The KUBARK connection?

Today's Washington Post draws our attention to a CIA interrogation manual on interrogation published in 1963 and declassified in 1997. Known as the KUBARK manual, it delineates techniques for extracting information from prisoners -- techniques which bear some relationship to the vile practices at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

The KUBARK methodology, in turn, seems to derive from the findings of various MKULTRA scientists. MKULTRA was the CIA's ten-year study of ways to modify human behavior and perception; it was shut down in late 1963 when the CIA inspector general, a Kennedy appointee, got wind of some of the more fragrant activities.

A note on nomenclature: All CIA project cryptonyms (code names) begin with a two-letter prefix. KU refers to the agency itself. A folk etymology holds that MK stands for Mind Kontrolle, or something similar. (I once asked a former CIA employee what method was used to choose these prefixes, particularly the MK prefix; she had no idea.) After the prefix comes a word supposedly chosen at random, although (I am told) there is room for subtle humor in this area.

I imagine that paranoids of a certain sort -- the aluminum chapeau aficionados -- will have a field day as they pass around the Washington Post article. Any reference to MKULTRA attracts the respectful attention of schizophrenics. In truth, I don't see much resemblance between the scientific methodology employed by the MKULTRA scientists and the sledgehammer tactics used at Abu Ghraib.

The Post story outlines some of the major differences. Compare, for example, the sensory deprivation confinement of John Walker Lindh to the similar technique "pioneered" in a CIA experiment conducted in the 1950s:

The payoff of such techniques, the manual said, is that when the interrogator appears, he or she appears as a "reward of lessened anxiety . . . providing relief for growing discomfort," and that sometimes, as a result, "the questioner assumes a benevolent role."

By all accounts, the interrogators never seem benevolent in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gitmo.

The problem may well be simple bigotry and hatred. Sophisticated methods of psychological coercion cannot penetrate a wall of cultural intolerance. When the KUBARK methods were researched, CIA scientists presumed the detainees would be Eastern Europeans -- people similar to Americans, people who could be "turned." But detainees in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere lack basic humanity in the eyes of their questioners. Lyndiee England and her compatriots had no desire to take on a "benevolent" role -- they may not even have desired information. Viewing all Muslims as terrorists, these "interrogators" lusted for simple revenge.

Much the same thing occurred in Vietnam; see Peter Dale Scott's historical note here.