Part 1 - Two Doctor Shocks - Torture and Chicago School Fundamentalism
Following a crisis shock, another quickly follows. The corporate piranhas exploit disorientation with economic “shock therapy” along with “police, soldiers and prison interrogators” with torture their method of choice “to build a model country (by) erasing people and then trying to remake them from scratch.”
Above photograph of industrial ruins on S. Torrance Ave in Chicago, March 2007: The massive loss of manufacturing jobs because of globalization has left huge stretches of Chicago (such as several miles along S. Torrance Ave., above) with the ruins of industrial plants whose jobs have been shipped overseas, first to places like Mexico and now to China, where wages and working conditions for manufacturing jobs are the closest thing to mass slavery in the world today. The promotion of “free trade” by both the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and the Republicans under Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush have left many American cities in worse shape than Chicago. Instead of blaming the incompetence of executives of the steel industry (above) and others in power for the decline of American competitiveness in the world, as “The Shock Doctrine “ shows, the blame is placed on industrial workers, unions, and urban schools. Chicago’s corporate “school reform” is one of the local manifestations of the Shock Doctrine in action. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.Klein reviews the history of CIA’s interest in torture as a way to control the human mind. It began with the Montreal doctor they funded to perform “bizarre experiments on his psychiatric patients (by) keeping them asleep and in isolation for weeks, then administering huge doses of electroshock (plus) experimental (psychedelic LSD and hallucinogen PCP angel dust) drug cocktails.”
The experiments were performed at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute by Dr. Ewen Cameron, even though they clearly violated all standards of medical ethics using human guinea pigs without their permission, with permanent damage their reward. Cameron believed by blasting the human brain with an array of shocks, he could “unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild (on a blank slate) new personalities” cleansed of their previous nature. It was voodoo science, and it failed. His patients were his victims, but CIA gained a wealth of knowledge it now employs with no pangs of conscience or regard for ethics.
Klein traces CIA’s interest in mind manipulation to a 1951 trinational meeting of intelligence agencies and academics in Montreal when concern was that Communists could brainwash POWs to control them. That was when the spy agency engaged Canadian researchers to learn how, and one of them was Dr. Donald Hebb, director of psychology at McGill, who was working on the problem. Intelligence agencies were impressed enough with his work to fund classified sensory-deprivation experiments on volunteer McGill students.
They proved intensive isolation interferes with clear thinking enough to make people more receptive to suggestion. They were also “formidable interrogation techniques” amounting to torture that Hebb knew violated medical ethics. He later characterized Cameron’s work as “criminally stupid,” but CIA got what it wanted - a way to interrogate “resistant sources” in a “new age of precise, refined torture, not the gory, inexact” kind from the Spanish Inquisition or what Nazis and other tyrants often practiced. Cameron’s experiments with human guinea pigs built on Hebb’s earlier work, laying the foundation for CIA’s “two-stage psychological torture method” of sensory deprivation followed by sensory overload. University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy in his book, “A Question of Torture”, on CIA interrogation, called it “the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries.”
Pre-9/11, these techniques were freely used covertly as any form of abuse or torture violates the Geneva, UN, and other statutes prohibiting these practices as well as the US Army’s own Uniform Code of Military Justice barring “cruelty” and “oppression” of prisoners. No longer, as “On September 11, 2001, that longtime insistence on plausible deniability went out the window” as well as any claim this nation respects the law and rights of free people everywhere. What once was done sub rosa or by proxy is now condoned and authorized at the highest levels of government on the fraudulent claim of national security to hide the real aim of social control.
Klein notes torture is still technically banned in the US, but only when pain is the “equivalent in intensity to (what accompanies) serious physical injury, such as organ failure.” Simply put, anything goes, but it’s not put that way. In Iraq, it was thought “shock and awe” would be so stunning Iraqis “would go into a kind of suspended animation.” A second makeover Chicago School fundamentalism shock could then be imposed on a blank post-invasion slate, and bingo, mission accomplished. Klein notes “there was no blank slate, only rubble and shattered, angry people” who were blasted with more shocks when they resisted. Like Cameron and his experiments, “Iraq’s shock doctors can destroy, but they can’t seem to rebuild,” and the same is true wherever these shock doctors show up.
