Sunday, September 10, 2006
Torture Lite?
There is a lot being said about U.S. torture and the various techniques they are using. There is the out and out stuff that I saw videos of Saddams work, but there is this more underhanded and alleged acceptable stuff. It's like comparing physical abuuse to verbal abuse. There was a man named John Zubec whose work is used prominently today. When I first started hearing about the style of torture being acceptable for the U.S. to get away with committing, I thought of John Zubec. When given the book "The Guineapigs" by my friend Maire, a book about torture in Northern Ireland by the Brits, I checked the index, and sure enough, Zubec is mentioned. So here is a tiny piece of torture history our kids aren't going to be learning about in the public schools.
"When I was a graduate student at University of Manitoba I used to have lunch with a grad student from Psych. The Psych-Zoo building had been built with funds from a grant from the Canadian Defense Research Board and the fifth floor was accessible only by special key and it housed the labs of John Zubec who had been involved in sensory-deprivation and other forms of research related to interrogation techniques (we did not know that at the time). Well this grad student told me that there was a 24-7 armed RCMP guard on the fifth floor, that sutdents were being given credits for participating in experiments dealing not only with sensory deprivation in general, but also succeptibility to pain, pain thresholds, malleability etc as functions of different forms and levels of sensory deprivation. I passed this information on of course, and soon we had student demonstrations against Zubec on a regular basis. We got a hold of the "Compton Report" which is a report by "Lord Compton" on British interrogation techniques in Northern Ireland, that cited, over and over, John Zubec as having provided the theoretical foundations for these torture techniques. Later, that same grad student told me about use of microwaves etc to experiment for possible synapse-jamming capabilities ona mass level. Before all of that was exposed, John Zubec committed suicide in August of 1974. One of his close friends, a guy I had for Cell Biology told me that he considered me as the chief culprit responsible for Zubec's suicide and that I had better not be a Biology major in his department; I told him that I was flattered but could not take "credit" for what was Zubec's choice--or perhaps someone elses."
--Jim Craven
"When I was a graduate student at University of Manitoba I used to have lunch with a grad student from Psych. The Psych-Zoo building had been built with funds from a grant from the Canadian Defense Research Board and the fifth floor was accessible only by special key and it housed the labs of John Zubec who had been involved in sensory-deprivation and other forms of research related to interrogation techniques (we did not know that at the time). Well this grad student told me that there was a 24-7 armed RCMP guard on the fifth floor, that sutdents were being given credits for participating in experiments dealing not only with sensory deprivation in general, but also succeptibility to pain, pain thresholds, malleability etc as functions of different forms and levels of sensory deprivation. I passed this information on of course, and soon we had student demonstrations against Zubec on a regular basis. We got a hold of the "Compton Report" which is a report by "Lord Compton" on British interrogation techniques in Northern Ireland, that cited, over and over, John Zubec as having provided the theoretical foundations for these torture techniques. Later, that same grad student told me about use of microwaves etc to experiment for possible synapse-jamming capabilities ona mass level. Before all of that was exposed, John Zubec committed suicide in August of 1974. One of his close friends, a guy I had for Cell Biology told me that he considered me as the chief culprit responsible for Zubec's suicide and that I had better not be a Biology major in his department; I told him that I was flattered but could not take "credit" for what was Zubec's choice--or perhaps someone elses."
--Jim Craven
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]