The history of CIA torture techniques

This is the article I mentioned a few months ago, covering some of the history and development of American "soft torture" techniques.  It is chilling and heinous what they did (and may still be doing) to people.  It is by Rebecca Lemov and was published November 16, 2005, by Slate magazine.    

 

A Wikipedia article about Cardinal Mindszenty is available at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindszenty .  If he was tortured, it was wrong, but you can see that he was right-wing and would have had reasons to oppose and possibly act illegally against left governments.  Lemov tries to link this to the "Russians" and "Communists" but gives little information to prove that this was a systematic practice of the officially Marxist-Leninists states.  He sounds like a reactionary cleric, too reactionary even for the Vatican in the 60's, who made at least one anti-semitic statement (blaming the Jews for revolution in Hungary), according to a brief Web search.  He was reportedly an enemy of the Hungarian Bolsheviks after WWI and the "communist" Hungarian government after WWII (whether it was ML or not is another question, and it could have been ultra-left to attack the Catholic Church), but also an enemy of the Arrow Cross (?) Hungarian fascists during WWII.  This is based on just a little research, mainly through Wikipedia, though, so I could be wrong about the historical context.       

 

The Birth of Soft Torture

CIA interrogation techniques—a history.

By Rebecca Lemov
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 5:07 PM ET

In 1949, Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty appeared before the world's cameras to mumble his confession to treasonous crimes against the Hungarian church and state. For resisting communism, the World War II hero had been subjected for 39 days to sleep deprivation and humiliation, alternating with long hours of interrogation, by Russian-trained Hungarian police. His staged confession riveted the Central Intelligence Agency, which theorized in a security memorandum that Soviet-trained experts were controlling Mindszenty by "some unknown force." If the Communists had interrogation weapons that were evidently more subtle and effective than brute physical torture, the CIA decided, then it needed such weapons, too.

Illustration of an experiment run by Hull at Yale on university students in 1937.

 

Months later, the agency began a program to explore "avenues to the control of human behavior," as John Marks discusses in his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. During the next decade and a half, CIA experts honed the use of "chemical and biological materials capable of producing human behavioral and physiological changes" according to a retrospective CIA catalog written in 1963. And thus soft torture in the United States was born...

The rest of the article is available at www.slate.com/id/2130301?nav=nw