In 1983, the CIA spelled out “unique” methods of torture in its Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, a how-to guide passed on to security goons in Latin America, who previously used beatings, false imprisonment, executions under Project X, a program run by Army Foreign Intelligence unit in the 1960s (see Improper Material in Spanish-Language Intelligence Manuals, declassified in March, 1992). “This ‘report of investigation’ was sent to then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney in March 1992, nine months after the Defense Department began an internal investigation into how seven counterintelligence and interrogation manuals used for years by the Southern Command throughout Latin America had come to contain ‘objectionable’ and prohibited material,” notes the National Security Archive (see previous link). Apparently, Cheney disagreed with the report’s conclusions since torture has taken on new and startling dimensions in the second Bush administration. Tomgram writes in an introduction to Alfred McCoy’s The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib:

In 2001, these CIA torture techniques were let loose again by a Bush administration intent on creating an offshore mini-gulag of “information extraction” in its zeal to pursue its “war on terror.” Overlapping CIA and Pentagon detention systems were set up worldwide where, beyond the oversight of anyone, the “arts of interrogation” could be practiced (and in which they could spread like some malign virus). Unfortunately, what we now call “Abu Ghraib” is but the tip of the iceberg and has largely proved a tale of Bush administration damage control. There have been or are now underway eight investigations of Abu Ghraib (and sometimes of detention practices in Afghanistan as well). All are Pentagon appointed and almost all are military staffed.

It should be noted that in 1983 the CIA realized that pain “inflicted upon the subject from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist” (see Excerpts from the CIA Torture Manual, reprinted in Harper’s Magazine, April 1997). Instead of “hand-son” torture (for instance with drills), the CIA devised “no touch” torture methods. “Although seemingly less brutal, ‘no touch’ torture leaves deep psychological scars on both victims and interrogators,” writes Alfred W. McCoy, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The victims often need long treatment to recover from trauma far more crippling than physical pain. The perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating cruelty and lasting emotional problems.” As Abu Ghraib vividly demonstrates, the “no touch” methods were abandoned, ostensibly at Cheney’s behest, for the “escalating cruelty” of rape and the Black and Decker technique.

Finally, it is obvious Cheney’s rape, torture, and murder minions are not interested in “information extraction” through torture (admitted by the CIA not to work). Indeed, their real motivation appears more sinister and perverse—they obviously relish the act of torturing Arabs, especially those innocent of any crime or direct collaboration with the resistance (it can be assumed the vast majority of Iraqis passively support the resistance at minimum). As the Red Cross reported in early 2004, a full 70 to 90 percent of “detainees” in Iraq are innocent of any crime and were “arrested by mistake.” In fact, they were not “arrested by mistake” but deliberately under Cheney’s “philosophical guidance” and tortured because the Bush neocons hate and fear Arabs and Muslims, primarily because Cheney’s perverse minions in the Pentagon are either Zionist neocons or are influenced by the neocon philosophy, and as we know the foundation of Zionism, including the Straussian flavor of neoconism, is a visceral hatred and fear of Arabs and Islam. If we need a further example of what the neocons plan to do to the Iraqis (and Syrians and Iranians when they get the chance), we need look no further than occupied Palestine and the brutality and violent perversity of the IDF.