northern EXPOSURE?

A defector, for example, can be reasonably certain that there will be no reprisal if all other members of his particular cell (who alone have knowledge of his membership) are eliminated by the government security forces. This fact can be used to encourage insurgent defectors to provide information to the government. Extract from U.S. Army Foreign Intelligence Assistance Programme Manual

It s a school with a difference. You could almost call it a school of hard knocks, except they teach you how to deliver, not receive them. The curriculum is cruel, in the most literal sense of the word. Subjects taught include interrogation, torture, kidnapping and execution. A typical day might include discussion of such things as motivation by fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, false imprisonment and the use of the truth serum.
Graduates of this evil establishment include such notorious figures as Panama s drug-dealing dictator, Manuel Noriega, and Roberto D Aubuisson, the man who organised many of El Salvador s death squads. Pinochet s sons were also trained there. No wonder the New York Times has dubbed the place the School of the Dictators. When the pupils of this particular place get out for the summer, whole countries shudder with fear.
And where is this house of horrors? Russia? Chile? The Middle East, perhaps? In fact, it s firmly based on American soil. The School of the Americas was first established by the U.S. government in Panama in 1946 with the ostensible aim of improving ties with Latin American and Caribbean militaries and educating them in the virtues of democratic civilian control over the armed forces. However, as the cold war became progressively chillier, the school s emphasis gradually shifted to counter-insurgency against leftist guerrillas, and the Central Intelligence Agency became heavily involved.
By the 1960 s, the place was specialising in instruction in interrogation techniques and psychological warfare. The CIA s explicit recommendations of torture and other abusive interrogation methods gradually worked their way into standard lessons before eventually being codified in the training manuals. In 1984 the School of the Americas relocated to Fort Benning in Georgia. To date, it has trained nearly 60,000 military and police officers from Latin America and the United States, many of whom have since been involved in activities that are suspect to say the least. A long roster of its graduates has returned to their home countries to become military dictators or armed silencers of democratic debate.
Last year, a number of documents and training manuals from this sadistic school were declassified and released by the Pentagon following a request under the Freedom of Information Act. Hot Press has obtained copies of some of these manuals. Even their titles make for sobering reading Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation , Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual , Handling Of Sources , Terrorism And The Urban Guerrilla and so on. The actual contents are warped, to say the least. At least two of the manuals present psychological research and techniques for the purpose of improving the effectiveness of so-called interrogations . They also include training instructions to (a) use threats or force with prisoners, (b) neutralise opponents, (c ) hold prisoners in clandestine jails and (d) infiltrate and spy upon civilian organisations. Most of the material wouldn t be out of place in a Robert Ludlum thriller. But this is fact, not fiction.
The manuals also include descriptions of the effects of specific psychological trauma-producing conditions such as randomisation of events and sensory deprivation, and they stress the usefulness of tailoring the approach to the subject s personality, implying that a psychological evaluation of the subject be done. For example, the following passage from the Kubark manual describes how best to psychologically disarm somebody when arresting them:
The manner and timing of arrest should be planned to achieve surprise and the maximum amount of mental discomfort. He should therefore be arrested at a moment when he least expects it and when his mental and physical resistance is at its lowest, ideally in the early hours of the morning. When arrested at this time, most subjects experience intense feelings of shock, insecurity and psychological stress and for the most part have great difficulty adjusting to the situation. It is also important that the arresting party behave in such a manner as to impress the subject with their efficiency.
Elsewhere the manual sings the praises of solitary confinement for the purposes of extracting information:
Solitary confinement acts on most persons as a powerful stress. A person cut off from external stimuli turns his awareness inward and projects his unconscious outward. The symptoms most commonly produced by solitary confinement are superstition, intense love of any other living thing, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, hallucinations and delusions.
In the section describing how to set up an efficient interrogation room in a safe-house, the manuals advise in their check-list to be sure to check the voltage of the electricity supply. While torture is deemed acceptable, however, the manuals don t advise threatening death. Or, at least not during an interrogation!
The threat of death has often been found to be worse than useless. It has the highest position in law as a defence, but in many interrogation situations it is a highly ineffective threat. Many prisoners, in fact, have refused to yield in the face of such threats but have subsequently been broken by other procedures. The principal reason is that the ultimate threat is likely to induce sheer hopelessness if the interrogatee does not believe that it is a trick; he feels that he is as likely to be condemned after compliance as before. The threat of death is also ineffective when used against hard-headed types who realise that silencing them forever would defeat the interrogator s purpose. If the threat is recognised as a bluff, it will not only fail but also pave the way to failure for later coercive ruses used by the interrogator.
It goes on like this. Many euphemisms are used and it takes a certain amount of reading between the lines to work out what s being discussed but, for the most part, there can be little doubt about what s being detailed in the manuals. Sections on how to recruit spies (and then how to get rid of them when their usefulness has run out), infiltrate organisations, destabilise communities and many other tricks of the trade, are discussed and minutely detailed. One manual in particular recommends kidnappings, assassinations, blackmail and the hiring of professional criminals. It s like The Anarchist s Cookbook re-written by the supposed good guys .
Naturally enough, there was a certain amount of public outcry when the contents of these manuals were publicised. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran articles calling for a public investigation into the CIA s involvement. A number of prominent American politicians called for the immediate closure of the School of the Americas, as did several human rights organisations, including Amnesty International. And a group calling itself Psychologists for Social Responsibility issued a press statement denouncing the use of psychological research for the purposes of torture.
While the Pentagon admitted that mistakes had been made, it denied that the manuals were still in use, claiming that they had been withdrawn in 1992. Following a four month investigation, the US assistant, Inspector General Russell A. Rau, released a statement last February saying that no deliberate and orchestrated attempt was made to violate Defence Department or U.S. Army policies and that further investigation to assess individual responsibility is not required. The School of the Americas remains open today and although the authorities claim that its training manuals have been thoroughly reviewed and revised , they remain classified and are not available for inspection by either the public or representatives of human rights groups.
However, in a potentially startling development which brings the whole story much closed to home, Hot Press has now been approached by an American psychologist who claims that the CIA and US Department of Defence have been giving school of the American-type training to the RUC and British Military Intelligence in Northern Ireland on a regular basis for the last 20 years.
Dr. Rona Fields is a psychologist and sociologist, who specialises in researching social change and violence. A fellow of the American Psychological Association, she has spent many years travelling around the globe s troubled spots documenting the psychological effects of torture and social control on the civilian population as a whole. Her work has taken her to Lebanon, Iran, South Africa, Angola, South America, Asia and, of course, Northern Ireland. Dr. Fields spent several years in Belfast in the 1970 s studying the overall effects of internment and torture on the psychological make-up of the Catholic population and has written a number of books on the subject.
When I first went to Belfast in the early 1970s to research allegations of torture I was quite sceptical, I was dubious frankly, she recalls. I mean, there s a long history of Irish allegations of British torture and British travesties against human justice and so on. And, as an American, I was sceptical. Anyway, I started examining people who still had the bruises from their interrogation and taking pictures of them.
I realised very soon after I started that these people who had alleged to have been tortured in fact had suffered measurable brain damage as a result. You know, one of the techniques being employed at the time was sensory deprivation. They d put a heavy cloth sack over prisoner s heads for long periods of time to disorientate them. This practice restricts the supply of oxygen to the brain and can cause quite serious brain damage. So I started getting into it further. For social scientists it s not like with clinicians where you take it case by case. You need to have a critical mass statistically to say that this treatment causes this result.
Fields interviewed and tested literally thousands of Irish Catholics who had been interned and interrogated by the British armed forces. With the help of some sympathetic Republicans and their families she also managed to do psychological profiles of hundreds of prisoners in Long Kesh, smuggling standardised tests in and out of the prison. Gradually a pattern began to emerge.
The consequences of these kinds of experiences if people survive them are consistent across the board, she says. And in 1972 and 73 I began to posit that the treatment i.e. the interrogation and torture as well as the social dynamics, were part of a very large psychological experiment, because I was seeing things that related all the way back to research that I could cite and quote. And I did.
Fields published an article entitled Ulster: A Psychological Experiment? in an academic journal in 1973, putting forward the controversial theory that the Catholic population (and increasingly, the Protestants as well) were the control group for a massive experiment in psychological social control. Naturally enough, moves were quickly made to discredit both her and her theory.
A number of people said that it was a bit far-fetched, she smiles. All of the psychologists in Northern Ireland who work for the government of course were unwilling to see anything in it. Anybody who did come out and agree with me immediately had their credibility attacked and was discredited.
Although Fields continued to push her theory for several years, it wasn t until the manuals for the School of the Americas became declassified last year that she found the traces of evidence which appeared to confirm what she had been saying all along.
Initially her interest in the manuals and School of the Americas records stemmed from something else entirely. Her cousin, Ernesto Traubmann y Riegelhaupt, had been Minister for Mines in the Allende government in Chile, before being tortured to death following a military coup. She found the name of his torturer on the list of graduates from the school. However, she also found something else that immediately brought her thoughts back to Northern Ireland.
She points to a paragraph on page 3 of the US Army Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program Manual (of which Hot Press has a copy). It reads: Qualified U.S. Army Intelligence officers and enlisted specialists are being assigned to U.S. military agencies in foreign countries to assist host country personnel in intelligence matters. Working closely with host Army personnel, these advisors assist in the development of effective intelligence procedures, the initiation of in-country intelligence training activities and the implementation of internally orientated military intelligence and counterintelligence operations.
In each country that is considered an ally for one reason or another, these courses are given on site, she says. They don t even have to ship their people to the School of the Americas. As much as the CIA and the Department of Defence may draw from each other, they re still two different institutions and they re working with different institutions in Northern Ireland. For example the Department of Defence would be working with the British army. The CIA would be working with intelligence and police CID and Special Branch.
So I went through the Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program (FIAP) manuals and the manuals for the School of the Americas. I found very close correspondence with what was done in Chile and Argentina. A part that interested me greatly and interested my colleagues was the establishment of information and informer networks and the recruitment of indigenous resources. They have such wonderful names for these things!
And then I got the CIA manuals and that was the big find, because in the manuals it was clear that they were citing and quoting research that I had cited and quoted, research that had quite obviously been written by psychologists and psychiatrists. These were documents that drew on stuff that I said was being used in Northern Ireland. And I found paragraph after paragraph describing exactly what I had found people had gone through. There was even a reference paragraph that describes what Roisin McAlliskey went through. It s phenomenal and scary what these people do.
Essentially what Dr. Fields is saying is that exactly the same training manuals used to teach military and intelligence personnel in the School of the Americas, have been used for the same purposes in the North of Ireland.
The CIA, the U.S. Defence Department Intelligence, the RUC, British Military Intelligence and the Special Branch all work together hand in glove, she insists. They share resources, techniques and information. I m quite sure that neither my President nor my Congress-people have any idea that the CIA has used their cousins in Northern Ireland as part of their big experiment!
But what would be in it for them? What would be the end result of such an experiment?
Well essentially their main objective is to root out the potential of communist insurgency, she explains. So their objective is to get all of the groups that are potentially social change-orientated or can change the social institutions of that society. By playing with the psyches of the population at large through internment, torture, propaganda, etc. they keep all of the groups in-fighting with each other. They keep on breaking up into splinter group after splinter group, so much so that they never really have the coherence necessary to change the institutions of the society. You just keep them going in a vicious circle. Like, who are the subversives in Northern Ireland? There s a lot more to it than just the IRA. All the way through what they ve been trying to do is to fractionate.
Dr. Fields also claims that the recent trip to South Africa attended by both David Trimble and Martin McGuinness may have been indirectly funded by either the CIA or the Department of Defence.
The only way to prove anything is if you try to track the money, she says. The money that is laundered by the CIA goes through a number of places but one of the places it goes through is something called the Foreign Service Institute, which is part of the State Department. And if the money funding trips to South Africa for Northern Irish people is coming from there, it should if it s all legal and above board money be part of a State Department appropriation and it would show up in a budget. And that s public information. But I m willing to bet that there s no way to account for any of the funds that have been spent on these meetings. And that would be one of the places to start.
The purpose of the recent South African trip was for both sides to observe truth commissions in progress. However, Dr. Fields claims that a truth commission in Northern Ireland would perfectly suit the purposes of both the CIA and British Military Intelligence.
Truth commissions will provide amnesty for all of the leaders of the different armed factions. If there s an amnesty then it will get a lot of people out of jail, it ll wipe the slate clean and let things start over. And that is going to appeal to a lot of people who re really tired of the whole thing. But what people forget or don t recognise is that it also wipes the slate clean for the security forces the British government and the American government.
Hot Press has been unable to ascertain just how much truth there is in Dr. Field s allegations. A check with various security and intelligence media correspondents (none of whom would go on the record) revealed that while nothing quite as detailed about CIA involvement in the Northern Ireland situation had been heard before, nobody was particularly surprised either. The general consensus seemed to be that given the IRA s connections with Libya, it makes perfect sense that the CIA would have an interest in subversive activity in the North. It would also make sense that they would work very closely with British Military Intelligence.
The following questions were faxed by Hot Press to the American Embassy in Dublin:
1. When was the last time an agent of the U.S. Army Foreign Intelligence Assistance Programme gave on-site training to British soldiers or Military Intelligence personnel in Northern Ireland?
2. Has the FIAP ever worked with or trained the Irish military or Special Branch?
3. Have any British or Irish intelligence agents ever received anti-subversive training in America, specifically in the School of the Americas in Georgia?
4. How significantly have the School of the Americas training manuals changed since 1992?
5. Did the FIAP fund the recent trip by Northern politicians to South Africa? Did they fund similar trips in the 1970 s to Stirling in Scotland and to Massachusetts?
The Embassy replied that, as a matter of policy, it does not comment on intelligence matters.
So what to make of all of this then? Fact or conspiracy theory? Certainly, given the nature of the material in the School of the Americas manuals, it wouldn t be beyond the realms of possibility that the CIA would train British military personnel in Northern Ireland in techniques of torture, coercion and, quite possibly, murder. After all, they ve done it in many other places, why should Ireland be any different? The question is, if they have trained them (or if they re still training them), is President Clinton aware of it?
If all of this seems too far-fetched to you then here s an interesting case in point. You may remember a slight scandal some months back involving the senior Republican Gerry Kelly and Senator George Mitchell s aide Martha Pope. It was alleged in several media reports that they were having an affair. In fact they had never even met. It s now widely believed that the story had been planted by British intelligence in an attempt to smear and discredit both parties and to damage the peace talks. Writing in the Irish News recently, Colin Wallace, a former British army press officer who ran a campaign of disinformation during the 1970 s, called the British intelligence officers masters of the smear. Coincidentally, the value of smear campaigns is widely covered in the School of the Americas manuals.
The truth is out there. Somewhere. n