Paris, August 13, 2009 – Little mainstream comment seems to have
appeared on the latest revelations of incompetence and sadistic
fantasy published this week about the ways in which the American
nation lost its honor and international reputation because of the
Bush administration’s infatuation with torture.

This has constituted , as Vice President Richard Cheney has put it, “the dark
side” of Administration policy -- its 8-year excursion into what commonly is
understood to be criminal international behavior, which the vice president continues
to defend with relish and conviction.

The revelations concern the two men who reportedly created the
torture techniques that the CIA and U.S. military have been using on
prisoners since early in the “war on terror.”

According to The New York Times (in a story last week by Scott
Shane), the two had for years been involved with an Air Force
survival course supposedly based on Chinese Communist “brainwashing”
techniques used in the Korean War.



The program involved mid-level abuse -- and sometimes more. (One of
the two, Bruce Jessen, allegedly had to be stopped in a mock
interrogation that colleagues thought had become “pretty scary”).
This was to prepare the airmen for what they might meet if captured
by an enemy.

Most anyone who has been in military service since the Korean War
has been given a taste of this, but it was an Air Force specialty.

One of the two successive head psychologists at the course housed
at the Spokane Air Force base was George Mitchell, a poor boy from
Florida who joined the Air Force in 1974 for adventure, became an
explosives expert, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in
psychology, which he completed with a doctorate obtained at the
University of South Florida with a dissertation comparing diet and
exercise plans in controlling hypertension.

The second was Bruce Jessen, a farm boy who had earned a psychology
doctorate at Utah State in what was known as “family sculpting,” in
which clients made physical models of their family to deal with
emotional relationships.

When 2001 came, the two friends saw their opportunity, convincing
the government that they were experts on torture. Neither knew much,
if anything, about al Qaeda, the intelligence world, Islam, foreign
languages or foreign countries.

They simply reversed what they had been teaching, and taught the
torture rather than the resistance. According to the Times, they
then “made millions selling interrogation and training services to
the CIA.”

Now there is an aspect to this which so far as I know has never
been mentioned in connection with the U.S. torture program..
“Brainwashing” is a myth. The Defense Department official conclusion
after the Korean war was that “no confirmed cases of brainwashing
came out of the Korean war.” The DOD said that Chinese Communist
treatment of prisoners was not unusual. The academic community
eventually concluded that the concept of brainwashing was “not
considered useful in Social Science.”

The whole thing came from a sensational book and a later sensational movie, "The Manchurian Candidate". Press and
public hysteria built up from the fact that some American prisoners
in Korea gave “confessions” of war crimes to enemy propaganda,
presumably to escape routine brutality or to get privileged treatment.

The Air Force courses of the past 60 years on how to survive
brainwashing were cooked up in the United States out of peoples’
imaginings of what it might be like to be brainwashed. The tortures
sold to the CIA by Mitchell and Jessen were made up in the U.S.A.

One more thing must be added to illuminate the atmosphere in which
this could have happened in the United States.

The University of Lausanne in Switzerland has allowed it to
be made known that one of their theology faculty, Prof. Thomas Romer,
in early 2003, received a call from the Elysee Palace in Paris,
the seat of the French presidency.

The President, Jacques Chirac, supposedly wanted a clarification of
the significance of the figures of Gog and Magog in Biblical
prophesy. He was calling Lausanne because he didn’t want his query
to be leaked to the press in France.

The theologian explained to him that the two are obscure
figures who appear in the Book of Genesis, and again in Ezekiel, in
connection with a prophesy of a great war, desired by God, to cleanse
the world of His enemies before the arrival of the world’s Last Days,
when a New Age would follow.

Chirac reportedly said he was calling because he was distressed
that President George Bush had twice telephoned him to inform him, as
France’s president , that this war was beginning, and urging France to
join the United States in fulfilling the divine prophesy. As is well
known, France did not do so.

This appears in a new book of interviews by a respected French
journalist and friend of Chirac, Jean-Claude Maurice, provocatively
called “If You Quote Me, I’ll Deny It.” The report by Maurice has
not been confirmed by the former French president. But it has not
been denied.

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