[excerpt from a post by Antifascist, on Antifascist Calling. This material is also covered in detail in the excellent documentary Taxi To The Dark Side ( that’s a  torrent link.) None of it — including MKUltra — is conspiracy theory. The irony, if irony it is, is that these are in fact inverted Manchurian Candidates who ultimately are transformed into appropriately hell-bent “terrorists”.]

In a statement released Tuesday, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, wrote:

…how did it come about that American military personnel stripped detainees naked, put them in stress positions, used dogs to scare them, put leashes around their necks to humiliate them, hooded them, deprived them of sleep, and blasted music at them. Were these actions the result of “a few bad apples” acting on their own? It would be a lot easier to accept if it were. But that’s not the case. The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. (”The Origins of Aggressive Interrogation Techniques,” Carl Levin, United States Senator, June 17, 2008)

As I wrote in April, those who committed these unspeakable atrocities “were acting out scenes from a CIA ‘masterwork’ composed decades earlier: KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation.”

The July 1963 CIA torture manual describes a fear-cloaked shadow world of hooding, isolation, sensory deprivation, drugging, sexual humiliation and other unseemly interrogation techniques, many of which were “perfected” by “outsourced” psychiatrists on their patients during the 1950s and 1960s during the Agency’s criminal MKULTRA “mind-control” experiments.

Fast-forward 50 years, and the fruit of these Nazi-like experiments in psychological torment are all-too-discernible in the hollowed-out eyes and shattered minds of America’s “war on terror” prisoners. As former Pentagon lawyer Richard Shiffrin told The New York Times, the Rumsfeld’s Defense Department turned to SERE out of “great frustration” at the nature of the intelligence obtained from prisoners through lawful means.

As Salon investigative journalist Mark Benjamin, a reporter who broke many stories on the reverse-engineering of SERE tactics as a torture tool, writes,

But as more and more documents from inside the Bush government come to light, it is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture. Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon and the CIA began an orchestrated effort to tap expertise from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, for use in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. …

SERE training has nothing to do with effective interrogation, according to military experts. Trained interrogators don’t work in the program. Skilled, experienced interrogators, in fact, say that only a fool would think that the training could somehow be reverse-engineered into effective interrogation techniques.

But that’s exactly what the Bush government sought to do. As the plan rolled forward, military and law enforcement officials consistently sent up red flags that the SERE-based interrogation program wasn’t just wrongheaded, it was probably illegal. (”A Timeline to Bush Government Torture,” Salon, June 18, 2008)

What were the results obtained by Shiffrin and others into the efficacy of reverse-engineered SERE tactics? “It was real ‘Manchurian Candidate’ stuff,” Shiffrin told the Times.