Terror in America, Ii: Inquisition

By Leslie Herzberger

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 4, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469100098

Leslie Herzberger

The author was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1946. He served in the U.S. Army, then attended Columbia University School of International Affairs, and the Ph.D. Program in History at New York University. This book is part of the follow-up of the PH.D. Thesis Proposal that the author presented to New York University on December 24, 1980, and worked out as a private scholar the next 20 years. The work that went into the book spanned a period of around thirty years overall.

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Copyright © 2008 by Leslie Herzberger.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Interrogation ‘Without Letup’

Introduction

To Mayhem In Amerika

Chapter I

In The Beginning: Mayhem In Amerika

1972-1981

Chapter II

In The Beginning: Inquisition In Amerika

1972-1981

Appendix

The Set-Up, 1979-1980

Brooklyn College of CUNY

Graduate School—History M.A. Program.

Head of Program, William Jannen, Ph.D.

The Fascist Personality

The Revolutionary Personality

A Paradigm For

Revolutionary Change

That Came Out Of My Work

From 1968-1992

Chapter III

The Nature of The Inquisition As of 1980: Thrasymachus In Amerika

II

The Left In The Atrocity

III

The Atrocity In The 1980’s:

Reaganomics In Action

The Left And The Right Come Together

In Atrocity And Mayhem

In Amerika.

IV

1990: The Set-up In The Valley Of Death.

The Military And The Jews

Chapter IV

Inquisition And Mayhem In America, 1981-1993. A Chronology of Events

Chapter V

When All Is Said And Done—The Foreign Policy Establishment Did It.

Chapter VI

A Time In Hell

1997-2008

Chapter VII

Who Did It In April 1, 1981,

In New York City

APPENDIX

Endnotes

Nearly all historians are 99 percent certain that Stalin oversaw the Kirov murder through the Moscow Cheka (and one well-placed commentator, Volkogonov, calls it certain). I am now told that post-glasnost research has rendered this view more doubtful.All cui bono? considerations point to Stalin: he had at least a dozen reasons for wanting Kirov dead (or 300 reasons: those votes at the Congress of Victors). No other event would have served Stalin so well as a springboard for mass repression. And the subsequent fates of nearly every key player in the murder (no man, no problem) speaks of Stalinist assiduity. True, the crime and the cover-up were haphazardly managed; it is particularly hard to understand the Cheka’s selection of Nikolayev, a figure of almost epileptic instability. But he finished the job: Kirov was dead. Anyway, Stalin’s guilt in the matter, when set beside his greater guilt, is another near-irrelevance. Perhaps we should throw our hands in the air and attribute Nikolayev to mere Stalinian voodoo, like his magically timed, stroke-inducing affronts to Lenin in 1922-23. The point is that the momentum for terror had already gathered. Kirov’s murder gave rise to a prodigiously exaggerated version of the Rohm purge (June 30, 1934); but its real equivalent was the Reichstag Fire of the previous year. Nikolayev simply saved Stalin the trouble of torching the Kremlin.

The top Leningrad Chekists were in attendance when the night train from Moscow pulled into the station. Stalin approached their chief, Medved, and, instead of patting him on the back, slapped him across the face. A student of Machiavelli, Stalin knew that the Prince must be an actor. At Kirov’s state funeral there was a more sinister piece of showmanship: Stalin kissed Kirov’s corpse.

Borisov, the personal bodyguard, was not with Kirov when Nikolayev struck (it is thought that some Moscow Chekists detained or distracted him at the door). Late in the morning of December 2, he was sent by lorry to the Smolny, there to be interrogated by Stalin. On Voinov Street there was a minor accident. The driver and the three Cheka guards were unhurt. Borisov was dead. They had used iron bars on him in the back of the truck.

Downward selection had long been about its work, and the cadres were ready; the punitive organs were ready. As Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who would kill himself three years later, remarked to none other than Sergei Kirov in January 1934: Our members who saw the situation in 1932-33 and who stood up to it are now tempered like steel. I think that with people like that, we can build a state such as history has never seen.

[Martin Amis, Koba The Dread, Knopf Publishers 2002, Canada]

Interrogation ‘Without Letup’

The convicted officer said his interrogators deprived him of sleep for days and nights, forced him to stand outside his interrogation room for hours during winter and then to take a bitterly cold shower, made him strip, spat in his face, threw him on the floor, pulled him around by the hair and threatened to arrest his wife and mother.

All this went on day after day, hour after hour, without letup, he told reporters. The interrogators would be switched and you would be sitting there. You had no right to speak and there was terrible pressure to ‘tell, tell, tell’—and you had nothing to tell.

The military Judge Advocate General, Brig. Amnon Nevo, who represented the Government in the appeal, acknowledged that Shin Beth had employed illegal interrogation methods against Lieutenant Nafsu and had lied about the methods to the military court. Shin Beth also admitted to having destroyed most transcripts of Lieutenant Nafsu’s interrogation.

It is not clear why the agency framed Lieutenant Nafsu.

[The New York Times, May 26, 1987]

German Aid For Victims Of Torture

By STEPHEN KINZER

BERLIN, Dec. 13—When Johannes Hundee Hurisso was released after 12 years in an Ethiopian prison, torture had devastated both his mind and body.

Guards had beaten him relentlessly in what they said were efforts to chase the devils of counterrevolution from your mind, and upon his release in 1991 he was unable to walk and barely able to breathe.

Today, after three years of treatment at a Berlin clinic, Mr. Hurisso considers himself 70 percent healed.

I thought my pains could be cured with medicine, but I was wrong, he said. Medicine did not help to cure the torture virus.

The Berlin Treatment Center for Torture Victims, founded in 1992, is one of about 40 such clinics established in Europe.

With a staff of 14 and an annual budget of about $1 million, the Berlin center occupies several rooms in a sprawling medical complex run jointly by a local university and the German Red Cross.

Mr. Hurisso, a former newspaper editor, made his way to the Berlin center with help from the human rights group Amnesty international, which had taken up his case while he was in prison. After treatment for deep wounds into which torturers had rubbed salt, and for lung ailments that left him coughing up blood, he began psychological treatment.

It begins with counselors trying to persuade the patients to discuss what they have suffered. Later it moves on to relaxation exercises, some of which are recorded on tapes for patients to take home, various forms of physiotherapy and sports, and in some cases music or art therapy.

The largest number of patients at the Berlin center are Kurds who have emerged from prisons in Turkey and Iran. People from the Balkans make up an ever-increasing portion, and the patient list also includes men and women from Iraq, Syria, Romania, India, Lebanon and Tunisia. Several victims of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police agency, are also under treatment.

In many countries, methods of psychological torture, especially isolated confinement, sexual abuse and forcing victims to watch family members—suffer, are becoming increasingly refined, said Dr. Mechthild Wenk-Ansohn, one of the staff doctors. Unfortunately many of our colleagues, doctors, are involved in developing methods of torture that do not leave the physical traces we normally associate with torture.

We naturally try to treat the physical symptoms of our patients first, but the psychological symptoms are often much harder to cure, Dr. Wenk-Ansohn said. "One of our patients, for example, is a young girl who was arrested when she was 11 years old in the Kurdish region of Turkey after her father refused to join the local militia.

Her memories of torture are so acute that she can hardly bear to be touched. She told me: ‘The torture has taken root inside me. It’s in every part of my body, and there’s no room left for me.’

C.I.A. Taught Coercion To 5 Latin American Forces

By TIM WEINER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28—The Central Intelligence Agency taught techniques of mental torture and coercion to at least five Latin American security forces in the early 1980’s, but repudiated the interrogation methods in 1985, according to documents and statements the agency made public today.

A 1983 C.I.A. manual sought to teach foreign agents ways to extract information from people without extracting fingernails. It advised against physical torture as counterproductive. Instead, it discussed using intense fear, deep exhaustion, solitary confinement, unbearable anxiety, and other forms of psychological duress against a subject as ways of destroying his capacity to resist his interrogator.

While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, it said, we do want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them.

Those techniques were taught in at least five Latin American countries during President Ronald Reagan’s first term. Exactly which five is not clear, although the Reagan Administration’s anti-Communist covert actions in Central America directly involved security forces in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and indirectly the armies of Panama and Argentina.

The security forces of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala worked in concert with the C.I.A. against Communist guerrillas and suspected leftists during the 1980s’s. Those forces killed, imprisoned and tortured thousands of suspected enemies during the last decade of the cold war.

The agency’s role in training those security forces was discussed in the press and in closed-door Congressional hearings in the mid-1980’s. Those discussions helped persuade the C.I.A. to privately rewrite the manual and renounce coercive interrogation techniques in late 1984 and early 1985.

At about the same time, in October 1984, the agency was embarrassed by public disclosure of another C.I.A. training manual that advised the Nicaraguan contras on how to kidnap and kill leftist officials, blackmail citizens and destroy villages. The agency said the manual was the work of an overzealous freelancer on its payroll.

The 1983 manual on interrogation and the 1985 prohibition against coercive methods were made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Baltimore Sun for a series on the C.I.A.’s relationship with a Honduran military battalion. The C.I.A.’s office of public affairs acknowledged for the first time today the agency’s prior teaching and subsequent repudiation of psychological torture.

The 1983 manual, under the heading Coercive Techniques, advised against direct physical brutality, which it said creates only resentment, hostility and further defiance in a prisoner. But, it said, if a subject refuses to comply once a threat has been made, it must be carried out.

The torture situation is an external conflict, a contest between the subject and his tormentor, the manual said. The pain which is being inflicted upon him from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist. On the other hand, pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance.

So if a subject is required to maintain rigid positions such as standing at attention or sitting on a stool for long periods of time, the manual said, the immediate source of pain is not the ‘questioner’ but the subject himself.

This kind of physical and psychological harassment could be combined with persistent manipulation of time like retarding and advancing clocks, disrupting sleep schedules, disorientation regarding night and day—all to the end of breaking the subject’s will to resist, to drive him deeper and deeper into himself, until he no longer is able to control his responses in an adult fashion, the manual said.

Some of the passages in the 1983 manual paralleled some of the milder language from a 1963 C.I.A. guidebook on interrogating suspected spies or Soviet agents. The 1963 text, which was written at a time when the C.I.A. was not subjected to Congressional oversight or outside scrutiny, said approval from headquarters was necessary before a interrogator used physical torture, electric shocks, mind-altering drugs or bodily harm on a subject.

In 1985, the C.I.A. adopted a formal policy against inhumane treatment during interrogation. It rewrote the manual, deleting or editing its harshest passages. And, in a written statement to its officers and foreign agents, it warned against the use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation.

Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain cooperation of sources, the 1985 policy statement said. Use of force is a poor technique. Force yields unreliable results, it said, and will probably result in adverse publicity and/or legal action against the interrogator.

However, it continued, the use of force is not to be confused with psychological ploys, verbal trickery, or other nonviolent and non-coercive ruses employed by the interrogators in the successful interrogation of reticent or uncooperative sources.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 1997

Nationwide Terrorist Alert Leads to Two Innocent Men

By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK

HOUSTON, Feb. 25—For a time on Monday, they seemed to be the two most wanted men in America. The F.B.I. put out a terrorist threat advisory and released a composite sketch to the police and news organizations nationwide. The men were traveling in a rented U-Haul truck that might contain the makings of a massive bomb, the agency warned.

But shortly after Federal agents caught up with the two men late Monday, knocking on the door of their motel room in a suburb of Atlanta, the men reclaimed their normal identities as a couple of guys from Fort Worth traveling around the South for their industrial cleaning company.

The F.B.I. canceled its highly unusual alert concerning the two men this morning, after it had been conclusively determined that they were conducting legitimate business, an F.B.I. spokesman in Atlanta said today.

The men were spotted in Texas last Saturday by someone who believed they had huge amounts of potentially explosive ammonium nitrate fertilizer; in fact, the material was soap.

And the diesel fuel they were seen buying at a Texaco station in the small North Texas town of Watauga is used to run their machinery, which cleans commercial printing presses of their ink and grime, said the police in nearby Haltom City, Tex.

The two men, whose names were not released by any law-enforcement agency, apparently continued on their way today to a cleaning job somewhere east of Atlanta.

They were described as "very friendly and