Dialectics of pain

The Soviet army chased the Nazis into Poland in 1945—and stayed there when World War II ended. The Polish resistance movement switched from fighting Nazis to battling communists. They were heroes to everyday Poles. Moscow sent secret police to help deal with them.

A decade of torture, mock trials and public confessions followed. Polish historian Marek Jan Chodakiewicz documented that dark period in The Dialectics of Pain.

The Soviets in Poland captured thousands of insurgents. Often, they didn’t bother charging them with a crime.

“Instead, the secret policemen simply forced them to reveal the infrastructure of their organization, to divulge the whereabouts of their confederates and to confess to general charges like ‘killing Jews’ or ‘killing communists,’” Chodakiewicz wrote.

The confessions—even though they weren’t true—soured the public on the resistance.

“The objective of the … endeavor,” Chodakiewicz explained, “was to break the spirit of the individual under interrogation and then to destroy his image in the eyes of the public.”

Soviet methods of extraction were brutal. Polish resistance fighter Kazimierz Moczarski went into great detail about the “49 types of torture and battery” his tormentors used.

They beat him all over his body, ripped hair from his beard and crotch and forced him to sit naked on a bolt. The secret police also subjected Moczarski to several punishments the CIA employed decades later.

The Stalinists stripped Moczarski naked and left him in solitary confinement for days. They deprived him of sleep for more than a week, forcing him to stand up in his cell and slapping him awake when he dozed. He recalled powerful and terrifying hallucinations.

They denied Moczarski medical care and threatened his family with harm. They claimed his wife was a whore.

Sound familiar? According to the Senate report, the CIA kept its captives awake for upwards of 180 hours. The prisoners hallucinated. The spooks forced captives to stand for hours on broken limbs.

Abu Zubaydah—one of the CIA’s first prisoners—got shot during his capture. The Americans let the wound fester.

They threatened to rape the mother of another captive. One interrogator played Russian roulette with a detainee. That’s a deadly game where two people take turns aiming a loaded pistol at their own heads. The winner gets to live.

The CIA did all this—it said—to gain intelligence. It claimed these prisoners knew things about ongoing terror plots.

In truth, the Agency extracted next to no actual intelligence. Seven of the 39 victims gave no information at all. The other 32 made up stories about terrorist plots in order to end their torment.

The KGB would have spun that information into propaganda. If the CIA did the same, it isn’t owning up to it.

The Senate report reveals that the CIA figured out early on that torture wasn’t resulting in useful intel. After all, the Agency derived its torture tactics on reports from American airmen who had been captured in North Vietnam. The Vietnamese had designed these techniques to extract false confessions for propaganda purposes.

The North Vietnamese—learning from their Soviet backers—understood torture. The CIA did not. They wanted to change the old Soviet model. They wanted intelligence, not confessions.

The CIA “need[ed] a different working model for interrogating terrorists,” an Agency torturer explains in the Senate report. “Where confessions are not the ultimate goal.”