pages 111+112+113
While the policies attempted to excise collectivism from the culture, inside the prisons torture tried to excise it from the mind and spirit. As an Argentine junta editorial noted in 1976, "minds too must be cleansed, for that is where the error was born."
Many tortures adopted the posture a doctor or a surgeon. Like the Chicago economists with their painful but necessary shock treatments, these interrogators imagined that their electroshocks and othe torments were therapeutic-that they were administering a kind of medicine to their prisoners, who were often referred to inside camps as apestosos, the dirty or diseased ones. they would heal them of the sickness that is socialism, of the impulse toward collective action. Their "treatments were agonizing, certainly: they might even be lethal-but it was for the patients own good. "If you have gangrene in an arm, you have to cut it off, right?" Pinochet demanded, in impatient response to criticisms of his human rights record.
In testimony from truth commission reports across the region, prisoners tell of a system designed to force them to betray the principle most integral to their sense of self. For most Latin American leftists, that most cherished principle was what Argentina's radical historian Osvaldo Bayer called "the only transcendental theology; solidarity." The torturers understood the importance of solidarity well, and they set out to shock that impulse of social interconnectedness out of their prisoners. Of course all interrogation is purportedly about gaining valuable information and therefore forcing betrayal, but many prisoners report that their torturers were far less interested in the information, which they usually already possessed, than in achieving the act of betrayal itself. The point of the excercise was getting prisoners to do irreparable damage to that part of themselves that believed in helping others above all else, that part of themselves that made them activists, replacing it with shame and humiliation.
The ultimate acts of rebellion in this context were small gestures of kindness between prisoners, such as tending to each others wounds or sharing scare food. When such loving acts were discovered, they were met with harsh punishment. Prisoners were goaded into being individualistic as possible, constantly offered Faustian bargins, like choosing between more unbearable torture for themselves or more torture for a fellow prisoner. In some cases, prisoners were so successfully broken that they agreed to hold the picana on their fellow inmates or go on television and renounce their former beliefs. These prisoners represented the ultimate triumph for their torturers: not only had the prisoners abandoned solitarity but in order to survive they had succumbed to the cutthroat ethos at the heart of laissex-faire capitalism-"looking out for number one," in the words of the ITT executive.
Besides being a tactic out of Of Orwell's book 1984.. (room 101) This reminded of a program being used at a drug-rehab in Texas called Gateway. Here a woman describes the experience..
http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=166294&page=2I do not consider being abused better than getting no help, no. Most of the people I saw leaving that program knew exactly what to say to keep the punishments to a minimum and their families happy by the time they got out, but inside they were changed forever--made into something hard, brittle and deeply fearful. No one is talking about complaining because it's "not a walk in the park"--it is torture, and if the licensing agencies had any idea what really goes on in SAFP they would shut it down in a heartbeat. Sleep deprivation, public humiliation, name calling and vicious taunts, religious coercion, driving psychiatrically fragile people to the limits of their endurance, using mind control tactics that had many of the women experiencing what is called the Stockholm Syndrome, where they identify with and try desperately to please their captors, only to have their every attempt thwarted. Here's one example: During the shutdown, we were still supposed to be writing each other up for infractions, evben though there's not much wrong you can do when confined to a chair and forbidden to speak all day every day. When the counselors would come in and open up the box where we put the writeups, they would start screaming and raving at us because the box was not full enough, and we would "never" get off shutdown if we didn't start holding each other accountable for our horrible crimes we were doubtless committing while sitting silently in chairs. So the women would get all upset and confused, and wanting desperately to get off shutdown, would start writing each other up for things like closing their eyes for a few seconds, or whispering a word or two to a neighbor who was having a breakdown, or maybe even making something up entirely. Then the counselors would come in the next day and the box would be full, and they would again start screaming and raving saying that if we could not behave any better than that, we would never get off shutdown. Then they would leave and the women would collapse in tears of despair.
Or, they would have us speng six hours cleaning the dorm with rags and toothbrushes, and it would be so clean there was NOTHING anywhere to clean (48 women cleaning one small room for 6 hours, you can imagine), not a speck of dust to be found. Then the counselor supervisor, a huge mean bald guy that thundered and screamed at everyone all the time, would come in and run his finger along a railing that was clean as clean could be, look at it, and scream "This dorm is FILTHY!!!!! You will NEVER get off shutdown!!!"
Their goal seemed to be to cause everyone to turn against everyone else, and it turned into a sick little junior high school charade, with everyone plotting and note writing and tattling and having affairs with guards and inmates alike, and it was a sick, sad, horrible environment. Again, I was not at the men's units, so I can only speak for the women, and maybe men can take that kind of stuff better, but in no way is it good for anyone. Treatment is not about torture and mind control, it's about helping people get better.
It's pretty clear that they right-wing has been using our own prisoners to develope these methods of torture, of which I find, that the mental forms of torture and breaking the self, to be the most evil thing I have ever heard of.
Link to previous thread.. The Clintons and the Cheney's
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2533968
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