[R-G] "A history of hypocrisy": Canadian complicity links U.S. Cold War torture with cases like Maher Arar’s

[Anthony Fenton]

http://lrc.reviewcanada.ca/index.php?page=a-history-of-hypocrisy

Literary Review of Canada
Volume 16, Number 4
May 2008
Pages 5-8
A History of Hypocrisy

Canadian complicity links U.S. Cold War torture with cases like Maher  
Arar’s.

AN ESSAY
by Regan Boychuk

I.
To judge by the statements of government officials, Canada is—as it  
should be—staunchly opposed to torture. Just over two decades ago,  
Canada became one of the first countries to ratify the United Nations  
Convention against Torture, adopting an absolute ban on “any act by  
which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is  
intentionally inflicted on a person.” In 2005, foreign affairs  
minister Pierre Pettigrew restated our support: “The use of torture  
is unacceptable and must not go unchallenged. Canada is fully  
committed to the elimination of torture, to investigating suspected  
cases of torture, and to supporting torture victims.” Canada recently  
also co-sponsored a resolution at the UN calling on Iran to address  
its continued use of torture, and our current minister of foreign  
affairs publicly demanded that Syria take firm measures to stop its  
use of torture, investigate allegations, prosecute perpetrators and  
provide remedies for torture victims.

Officials’ noble words notwithstanding, there is much that suggests a  
darker reality shadowing the image of Canadian opposition to torture.  
In April 2006, for example, the UN Human Rights Committee stated it  
was “concerned by allegations that Canada may have cooperated with  
agencies known to resort to torture with the aim of extracting  
information from individuals detained in foreign countries.” The  
committee mentioned Maher Arar in particular, but was also concerned  
about similar cases involving other Canadians tortured abroad. Indeed,  
at the later Iacobucci inquiry into three such cases, Justice  
Department lawyer Michael Peirce, speaking on behalf of the Canadian  
Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP and the Department of Foreign  
Affairs, argued that signing the UN Convention against Torture does  
not necessarily prevent Canada from sharing intelligence with  
countries employing torture.

In the wake of 9/11, the Supreme Court of Canada likewise unanimously  
decided that there were instances when Canada could deport people to  
face torture. This is despite perfectly clear language in the  
Convention against Torture that rules out sending anyone to another  
state “where there are substantial grounds for believing that he  
would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” As a result, the  
UN Human Rights Committee found Canada in violation of the prohibition  
of torture enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and  
Political Rights. As Human Rights Watch’s Jennifer Egsgard wrote to  
The Globe and Mail, that Supreme Court ruling, “humiliatingly, makes  
Canada the only Western nation whose laws have been interpreted to  
allow them to return an individual to torture.”

More recently, details of Canadian complicity in Afghan abuse have  
been trickling out across the front pages of the Globe. After  
repeatedly dismissing credible allegations of torture, the Harper  
government was finally forced to concede that torture existed in  
Afghan prisons when Canadian diplomats were confronted with a man  
covered in fresh welts who pointed out the hidden electrical cable and  
rubber hose secret police had used to beat him. He had been captured  
by Canadian forces, who routinely hand detainees over to Afghan  
authorities. A couple of weeks later, it was revealed that the  
Canadian government knew of—but tried for months to keep secret— 
allegations that the governor of Kandahar was personally involved in  
the torture of at least one detainee. Despite pledging to cooperate,  
the federal government has likewise refused to release uncensored  
documents to the Military Police Complaints Commission’s  
investigation of Afghan detainee transfers. And when the MPCC decided  
to hold a public interest hearing to gain access, the Tories moved to  
quash the inquiry.

All of this has unfolded under the banner of America’s so-called war  
on terror. “Since 9/11,” the University of Ottawa’s Peter Jones  
reminded us in the Ottawa Citizen last October, “the Bush  
administration has systematically redefined torture to provide the CIA  
and other U.S. agencies with legal exemptions from both U.S. laws and  
international conventions to which the U.S. is party.” But  
criticizing Yankee torture—or that of Iran or Syria for that matter— 
is cheap and easy for Canucks. It is one thing to excoriate others for  
their crimes, quite another to look at our own. As Canadians, our  
focus should be on the role our own government has played in all this.  
And a look at the history of U.S. torture suggests that the injustices  
revealed in cases like Maher Arar’s are not exactly anomalies in what  
is in fact a long record of Canadian collusion, from Cold War  
assistance in the development and spread of modern torture techniques  
to complicity in worldwide abuses today.
II.

Between 1950 and 1962, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency led a  
massive project to improve psychological warfare in order to influence  
whole societies and better interrogate individuals. As much as US$1  
billion a year was spent on research and operations, in what historian  
Alfred McCoy describes as “a veritable Manhattan Project of the  
mind.”¹ These efforts led to the CIA’s very own brand of  
psychological, “no touch” torture—an innovation that took shape  
around Canadian ideas.

Throughout the CIA’s development of psychological torture, the U.S.  
had an unwritten understanding regarding such classified research with  
its close ally and neighbour, Canada. As the chair of Canada’s  
Defence Research Board at the time described it: “If they wanted  
classified research they came to the board and if we thought it was  
suitable we paid for it and then passed it along to the U.S.” Some of  
the research Canadian officials evidently thought of as suitable  
included that of two McGill University professors that would  
ultimately leave a trail of victims—not just in Montreal, but around  
the globe.

In March 1951, the CIA initiated a top-secret research program into  
“all aspects of special interrogation.” Within months, defence and  
intelligence officials from the U.S., Britain and Canada met secretly  
at Montreal’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Ostensibly, these western officials  
were concerned with reports that communists may have developed new  
methods of mind control resulting in the disturbing public confessions  
made behind the Iron Curtain and in prisoner-of-war camps during the  
Korean War. But Britain had already researched the topic and all  
attending agreed there was “no conclusive evidence” that the  
communists had made any giant leaps in mind control; the meeting  
participants therefore turned their attention to the offensive  
possibilities of new research into the human mind, rather than  
defensive concerns.

What eventually emerged as the conceptual core of the CIA’s  
particular brand of torture was the devastating impact of sensory  
deprivation, first proposed as an avenue of research at the Ritz- 
Carlton meeting by Donald Hebb, chair of McGill’s psychology  
department. Hebb subsequently received a secret Canadian defence grant  
of CA$10,000 per year to study “whether slight changes in attitude  
might be effected” by short periods of isolation intensified by light- 
diffusing goggles, earphones and cardboard tubes to reduce tactile  
perception. In stark contrast to Hebb’s modest predictions, the  
impact turned out to be overwhelming—the study’s participants all  
reported serious confusion and hallucinations, with Hebb concluding  
that after two to three days of sensory deprivation, “the subject’s  
very identity began to disintegrate.” (Four of the first 22  
volunteers spontaneously said that being in Hebb’s sensory  
deprivation chamber “was a form of torture.”)

Amid hundreds of generously funded projects, the CIA was quick to  
recognize Hebb’s research as the most promising: with just a few  
simple tools (goggles, gloves and a pillow), many subjects could be  
reduced to a state resembling acute psychosis within 48 hours, making  
them more vulnerable to interrogators.
Less ethical researchers would refine Hebb’s findings, testing and  
escalating sensory deprivation’s impact on unwitting victims more  
like those to be targeted in the CIA’s field of operations. One such  
ethically challenged researcher was Hebb’s colleague at McGill, Ewen  
Cameron.

In 1943, the Scottish-born Cameron was appointed professor of  
psychiatry at McGill and director of the newly created Allan Memorial  
Institute. Funded lavishly throughout the 1950s by the Canadian  
Department of National Health and Welfare and the Defence Research  
Board, Cameron started experimenting with brainwashing in 1953, using  
techniques he described as “an adaptation of Hebb’s psychological  
isolation” that incorporated sedation, hypnosis and LSD.

As documented by writers, including Harvey M. Weinstein, the 1956  
publication of Cameron’s results brought him to the attention of the  
CIA. Having found a scientist willing to test the effects of  
prolonged, involuntary sensory deprivation, the CIA then funnelled  
about US$62,000 to Cameron between 1957 and 1963 for further  
brainwashing research on unwitting Allan Memorial patients.
(The stories of lives destroyed by Cameron’s experiments are legion.  
Among the more poignant for Canadians concerned with their own  
government’s crimes is that of 26-year-old Linda MacDonald. She was  
admitted to the Allan Memorial Institute for depression in 1963, after  
the CIA—but not the Canadian government—had grown tired of funding  
Cameron’s work. MacDonald’s “therapy” lasted six months and  
included an 86-day drug-induced sleep; at the end, she was totally  
amnesiac and had to be toilet trained.)

III.
In 1963, the CIA formally distilled its behavioural findings into the  
Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook. Hebb and Cameron’s  
Montreal research provided what Anne Collins, author of In the Sleep  
Room, calls the “Canadian contribution” to CIA interrogation,  
inspiring psychological torture techniques that were not only brutally  
effective but also left no telltale physical marks. Kubark laid out a  
novel two-phase combination of Hebb and Cameron’s sensory deprivation  
with stress positions (such as prolonged squatting) that induce  
suffering that is “self-inflicted” and therefore more  
psychologically devastating. “For the next forty years,” writes  
Alfred McCoy, “the Kubark manual would define the agency’s  
interrogation methods and training programs throughout the Third  
World.” One of the first stops on Kubark’s world tour was Vietnam.

According to historian Darius Rejali in Torture and Democracy, “by  
1963, there was no doubt that the South Vietnamese government tortured  
prisoners.” Beginning in the mid 1960s, the U.S. ran its infamous  
Phoenix “counterterror” program together with Saigon authorities in  
a combined effort to eliminate the Vietcong and their supporters from  
South Vietnam. Phoenix ultimately left tens of thousands tortured and  
killed, the overwhelming majority of them innocent.

For its part, Canada was a member of the International Commission of  
Control and Supervision responsible for supervising the implementation  
(and, in practice, violation) of Vietnam’s peace accords when the  
Phoenix program was winding down in 1973. Political scientist Victor  
Levant has documented that, while our government feigned objectivity  
and impartiality on Vietnam, “the record of Canadian actions reveals  
a continuing pattern of partisan behaviour as well as a cynical  
disregard for the responsibilities of international peacekeeping.  
Ottawa needed no prompting from Washington on this score.” This is  
most certainly the case with the Canadian contingent of the  
commission’s refusal to shed unfavourable light on its neighbour to  
the south by investigating widespread torture among SouthVietnam’s  
hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. The Canadian government  
defended this stance, in part, by arguing that “these prisoners’  
status is comparable to that of the Japanese Canadians who were  
interned during WWII and therefore exclusively within South Vietnam’s  
internal jurisdiction.”² As John Holmes, an influential Canadian  
diplomat of the period, once boasted, having principles—but finding  
ways around them—was a “Canadian idea.”

“In retrospect,” McCoy writes, “Phoenix proved a seminal  
experience for the U.S. intelligence community, combining both  
physical and psychological techniques in an extreme method that would  
serve as a model for later counterinsurgency training in South and  
Central America.” From the mid 1960s to the mid ’80s, the U.S. army  
exported this model to Latin America through training programs and  
materials for allied governments, resulting in counterguerilla  
operations from Columbia to Guatemala that bore “an eerie but  
explicable resemblance to South Vietnam.”

Throughout, Hebb and Cameron’s contributions remained evident. In an  
updated version of their Kubark manual, the CIA’s Honduras Human  
Resource Exploitation Manual (1983) makes reference to the “powerful  
stress” caused by sensory deprivation: “the more complete the  
deprivation, the more rapidly and deeply the subject is affected. The  
stress and anxiety become unbearable for most subjects.” During this  
period, both the Trudeau and Mulroney governments avoided direct  
criticism of U.S. policy in Latin America that supported regimes that  
executed hundreds of thousands and tortured tens of thousands more.

In 1980, Canada supported a UN resolution condemning abuses in El  
Salvador, but soon acquiesced to continuing U.S. military aid and  
worked repeatedly to moderate direct denunciations of the Salvadoran  
government drafted by countries such as France and Mexico. When it  
came to ongoing state terror in Guatemala in 1984, church observers  
and a former senior human rights advisor to the Canadian government  
accused Canada of accommodating U.S. objections to the wording of a  
resolution concerning its Guatemalan allies in the UN Commission on  
Human Rights. Allan MacEachern, the minister of foreign affairs at the  
time, said that because U.S.-Canada relations were the first priority  
of Canadian foreign policy, there had to be limits to Canadian  
criticism of U.S. policy.³

IV.
As Alfred McCoy compellingly argues, Canadian research continues to  
echo to this day in Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and locations  
unknown. He points out that, for example, those iconic Abu Ghraib  
photos reflect familiar Kubark methods, rather than just the sadistic  
improvisation of a few “creeps”: the hood imposes sensory  
deprivation, while standing for an extended period with outstretched  
arms administers so-called self-inflicted pain.

Likewise, the issue of “disappeared persons” closes the loop  
between America’s propagation of torture in Latin America in the  
1970s and ’80s and today’s ongoing “war on terror.” People are  
“disappeared” when authorities hold them secretly, often to  
facilitate their torture and/or execution. The UN General Assembly  
first noted it as an urgent problem in 1978 and, since 1980, more than  
51,000 people have been disappeared by governments in more than 90  
countries, many of them in Latin America. At least 40,000 cases remain  
unsolved today.

In this alleged war on terror, America resorts not only to widespread  
torture but also to “extra-ordinary rendition,” the practice of  
disappearing people to other countries without due judicial process.  
Essentially, it is state kidnapping and is used to deliver captives to  
jurisdictions such as Syria and Egypt where they face torture by proxy  
or death. Although the scales of abuse are clearly different, the  
London director of Human Rights Watch recalled disappearances under  
regimes such as Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia before observing  
that “the U.S. administration [has] made little secret that it  
apparently feels entitled to make people vanish.” Details remain  
secret. As journalist Stephen Grey emphasized in an article for  
Salon.com, “we know the fate of just a small fraction of the  
thousands of prisoners captured by U.S. forces around the world since  
9/11.”

Such abuses lent new momentum to the issue of “forced  
disappearances” at the UN more than 20 years after it first emerged  
on the world agenda. Here again, Canada has played a questionable  
role. In the 1980s, Canada was instrumental in creating and supporting  
the UN Working Group on Involuntary Disappearances, and in 2007 the  
Canadian delegate to the UN Human Rights Council reaffirmed that those  
responsible for enforced disappearances should not go unpunished.  
Nonetheless, as Human Rights Watch reported in 2006, Canada also  
worked aggressively to dilute key provisions of an international  
treaty on forced disappearances:

“To their disgrace, the United States and Russia strongly opposed the  
[treaty] effort, not least because each had begun using forced  
disappearances itself … Canada contributed to this shameful  
opposition, not because it is known to forcibly “disappear” people,  
but apparently because Prime Minister Martin, eager to improve  
relations with the United States that had been strained under his  
predecessor, decided to run interference for one of his neighbor’s  
unsavory practices.”⁴

Despite the efforts of the U.S. and Canada, the text of the  
International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from  
Enforced Disappearance—modelled after the UN Convention against  
Torture—was approved by the General Assembly in December 2006.  
Seventy-two countries have since signed it, neither the U.S. nor  
Canada among them.

Documents obtained by Canadian Press help shed some light on the  
Canadian government’s lack of support. In late November 2005, a  
secret Canadian Border Services Agency briefing reported that 20 CIA  
aircraft had made 74 flights through Canada since 9/11, flights quite  
possibly carrying kidnap victims through Canadian airports and  
airspace into the hands of torturers. A later government review of  
those flights uncovered no “illegal activities,” but there is no  
indication that this secretive assessment process took Canada’s human  
rights standards—or anything beyond basic flight regulations—into  
consideration. Moreover, the Canadian government may not actually deem  
extraordinary rendition illegal; a 2005 Department of Justice opinion  
on the issue remains secret and, although a Foreign Affairs briefing  
note from the same year acknowledges the practice is “highly  
controversial,” department spokesman Rodney Moore stated in 2006 that  
“whether any particular rendition is lawful would depend on the facts  
of each individual case.”

V.
In the final pages of A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy quotes the  
inspiring words of an Israeli judge from a 1999 ruling against the  
abuse of Palestinian prisoners, reminding us that “not all means are  
acceptable” for a democracy “and not all practices employed by its  
enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with  
one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand.”  
But these words are not quite as meaningful as they first appear: by  
2003, the Public Committee against Torture in Israel concluded that  
torture of Palestinian prisoners was again “methodical and routine.”

Not that you will find the Canadian government complaining about such  
abuse; far from it. When the Department of Foreign Affairs and  
International Trade recently disclosed training material that listed  
the U.S. and Israel among countries where prisoners are at risk of  
torture, all the U.S. and Israel had to do was say “Boo!” and  
Canadian officials scrambled to remove them from the list, in spite of  
consensus among human rights groups that they both torture.

So, from the early days of the Cold War, the Canadian government  
coordinated and funded the CIA’s research into psychological torture.  
When they exported the resulting techniques to Vietnam and Latin  
America, we ran interference. And with today’s war on terror, our  
complicity with U.S. torture has only grown. Apparently the “Canadian  
idea” about finding ways around one’s principles knows few bounds.

Notes
1 My discussion of the history of American torture throughout this  
essay owes a great deal to Alfred McCoy’s penetrating and important A  
Question of Torture (New York: Metropolitan, 2006) and his “Science  
in Dachau’s Shadow,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences,  
Fall 2007.
2 Victor Levant, “The Political Economy of Canadian Foreign Policy in  
Vietnam,” PhD thesis, McGill University, 1981, pages 769, 761–66.
3 Liisa North and CAPA, eds., Between War and Peace in Central  
America: Choices for Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1990), pages  
198, 205–06; Robert O. Matthews and Cranford Pratt, eds., Human  
Rights in Canadian Foreign Policy (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s  
University, 1988), pages 85, 91, 97, 232, 236, 238.
4 Human Rights Watch, World Report 2006, pages 2, 17.
The LRC welcomes letters. We reserve the right to publish such letters  
and edit them for length, clarity and accuracy. E-mail  
editor[at]lrcreview[dot]com.
Regan Boychuk lives in Calgary, where he researches Canadian foreign  
policy.