The Shock Doctrine: The Kurbark Interrogation Manual page 368

[Joanne98]

The Bush team had failed to shock Iraqis into obedience either with Shock and Awe or with economic shock therapy. Now the shock tactics became more personal using the Kurbark interrogation manual's unmistakeable formula for inducing regression.

Many of the important prisoners were taken to a secured area near the Baghdad International Airport, run by a military task force and the CIA. Accessible only by special ID and kept hidden from the Red Cross, the facility was so clandestine that even high-level military officials were denied entry. To maintain its cover it repeatedly changed names-from Task Force 20 to 121 to 6-26 to Task Force 145.

Prisoners were held in a small generic building, designed to create the textbook Kurbark conditions, including sensory deprivation. The building was divided into five areas; a medical exam room, a "soft room" that looked like a living room for co-operative prisoners, a red room, a blue room and the much-feared black room-a small cell with every surface painted black and speakers in all four corners.

The existence of the secret facility became public only when a sergeant who worked there, using a pseudonym Jeff Perry, approached Human Rights Watch to describe this strange place. Compared with with the bedlam of Abu Ghraib, with it's untrained guards mostly making it up as they went along, the CIA's airport facility was spookily ordered and clinical. According to Perry, when interrogators wanted to use "harsh tactics" against prisoners in the black room, they went to a computer terminal and printed out a form that was a kind of torture menu. "It was all already typed out for you," Perry recalled "environmental controls, hot and cold, you know, strobe lights, music, so forth. Working dogs...you would just check what you want to use off." When they completed the forms, the interrogators took them to a superior officer for authorization. "I never saw a sheet that wasn't signed."

Previous thread The Salvador Option..
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2568489

and if you want to know what happens next, you have to buy the book.

:P

[Joanne98]

1. kick

[mac2]

2. I heard this author talk on PBS

Where has she been? We Americans are being silenced and many in jail for political reasons. We do have a Police State.

[mmonk]

3. Thanks Joanne98.

And I'm fortunate to have the book so I know what happens next. ;-)

[Joanne98]

4. kick

[Joanne98]

5. kick

[Joanne98]

6. ..........