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   The CIA's Declassified Torture Handbook: How to Create a "World of Fear,   
   Terror, Anxiety, Dread."   
   Posted by Lauren Harper   
   President Kennedy and President Joao Goulart on a state visit to Washington   
   April 2, 1962, a year before the US supported a coup to overthrow him and   
   began spreading the KUBARK manual across Latin America.   
   President Kennedy and President Joao Goulart on a state visit to Washington   
   April 2, 1962, a year before the US supported a coup to overthrow him and   
   began spreading the KUBARK manual across Latin America.   
      
   Senator Feinstein's quest to declassify her committee's report on the CIA's   
   post-9/11 torture program has increased attention on the agency's illegal -and   
   decades-old- interrogation techniques. Now, newly-declassified portions of the   
   CIA's infamous 1963    
   KUBARK manual, a comprehensive guide for teaching interrogators how to   
   effectively create "a world of fear, terror, anxiety, [and] dread," helps to   
   further contextualize the agency's long-standing interrogation practices.   
      
   The fear of Communist expansion into the Western Hemisphere after Fidel   
   Castro's 1959 victory in the Cuban Revolution was the geo-political background   
   for the 1963 KUBARK manual. Castro's victory not only encouraged the 1964   
   U.S.-supported overthrow of    
   democratically elected Brazilian President Joao Goulart; it also encouraged   
   the CIA to spread KUBARK across the continent to help prop up pro-U.S.   
   governments. After the Brazilian coup, right-wing military leaders across   
   Latin America began seizing    
   control from democratically elected governments with US encouragement, School   
   of the Americas degrees, and a copy of the KUBARK manual.   
      
   The Secret, 127-page KUBARK manual, first declassified (with redactions) in   
   1997 thanks to a Baltimore Sun FOIA request, is a comprehensive guide for   
   training interrogators in obtaining intelligence from "resistant sources."   
   According to the National    
   Security Archive's 2004 posting, Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past,   
   KUBARK -a CIA cryptonym for itself- "describes the qualifications of a   
   successful interrogator, and reviews the theory of non-coercive and coercive   
   techniques for breaking a    
   prisoner."   
      
   The 1963 KUBARK Manual.    
   The 1963 KUBARK Manual.   
      
   The report contains veiled references to the use of electric shock, saying   
   that when choosing an interrogation site "the electric current should be known   
   in advance, so that transformers and other modifying devices will be on hand   
   if needed." The manual    
   also notes "the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more   
   effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can   
   trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain." Under the   
   subheading "Pain,"    
   the manual's guidelines discusses theories behind various thresholds of pain,   
   and recommends that a subject's "resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain   
   which he seems to inflict upon himself" rather than by direct torture.   
   According to Alfred McCoy,    
   author of A Question of Torture, self-inflicted pain, like stress positions,   
   "causes victims to feel responsible for their suffering and thus capitulate   
   more readily to their torturers."   
      
   Screen Shot 2014-04-15 at 11.17.09 AM   
   Introduction to the manual's "Pain" section; part of the original 1997 release.   
      
   Now, thanks to a mandatory declassification review request (MDR) filed by   
   MuckRock user Jeffrey Kaye, a less-redacted version of the KUBARK manual is   
   available. Revelations from the new release include the CIA's admission to   
   doctoring detainees'    
   interrogations tapes, a practice it considered "effective" in making it seem   
   as though the detainee had confessed, and using foreign intelligence services   
   for detention and interrogation purposes. The references to foreign   
   intelligence services mean that    
   rendition is not a product of the post-9/11 world; it is a practice at least   
   50 years old. Supporting this, CIA ex-Deputy Counsel John Rizzo said in a   
   recent Democracy Now interview that "[r]enditions were not a product of the   
   post-9/11 era... renditions,   
    in and of themselves, are actually a fairly well-established fact in American   
   and world, actually, intelligence organizations."   
      
   It was only after congressional committees began questioning the CIA's   
   interrogation techniques in Latin America in the early 1980s, particularly in   
   Honduras, that the agency began to revise its practices, if only temporarily.   
   The result of the    
   congressional attention was an editing -by hand- of the CIA's "Human Resource   
   Exploitation" manual, based largely off of the earlier KUBARK manual, to alter   
   passages that appeared to advocate coercion and stress techniques to be used   
   on prisoners. CIA    
   officials also attached a new prologue page to the manual stating: "The use of   
   force, mental torture, threats, insults or exposure to inhumane treatment of   
   any kind as an aid to interrogation is prohibited by law, both international   
   and domestic; it is    
   neither authorized nor condoned," but with the caveat that forms of torture   
   and coercive techniques "always require prior [headquarters] approval" first.   
      
   torture   
   At left, the 1985 prologue declaring torture illegal; at right, the CIA's Abu   
   Zubaydah interrogation photo.   
      
   Even though Feinstein's report does not recommend any further inquiries into   
   the CIA's interrogation practices, I hope it will generate more resistance to   
   torture than the CIA's own secret 1985 handwritten changes have.   
      
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