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She was not alone: just one of her captors has acknowledged that he himself tortured and murdered one hundred and twenty people.183

The CIA has aided torturers the world over. Indeed, the torturers and the CIA often work together (indeed, the torturers are often CIA “assets”). In the late 1940s, the CIA was central to creating Greece’s secret police, the KYP, which soon began systematically torturing people. By the 1960s torturers were telling prisoners their equipment—such as a special “thick white double cable” whip that was “scientific, making their work easier,” and the “iron wreath,” a head screw progressively tightened around the head or ears—came as U.S. military aid.184

The CIA set up Iran’s notorious SAVAK secret police, and instructed them in torture methods, with, for example, films on such topics as how to most effectively torture women.185

In 1950s Germany the CIA not only used normal methods to torture immigrants they suspected of being Soviet plants but they also used esoteric methods, such as applying turpentine to a man’s testicles or sealing someone in a room and playing Indonesian music at deafening levels until he cracked.186

In Vietnam, the CIA set up its notorious Operation Phoenix, a systematic program of assassination, terror, and torture. It condoned confining prisoners in “tiger cages,” five-by-nine-by-six-foot stone compartments, where three to five men would be shackled to the floor, beaten, mutilated. Their legs would wither, and they would become paralyzed, or at best reduced for the rest of their miserable lives to scuttling like crabs. Buckets of lime were emptied upon them. Elsewhere in Vietnam, CIA assets applied electric shocks to victims’ genitals, tapped six-inch dowels through victims’ ears and into their brains, and threw victims out of helicopters in order to force their associates to talk.187 More recently in Afghanistan, U.S.-backed troops loaded 3,000 prisoners into container trucks, sealed the doors, and left these to stand for days in the sun. A U.S. commander ordered an Afghan soldier to shoot bullets through the containers’ walls to provide air holes. Soon enough, blood began to stream from the containers’ bottoms. Those victims who survived so far were dumped in the desert and shot by Afghans who were watched over by thirty to forty U.S. soldiers. Often the Americans took more direct roles: as one Afghan soldier stated, “I was a witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner’s neck. The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no power to stop them.” The bodies of their victims were left to be eaten by dogs.188

Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America. There we find CIA-associated torture. Literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of human beings have been tortured or killed by people taught by these manuals.

Even The Washington Post has commented that CIA and U.S. Army Special Forces interrogators routinely beat prisoners. They hood them, deprive them of sleep, bombard them with light, bind them in painful positions with duct tape. As one agent put it: “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.”189

This “doing their job” of course includes torturing children. In the same article where a CIA-agent spoke glibly of “playing smackyface” with victims, it was revealed that if “smackyface” doesn’t work—and prisoners have died from what even a military coroner acknowledges is “blunt force injury”—the CIA has at its disposal other means to make victims “regress,” or talk: the agent stated explicitly—and I have to say the capitalist journalist expressed no disapproval of the agent’s stated option—that he had access to victims’ young children. Surely their “regression”—the exploitation of these “human resources”—would make their father talk.

We all know that agents of the United States government torture prisoners. We all know that this has been happening for a very long time. Part of the most recent response by those in power to this widespread understanding has been to redefine