FASCINATING: "US has a 45-year History of Torture" covers many differnet parts of LatAm

[magbana]

From Walter Lippmann's CubaNews List, note his comment below about the 1902 magazine cover showing US soldiers waterboarding a Cuban insurgent during the Spanish-American war.


Excellent discussion of the history, having roots
going much, much, much further back. For example,
here's an image of US waterboarding in Cuba, 1902:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2299.html
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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-langguth3-2009may03,0,6987276.story
From the Los Angeles Times

Opinion
U.S. has a 45-year history of torture

The difference between American involvement in South American atrocities in 1964 and 'enhanced interrogation' now is that some modern-day officials appear proud of themselves.
By A.J. Langguth

May 3, 2009

As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S. agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle.

I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign against CIA abuses.

At the time, I was researching a book on the United States' role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator's files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture. The stories came from Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and the rest of the continent's Southern Cone.

Despite my past reporting from South Vietnam, I had been naive enough to be at first surprised and then appalled by the degree to which our country had helped to overthrow elected governments in Latin America.

Our interference, which went on for decades, was not limited to one political party. The meddling in Brazil began in earnest during the early 1960s under a Democratic administration. At that time, Washington's alarm over Cuba was much like the more recent panic after 9/11. The Kennedy White House was determined to prevent another communist regime in the hemisphere, and Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, was taking a strong interest in several anti-communist approaches, including the Office of Public Safety.

When OPS was launched under President Eisenhower, its mission sounded benign enough -- to increase the professionalism of the police of Asia, Africa and, particularly, Latin America. But its genial director, Byron Engle, was a CIA agent, and his program was part of a wider effort to identify receptive recruits among local populations.

Although Engle wanted to avoid having his unit exposed as a CIA front, in the public mind the separation was quickly blurred. Dan Mitrione, for example, a police advisor murdered by Uruguay's left-wing Tupamaros for his role in torture in that country, was widely assumed to be a CIA agent.

When Brazil seemed to tilt leftward after President Joao Goulart assumed power in 1961, the Kennedy administration grew increasingly troubled. Robert Kennedy traveled to Brazil to tell Goulart he should dismiss two of his Cabinet members, and the office of Lincoln Gordon, John Kennedy's ambassador to Brazil, became the hub for CIA efforts to destabilize Goulart's government.

On March 31, 1964, encouraged by U.S. military attache Vernon Walters, Brazilian Gen. Humberto Castelo Branco rose up against Goulart. Rather than set off a civil war, Goulart chose exile in Montevideo.

Ambassador Gordon returned to a jubilant Washington, where he ran into Robert Kennedy, who was still grieving for his brother, assassinated the previous November. "Well, he got what was coming to him," Kennedy said of Goulart. "Too bad he didn't follow the advice we gave him when we were down there."

The Brazilian people did not deserve what they got. The military cracked down harshly on labor unions, newspapers and student associations. The newly efficient police, drawing on training provided by the U.S., began routinely torturing political prisoners and even opened a torture school on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to teach police sergeants how to inflict the maximum pain without killing their victims.

One torture victim was Fernando Gabeira, a young reporter for Jornal do Brasil who was recruited by a resistance movement and later arrested for his role in the 1969 kidnapping of Charles Burke Elbrick, the U.S. ambassador. (Elbrick was released after four days.) In custody, Gabeira later told me, he was tortured with electric shocks to his testicles; a fellow prisoner had his testicles nailed to a table. Still others were beaten bloody or waterboarded. When Gabeira's captors said anything at all, they sometimes boasted about having been trained in the United States.

During the first seven years after Castelo Branco's coup, the OPS trained 100,000 Brazilian police, including 600 who were brought to the United States. Their instruction varied. Some OPS lecturers denounced torture as inhumane and ineffectual. Others conveyed a different message. Le Van An, a student from the South Vietnamese police, later described what his instructors told him: "Despite the fact that brutal interrogation is strongly criticized by moralists," they said, "its importance must not be denied if we want to have order and security in daily life."

Brazil's political prisoners never doubted that Americans were involved in the torture that proliferated in their country. On their release, they reported that they frequently had heard English-speaking men around them, foreigners who left the room while the actual torture took place. As the years passed, those torture victims say, the men with American accents became less careful and sometimes stayed on during interrogations.

One student dissident, Angela Camargo Seixas, described to me how she was beaten and had electric wires inserted into her vagina after her arrest. During her interrogations, she found that her hatred was directed less toward her countrymen than toward the North Americans. She vowed never to forgive the United States for training and equipping the Brazilian police.

Flavio Tavares Freitas, a journalist and Christian nationalist, shared that sense of outrage. When he had wires jammed in his ears, between his teeth and into his anus, he saw that the small gray generator producing the shocks had on its side the red, white and blue shield of the USAID.

Still another student leader, Jean Marc Von der Weid, told of having his penis wrapped in wires and connected to a battery-operated field telephone. Von der Weid, who had been in Brazil's marine reserve, said he recognized the telephone as one supplied by the United States through its military assistance program.

Victims often said that their one moment of hope came when a medical doctor appeared in their cell. Now surely the torment would end. Then they found that he was only there to guarantee that they could survive another round of shocks.

CIA Director Richard Helms once tried to rebut accusations against his agency by asserting that the nation must take it on faith that the CIA was made up of "honorable men." That was before Sen. Frank Church's 1975 Senate hearings brought to light CIA behavior that was deeply dishonorable.

Before Brazil restored civilian government in 1985, Abourezk had managed to shut down a Texas training base notorious for teaching subversive techniques, including the making of bombs. When OPS came under attack during another flurry of bad publicity, the CIA did not fight to save it, and its funding was cut off.

Looking back, what has changed since 1975? A Brazilian truth and reconciliation commission was convened, and it documented 339 cases of government-sanctioned political assassinations. In 2002, a former labor leader and political prisoner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was elected president of Brazil. He's serving his second term.

Fernando Gabeira went home to publish a book about kidnapping the American ambassador and his ordeal in prison. The book became a bestseller throughout Brazil, and Gabeira was elected to the national legislature. In an election last October, he came within 1.4 percentage points of becoming the mayor of Rio de Janeiro.

But in our country, there's been a disheartening development: In 1975, U.S. officials still felt they had to deny condoning torture. Now many of them seem to be defending torture, even boasting about it.

A.J. Langguth is the author of "Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America."

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WALTER LIPPMANN
Los Angeles, California
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
"Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"
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[Judi Lynn]

1. Here's an article by the same author on Dan Mitrione, the former Indiana police chief

who was hired by Dwight D. Eisenhower's State Department, and, when he was killed, was given a hero's funeral by then President Richard M. Nixon, attended by Nixon officials, and his son-in-law, David Eisenhower, with the financial burden on the wife and his nine chilrden softened greatly with a benefit staged by Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis{blockquote]THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 11, 1979 A19

Torture’s Teachers

By A.J. Langguth

LOS ANGELES – A few months ago, I received some clippings of interviews with a former Federal Intelligence agency official. That operative, Jesse Leaf, had been involved with the agency’s activities in Iran, and well into the stories Mr. Leaf made some damning accusations.

He said that the C.I.A. sent an operative to teach interrogation methods to SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, that the training included instructions in torture, and the techniques were copied from the Nazis.

Reading through the clippings, I could think of several reasons why the accusations had not been featured prominently. Mr. Leaf could not, or did not, supply the name of the instructor, his victims would be hard to locate; and the testimony from opponents of the Shah would be suspect.

But there is still another reason that I take to be the truest one: We – and I mean we as Americans – don’t believe it. We can read the accusations, even examine the evidence and find it irrefutable. But, in our hearts, we cannot believe that Americans have gone abroad to spread the use of torture.

We can believe that public officials with reputations for brilliance can be arrogant, blind or stupid. Anything but evil. And when the cumulative proof becomes overwhelming that our representatives in the C.I.A. or the Agency for International Development police program did in fact teach torture, we excuse ourselves by vilifying the individual men.

This has been on my mind since I returned from Cuba recently. In Havana, I had tried to hunt down a former double agent, a Cuban named Manuel, who was said to have information about United States involvement with torture in Latin America. Manuel had revealed his true sympathies by leaving his job with the C.I.A. in Montevideo and returning to his homeland. But from his editor I learned that Manuel, whose full name turned out to be Manuel Hevia Conculluela, would be out of the country the entire time I was in Cuba. I could, however, get a copy of the book he had published six months earlier, "Pasaporte 11333, Eight Years With the C.I.A."

Mr. Hevia had served the C.I.A. in Uruguay’s police program. In 1970, his duties brought him in contact with Dan Mitrione, the United States policy adviser who was kidnapped by the Tupamaro revolutionaries later that year and shot to death when the Uruguayan Government refused to save him by yielding up politician prisoners.

Mr. Mitrione has become notorious throughout Latin America. But few men ever had the chance to sit with him and discuss his rationale for torture. Mr. Hevia had once.

Now, reading Mr. Hevia’s version, which I believe to be accurate, I see that I too had resisted acknowledging how drastically a man’s career can deform him. I was aware that Mr. Mitrione knew of the tortures and condoned them. That was bad enough. I could not believe even worse of a family man. A Midwesterner. An American.

Thanks to Mr. Hevia, I was finally hearing Mr. Mitrione’s true voice:

"When you receive a subject, the first thing to do is to determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, through a medical examination. A premature death means a failure by the technician.

"Another important thing to know is exactly how far you can go given the political situation and the personality of the prisoner. It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die…

"Before all else, you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist…

A few months later, Mr. Mitrione paid with his life for those excesses. Five years late, thanks to the effort of such men as former Senator James Abourezk, the police advisory program was finally abolished.

But few of the accomplices in torture have ever been called to account. Years ago in open hearings, Senator Frank church tried to force some admissions but his witnesses sidestepped his staff’s sketchy allegations. Given the willingness of congress to accept the C.I.A.’s alibis about national security, I don’t think any other public hearings would fare better.

But neither Jimmy Carter nor Adm. Stansfield Turner, the Director of Central Intelligence, is implicated in those past cruelties, and the President should call on Admiral Turner for a complete internal investigation and a full report. If he wants Vice President Mondale to oversee the effort, all the better. They can start with Operation Bandierantes in São Paolo, Brazil, continue with manual Hevia’s exposé of practices in Uruguay, and then move on to Child, Iran, and Southeast Asia.

If, at the end, the President can assure us that no American who taught or condoned torture is still working for the C.I.A. or any other agency of the Government, I know that at least we will want to believe him.http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/langguthleaf.html

~~~~~~~~~~~

Uruguay 1964-1970
Torture - as American as apple pie
excerpted from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum

"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.''

The words of an instructor in the art of torture. The words of Dan Mitrione, the head of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Montevideo.
Officially, OPS was a division of the Agency for International Development, but the director of OPS in Washington, Byron Engle, was an old CIA hand. His organization maintained a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under OPS cover, although Mitrione was not one of them.
OPS had been operating formally in Uruguay since 1965, supplying the police with the equipment, the arms, and the training it was created to do. Four years later, when Mitrione arrived, the Uruguayans had a special need for OPS services. The country was in the midst of a long-running economic decline, its once-heralded prosperity and democracy sinking fast toward the level of its South American neighbors. Labor strikes, student demonstrations, and militant street violence had become normal events during the past year, and, most worrisome to the Uruguayan authorities, there were the revolutionaries who called themselves Tupamaros. Perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful and most sophisticated urban guerrillas the world has ever seen, the Tupamaros had a deft touch for capturing the public's imagination with outrageous actions, and winning sympathizers with their Robin Hood philosophy. Their members and secret partisans held key positions in the government, banks, universities, and the professions, as well as in the military and police.
"Unlike other Latin-American guerrilla groups," the New York Times stated in 1970 "the Tupamaros normally avoid bloodshed when possible. They try instead to create embarrassment for the Government and general disorder." A favorite tactic was to raid the files of a private corporation to expose corruption and deceit in high places, or kidnap a prominent figure and try him before a "People's Court". It was heady stuff to choose a public villain whose acts went uncensored by the legislature, the courts and the press, subject him to an informed and uncompromising interrogation, and then publicize the results of the intriguing dialogue. Once they ransacked an exclusive high-class nightclub and scrawled the walls perhaps their most memorable slogan: "O Bailan Todos O No Baila Nadie -- Either everyone dances or no one dances."
Dan Mitrione did not introduce the practice of torturing political prisoners to Uruguay It had been perpetrated by the police at times from at least the early 1960s. However, in surprising interview given to a leading Brazilian newspaper in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that US advisers, and in particular Mitrione, had instituted torture as a more routine measure; to the means of inflicting pain they had added scientific refinement; and to that a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoners that it was his family being tortured.
"The violent methods which were beginning to be employed," said Otero, "caused an escalation in Tupamaro activity. Before then their attitude showed that they would use violence only as a last resort."
The newspaper interview greatly upset American officials in South America and Washington. Byron Engle later tried to explain it all away by asserting: "The three Brazilian reporters in Montevideo all denied filing that story. We found out later that it was slipped into the paper by someone in the composing room at the Jornal do Brasil."
Otero had been a willing agent of the CIA, a student at their International Police Services school in Washington, a recipient of their cash over the years, but he was not a torturer. What finally drove him to speak out was perhaps the torture of a woman who, while a Tupamaro sympathizer, was also a friend of his. When she told him that Mitrione had watched and assisted in her torture, Otero complained to him, about this particular incident as well as his general methods of extracting information. The only outcome of the encounter was Otero's demotion.
William Cantrell was a CIA operations officer stationed in Montevideo and ostensibly a member of the OPS team. In the mid-1960s he was instrumental in setting up a Department of Information and Intelligence (DII), and providing it with funds and equipment. Some the equipment, innovated by the CIA's Technical Services Division, was for the purpose torture, for this was one of the functions carried out by the DII.
"One of the pieces of equipment that was found useful," former New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth learned, "was a wire so very thin that it could be fitted into the mouth between the teeth and by pressing against the gum increase the electrical charge. it was through the diplomatic pouch that Mitrione got some of the equipment he needed in interrogations, including these fine wires.''
Things got so bad in Mitrione's time that the Uruguayan Senate was compelled undertake an investigation. After a five-month study, the commission concluded unanimously that torture in Uruguay had become a "normal, frequent and habitual occurrence inflicted upon Tupamaros as well as others. Among the types of torture the commission's report made reference to were electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under the fingernails, burning with cigarettes, the slow compression of the testicles, daily use of psychological torture ... "pregnant women were subjected to various brutalities and inhuman treatment" ... "certain women were imprisoned with their very young infants and subjected to the same treatment."
Eventually the DII came to serve as a cover for the Escuadron de la Muerte (Death Squad), composed, as elsewhere in Latin America, primarily of police officers, who bombed and strafed the homes of suspected Tupamaro sympathizers and engaged in assassination and kidnapping. The Death Squad received some of its special explosive material from the Technical Services Division and, in all likelihood, some of the skills employed by its members were acquired from instruction in the United States. Between 1969 and 1973, at least 16 Uruguayan police officers went through an eight-week course at CIA/OPS schools in Washington and Los Fresnos, Texas in the design, manufacture and employment of bombs and incendiary devices. The official OPS explanation for these courses was that policemen needed such training in order to deal with bombs placed by terrorists. There was, however, no instruction in destroying bombs, only in making them; moreover, on at least one reported occasion, the students were not policemen, but members of a private right-wing organization in Chile. Another part of the curriculum which might also have proven to be of value to the Death Squad was the class on Assassination Weapons-
"A discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin" is how OPS put it. Equipment and training of this kind was in addition to that normally provided by OPS: riot helmets, transparent shields, tear gas, gas masks, communication gear, vehicles, police batons, and other devices for restraining crowds. The supply of these tools of the trade was increased in 1968 when public disturbances reached the spark-point, and by 1970 American training in riot-control techniques had been given to about a thousand Uruguayan policemen.
Dan Mitrione had built a soundproofed room in the cellar of his house in Montevideo.
In this room he assembled selected Uruguayan police officers to observe a demonstration of torture techniques. Another observer was Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a Cuban who was with the CIA and worked with Mitrione. Hevia later wrote that the course began with a description of the human anatomy and nervous system
Soon things turned unpleasant. As subjects for the first testing they took beggars ... from the outskirts of Montevideo, as well as a woman apparently from the frontier area with Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the effects of different voltages on the different parts of the human body, as well as demonstrating the use of a drug which induces vomiting-I don't know why or what for-and another chemical substance. The four of them died.
In his book Hevia does not say specifically what Mitrione's direct part in all this was but he later publicly stated that the OPS chief "personally tortured four beggars to death with electric shocks''.
On another occasion, Hevia sat with Mitrione in the latter's house, and over a few drinks the American explained to the Cuban his philosophy of interrogation. Mitrione considered it to be an art. First there should be a softening-up period, with the usual beatings and insults. The object is to humiliate the prisoner, to make him realize his helplessness, to cut him off from reality. No questions, only blows and insults. Then, only blows in silence.
Only after this, said Mitrione, is the interrogation. Here no pain should be produced other than that caused by the instrument which is being used. "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect," was his motto.
During the session you have to keep the subject from losing all hope of life, because this can lead to stubborn resistance. "You must always leave him some hope ... a distant light . "
"When you get what You want, and I always get it," Mitrione continued, "it may be good to prolong the session a little to apply another softening-up. Not to extract information now, but only as a political measure, to create a healthy fear of meddling in subversive activities. "More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Uruguay_KH.html

http://web.wm.edu.nyud.net:8090/modlang/hispanic_studies/HS480/usinvolvement/images/mitrione.gif

Gone, but not forgotten,
class A asshole, Dan Mitrione

Assassination Attempts: Dan A. Mitrione Government Agent Part 1
About the assassination of Dan A. Mitrione a U.S. government agent, his biography and history in Uruguay.
The Victim: DAN A. MITRIONE. Mitrione was a U.S. Government agent who was dispatched to Latin America as part of the U.S. Government's attempt to maintain totalitarian puppet-allies. He supposedly advised local officials on traffic safety, but his real job was to create sophisticated police states in order to minimize the possibility of popular rebellion against dictatorial regimes.

Dan Mitrione started as a cop in Richmond, Ind., in 1945. He became police chief in 1955 and joined the FBI in 1957. In 1960, under the State Department's International Cooperation Administration (predecessor of the Agency for International Development-AID), he went to Brazil to train police there in advanced counterinsurgency techniques. During his 7 "Public Safety" years in Brazil, the use of torture against opponents of the military regime became virtually routine. In addition, the Brazilian police, many of whom were trained by Mitrione, formed a vigilante "Death Squad" which disposed of over 100 "undesirables" without arrest or trial.


Documentation of Mitrione's activities has been compiled by a wide range of investigators, from religious groups to Hollywood film makers. NARMIC, a research/action arm of the American Friends Service Committee, reported that:


. . . after training such a police force, Mitrione returned to the U.S. as a Latin America expert. In 1967 he trained foreign officers in the techniques of counterguerrilla warfare at the AID-Public Safety Police Academy in Washington, D.C. In July of 1969, Mitrione headed for South America again, this time to Uruguay for AID. He was the leader of a 4-man team of Public Safety advisors that trained 1,000 Uruguayan police in police management, patrolling, use of scientific and technical aids, antiguerrilla operations and border control. These trainees have in turn instructed an untold number of police in more outlying regions of the country.

Mitrione himself, during his year-long stay, trained personnel in transportation techniques, established a police training facility and a radio network for Montevideo police, and set up a joint operations center of communications to facilitate cooperation between the police and the army.

To accomplish what he called "Uruguay's total penetration," Mitrione designed and initiated the following measures according to Costa-Gavras and Franco Solinas, authors of State of Siege:

A network of spies and infiltrators in high schools and universities.

Hidden cameras in terminals, etc., to photograph all persons traveling to socialist countries.

More:
http://www.trivia-library.com/a/assassination-attempts-dan-a-mitrione-government-agent-part-1.htm

As was pointed out years ago by DU'er "Say What" at another website, filmmaker Costa Gavras's explosive film, which was praised world-wide, but highly condemned in the U.S., its opening at the American Film Institute in Washington simply cancelled, State of Siege was based on the South American history of this USAID employee.