Three weeks ago, I participated in a fantastic symposium organized by Mila Burns and Jonathan Brown as part of the triennial Congreso Internacional de Americanistas held this year in Salamanca, Spain. The symposium explored the influence of Latin Americans on the Cold War, an important intervention in a field that has more often approached the relationship from the opposite direction. At one point in the discussion, Alan McPherson gave concise expression to something that many were feeling. The more closely you look at the Cold War in Latin America, he observed, the less of the Cold War you see.1 I’ve long been inclined to agree. After all, to riff on McPherson’s comment, the big questions that marked the politics of the region from World War II through the 1980s were not primarily “Cold War” questions. Is the U.S. an imperialist power? How should resources be distributed? Whose interests should be advanced by the state, and how should violence be deployed in their service? The answers to these questions were surely colored by the struggle for supremacy between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as it unfolded, but in most cases, they were not determined by it.
The ensuing conversation got me thinking about the very meaning of the term “cold war,” in light of a fascinating 1960 document I saw at Rio de Janeiro’s Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG, or Superior War College) last July. Founded in 1949 and modeled explicitly on the U.S. National War College, the ESG functioned as a military-civilian think tank and was responsible, more than any other institution, for developing the Brazilian instantiation of the “national security doctrine” that would give shape to the country’s 1964-1985 dictatorship and in turn influence parallel regimes in Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, and elsewhere.
Cruder analyses paint the ESG as something of a U.S. satellite campus, a locus for the transmission of a doctrine devised up north. But this isn’t at all what I saw while working in its library last year. While U.S. influence was evident in many of the ESG lectures, conferences, and curricula I consulted — particularly those from the school’s intelligence course — on the whole, ESG students and officials showed far greater interest in French conceptions of counterrevolutionary war, and they borrowed eagerly from the British and the Portuguese as well. Operating within a continental system unambiguously dominated by the United States, in the 1950s and 1960s, esguianos (as those connected to the center were called) wove these diverse stems into a unique basket of strategies and tactics, in turn giving form to a security state distinct from any that had come before. (For the best treatment in English of the ESG, see Benjamin Cowen’s excellent 2016 book, Securing Sex.)
The 1960 document I had in mind offers unusually direct insight into what “cold war” meant at the ESG. It is a report of a symposium on the topic of revolutionary war, one of a series of annual events at which the students of the school’s various courses discussed major topics. Each symposium culminated in a written exercise. At the 1960 event, the students of the Curso de Estado-Maior Conjunto (Joint General Staff Course) were divided into four teams of approximately ten members each and asked to “characterize (communist) revolutionary war in relation to so-called cold war, psychological war, and insurrectional or subversive war.”
The first page of the symposium report.
In the more than 60 pages that they submitted in response, the four teams agreed that Brazil, like other non-communist countries, was engaged in a “political, economic and pyscho-social” cold war waged by international communism. The groups did not define this uncapitalized cold war in terms of the confrontation between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. The former country, in fact, went unmentioned in the essays, though the latter was referenced frequently. Instead, as Team A explained, cold war was the “orienting idea” of global communism and the instrument through which it sought to achieve “its unlimited political objectives.” Team B, the only one to specify any sources for its definition of the concept, cited British Air Marshall Robert Saundby and French Colonel Jean Némo in support of a similar characterization.
While cold war was both broad and ongoing, all four teams focused the bulk of their attention on one of its “facets” in particular. As the very framing of the exercise suggests, this facet was revolutionary war. Several of the groups cited French officers Gabriel Bonnet and Jacques Hogard to characterize revolutionary war as the principal instrument, in the context of cold war, by which the Bolshevik revolution sought to conquer the world. Its agents, the students claimed, would deploy the tactics of psychological warfare to both weaken and win the sympathy of the population, with the ultimate the aim of launching “insurrectional or subversive war” at specific places and times. Numerous ESG documents explored this two-phase sequence in far greater detail, identifying five discrete sub-stages of revolutionary war and proposing strategies and tactics appropriate to each. (The most compelling research on this subject has been done by Brazilian historian João Roberto Martins Filho.)
In sum, though these students of the Joint General Staff Coursesaw revolutionary war as a facet of cold war, they gave much greater weight to the former and defined both in ways that owed vastly more to France and (to a lesser degree) Britain than to the U.S. This tendency held across most of the school’s doctrinal documents — though not, I should stress, those connected to the ESG’s intelligence course, where U.S. influence was stronger.
I make this observation not because I read in the words of these esguianos anything incompatible with the hemispheric role that the U.S. military sought for Brazil. Yet it is nonetheless significant that in their essays, all four teams cast Brazil not as a subsidiary participant in a standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but as a country on the front lines of a global war. In 1960, this conflict may still have been limited to psychological warfare, but “insurrectional or subversive war” represented an ongoing and imminent risk. Open — if typically small-scale — combat would indeed arrive in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a reaction to the military’s own “Revolution of 1964.” And when it did, it should hardly be surprising that a dictatorship born of the ESG would respond most immediately in the terms not of cold but of counterrevolutionary war.
I learned that former U.S. torture-center supervisor Gina Haspel would become the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency at an impossibly apt moment. I’ve just come back to New York after more than a year and a half abroad, and I spent Monday at the main branch of the New York Public Library to fill a hole in my research. The gap concerned the Movimiento Argentino Antiimperialista de Solidaridad Latinoamericana (MAASLA, the Argentine Anti-Imperialist Movement for Latin American Solidarity), a virtually unstudied Buenos Aires-based group that denounced repression and torture as explicitly transnational phenomena from 1972 to 1976. (They even used the word “transnational” itself; anyone who’s written a history grant recently will understand how exciting this is!)
I knew that in 1974, MAASLA had published a 40-page pamphlet titled “La CIA. ¿Qué es? ¿Qué hace en América Latina?” (“The CIA. What is it? What does it do in Latin America?”), with a skull-faced Statue of Liberty on its cover. Together with the table of contents, this was the only part of the document that I had seen; “La CIA” itself was missing from the Argentine archive where I’d learned of its existence. Fortunately the microform reading room at the main branch is the domain of miracles, and in place of acute curiosity and I now have a digital copy from microfiche.
As you may have begun to suspect, Lady Death was smiling at me from my computer screen as my phone buzzed Tuesday morning with the news that torture enthusiast Mike Pompeo would replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, and that Haspel in turn would lead the CIA. This coincidence was striking not simply because MAASLA’s 1974 pamphlet concerns the CIA, but because it emerged as part of the CIA’s first major scandal, which began to unfold publicly that same year. At a moment when the darkest stretches of the CIA’s gloomy past are showing with unusual clarity through the whitewash of the Obama years, I’d like to remember MAASLA and its efforts to turn up the heat in Latin America as the CIA faced an unprecedentedly broad attack at home.
The CIA had dealt with public-relations challenges before 1974, of course. The botched Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 and the discovery six years later of agency links to dozens of nominally independent groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom are just two among many public revelations that had battered “the Company,” as the CIA likes to call itself.
Yet even by those standards 1974 was an outstandingly rough year for U.S. intelligence operations. With the Company already tarnished by public recognition of its involvement in Nixon’s Watergate burglary, in June of ’74, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks — formerly of the CIA and State Department, respectively — published a book called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. In it the two authors accused the Company of abandoning run-of-the-mill intelligence work in favor of complex and often inept covert operations designed to further U.S. imperial designs. Accounts had also begun to circulate concerning an upcoming tell-all book by CIA defector Philip Agee, to be published the following year in London under the title, Inside the Company. Agee had been stationed in Mexico, Ecuador, and Uruguay, and it was understood that he was going to name names (as indeed he would).
In the meantime some of Agee’s more damning anecdotes — among them accounts of CIA efforts to destabilize Salvador Allende’s government in Chile — had already leaked, including in a September 30, 1974 article in Time magazine, adding color to charges of U.S. interference abroad that had been all but confirmed by President Gerald Ford just weeks before.Even more damningly, in December New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh got a hold of parts of a 700-page internal CIA memo baptized “the Family Jewels.” As Hersh explained on the front page of the Times, the memo documented dozens of illegal activities undertaken by the CIA over the previous two decades, including assassination attempts against foreign leaders and domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens. (After countless Freedom of Information Act requests, the Family Jewels were finally declassified in 2007, so you can take a look for yourself — it doesn’t get much juicier than this.)
The September 30, 1974 cover of Time magazine. MAASLA cited this issue repeatedly in its report on the CIA. [From Time.com]These journalistic revelations fed an increasing Congressional interest in the CIA’s activities, leading to repeated closed-session testimony by CIA Director William Colby in 1974 and the formation of Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities the following year. Mounting awareness of the Company and its methods would play a major role in the growing disillusionment within the U.S. regarding policing and intelligence activities at home and abroad, but decades before the ascent of digital media there was no guarantee that these revelations would reach, let along reverberate in, the countries on the receiving end of the CIA’s destabilization efforts.
That is where MAASLA enters the picture. As the CIA’s “dirty tricks” were starting to leak, Argentina was experiencing a remarkable political moment. The dictatorship that had dominated the country since 1966 had been voted out of power in March 1973, and in its place, democratically elected President Héctor Cámpora had brought the left wing of the movement led by long-exiled former President Juan Perón into power for the very first time. While Cámpora would be made to step down after less than two months in office to clear the way for Perón’s personal return to the presidency in September, for a brief moment in mid-1973, it seemed that the entire Argentine political world had shifted far to the Left, and that revolution was just around the corner. This feeling lingered even as Perón turned decisively to the Right once in office, its permanence aided by the thousands of left-wing refugees from military-led Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil who had poured into the country. Even as Argentine political violence increased precipitously over the course of 1974, Buenos Aires stood out as a bastion of comparative freedom for the Left in a region offering few alternatives.
Amid this transnational churn, MAASLA emerged as an Argentine center for exile activism. While its executive leadership and national board were comprised predominantly of Argentine artists, academics, and politicians from the Left and Center-Left, MAASLA built strong connections with committees of exiles working to denounce political crimes in neighboring countries, and many of its own volunteers were exiles themselves. MAASLA expanded on the work of the coalition of groups that had sought to destabilize Argentina’s own recent dictatorship through the defense of political prisoners and the denunciation of its practices of “repression and torture”. Appeals on behalf of political prisoners were MAASLA’s bread and butter, salted liberally with accusations of systematic counterrevolutionary violence.
A poster for a 1973 MAASLA event on behalf of Paraguayan political prisoners. [From the archives of the Fondazione Basso.]Unlike those earlier “repression and torture”-centered organizations, however, MAASLA framed its denunciations not in Argentine but rather in transnational terms. That so many Latin American countries were now governed by repressive military dictatorships was not “the result of the capriciousness of one dictator or another,” MAASLA’s leaders wrote in November 1972. Instead, these regimes “are guided by a common doctrine and by similar methods,” all of which harkened to the “doctrine of the ‘internal front,’ developed by the Pentagon.” 1
For MAASLA, the similarities among the repressive methods employed in these different countries underscored their common origin: “the same aberrant criminal techniques are instilled in ‘experts’ in repression at the police schools of [the] Panama [Canal Zone] and Washington,” they wrote. The effectiveness of this counterrevolutionary system was further enhanced by the “million-dollar budgets” of the CIA and related U.S. agencies, which play a “papel principalísimo” — a decidedly principal role — “in the commission of the crimes that we have denounced.”
MAASLA’s interpretation of regional repression would only be reinforced in 1973, as Uruguay and Chile joined Paraguay and Bolivia on the list of southern South American countries governed by military juntas. The Chilean coup in particular led MAASLA to call in September 1973 for the unmasking of “the common enemy that arms the fascists: yankee imperialism and its most direct agent, the fascist government of Brazil.”
This reference to Brazil was hardly a throwaway; indeed, the country held an increasingly privileged place in denunciations of South American repression as a transnational phenomenon. MAASLA documents make frequent reference to Brazil’s “mini-imperialism” in South America, citing Brazilian diplomats and security officials as they criss-crossed the region, facilitating coups and training their executors in the repressive techniques that had turned Brazil’s military government, in power since 1964, into a “model” for counterrevolution.
This belief in Brazil’s key role in the Right’s violent South American advance led MAASLA to collaborate intimately in the organization of the Second Russell Tribunal (1974-1976), a series of Europe-based hearings patterned on the First Russell Tribunal’s moral condemnation of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. Russell II was originally planned to center only on Brazil, but after the Chilean coup its purview was extended to include the whole of the region. Nearly a year before Allende’s overthrow, MAASLA was urging that the scope of the tribunal be expanded. Much of MAASLA’s correspondence with the tribunal’s organizers concerned its efforts to include more Latin Americans in Russell II and to keep the focus of the hearings squarely on the linkages among South America’s military regimes, all of which pointed due north via Brazil to the United States.
The third and final session of Russell II. [From Brazil’s Memorial da Anistia.]MAASLA’s case for U.S. coordination of the Latin American counterrevolution became much stronger with the CIA leaks of 1974. The group’s CIA pamphlet referenced at the start of this post was printed before Hersh’s seminal December 1974 article about the “family jewels,” but it was nonetheless informed by a thorough reading of the substantial sources then available. Cited prominently throughout the report, these sources include the September 30 Time cover article depicted above, fragments of confidential testimony as well as public declarations by high U.S. officials as reported by the press, and The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. MAASLA also cited information gleaned from a remarkable conference on CIA covert action organized by the Center for National Security Studies and held September 12 and 13, 1974, in a Congressional hearing room on Capitol Hill, which was attended by journalists, academics, and even CIA Director Colby himself.
The central message of the well-sourced pamphlet, directed primarily to Argentine readers, was clear: it could happen here. Page after page documented past CIA incursions in the region, from the overthrow of Guatemalan reformist Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 to the more than decade-long financing of Allende’s Chilean opponents. The CIA was not the only U.S. agency devoted to destabilizing Latin America, the pamphlet contended; indeed, an organizational chart on page 8 includes numerous groups, among them the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Agency for International Development, responsible for the training of foreign police.
In cataloguing the activities of these groups, MAASLA did not shy away from naming names, and the pamphlet included deep dives into the personal histories of important intelligence figures. The last of these individuals to be profiled was then-current U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Robert C. Hill, who had previously been instrumental in the coup against Arbenz. Argentina had been encircled by repressive military dictatorships, and now its U.S. ambassador was an old hand at regime change. Without constant vigilance and firm political opposition, MAASLA insisted, Argentina would be next to fall.
In broad strokes, MAASLA was not wrong. In the months following the publication of “La CIA,” paramilitary violence against the Argentine Left increased vertiginously, much of it under the banner of a diffuse state-linked organization called the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, or Triple A — a death squad similar in operation to units previously formed in Brazil and Uruguay. On Christmas Eve 1974, the Triple A attacked MAASLA’s headquarters in downtown Buenos Aires, killing Raúl Feldman, an Uruguayan exile and the only person in the office at the time.
Feldman had been working to transcribe interviews with Uruguayan torture victims from cassette tapes. These tapes were seized in the attack, together with the bulk of the group’s materials, and the office was destroyed. While MAASLA continued to operate out of a new space in 1975, deteriorating political conditions made the group’s work increasingly dangerous. Two months after Argentina’s own 1976 military coup, MAASLA was formally declared illegal and dissolved.
Accept or reject MAASLA’s nearly monolithic focus on the role of the U.S. in the rise of Latin America’s repressive Right, the bottom line remains the same. At a time of mounting interest in the clandestine activities of the U.S., MAASLA helped to ensure that investigations happening there had repercussions that extended beyond the U.S. itself. Its correspondence and publications, moreover, are valuable tools for contemporary historians seeking to reconstruct a moment at which the transnational dimensions of southern South America’s Cold War-era counterrevolution were coming clearly into focus for the first time.
On Monday, the US Director of National Intelligence delivered the second of at least three tranches of newly declassified government documents concerning Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship. This latest batch seemed to hold greater promise than the first, as its contents are drawn largely from the briefings, memos, and reports prepared for three presidents (and one unusually powerful vice president) by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence organs. Despite scattered sensationalistic claims in the press, the documents do not appear to include any true bombshells. Indeed, the closest that they come to shocking is their confirmation, reported by the National Security Archive yesterday, that the CIA knew of attempts by agents of the six-country Operation Condor network to assassinate targets in Europe, possibly including human rights activists. (Scholars and journalists have already documented these efforts, though we have never seen such clear proof that the CIA itself knew about them.)
What these documents lack in explosive power, however, they make up for in granularity, illuminating in remarkable detail one aspect of the “intelligence community” (IC) that has received far too little attention: its relationship to the presidency. Then as now, the briefing materials that the CIA and other agencies prepare for the president are key shapers of (sadly still just) his worldview. This dynamic is particularly salient at present, with the incoming president refusing to receive Presidential Daily Briefs and the CIA using charges of Russian election interference to all but openly declare its opposition to Trump. So let’s dig in and take a close look at one particularly interesting document from the tranche: a November 1978 CIA assessment of Southern Cone perceptions of Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy in the region, which in this case includes Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay — five countries led at the time by extraordinarily repressive right-wing authoritarian regimes.
First, though, some background. When it comes to relationships with the IC, Carter is to my mind the most interesting of recent presidents. He came into office having decided, at the tail end of his presidential campaign, to overhaul the United States’ relationship to the world — and its own Vietnam War-bruised self-image — by making human rights the center of US foreign policy. This proved to be a tremendous challenge. While a slice of the State Department, led by Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Patricia Derian, worked to execute Carter’s promised turn, they met fierce resistance from a foreign relations and security establishment willing to brook little deviance from the “pragmatic” Kissingerian approach of the past. And future, of course — the establishment largely won in the end. Nonetheless, for a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Derian and a band of sympathetic Congressional Democrats did manage to make human rights an issue central to the US’ relationship with the Southern Cone — and, in turn, to the president’s relationship with the IC.
It was within this context that the CIA presented Carter with its November 1978 analysis of Southern Cone reactions to the US emphasis on human rights. Readable in its entirety at the bottom of this post, the memo reveals the subtlety of CIA manipulation at work. Take, for example, the summary that opens the document:
The Southern Cone governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay have a somewhat cynical view of US policies toward Latin America. The perspective is shaped by the conviction that Washington’s preoccupation since the mid 1960s with other parts of the world has left the US out of touch with Latin American realities. They view US policy toward their region as inconsistent, incoherent, and unreasonably punitive. There is a strong feeling that in the broader arena the US has been outmaneuvered by the Soviets and is losing its ability to lead the West.
By tying US economic and especially military aid to improvements in civil liberties and detainee treatment, Carter and his allies have fallen “out of touch” with the “realities” of the region — in other words, with the view, long championed by the CIA and by the security establishment at large, that Latin America was at risk of falling into Soviet hands, a risk that only strong (and bloody) leadership could mitigate. The risks are so great that in the next two sentences the report’s authors go right for the jugular, labeling Carter’s policies not only “inconsistent” and “incoherent,” but indicative of a broader failure of the US to keep the USSR in line and effectively “lead the West.”
But wait, you might object, isn’t the CIA simply relaying the perceptions of others? Indeed — and therein lies the very brilliance of the report. By channeling the voices of their stated subjects (the title promises an approximation of “Southern Cone perceptions,” after all), the memo’s authors can deliver a damning critique of U.S. foreign policy without appearing insubordinate, and thereby maximize their chances of countering opponents like Derian.
Nonetheless, the authors’ voice slips through at times – though they can be hard to spot, given how little they depart from the regimes’ own perspectives. For instance, in discussing an upcoming UN vote concerning Chile, the memo’s authors explain that “the Chileans will be interested in the US vote on the UN Human Rights Committee’s attempt to provide funds to ‘victims’ of Chilean human rights violations.” The word “victims” surrounded by quotation marks stands out as an inadvertent revelation, suggesting the authors’ skepticism as to the status of these individuals, then denounced as terrorists by regime sympathizers.
The authors then turn to broader Chilean frustrations with the US, noting that Chile’s leaders
…believe that there is a small coterie in Washington that is actively working to undermine the Pinochet regime. They find it incomprehensible that the US does not realize that the stringent government controls in Chile were a necessary course of action after the overthrow of the Marxist Allende regime.
By “stringent government controls,” the authors mean, of course, the extrajudicial execution of some 3,000 and the torture of many thousands more.
Such abuses, however, are never enumerated in the report. Instead, the authors include list after eulogistic list of the many human rights improvements made by these regimes in recent years. These improvements are the only exception to the otherwise unfailingly negative tone of the memo. Indeed, while Southern Cone states are clearly upset about Carter’s approach to diplomacy,
This does not mean that US human rights policy has had a completely negative impact on the area. On the contrary, police and military officials in these countries are now sensitized to human rights considerations. Every chief of state in the area claims to have made clear to his subordinates that torture and arbitrary arrest will no longer be tolerated. All of these countries have shown general improvement during the past year in their treatment of prisoners.
The CIA has eyes and ears across the continent; while it can report honesty that every regional leader now “claims” to have told police and military officials to stop torturing, it cannot possibly have believed that these statements carried the weight of truth. Yet rather than question these purported advances, the authors find an altogether distinct concern to raise. Southern Cone governments feel, they explain, that “these improvements go unacknowledged by Washington, and moreover, the torrent of criticism, adversary treatment, and antagonistic US legislation has continued.” The implication is clear; Congressional Democrats and the White House need to reward “these improvements” by loosening human rights-based restrictions and drawing valuable allies closer to the US.
The worldview undergirding this implication comes most clearly into focus in the report’s most fascinating section, “Public Views of US Policies.” While conceding the difficulty of getting an accurate view of public sentiment in the Southern Cone, the authors nonetheless claim that “most citizens seem to support the military governments; the rest are either unconcerned with politics or belong to a declared opposition.”“Judging from newspaper commentary and personal conversations,” moreover, “US human rights policy has had little impact on the general populace.”
This characterization of public sentiments may indeed by correct; what littleresearch has been done on the question suggests that the region’s dictatorships did indeed enjoy substantial popular backing, especially from the middle and upper classes. Yet the CIA memo includes no discussion of the factors that could have contributed to such sentiments, questions of great relevance to US policymaking. Southern Cone dictatorships worked hard to exaggerate the threat posed by armed insurgents already decimated by repression, limit access to information concerning abuses, and terrify those who might think to step out of line and publicly criticize the regime. Those who dared to do so nonetheless receive no credit in the CIA’s discussion of “public views”; instead, they are cast uniformly — and suspiciously — as members of the “declared opposition.” Indeed, the authors continue, “some political groups that have long opposed the various governments and other groups representing civil and human rights causes have used the policy to air their own specific grievances. Liberal clergy have also cited the policy as being similar to their own programs.” If you’re familiar with the CIA of the 1970s, you’ll know that dissent is only celebrated east of the Iron Curtain, and “liberal clergy” is a phrase never uttered admiringly. The implicit criticism of these characterizations is echoed later in the report, in the authors’ contention that Chile’s longstanding opposition political parties “view US human rights policy as made to order for their own campaign against the government.”
“Their own campaign,” “declared opposition” — these are phrases designed to emphasize that by failing to appreciate the complex political realities of the Southern Cone, Carter is playing the stooge, allowing the US to serve the interests of those who aren’t likely to put Washington’s needs front and center. Reading this sustained but ingeniously packages assault on the coherence and effectiveness of Carter’s human rights policy, I can’t help but wonder: when its authors note, toward the middle of the report, a “growing opinion in Brazil that the US has lost or is losing its resolve and even some of its capacity as a world power,” might they really have meant to say, in the CIA?
Last week, M. Gregg Bloche, a doctor and professor of law at Georgetown, published a compelling op-ed in the Times. Drawing on recently declassified government documents, Bloche shows that US doctors employed by the CIA played an active role in the design and implementation of state torture after September 11, 2001. With the president-elect still unsure about his preferred approach to interrogation — the leading possibilities range from “bring[ing] back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” to giving detainees “a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers” — the piece could hardly be more timely.
Sadly, the CIA’s torture doctors do not stand alone among medical professionals. We’ve known for years that psychologists on government contracts designed the torture program, and that doctors were present to regulate torture. Moreover, an American Psychological Association report released last year showed that individuals at the highest level of the profession (and the APA) worked to shield “enhanced interrogation” from criticism.
What is new in Bloche’s op-ed is the confirmation of doctors’ willingness to go above and beyond the practices ruled “legal” by the Bush Justice Department’s infamous torture memos. The premise is, on its face, absurd; international legal instruments from the Geneva Conventions to the Convention Against Torture leave no room for practices like simulated drowning and sleep deprivation. Yet the Justice Department did claim that these practices were allowed. Nonetheless, Bloche’s CIA doctors refused even this cellophane cover, pursuing waterboarding in such a way as to make it “more terrifying and dangerous than what government lawyers permitted.” (Indeed, these doctors turned the practice from a simulation of drowning into the real thing.)
Reading all of this left me frustrated and surprised, though not for the reasons one might expect. Yes, the Hippocratic Oath demands that doctors do no harm, but in each of the instances of systematic torture that I have studied, psychologists were critical to the development of “scientific” torture, and doctors helped to calibrate and respond to the deliberate infliction of pain in order to ensure maximal distress while keeping their victims alive. Likewise, US doctors may have exceeded the bounds of the officially approved torture program, but this too is a constitutive aspect of systematic torture. Indeed, any centrally planned apparatus of state repression presumes to operate within limits, yet in practice such “controls” never last long. Even the CIA has recognized as much. Its 1983 Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual, used across Latin America, included, along with instruction in “coercive interrogation,” this warning: “The routine use of torture lowers the moral caliber of the organization that uses it and corrupts those that rely on it.”
No, the real surprises in Bloche’s op-ed were altogether more depressing. The first isn’t news, but still worth underscoring: it is shocking that the Bush administration opted to bring so many outside experts, namely lawyers and psychologists, into its torture program. If the Justice Department and the APA hadn’t gotten involved, and CIA interrogators and doctors had been left to run it alone, I suspect we’d know as much about this latest round of “coercive interrogation” as we do about the prior half-century of US state torture. Whatever approach Trump ultimately alights on, I’m confident he won’t make this particular mistake.
The same cannot be said for the CIA’s doctors and other operatives, however. Since the first revelations, in the early 2000s, of US detainee treatment in Iraq, there has been no legal accountability for those implicated in the design and execution of torture. Indeed, few have even called for them to be tried. Violators of international law and the most elemental norms of decency, then, have suffered few adverse consequences beyond those imposed by their own consciences. This abandonment of accountability extends to Bloche’s op-ed as well, and in the process it demands a logical leap so large that it sails clear beyond the page. After spending sixteen paragraphs carefully outlining the horrific and (even under the loosest, torture-memo-iest interpretation of US law) illegal behavior of these doctors, Bloche concludes his piece with this call:
“An independent inquiry into what those physicians did and how they lost their ethical moorings is vital. So are clear lines between acceptable and improper use of medical expertise for national security purposes. The law of armed conflict sets standards for access to medical care for detainees, and clinical assessment is a potent tool for detecting abuse.
“Meanwhile, it’s urgent that American medicine sends a powerful, public message to President-elect Trump that there can be no place for medical participation in the engineering of cruelty, even in clandestine service to the nation. And it’s critical that C.I.A. and military doctors heed this message, even if they must defy orders to the contrary.”
Independent inquiries are all well and good, but how will we draw “clear lines” without acknowledging a cut-and-dry violation of the law? And how can we argue with a straight face that there “can be no place for medical participation in the engineering of cruelty,” when Bloche has just devoted 800 words to demonstrating the opposite?
In a remarkable twist of fate, the very day after reading Bloche’s piece in the Times, I came across this news clipping at Chile’s Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos:
It’s a special October 1986 issue of the Chilean newspaper La Hora, about torture in Uruguay. The headline reads, “The Complicity of Military Doctors in Torture was Systematic and Extensive.” It’s a translation of an article published earlier that year in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association by — wait for it — M. Gregg Bloche! After reviewing the evidence for medical participation in widespread state torture under Uruguay’s 1973-1985 dictatorship, Bloche 1986 concludes by reflecting on the individual responsibilities of physicians to denounce torture, and by endorsing efforts by Uruguay’s then-president and its medical community to cast those responsible out of the profession. It’s a far cry from full legal accountability, but it’s much more than Bloche 2016 is calling for here in the US, today.
Reading Bloche 1986 tempts me to invert one of Bloche 2016’s more striking phrases. If history teaches us anything hopeful about the relationship of medicine to torture, it is not that there can be no medical participation in the engineering of cruelty. Instead, it’s that there can be no engineering of cruelty without medical participation. So let’s revoke some medical licenses — or better still, let’s put some doctors in jail.
