Doctors Who Torture

[Judi Lynn]

Weekend Edition April 26-28, 2013

Pain and Punishment

Doctors Who Torture

by Dr. CESAR CHELALA
Buenos Aires

Last July at the Libertad (Freedom) prison in Uruguay was unusual. Miguel Angel Estrella, an Argentine pianist (and now Argentina’s Ambassador to UNESCO), was giving a concert in the same prison where he had been imprisoned and tortured 32 years earlier.

He dedicated the concert to the 50 inmates currently imprisoned. After he was liberated, Estrella had testified against Dolcey Britos, a psychologist who had masterminded the psychological torture of prisoners at Libertad.

Estrella was liberated thanks to an unprecedented international campaign on his behalf. A friend since my youth, he told me in New York about the ordeal he went through while he was a prisoner in Uruguay. A professional pianist, he was subjected to a most unusual and frightening punishment. He was beaten repeatedly on his hands and threatened with amputation, a spiritual death for a pianist.

He told me: “They (the torturers) concentrated on my hands like sadists. They applied electricity under my nails, without stopping and later they hung me from my arms. After two days of torture I hurt all over, and didn’t have any sensation left in my hands. I touched things and didn’t feel anything.

“The last time I was tortured they threatened to cut off my hands with an electric saw, saying, ‘We are going to chop off your hands, finger by finger, and then we are going to kill you, as the Chileans killed Víctor Jara (a famous Chilean folk singer and guitar player who was killed after being tortured, his hands repeatedly smashed before his death)‘.”

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/26/doctors-who-torture/

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. That's the problem.

Such a carefully orchestrated torture raises the question of how health professionals — including psychologists and psychiatrists — could have participated in it.

The problem is that each advancement in healing can have a shadow, a way to invert it. For instance, in psychology there's a simple technique to help people, called reflective listening. Basically what you do is listen closely to someone, and then rephrase what they said, and say it back to them as they speak to show them that they are being heard. For whatever reason, this simple act of the individual feeling heard and understood is incredibly powerful in helping people feel better, and de-escalate from intense bad emotional states. However, once the power of this is understood, so is its inverse: the systematic misinterpretation and re-contexting of an individuals words to cause emotional damage, make the individual feel misunderstood. Sadly I've seen this at work in the political scene and out in the world.

So just as a powerful technique to promote understanding and healing is born, so is a powerful psychological weapon to do damage individuals, simply by inverting the technique. At this point there's such a long history of this kind of inversion happening, that almost any one who comes up with a way to heal and help needs to think first about the inverse of their technique, and possibly how to mitigate it before they release their work.

PEace

[Judi Lynn]

3. True. A method used to advance healing can be inverted and do horrendous damage.

If both experiences happen within the same lifetime it's going to work out far better if the latter is going to be the fine-tuned reflective listening! I feel sure about that!

Have never seen your point made before, it's really good to see it now.

Thank you.

[Socialistlemur]

5. Medical abuses for polítical reasons is quite common

I get the feeling that people are quite naive about the purity of medical practice. Police are supposed to protect the citizenry from criminals, but we all know stories about crooked cops. Doctors are supposed to heal, but are we really so naive to believe it applies to every doctor? We know of the sick experiments carried out by the nazis, and also the gross abuses of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. I heard a story once about doctors in Argentina who had cured an urban guerrilla captured during a shootout in 9 de Julio avenue in 1980....apparently they treated him very well. And drugged him so he would talk, thus he gave the location of key safe houses which were later surrounded and destroyed.

[Judi Lynn]

2. At the same time, the US had a full time torturer in Uruguay.

Here's his Wikipedia:

Daniel A. Mitrione (August 4, 1920 – August 10, 1970) was an Italian-born[1] American police officer, Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and a United States government advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency in Latin America.

Career

Mitrione was a police officer in Richmond, Indiana, from 1945 to 1947 and joined the FBI in 1959. In 1960 he was assigned to State Department's International Cooperation Administration, going to South American countries to teach "advanced counterinsurgency techniques." A. J. Langguth, a former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon, claimed that Mitrione was among the US advisers teaching Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply to prisoners without killing them.[2] Langguth also claimed that older police officers were replaced "when the CIA and the U.S. police advisers had turned to harsher measures and sterner men."[3] and that under the new head of the U.S. Public Safety program in Uruguay, Dan Mitrione, the United States "introduced a system of nationwide identification cards, like those in Brazil… [and] torture had become routine at the Montevideo [police] jefatura."[4]

From 1960 to 1967, Mitrione worked with the Brazilian police, first in Belo Horizonte then in Rio de Janeiro. He returned to the US in 1967 to share his experiences and expertise on "counterguerilla warfare" at the Agency for International Development (USAID), in Washington D.C. In 1969, Mitrione moved to Uruguay, again under USAID, to oversee the Office of Public Safety.

Mitrione was also in the Dominican Republic after the 1965 US intervention.[5]

[edit] Uruguayan posting and death

In this period the Uruguayan government, led by the Colorado Party, had its hands full with a collapsing economy, labor and student strikes, and the Tupamaros, a left-wing urban guerilla group. On the other hand, Washington feared a possible victory during the elections of the Frente Amplio, a left-wing coalition, on the model of the victory of the Unidad Popular government in Chile, led by Salvador Allende, in 1970.[4] The OPS had been helping the local police since 1965, providing them with weapons and training. It is claimed that torture had already been practised since the 1960s, but Dan Mitrione was reportedly the man who made it routine.[6] He is quoted as having said once: "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect."[7] Former Uruguayan police officials and CIA operatives claimed Mitrione had taught torture techniques to Uruguayan police in the cellar of his Montevideo home, including the use of electrical shocks delivered to his victims' mouths and genitals.[8] He also helped train foreign police agents in the United States in the context of the Cold War. It has been alleged that he used homeless people for training purposes, who were allegedly executed once they had served their purpose.[9]

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Mitrione

[center] [/center]
Daniel Mitrione was born in Italy on 4th August, 1920. The family emigrated to the United States and in 1945 Mitrione became a police officer in Richmond, Indiana.

Mitrione joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1959. The following year he was assigned to the State Department's International Cooperation Administration. He was then sent to South America to teach "advanced counterinsurgency techniques." His speciality was in teaching the police how to torture political prisoners without killing them.

According to A.J. Langguth of the New York Times, Mitrione was working for the CIA via the International Development's Office of Public Safety (OPS). We know he was in several foreign countries but between 1960 and 1967 he spent a lot of time in Brazil and was involved in trying to undermine the left-wing president João Goulart, who had taken power after President Juscelino Kubitschek resigned from office in 1961.

João Goulart was a wealthy landowner who was opposed to communism. However, he was in favour of the redistribution of wealth in Brazil. As minister of labour he had increased the minimum wage by 100%. Colonel Vernon Walters, the US military attaché in Brazil, described Goulart as “basically a good man with a guilty conscience for being rich.”

The CIA began to make plans for overthrowing Goulart. A psychological warfare program approved by Henry Kissinger, at the request of telecom giant ITT during his chair of the 40 Committee, sent U.S. PSYOPS disinformation teams to spread fabricated rumors concerning Goulart. John McCloy was asked to set up a channel of communication between the CIA and Jack W. Burford, one of the senior executives of the Hanna Mining Company. In February, 1964, McCloy went to Brazil to hold secret negotiations with Goulart. However, Goulart rejected the deal offered by Hanna Mining.

More:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmitrione.htm

[Demeter]

4. There's aman who lived 50 years too long