Interrogation, Sensory Deprivation and the CIA/MI-5/6A Canadian Connection
Thirty-six years ago, Donald Capri was driving across the Redwood Bridge in Winnipeg when he spotted a body floating in the Red River. Police later identified the victim as Prof. John Zubek, a distinguished psychologist at the University of Manitoba. Cause of death was determined to be suicide by drowning. Zubek was 49.
Zubek’s mysterious life and death has a direct and largely unexplored relationship with the CIA’s methodology of interrogation. Zubek devoted his life’s work to researching sensory deprivation. In a special isolation chamber at the University of Manitoba, he conducted experiments on more than 500 people over 15 years, depriving them of all sensations for up to two weeks. The research was begun at a time when the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program was spending millions to understand how manipulating human behaviour could assist interrogations.
Zubek, who was funded by the Canadian defence department and the US government, was considered a world leader in sensory deprivation research, elaborating the covert work begun by colleague Donald Hebb at McGill University — work he assisted, according to documents in Zubek’s personal papers.
Despite his death in 1974, Zubek’s legacy endures in the methods used at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other detention centres. The notorious photo of a hooded prisoner in Abu Ghraib, standing on a box with arms extended, shows the importance of sensory deprivation in the CIA’s methods. So does the declassified Foreign Affairs document that reveals how Omar Khadr was placed on the “frequent flyer” program at Guantanamo, constantly moved from cell to cell and denied uninterrupted sleep. “He will soon be placed in isolation for up to three weeks and then he will be interviewed again,” says the once-secret 2004 memo. In his influential book A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy argues that the “no-touch torture” technique of sensory deprivation is critical to the US interrogation paradigm.
I have examined Zubek’s archives at the University of Manitoba and written a lengthy article about his activities for the current issue of Canada’s History magazine.
– See more at:
http://sttpml.org/psychotronic-and-electromagnetic-weapons-remove-control-of-the-human-nervous-system/
Experiments in Isolation
When a professor at the University of Manitoba started doing experiments in sensory deprivation in the 1960s, few people thought anything of it.
No one then realized that intelligence agencies such as the CIA would use the findings of researchers like Dr. John Zubek to develop new and disturbing methods of interrogation.
Award-winning journalist Cecil Rosner has followed this story over the years.
You can read his article, “Isolation,” in the August/September issue of Canada’s History magazine.
Here is Cecil Rosner being interviewed by Canada’s History Associate Editor Nelle Oosterom (11 mins, 12 secs):
Alone again: John Zubek and the troubled history of sensory deprivation research.
Abstract
In the 1950s, sensory deprivation research emerged as an influential new field for behavioral science researchers, supported by the intelligence community. Within a few years, deprivation research had become ubiquitous; images of sensory deprivation were invoked to explain a wide range of phenomena, from religious revelations to the very structure of psychoanalysis. Yet within a decade and a half, this field of research became implicated in cases of torture and abuse. This article examines the history of University of Manitoba psychologist John Zubek, who remained one of the final researchers still conducting sensory deprivation research in the 1970s. It raises questions on how might it be possible to successfully and cautiously perform controversial research.
http://issuu.com/canadashistory/docs/isolationa
© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Brits used university’s expertise in 1970s
Posted: 08/28/2009 1:00 AM |
Professor John Zubek after ten days in complete isolation in 1959. (WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES) Photo Store
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THE revelation this week that a top secret CIA memo references the research of a University of Manitoba professor closely mirrors the ordeal of another of the university’s researchers more than 30 years ago.
According to the Free Press archives, psychologist John Zubek was a leading scientist in the field of sensory deprivation.
In some of his experiments, volunteers were put in a glass dome and subjected to white noise, sometimes for as long as two weeks.
In 1972, a British army official testified at a parliamentary committee that a Manitoba scientist’s research was partly responsible for the interrogation methods used on suspected members of the Irish Republican Army.
IRA suspects were forced to stand on their toes with their hands against a concrete wall, while wearing black hoods and being subjected to loud white noise.
When the news broke, Zubek told the Free Press that “brainwashing” has never been the intent of his research.
“That is not the case at all,” he said, calling the interrogation method “an unfortunate application” of the knowledge.
Much of his research had been aimed at practical problems such as confinement in bomb shelters, submarines, spaceships and prisons. However, he added, “to be realistic, these techniques for extracting vital information may have their place in certain situations such as times of war.”
Despite Zubek’s protests that the British used the research without his knowledge, students picketed his classes.
The allegations that Zubek knew it was being used by the military, were likely inflamed because his research was funded by the Canadian Defence Research Board.
Zubek died in 1974 after a brief illness. He was 49.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 28, 2009 A4
From STTPML:
Guineapigs – Torture Irish Prisoners
https://prezi.com/ujqyu_7szuwc/john-zubeks-isolation-experiments/
http://www.canadashistory.ca/ Magazine/Online-Extension/Articles/-in-Isolation.aspx
http://j-source. ca/article/interrogation-sensory-deprivation-and-cia-canadian-connection , Raz, M. (2013).
http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/postcards-from-the-edge-of-consciousness
Alone again: John Zubek and the troubled history of sensory deprivation research. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 49(4), 379-395.
Here is Cecil Rosner being interviewed by Canada’s History Associate Editor Nelle Oosterom (11 mins, 12 secs):
http://j-source.ca/article/interrogation-sensory-deprivation-and-cia-canadian-connection
http://www.canadashistory.ca/Magazine/Online-Extension/Articles/Experiments-in-Isolation
Truthdigger of the Week: Amal Clooney
Posted on Feb 22, 2015 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_amal_clooney_20150221
By Roisin Davis
Amal Clooney arrives at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, in January. (AP/Christian Lutz)
Every week the Truthdig editorial staff selects a Truthdigger of the Week, a group or person worthy of recognition for speaking truth to power, breaking the story or blowing the whistle. It is not a lifetime achievement award. Rather, we’re looking for newsmakers whose actions in a given week are worth celebrating.
From the use of drones in the Middle East to the extradition of Julian Assange, lawyer Amal Clooney has taken on some of the world’s most high-profile human rights cases in her short career. Although the tabloid media may (depressingly) view marrying the planet’s most eligible bachelor—actor George Clooney—as her greatest achievement, her legal track record speaks for itself. In the last year alone, she has represented the Greek government in its quest to repatriate the contentious Elgin Marbles; she has fought on behalf of Armenia against a Turkish politician who has denied the Armenian genocide; and she has risked arrest by defending Al-Jazeera journalists imprisoned in Egypt.
Now Amal Clooney will represent Northern Ireland’s “Hooded Men,” 14 Irish prisoners who endured Britain’s version of Guantanamo in a case that, according to researcher Lauretta Farrell, has become “the benchmark by which other countries measure their ‘enhanced interrogation programs,’ and continues to be used to justify the use of torture by democratic societies.” The trial will be heard in the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, and its result could rewrite international law and help combat the use of torture globally.
Decades before Abu Ghraib’s hooded captives would become symbolic of torture in the public consciousness, the Hooded Men were subjected to dehumanizing, horrific “special treatment” at the hands of the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary—Northern Ireland’s former police force. Several of the men, who were arrested on suspicion of belonging to the Irish Republican Army, were in fact prominent civil rights activists, and one of them—P.J. McClean—was a founder of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. None were ever convicted of any offense.
Twelve of the men were captured on Aug. 9, 1971, when 342 Catholics were arrested as part of Operation Demetrius, which ushered in one of Ireland’s darkest times with mass internment, or imprisonment, without trial. During the first half of the 1970s, almost 2,000 people were interned and 7,000 people fled or were forced out of their homes amid sectarian violence. Under the notorious Special Powers Act, which rescinded habeas corpus and allowed almost free rein to British forces, internment had been employed by the Unionist government in every decade since the creation of the Northern Irish state as a means to suppress Republican opposition.The 14 men would later describe themselves as “the guinea pigs” for what became known as the five techniques for in-depth interrogation: prolonged “wall-standing,” hooding, subjection to noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink. Wall-standing involved forcing prisoners to stand balanced in the “search position” against a cell wall for hours at a time, causing painful muscle cramps. One of the men described being forced to remain in this position for 43½, and there were many other recorded instances of prisoners being kept this way for more than 20 hours. According to Amnesty International, hooding meant that a prisoner’s head was covered with an “opaque cloth bag with no ventilation” except during interrogation or when in isolation. Subjection to noise meant placing the prisoner in close proximity to “white noise” from machinery, such as a generator or compressor, for as long as a week. One of the men described to Amnesty International how he was driven to the brink of insanity by the noise and how he tried to commit suicide by banging his head against metal pipes in his cell.
In addition to the five techniques and the severe beatings that they suffered constantly, the men have recounted being thrown out of helicopters blindfolded, being forced to exercise to the point of exhaustion, being bitten by dogs and being forced to run over gravel and glass in their bare feet.
In 1971, Ireland took the first interstate case to come before the European Court of Human Rights, Ireland v. United Kingdom, which alleged that the United Kingdom had breached the European Convention on Human Rights through the torture and ill-treatment of the Hooded Men by members of the British army and Northern Ireland’s constabulary. Although the European Commission of Human Rights upheld a complaint in 1976 by the Irish government that the men had been tortured, the ruling was later overturned on appeal when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the men had been subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment, but not to torture.
As a result, the 1978 ruling has been used as a legal justification for similarly “enhanced interrogation techniques,” most recently in the George W. Bush administration’s infamous “torture memos,” which provided the legal framework for the interrogation techniques that could be used on U.S. detainees. Soon after, the CIA began applying the five techniques in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world.
Jay Bybee, an assistant attorney general at the time, singled out the Hooded Men’s case as particularly useful for the Bush administration’s purposes. “Careful attention to this case is worthwhile … ,” he wrote, “because the Reagan administration relied on this case in reaching the conclusion that the term torture is reserved in international usage for ‘extreme, deliberate, and unusually cruel practices.’ ”
Clooney’s team will be revisiting the Ireland v. U.K. judgment in light of new information that shows the British government lied and withheld documents in the 1978 trial. According to the files, the British government did in fact consider the “special treatment” torture, even though senior ministers sanctioned its use in Northern Ireland. As an Irish television documentary demonstrates, both were charges that they had denied before the European court.
“The U.K. withheld from the European court what it knew about the terrible suffering deliberately inflicted on them and its being sanctioned at the highest levels of the U.K. government,” Colm O’Gorman, executive director of Amnesty International Ireland, has said.
Clooney, whose newfound celebrity has helped to bring international attention to the case, will be joined by other lawyers from Belfast, Dublin and London to persuade the European court to officially classify the men’s treatment as torture. Not only would victory for the 11 surviving men finally recognize that truth, but it would preclude the use of such techniques in the future. This is why the formidable and fascinating Amal Clooney is our Truthdigger of the Week.
COMMENT FROM STTPML:
One of the members of the STTPML Collective was a student at University of Manitoba when a group of students uncovered the classified work of Professor John Zubek, a professor of Psychology in the 1960s and 1970s on sensory deprivation, interrogation techniques, pain thresholds and other approaches to torture. Zubek’s work was cited in the Lord Compton Report on British Interrogation Techniques in Northern Ireland and was financed by the Defence Research Board, the U.S. Army and some other institutions that acted as fronts.
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1971/nov/16/northern-ireland-compton-committees
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1971/nov/17/northern-ireland-compton-committees
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_techniques
http://www.rte.ie/news/2013/0806/466566-derry-british-government-papers/
In early 1970s, this group found out from a student in the program, that Zubek was using students and giving extra-credit or pay for participation in “sensory deprivation and pain threshold studies” that troubled him. He claimed that the new Psych-Zoo building was built with Zubek’s extensive grant money and that there was a fifth floor with restricted access and 24-hr guards. This group began research on the possible origins, funding and uses of this program and discovered the Lord Compton Report in 1971 that made frequent references to Zubek’s work going back to 1964. They found out that his dissertation was in the area of history of Psychological theory not experimental psychology where all his work had been. They also found out that his work was funded by the Defense Research Board and the U.S. Army.
This same student in his program came to this group later and was even more troubled about a new line of research on electromagnetic and microwave transmissions and influences on neuronal synapses. He did not know that this line of research and its intentions, came from work first developed by the French CRS based on evidence of chickens near a microwave station being unable to coordinate their actions. This led to the hypothesis that their systems, like humans, being electromagnetic and biochemical systems, perhaps neuronal synapses were being jammed or could be jammed with microwave transmissions or electromagnetic targeting for crowd control and putting down insurgencies by jamming the frequencies on which neuronal synapses operate.
Zubek’s work was exposed by a student uprising against it (his grants build a new Psych-Zoo building with a secure and guarded fifth floor on it). Their argument was that his covert work and the use of university facilities and name on which all depend, was like a Nazi scientist developing Zyklon-B gas knowing well how it is likely to be used but claiming no moral responsibility for how it is used and keeping “plausibly deniable” how much he knew about who was funding him and how his work would be used. He later committed suicide by jumping into the Red River.
This is not science fiction; this work and the ugly forces and intentions behind it is alive and well under various masks.
Transcript of John Zubek’s Isolation Experiments
Isolation
Experiments
Research Bias
-White
-Male
-Students/Paid
-Academic
The Research
Sensory Deprivation
1959-1974 University of Manitoba
500+ students
To develop interrogation and torture techniques
Isolation Bed
Isolation Chamber
RESEARCHERS SHOULD RESPECT THE PRIVACY/ CONFIDENTIALITY AND THE DIGNITY OF THE SUBJECTS
RESEARCHER SUBJECTS MUST BE PROTECTED FROM PERSONAL HARM
RESEARCHERS SHOULD NOT MISUSE THEIR ROLE AS A RESEARCHER
RESEARCHERS MUST OBTAIN INFORMED CONSENT IN ORDER TO USE THEIR SUBJECTS THOUGHTS, FEELINGS OR ACTIONS IN A RESEARCH PROJECT
FINDINGS:
– subjects experienced wild hallucinations and extreme anxiety
– attained a lower cognitive performance
– had damaged perceptual-motor skills
– exercising would solve these problems
Ethical Issues
No, our group would not allow this research to go on further
Reasons for this
:
Zubek should have informed them on the extensive testing and the tramatic experince they will have after this.
Not just saying he needs volunteers for his testing.
Ethic’s Board ConclusionRESEARCHERS SHOULD DISCLOSE ALL SOURCES OF FINANCIAL SUPPORT
Zubek disclosed on all his financial support to the public, however it was discovered later on that the CIA greatly supported Zubek in his experiments. They were interested in his findings to develop better torture techniques. Though they never learned whether or not they financially supported his research.
While Zubek did get consent from his volunteers he never actually informed the subjects about what the research was about, what experiments were involved, but their were told they could quite at any time during the experiment
What Drove the Research?
-Interrogation methods at detention centres
-Astronauts & isolation conditions in space
-CIA’s methodology of interrogation
“Results can be used for wrong purposes and over this, we as scientists have little or no control.”
‘The Guineapigs’ by John McGuffin (1974, 1981)
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The Guineapigs
by John McGuffin (1974, 1981)
Originally published in London by Penguin Books, 1974. Paperback, 192 pp. Out of Print.
2nd edition Minuteman Press, San Francisco, 1981. Paperback, 75 pp. Out of Print.
The first edition by Penguin sold 20,000 copies and was banned after one week by the British government and Reginald Maudling. The 2nd edition in 1981 updated the fate of the victims and named the torturers, but omitted two chapters from the original edition.
A complete compilation of both editions is now here available for the first time. Feel free to download these pages, but if you decide to do so we would like to ask you to make a donation to Irish Resistance Books, in order that IRB can publish further works. (Note: We are not in receipt of any grants or Art Council funding.)
You may not edit, adapt, or redistribute changed versions of this for other than your personal use without the express written permission. Redistribution for commercial purposes is not permitted.
From the back cover (2nd edition):
The Guineapigs in the title were fourteen Irish political prisoners on whom the British Army experimented with sensory deprivation torture in 1971. These ‘techniques’ are now outlawed, following Britain’s conviction at the International Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, but have been exported and used by Britain’s allies throughout the world. This book first appeared in 1974, published by Penguin Books in London. It sold out on its first print run and was then abruptly taken off the market following pressure from the British Government.
In Ireland in 1971 there was deliberate and careful use of modern torture techniques, not merely to get information but to perfect the system of Sensory Deprivation for use against civilians. The author, an ex-internee himself spent two years researching the book following his release from Crumlin Road jail where he had been held without charge or trial. In this new edition he is at last able to name the torturers and those responsible for this sordid episode in British Imperial history. No member of the British Army or the Royal Ulster Constabulary has ever been convicted of torture or brutality to prisoners, although the Government has been forced to pay out over $5 million in compensation to torture victims.
This re-issue of ‘The Guineapigs’ is dedicated to the blanket men in Long Kesh concentration camp and the women political prisoners in Armagh jail. ‘Na reabhloidi Abu.’
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without the active help and advice of many people. Firstly I must thank the ‘guineapigs’ themselves, and in particular Jim Auld, Pat Shivers and Paddy Joe Mc Clean. A large debt is also owed to the Association for Legal Justice, Amnesty International (and in particular Richard Reoch) and the British Society for Social Responsibility in the Sciences. For help on the medical and psychological aspects of SD I am particularly indebted to Dr. Tim Shallice of the National Hospital and Dr. Pearse O’Malley of Belfast.
As for the rest, many have preferred that they remain anonymous, but special thanks must go to Judy Smith, Frank Doherty, Johnathan Rosenhead, Kevin Boyle, Hurst Hannum, Father Denis Faul, Margaret Gatt, Ian Franklin, Eamonn Kerr, Billy Close, Joe Quigley, Noelle, Hugh, Judith and, of course, R. W. Grimshaw. I am grateful to Gil Boehringer for permission to use part of his work for Appendix I.
Finally, I must thank Marie for her typing and Fra for putting up with it all.
JOHN McGUFFIN
Belfast, February 1974
Preface
Torture and brutality – or ‘ill-treatment’ as Sir Edmund Compton would prefer to call it – are as old as war itself. Mankind has expended centuries of research in trying to devise newer and more bestial ways of extracting information from reluctant witnesses or causing lingering and painful deaths.
The purpose of this book, however, is not to deal with torture in general. It is specific. It deals with the treatment meted out to fourteen Irishmen by the British ‘security forces’ in the period from August to October 1971. It is not written to show that this treatment was more barbaric than that practised by the British Army upon hundreds of other Irish internees/ detainees/ political prisoners since 1969 nor upon the victims of the ten colonial actions undertaken by the British since the Second World War. Instead it is an attempt to show how these men were selected as unwilling and unwitting subjects upon whom Army psychiatrists, psychologists and ‘counter-terrorist strategists’ could experiment in that particular field known as ‘SD’ – Sensory Deprivation. That the experiment was a dismal failure, both from a military and a propaganda point of view, mattered little to the men in the War Office. Worse still, the fact that several of the men used were literally driven out of their minds and still today, over two years later, suffer from severe mental traumas which they will carry with them to the grave has evoked not a shred of remorse, admission of guilt, or apology, let alone an attempt at recompense – though how do you give a man back his mental health? – from the ‘mother of parliaments’. This book is an attempt to tell these men’s story, the story of the ‘guineapigs’.
Table of Contents
| Chapter 1: | ‘Ill-Treatment’ – A Brief History |
| Chapter 2: | What is Sensory Deprivation? |
| Chapter 3: | The Swoop – The First Forty-eight Hours |
| Chapter 4: | The Experiment |
| Chapter 5: | The Compton Report |
| Chapter 6: | Replay |
| Chapter 7: | Parker: Cover-up MK2 |
| Chapter 8: | The After-effects |
| Chapter 9: | Down on the Killing Floor |
| Chapter 10: | Postscript – Torture in the World Today |
| Tailpiece | |
| Afterword | |
| Appendix I: | Memorandum of Modest Proposals for Preventing the Spread of Torture and Ill-treatment in Northern Ireland |
| Appendix II: | Proposed Draft for a UN Resolution on a Convention on Torture and the Treatment of Prisoners |
What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind
In the 1950s, university researchers put volunteers in tiny rooms and deprived them of sensory input. The results were shocking.
—By Michael Mechanic
The experiences of prisoners held in solitary confinement—the despair, the disorientation, the hallucinations—are well documented, but laboratory observations of isolated human subjects and the profound effects of extreme confinement are exceedingly rare, in part because such experiments might have trouble getting past institutional review boards these days. But that wasn’t the case during the ’50s, when Donald O. Hebb, a professor of psychology at Montreal’s McGill University, set out to study how sensory isolation affects human cognition.
Hebb had previously examined the effects of visual deprivation in rats as a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. In 1951, he secured a $10,000 grant from the Canadian Defence Research Board to expand his research to human subjects. The results were dramatic. Depriving a man of sensory input, he soon discovered, will break him in a matter of days.
Hebb’s experiments went well beyond the level of isolation prisoners typically experience in solitary. He offered male graduate students $20 a day—excellent pay for the time—to stay in small chambers containing little more than a bed. “It would be a bit more than a meter wide and a couple of meters long, probably enough for a table or something,” recalls Peter Milner, one of Hebb’s former graduate students who is now an emeritus psychology professor at McGill.
At the time, Milner was working on another project for Hebb, but he saw the sensory deprivation rooms firsthand. “They were given food by human beings, and also when they needed to use the washrooms and things they would be escorted there by other human beings. So they weren’t completely alone,” Milner says. He recalls watching as the subjects were led down the hall to the bathroom clad in frosted-over goggles. “They wore goggles and earphones and [there was] some sort of noise, just white noise, from a loudspeaker,” he says.
Prone in their isolation rooms, the volunteers also wore gloves and cardboard tubes over their arms to limit their sense of touch. A U-shaped pillow covered their ears and the hum of an air conditioner further obscured outside noise. “According to his theory, the brain would deteriorate if it didn’t have a continuous stream of sensory input,” Milner told me. “It was really just a test of this theory, which in any case didn’t really hold together much, although these sensory deprivation experiments tended to support it.”
Hebb had reportedly hoped to observe his subjects for six weeks. As it turned out, the majority lasted no more than a few days in isolation—and none more than a week. “Most of the subjects had planned to think about their work: Some intended to review their studies, some to plan term papers, and one thought he would organize a lecture he had to deliver,” wrote Woodburn Heron, one of Hebb’s collaborators, in “The Pathology of Boredom,” a 1957 Scientific American article describing the experiments. “Nearly all of them reported that the most striking thing about the experience was that they were unable to think clearly about anything for any length of time and that their thought processes seemed to be affected in other ways.”
A series of cognitive tests showed that the volunteers’ mental faculties were, in fact, temporarily impaired. While in isolation, for instance, the subjects were played tapes arguing that supernatural phenomena, including ghosts and poltergeists, were real; when interviewed later, they proved amenable to such beliefs. They performed poorly on grade-school tasks involving simple arithmetic, word associations, and pattern recognition. They also experienced extreme restlessness, childish emotional responses, and vivid hallucinations. “The subjects had little control over the content” of their visions, Heron wrote. “One man could see nothing but dogs, another nothing but eyeglasses of various types, and so on.”
Nor were their hallucinations merely visual: One volunteer repeatedly heard a music box playing; another heard a full choir accompanying his vision of the sun rising over a church. “One had a feeling of being hit in the arm by pellets fired from a miniature rocket ship he saw; another reaching out to touch a doorknob in his vision felt an electric shock,” Heron wrote.
Inspired by Hebb’s work, D. Ewen Cameron, head of McGill’s psychiatry department during the 1950s, began employing sensory deprivation as part of a technique called “psychic driving,” his unsuccessful attempt to “reprogram” the minds of mentally ill patients, some of whom later sued Cameron, according to Milner. In 1956, Cameron wrote in the American Journal of Psychiatry that he would hypnotize his schizophrenic patients “under stimulant drugs and after prolonged psychological isolation.”
Cameron’s experiments were torture, Milner told me, because unlike Hebb’s volunteers, Cameron’s subjects were entirely under his control. “They were sick people,” he says. “They came to him because they had a mental illness, and his job was to cure them. If they had been day patients they would have not bothered to come back. But because they were hospitalized there wasn’t much the patient could do. Hebb thought it was not only stupid, but rather wicked. And he was right.”
Hebb’s work wasn’t driven entirely by academic curiosity. There was a concern during the 1950s that the Soviets were using sensory deprivation to brainwash Canadian POWs in Korea, and the McGill researchers viewed their own work—some of which the Canadian government forbid Hebb from publishing—as an attempt to understand sensory deprivation so that some sort of defense might be devised against it. Yet this type of knowledge was famously put to use as part of the Bush-era program of “enhanced interrogation” (a.k.a. torture) of US detainees. As The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer has reported, psychologists versed in techniques of “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape”—a military program wherein soldiers were exposed to extreme conditions, including isolation, that they might encounter as POWs—were enlisted to advise interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. According to Mayer’s sources, they essentially “tried to reverse-engineer” SERE techniques to extract information from enemy combatants.
In any case, there’s a big difference between voluntary isolation, however extreme, and the situation in which thousands of American prisoners find themselves today—stuck in tiny cells for an indefinite length of time with minimal human contact and no clear process by which they might earn their way out. “The really scary thing,” noted Sara Shourd, one of three Americans taken captive by Iranian forces in 2009, in a recent interview with Mother Jones‘ James Ridgeway, “is that the US government and many governments were very critical of Iran for holding me in solitary for 13 and a half months, but when I got out I was shocked to find that the US had more people in solitary confinement than any other country—and in this country it is used routinely as an administrative practice, not as a very last resort.”
Read about the Fox Reality show where contestants were held in isolation—for a chance at $50,000.
A previous version of this article was published in 2008.
http://www.motherjones.com/print/200726