May 2006
Petting My Cat; Preparing for Prison
By Robin Lloyd
Robin Lloyd was among those arrested during nonviolent protests against the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Lloyd wrote this note to friends shortly after she was ordered to “self-report’” to prison on April 11.
Prison, I’m imagining, is the exact opposite of my cat. It is cold; she is warm. Prison is made up of metal with hard edges; my cat is composed of curves and silky hair. Then there is her purr.
I ask Google “Why do cats purr?” and get this answer: “Cats purr during both inhalation and exhalation with a consistent pattern and frequency between 25 and 150 hertz. Various investigators have shown that sound frequencies in this range can improve bone density and promote healing.”
There is no more safe or comfortable feeling than resting with my cat purring in the nook of my arm. I think I’ll make a CD of her sound track to play while I’m trying to sleep in prison. Better yet, I’ll give it to the warden to play over the loud speaker to the whole cellblock. I’m sure this would lower stress.
My cat is sitting on my lap as I read A Question of Torture by Alfred McCoy.
Recently, I’ve been on a speaking tour, talking about the history of the School of the Americas (SOA) — the facility in Columbus, Georgia where “torture manuals” were used as part of the curriculum in 1996, and whose continued existence lead me and 31 others to commit civil disobedience and face incarceration. We are now “prisoners of conscience,” but prisoners, just the same.
Reading about torture as a force underpinning American foreign policy — from the Abu Ghraib photos to the headlines about abuses at the US concentration camp at the Guantanamo base in Cuba — has flung open the doors to the dungeon for the American public. We look in and see the vast black hole of our hypocrisy and cruelty.
I hold my cat as I make the descent.
What is torture? The Abu Grhaib photos, despite the humiliation and grotesqueness they portray, don’t correspond to our archetypal images of torture — bodies bloodied and bruised, broken on a rack, with fingernails wrenched out. McCoy’s book, subtitled CIA Interrogation: From the Cold War to the War on Terror, explains the new “no-touch torture” — the result of decades-long research by the CIA into a range of interrogation techniques based on sensory deprivation and psychological torture.
McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program. They were then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of “police-training programs.”
In The Nation magazine, journalist Naomi Klein corroborates McCoy’s analysis by asserting that the School of the Americas is where the roots of the current torture scandals can be found — and where this new form of torture was refined.
“According to declassified training manuals,” she writes, “SOA students — military and police officers from across the hemisphere — were instructed in many of the same “coercive interrogation” techniques that have since migrated to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib: Early morning capture to maximize shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food ‘manipulation,’ humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions — and worse.”
Because these mistreatments don’t leave scars or bruises, some US mainstream media have been calling them frat house pranks, or ‘”Torture-Lite.” But these techniques can be just as traumatic to their victims as a physical beating.
Take the technique of audio-overstimulation. In many prisons in America’ global gulag, rock music such as Metalica’s “Enter Sandman” have been played at mind-numbing volume — sometimes for stretches of up to 14 hours — creating a “disco inferno,” reports Moustafa Bayoumi, who also contributed an article to The Nation ’s Torture Issue (December 26, 2005).
According to Bayoumi, Torture-Lite “can cause extreme psychological trauma. It’s designed to deprive the victim of sleep and... has been shown in different situations to be psychologically unbearable.”
Bayoumi quotes another journalist who searched for and found Haj Ali, the “man in the hood’” from the macabre Abu Ghraib photos. Haj Ali told of being hooded, stripped, handcuffed to his cell and bombarded with a looped sample of David Gray’s “Babylon.” It was so loud, he said, “I thought my head would burst.”
The journalist then cued up “Babylon” on his iPod and played it for Haj Ali to confirm the song. Ali ripped the earphones off his head and started crying. “He didn’t just well up with tears,” the journalist reported. “He broke down sobbing.”
Why is the Bush administration doing this? And how can Bush stonewall the rising clamor and continue to grant exemption from punishment and accountability to his highest lieutenants, the architects of his torture empire? This widespread, institutionalized use of torture produces broken and angry victims. And perpetuators — our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters — face their own kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome when they return home.
As more Americans learn about the terrible human rights violations emanating from Guantanamo and hidden prison cells around the world, we are bound, in increasing numbers, to turn on this administration in dismay and horror.
I will be keeping up with things via a battery-operated radio that we are allowed to buy at the prison commissary. I hope, when I get out in July, to join a full-voiced movement of protest against these crimes condoned at the highest levels of our government.
My cat will be taken care of by a housesitter. I hope she’ll be around to welcome me back. She’s the cat-equivalent of 90 years old!
Robin Lloyd is a co-founder of the Peace and Justice Coalition and she serves on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Lloyd, who is serving a three-month prison sentence, may be reached at: Robin Lloyd #92572-020, FCI Danbury, Federal Correctional Institution, Route 37, Danbury, CT 06811. This essay originally appeared in Peace and Justice News.
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