From jad@ckuxb.att.com Mon Nov 16 12:12:30 1992 Received: from att-out.att.com by css.itd.umich.edu (5.65/2.2) id AA25132; Mon, 16 Nov 92 12:12:28 -0500 Message-Id: <9211161712.AA25132@css.itd.umich.edu> From: jad@ckuxb.att.com Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 11:33 EST To: pauls@css.itd.umich.edu Subject: Part II, JOHN STOCKWELL Describes the CIA's Naziistic Torture Chambers Status: RO X-Status: Thanks to Kerry Miller, astingsh@ksuvm.ksu.edu, we can now learn a bit more about the CIA's naziistic atrocities. Kerry made the following transcript from a tape recording that I sent him of a broadcast by Pacifica Radio Network station WBAI-FM Radio (99.5) 505 Eighth Ave., 19th Fl. New York, NY 10018 (212) 279-0707 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * NARRATOR: John Stockwell spent 13 years with the CIA, including serving as a case officer in Africa and Viet Nam. He was commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976. JOHN STOCKWELL: If you ask the State Department today what is their official explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say, it is to attack economic targets, meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of course, they're attacking a lot more. To destabilize Nicaragua, beginning in 1981, we began funding this force of Somoza's ex-National Guardsmen, calling them the Contras, the counter- revolutionaries. We created this force, which did not exist until we allocated money. We armed them. We put uniforms on their backs and boots on their feet, gave them camps in Honduras to live in, medical supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction as we sent them in to destabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction, they have been systematically blowing up bridges, sawmills, grainaries, government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so the produce can't get to market. They raid farms and villages. The farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all. If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this and their approach to it, dig up the "Sabotage Manual" that they were circulating throughout Nicaragua. [It was] a comic-book type of a paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt; how you can gum up typewriters, what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines, what you can stuff in a sewer to stop up the sewage so it won't work; things you can do to make a society simply cease to function. Systematically, the Contras have been assassinating religious workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators. Remember the "Assassination Manual" that surfaced in 1984? It caused such a stir that President Reagan had to address it himself in the presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They used terror to traumatize society so that it cannot function. I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to understand what your Government and its agents are doing. They go into villages. They haul out families. With the children forced to watch, they castrate the father. They peel the skin off his face. They put a grenade in his mouth, and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch, they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes for variety, they make the parents watch while they do these things to the children. This is nobody's propaganda! There have been over 100,000 American Witnesses for Peace who've gone down there, and they have filmed and photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've happened, and documented 13,000 people killed this way -- mostly women and children. These are the activites done by the Contras. The Contras are the people President Reagan called "freedom fighters." He said: "They are the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." [*] In 1960, we came up with a new term, a policy of trying to correct the problems of Central and Latin America, the economic imbalances, by addressing them directly. President Kennedy's famous program: He said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable." However, the millions and millions of dollars that we put into this program, inevitably went to the rich, and not to the [ordinary] people of the countries involved. While we were doing this, or trying -- saying we were trying to correct the problems of Central and Latin America -- the CIA was doing its thing too. The CIA was, in fact, forming the police units that are, today, the death squads in El Salvador. The leaders [were] on the CIA's payroll, trained by the CIA in the United States. We had the public safety program going, throughout Central and Latin America for twenty-six years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people -- interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it. Dan Mitrione, the exponent of these things, spent seven years in Brazil and three in Uruguay, teaching interrogation, teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of the business: how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual. They gave them crank generators -- with U.S.AID written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from -- and developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth, and the other in or around the genitals. You could crank, and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register. Now, how do you teach torture? Dan Mitrione, I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you have to get involved. You have to lay on your hands and try it yourself. They would pick up guinea pigs off the streets: beggars, and take them in to use in these torture training classes. Of course, the horror of that is, these people wouldn't know why they were being tortured. They couldn't give up. They couldn't say, "I'm sorry. Stop the pain. I'll tell you the names of everybody involved." All they could do was lie there and scream. When they would collapse, they would bring in doctors who would shoot them up with Vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets to terrify the population, so that everybody would be afraid of the police and the government. This is what the CIA was teaching them to do. One of the women who was in this program for two years -- tortured in Brazil for two years -- testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said the most horrible thing about it, in fact, was that the people doing it were not raving psychopaths. She couldn't break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopaths. They were very ordinary people. She told about being tortured one day. She's on this table, naked in a room full of six men, and they're doing these incredibly painful degrading things to her body. And there's an interruption. The American is called to the telephone, and he's in the next room, and the others take a smoke break. She's lying on this table, and he's saying: "Oh, hi Honey. Yes, I can wrap it up here in another hour or so, and meet you and the kids at the Ambassador's on the way home." There's a lesson in all this. The lesson is: It isn't just the Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, who do inhuman things to other people. It's PEOPLE who do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these things on a massive basis, to people of the world today. We do it in a way that gives us plausible denial to our own consciences. We create a CIA, a secret police, with a vast budget, and let them go and run these programs in our name. We pretend like we don't know what's going on, though the information is there for us to know. And we pretend like it's okay because we're fighting some vague communist threat. We're just as responsible for these one to three million people we've slaughtered, and for all the people we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was for the people that they slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide !! AMY GOODMAN: That is John Stockwell, with excerpts from two of his talks on "The Secret Wars of the CIA." I'm Amy Goodman. ************************** [* A recent article from Propaganda Review commented: "Interestingly, when Reagan said that the contras were 'the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers' he was correct in ways he would not have wanted to acknowledge. Specifically, in the first Red Scare in this country's history, the 'threat' posed by Native Americans, 18th and 19th century US forces, like the contras, made extensive and systematic use of murder, torture, and other forms of terrorism against Indian noncombatants. Mr. Reagan's unconsciously ironic comment reminds us that the history of American political demonology has been a long one, and its consequences have been far more than ideological."] Kerry Miller * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * This is one of countless stories unveiling the deeply corrupted and subverted state of our theoretically democratic Government. This story makes disgustingly obvious the fact that patriotism is not the waving of flags, the tying of yellow ribbons and the mindless support of the Government, just because it happens to be ours. You don't support cancer just because you happen to have it. Patriotism is telling the truth to the people of our country in order that they may unite to conquer the anti-democratic cancer that is gradually destroying ours and our children's freedom. So please post the installments of this series to other bulletin boards, and post hardcopies in public places, both on and off campus. That would be a truly patriotic deed. John DiNardo