Let's look back
While the NSA was busy snooping on US citizens through Projects SHAMROCK and MINARET, the CIA got into the domestic spying act by initiating Operation CHAOS. President Lyndon Johnson authorized the creation of the CIA's Domestic Operations Division (DOD), whose purpose was to "exercise centralized responsibility for direction, support, and coordination of clandestine operations activities within the United States...."
When Johnson ordered CIA Director John McCone to use the DOD to analyze the growing college student protests of the Administration's policy towards Vietnam, two new units were set up to target anti-war protestors and organizations: Project RESISTANCE, which worked with college administrators, campus security and local police to identify anti-war activists and political dissidents; and Project MERRIMAC, which monitored any demonstrations being conducted in the Washington D.C. area. The CIA then began monitoring student activists and infiltrating anti-war organizations by working with local police departments to pull off burglaries, illegal entries (black bag jobs), interrogations and electronic surveillance.
Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, et. al., The Lawless State (Penguin: New York, 1976) p. 146..
After President Nixon came to office in 1969, all of these domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation CHAOS. After the revelation of two former CIA agents' involvement in the Watergate break-in, the publication of an article about CHAOS in the New York Times
Seymour Hersh, "Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces," New York Times (December 22, 1974), p. 1.
and the growing concern about distancing itself from illegal domestic spying activities, the CIA shut down Operation CHAOS. But during the life of the project, the Church Committee and the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission) revealed that the CIA had compiled files on over 13,000 individuals, including 7,000 US citizens and 1,000 domestic organizations.
The Lawless State, p. 153; US Commission on CIA Activites within the United States, Report to the President (US Government Printing Office: Washington DC, 1975), p. 144n3.
Cruel Science The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research
By ALFRED W. McCOY
From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led massive, secret research into coercion and consciousness that reached a billion dollars at peak. After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shocks, and sensory deprivation, this CIA research produced a new method of torture that was psychological, not physical--best described as "no touch torture."
The CIA's discovery of psychological torture was a counter-intuitive break-through--indeed, the first real revolution in this cruel science since the 17th century. In its modern application, the physical approach required interrogators to inflict pain, usually by crude beatings that often produced heightened resistance or unreliable information. Under the CIA's new psychological paradigm, however, interrogators used two essential methods, disorientation and self-inflicted pain, to make victims feel responsible for their own suffering.
In the CIA's first stage, interrogators employ simple, non-violent techniques to disorient the subject. To induce temporal confusion, interrogators use hooding or sleep deprivation. To intensify disorientation, interrogators often escalate to attacks on personal identity by sexual humiliation.
Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on to a second stage with simple, self-inflicted discomfort such as standing for hours with arms extended. In this phase, the idea is to make victims feel responsible for their own pain and thus induce them to alleviate it by capitulating to the interrogator's power.
more
http://www.counterpunch.org/mccoy05292004.html 
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