Stuff You Should Know - Is there a torture manual?

Episode Date: August 8, 2008

In May of 2007, the US military found drawings believed to be part of an Al-Qaida torture manual. However, the seminal manuals on torture are believed to be the work of the CIA. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about torture manuals. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children and how those five girls changed everything. Listen to unreformed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them because with every purchase, visa prevents, detects, and resolves online fraud. Safe, secure, visa. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer here at HowStuffWorks.com.

With me is my fellow staff writer, Charles W. Bryant. How are you, Chuck? I'm doing well, Josh. You seem not yourself today. And I have a feeling it may have something to do with our subject matter today. The subject matter exact torture, which is not fun. You know, first, torture, before I wrote this article, torture seemed like this kind of amorphous blob that happened to poor saps in, like, other countries. The more I started researching, is there a torture manual? I did actually several articles on torture. It became very real. And it is a really serious somber subject that, and it happens to a lot of people, actually, sadly, still today. It is, but you have to do your research. It's not the kind of thing

that, you know... It's not talked about. No, you don't want it all over the evening news. No, definitely not. It doesn't go well with dinner at all. But it does happen, and the things that do happen are very serious. In the introduction, I mentioned a May 2007 raid on a Baghdad house, and it looked like a normal house from the outside. Inside, they found an al-Qaeda torture manual, and it had these basically how-to drawings of how to remove an eyeball with a drill, how to squeeze a person to death by putting their head in the vise, or using a hot clothes iron on the chest. Right, and they also found the instruments of torture, like a house of horrors, blow torches and drills. All the stuff you needed to carry out

these things. Yeah, it's pretty scary. So it really kind of raised our eyebrows around here when that story broke, and kind of got us looking into this. And from some research, we found out that torture manuals are not all that uncommon in the world, scarily enough, and there's two. Pretty much the two seminal manuals on torture were both written by the American CIA. Do you know about this? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, they did most of this in fairness in the 1950s, right? The research- I think the initial research, yeah. They basically were trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. Right, and I think what they found, and what's kind of roundly accepted in the torture community, is that it's psychological

torture is really what gets people talking. Physical torture doesn't work. Right, because if you're physically torturing someone, they'll say anything just to keep the clamps off of the nipples. Exactly. It produces unreliable data. You come at somebody with a car battery, they're going to tell you whatever that you want to hear. Right. But yeah, the first edition came out in 1963 after at least a decade of the CIA spiking one another's drinks with LSD at parties. They also apparently used to experiment on unsuspecting Johns in San Francisco brothels. Right, the good old days. Yeah, pretty much when the CIA could do absolutely anything it wanted. So they did all these tests. They tested on civilians. They tested on our own military.

They tested on people who were captured and took all this experience and actually wrote it down and you had the Kubark manual. Right, which is a torture manual. It is. That's exactly right. It tells you what to do, what not to do, why you shouldn't do it, why you should do it. And Kubark is the code word for the CIA in Vietnam. Okay, I was going to ask you if that was someone's name. Yeah, it was the code name used for the CIA in Vietnam, and that's pretty much when it first came into use. Well, that was the first edition. The second edition was pretty much the culmination of 20 years of using Kubark and finding that you're tweaking, tweaking the original material. Based on results from what they get from the prisoners. The information, I would assume.

Yeah, I mean, you can test and test and test, but when you use something in the field, you're going to really find out what works and what doesn't. Right. So that culminated in the human resource exploitation manual. That's a fun read. That one was from 1983, 20 years after Kubark came out. And it's very much based along the same lines. Basically, the rule of thumb is, well, you don't turn the screws on thumbs. Physical torture is not good. Psychological works. Which means maybe cranking heavy metal music really loud 24-7, blindfolding. I know waterboarding was an issue not too long ago. And still is, apparently. I know Congress finds waterboarding very distasteful. In researching this, I found

that time and time again, Congress gets wind of some scandal and holds hearings and outlaws torture. And the CIA goes, okay, we're not going to do it except for these 14 guys who are given special. And right now, there's 14 people who are authorized in the CIA to use waterboarding as an interrogation technique. So they'll say that we don't want to torture anymore, but we really want to torture these guys before we outlaw it. Right. And I can see part of me sees the value in using torture. I'm a utilitarian in many ways, where killing one person to save a thousand just makes sense. Right. But at the same time, there's a real gray area. Like when you start, it's tough to stop it. Where do you draw the line? Right. And how do you

separate yourself from the enemy? Exactly. Yeah, you can cast on yourself. And as a democracy, we kind of have to set an example for everybody else, right? I believe that's true. Yeah. Well, we just barely scratched the surface. There's several torture articles. But the one we're talking about is, is there a torture manual? And you can read all of them on howstuffworks.com and hang tight to find out what article makes one of our colleagues skin crawl right after this. Stuff you should know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things to think about. Like say, what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket, or whether to buy the three or six megapixel camera. But thankfully, we don't need to think about online fraud. Because for every

purchase you make, Visa keeps an eye out for fraud with real time fraud monitoring. And by making sure you're not liable for any unauthorized purchases. How's that for peace of mind? Safe, secure, Visa. So Chuck, you want to tell them what article it is and what colleague? Yeah, the colleague is our fellow staff writer, Jonathan Strickland. And the article is how entomophagy works. Yes, the eating of bugs. Mr. Strickland, who is, like Chuck said, one of our fellow writers, is also a fellow podcaster. You can find his podcast, Tech Stuff, also on iTunes. Good luck with that. But anytime that's on the homepage, his skin kind of crawls. He freaks out a little bit, maybe hides under his desk more than usual, right? Yeah, he's a, when,

I mean, you see a spider crawl across the floor and Strickland's up on his desk. Yeah, it's, it's pretty bad. He has a weak constitution, very weak. We have fun with him every April Fool's Day or, you know, every Tuesday, whatever. So if you want to know about the eating of bugs, read How Entomophagy Works on HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? In 1968, five black girls were picked up by police after running away from a reform school in Mount Megs, Alabama. I'm writer and reporter, Josie Deffie Rice. And in a new podcast, I

investigate the abuse that thousands of black children suffered at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children and how those five girls changed everything. Listen to unreformed on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. The cartels, they just killed everybody that was home. Setting an aspiring private investigator on a collision course with corruption and multiple murders. The detective agency would turn out to be a front for a drug pilot. Would claim he did it all for the CIA. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Talk about walking into the devil's den. Listen to Murder in Miami on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts.