The CIA’s secret killers
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Global: At its height, the CIA program included secret prisons in countries including Afghanistan, Thailand, Romania, Lithuania and Poland — locations that are referred to only by color-themed codes in the report
IMAGE/Daily Mail
Before irrefutable evidence of its vast kidnapping and interrogation program in the post-2001 period surfaced the CIA similarly used to claim, year after year, that it had never been in the torture business either. Torture manuals drafted by the Agency would surface – a 128-page secret how-to-torture guide produced by the CIA in July 1963 called “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation”, another 1983 manual, enthusiastically used by CIA clients in the “contra” war against Central American leftist nationalists in President Reagan’s years – and the Agency would deny, waffle and evade until the moment came simply to dismiss the torture charge as “an old story.”
In fact the Agency took a practical interest in torture and assassination from its earliest days, studying Nazi interrogation techniques avidly and sheltering noted Nazi practitioners. As it prepared its coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1953 the Agency distributed to its agents and operatives a killer’s training manual (made public in 1997) full of hands-on advice:
“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. … The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.
“…In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.
“If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.”
What about targets of assassination attempts by the CIA, acting on presidential orders? We could start with the bid on Chou En-lai’s life after the Bandung Conference in 1954; they blew up the plane scheduled to take him home, but fortunately for him, though not his fellow passengers, he’d switched flights. Then we could move on to the efforts, ultimately successful in 1961, to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, in which the CIA was intimately involved, dispatching among others the late Dr Sidney Gottlieb, the Agency’s in-house killer chemist, with a hypodermic loaded with poison. The Agency made many efforts to kill General Kassim in Iraq. The first such attempt on October 7, 1959 was botched badly, and one of the assassins, Saddam Husssein, was, spirited out to an Agency apartment in Cairo. There was a second Agency effort in 1960-1961 with a poisoned handkerchief. Finally they shot Kassim in the coup of February 8/9, 1963.
Counterpunch for more
CIA torture report: These depravities are not going to infuriate the Muslim world – they’ve been enraged about them for years
by ROBERT FISK
It’s the Western response that the torturers really fear, which is why the CIA has been so intent on misleading us
Up to the end, they wanted to keep it secret.
And the vicious psychopaths and sadists that ran the CIA’s torture centres “on our behalf” must be protected, even praised by the Bushies for keeping our civilisation safe. Their lies – to us as well as their victims – were all in the cause of freedom, so let’s have no more talk of Muslims standing on broken feet, bubbling through the mouth after 82 rounds of waterboarding or being fed hummus through the rectum.
And the Republicans and Bushies, sniffing how badly they come out of all this – of course the release of these vile tortures is “ideologically motivated”, just as they claim – now respond with an excuse that almost parallels the weapons-of-mass-destruction-al-Qaeda-links-to-Saddam-Niger-tubes tosh we were fed before we embarked on our slaughter in Iraq 11 years ago. In fact, it’s the same old rubbish they churned out before the obscene Abu Ghraib photos were published. “It will significantly endanger Americans around the world,” the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told us.
The Independent for more
Hayden’s testimony vs. the Senate report
WASHINGTON POST
A look at then-CIA Director Michael V. Hayden’s testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on April 12, 2007, compared with the extensive summary on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program, released on Tuesday. Read full document and related story.
Hygiene
“Detainees have never been denied the means — at a minimum, they’ve always had a bucket to dispose of their human waste.” CIA Director Michael V. Hayden
This testimony is incongruent with CIA records. CIA detainees, particularly those subjected to standing sleep deprivation, were routinely placed in diapers. Waste buckets were not always available. In the interrogation of Abu Hazim, a waste bucket was removed from his cell for punishment. According to a CIA cable, Abu Hazim “requested a bucket in which he could relieve himself, but was told all rewards must be earned.” Senate report
Washington Post for more