During the 1960’s the CIA, M16 and other Western intelligence agencies commissioned scientific research into torture techniques. Eager to avoid the political embarrassments of the past (which may have forced them to scale down their own activities), they established a standard set of techniques to replicate the effects of torture without leaving any physical or medical marks (see Ian Cobain’s Cruel Britannia for a secret history of torture perpetrated by the West).
Scientists Harold Dearden and Professor Donald Hebb and others agreed to take on this research and began experimenting on humans. What came out of that was what’s known as the “5 techniques,” which produced greater psychological trauma more quickly and with better results than other conventional torture methods.
These techniques were infamously used on prisoners in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. And if they were kept secret during the 80s and 90s, they would define the West’s (particularly the US’s) torturing of detainees in the “War on Terror”. The global kidnap and torture programme, thoughtfully named as the “rendition programme”, was littered with examples of just that.
The added PR benefit was that politicians like Donald Rumsfeld could say that such “soft” techniques were nothing in comparison with physical mistreatment. And with these words, there was an air of moral superiority that “we” torture our prisoners “humanely”.
But the actual effects of torture never really changed. The end result was to break a person’s mental will, make them give up and become more susceptible to the options the torturer was giving them. Whilst previous techniques brutalised the body and inflicted pain, causing the victim to experience mental stress and thus make his mental defences weaker, the 5 techniques’ use of sensory deprivation and stress positions did exactly the same.
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