There is extensive evidence of US intelligence gathering techniques, much of it derived from declassified documents. It points to a clearly navigable path from the paranoia of the anti-communist post-WWII era to Abu Ghraib. This evidence is systematically laid out in Michael Otterman's From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond.
It is clear that the familiar images of American soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere cannot possibly be explained away as the actions of a few rogue elements. Such behaviour has a history that reveals the extent of our collective delusion.
This selective blindness has been recently evident, via the widespread shock expressed that so many doctors were involved in the June terror attacks on London and Glasgow. The high esteem in which the medical profession is held, is mostly deserved. However, it is clear that numerous American physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists have actively participated in experiments to test coercive techniques, and in the actual application of these techniques, for more than 50 years.
Definitions of torture are quite rubbery, depending on who is on the receiving end. A 1956 study, commissioned by the CIA, concluded that Soviet and Chinese methods, based on debility, dread and dependence (DDD), 'constitute torture and physical coercion'. However, by 2002, with the Americans employing many of the same techniques, thinking had changed. An administration memo argued that for a physical act to constitute torture 'it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure'.
Soon after WWII it became a matter of national security to understand communist 'brainwashing' techniques. Operating with 'extra-legal powers ... under a veil of secrecy ... the CIA was the primary agency charged with mind control research during the Cold War'. Much of their early work focused on the potential of drugs, such as LSD, to 'loosen lips' during the interrogation process. 'Unwitting soldiers' were used as guinea pigs.
By 1955 stress inoculation, deemed necessary to resist communist coercion, had evolved into the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, which inflicted on thousands of soldiers tortures such as electric shocks and confinement in an undersized wooden box. Racial, sexual and religious humiliation was frequently practised and students were also learning how to use the techniques to extract information.
Why did it take the CIA so long to discover that debility, dependency and dread