We Were Tortured by the CIA?!
I just happened to hear a Democracy Now (Amy Goodman) report (2/17/06) on the CIA development in the late 1959s of torture techniques now apparently being applied in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and once again publicized by the display of tapes of same on Australian TV.
To my horror I realized that I and a number of unwitting grad students of my generation had been the guinea pigs for these torture techniques. Back then, as now, we graduate students would do most anything to earn monies to supplement limited budgets. I had had the good fortune to have one of the national fellowships in a program that also set up week long summer conferences for us.
In the summer of 1957 I had participated in a 48 hour test experiment that was supposed to be for potential space astronauts and which was actually held in an airfield of a private aircraft operation in Long Island (I was a Columbia grad student at the time). We were offered $1.00 per hour for this stint which consisted of being locked in a simulated space capsule, blind-folded, with earphones with a heavy roar (which injured my hearing I learned later), gloves keeping us from physical contact, food through a straw and unimaginable elimination of wastes arrangements (messy). I prepared myself for this stint by staying up all night before the entry so that I would be sleeping through the first portion of it. I discovered a small hole in one of the gloves that allowed me to feel my beard growth to figure how long I had been at it and emerged after two days relatively intact to be subjected to pain tests -- hand held in freezing water, an electrical gadget hooked up to my arm with water that eventually began to boil on my bare skin, as I pointed out to the one administrating it. I had apparently been watched throughout by psychologists who asked why I kept touching my jaw with my gloved finger and told me that most of the guys had come tearing out of their capsules with wires dangling in psychotic states. Such is the effect of sensory deprivation.
When I met with my fellow grad student fellowship winners that summer I found that others had had similar experiences -- CIA LSD experiments in D.C. that had left some of the students in psychotic states.
Low and behold, Amy Goodman's expert on same reports that this was the starting point of the CIA torture techniques that have been operating ever since and which have manifested themselves in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.
I think I survived this stuff intact, but I wonder how many of my fellow grad students suffered post-traumatic stress. Certainly no one followed up to find out.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
To my horror I realized that I and a number of unwitting grad students of my generation had been the guinea pigs for these torture techniques. Back then, as now, we graduate students would do most anything to earn monies to supplement limited budgets. I had had the good fortune to have one of the national fellowships in a program that also set up week long summer conferences for us.
In the summer of 1957 I had participated in a 48 hour test experiment that was supposed to be for potential space astronauts and which was actually held in an airfield of a private aircraft operation in Long Island (I was a Columbia grad student at the time). We were offered $1.00 per hour for this stint which consisted of being locked in a simulated space capsule, blind-folded, with earphones with a heavy roar (which injured my hearing I learned later), gloves keeping us from physical contact, food through a straw and unimaginable elimination of wastes arrangements (messy). I prepared myself for this stint by staying up all night before the entry so that I would be sleeping through the first portion of it. I discovered a small hole in one of the gloves that allowed me to feel my beard growth to figure how long I had been at it and emerged after two days relatively intact to be subjected to pain tests -- hand held in freezing water, an electrical gadget hooked up to my arm with water that eventually began to boil on my bare skin, as I pointed out to the one administrating it. I had apparently been watched throughout by psychologists who asked why I kept touching my jaw with my gloved finger and told me that most of the guys had come tearing out of their capsules with wires dangling in psychotic states. Such is the effect of sensory deprivation.
When I met with my fellow grad student fellowship winners that summer I found that others had had similar experiences -- CIA LSD experiments in D.C. that had left some of the students in psychotic states.
Low and behold, Amy Goodman's expert on same reports that this was the starting point of the CIA torture techniques that have been operating ever since and which have manifested themselves in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.
I think I survived this stuff intact, but I wonder how many of my fellow grad students suffered post-traumatic stress. Certainly no one followed up to find out.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
posted by Ed Kent at 8:04 PM
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