Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Southern Illinois U. speaker questions America's use of torture
By Chris Klarer
Daily Egyptian (Southern Illinois U.)
04/04/2007

(U-WIRE) CARBONDALE, Ill. — Alfred McCoy put two choices before the American public Tuesday.

"We can honor our commitments under U.S. law and international treaty and ban torture unconditionally, or we can agree with the Bush administration's decision to make torture a permanent weapon in the awesome arsenal of American power," he said.

McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, was brought to Southern Illinois University-Carbondale by six academic departments and five local organizations to speak on U.S. policy surrounding use of torture.

Rich Whitney, the 2006 Illinois Green Party gubernatorial candidate, introduced McCoy at a signing for his recent book, "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror," at Rosetta Stone Bookstore.

"We have a phenomenon in our society where all too many people think that if you are critical of what the government does during wartime, you are being unpatriotic," Whitney said. "But in a republic during war, it's all the more important to know the truth."

McCoy said the Military Commissions Act of 2006 redefined the meaning of psychological torture by confining severe mental pain to include only drug injection, death threats, threats against another person and extreme physical pain.

McCoy said the scandal at Abu Ghraib — in which members of the Army Reserve abused Iraqi prisoners in 2003 — prompted him to delve back into torture, a topic he had abandoned years before.

"When I looked at that most iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi, I saw not the sadism of a few creeps, but instead the two key trademarks of the CIA psychological torture," he said. "The hood for sensory disorientation and the arms extended for self inflicted pain." He said the CIA began researching these forms of "no touch torture" in the 1950s.

"The CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, with costs that reached their peak in the late 1950s of $1 billion a year," he said.

McCoy said researchers discovered they could induce a state akin to psychosis in 48 hours of sensory deprivation.

One of the subjects involved in that particular experiment, a medical student, suffered a complete mental breakdown and had not recovered 10 years later when the researchers last heard from him, McCoy said.

He said the CIA also used techniques created by a Russian intelligence agency.

One such technique, self-inflicted pain, proved extremely effective, he said.

"The legs swelled, the skin erupted into separating lesions, the kidneys shut down, hallucinations began," he said. "In those hundreds of photos from Abu Ghraib you will see this technique used repeatedly, now called stress positions."

McCoy said the CIA has proliferated these techniques throughout many Latin American governments and institutions.

"The Bush administration has built a global gulag of torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and half a dozen additional black sites worldwide," he said.

Jeff Kazmierczak, a senior from Chicago studying international public service, said he appreciated the university bringing in a discussion of torture ethics.

"If your government is condoning torture, the people of that country are going to have a more violent mindset," he said. "I think psychological torture is just as bad as physical torture."

[ Back to Student Voices ]