Our terror program's ugly roots

A few unsettling details you may have missed about how the CIA did what it did with our money, and in our name, to various detainees captured, and under Americans' complete control, during the War On, And By, Terror:

*  The two so-called psychologists to whom the CIA paid $81 million to devise a program of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques - - and note that neither so-called psychologist had ever conducted an interrogation - - relied on a study in which dogs, said The New York Times, were rendered helpless by repeated, mild electric shocks.

This "learned helplessness" was supposed to lead detainees to divulge intelligence when they were facing more torture - - not mild electric shocks - - like water boarding.

*  And did you know that water boarding - - made legal - - so far - - through executive order and secretive practice by our leaders and their 'contractors' has previously sent Americans to prison and captured water-boarding Japanese soldiers and complicit officials to the hangman after World War II?

* George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the CIA they ran preferred to call their torture methods "enhanced interrogation techniques" - - and, of late, we hear water-boarding, beatings, rectal feeding and other harming and shaming referred to by the more-obfuscated term "EIT's" - - but did you know this history?

The phrase "Verschärfte Vernehmung" is German for "enhanced interrogation". Other translations include "intensified interrogation" or "sharpened interrogation". It's a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court.  

The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the president [George W. Bush]. 

Also: the use of hypothermia, authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld, was initially forbidden. 'Waterboarding" was forbidden too, unlike that authorized by Bush. As time went on, historians have found that all the bureaucratic restrictions were eventually broken or abridged. 

Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own. The "cold bath" technique - the same as that used by Bush against al-Qahtani in Guantanamo - was, according to professor Darius Rejali of Reed College: 

pioneered by a member of the French Gestapo by the pseudonym Masuy about 1943. The Belgian resistance referred to it as the Paris method, and the Gestapo authorized its extension from France to at least two places late in the war, Norway and Czechoslovakia.