From: jad@ckuxb.att.com (John A Dinardo)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: Part II, JOHN STOCKWELL Describes the CIA's Naziistic Torture Chambers
Keywords: John Stockwell describes the CIA's naziistic torture chambers
Date: 16 Oct 92 19:45:30 GMT
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu


    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   <ASTINGSH@KSUVM.KSU.EDU>
*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

     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
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive