent manipulation of time" like "retarding and advancing clocks, disrupting sleep schedules, disorientation regarding night and day" -- all to the end of breaking the subject's will to resist, to "drive him deeper and deeper into himself, until he no longer is able to control his responses in an adult fashion," the manual said. "
snipped. From:
C.I.A. Taught, Then Dropped, Mental Torture in Latin America
By Tim Weiner, The New York Times Wednesday 29 January 1997, Section A; pg. 11
And this -
From:
http://www.mrs.umn.edu/academic/anthropology/chollett/social/usrole.html"3. RE: IN CHICO MENDES, ARCHBISHOP: "WHY IS IT THAT WHEN I GIVE HELP TO THE POOR THEY CALL ME A SAINT, BUT WHEN I ASK WHY THEY ARE POOR IN THE FIRST PLACE, THEY CALL ME A COMMUNIST?"
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