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Is there a torture manual? · Stuff You Should Know

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  Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
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  Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
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  Speaker 1: from How Stuff Works dot Com? Stuff you should know
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  Speaker 1: and resolves online fraud safe Secure Visa. Hi, and welcome
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  Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer here
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  Speaker 1: at How Stuff Works dot Com. With me is my
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  Speaker 1: fellow staff writer, Charles W. Bryant. How are you, Chuck.
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  Speaker 1: I'm doing well, Josh. You seem not yourself today and
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  Speaker 1: feeling it may have something to do with our subject
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  Speaker 1: and subject matter exact torture, which is not fun. You know.
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  Speaker 1: At first, torture, before I wrote this article torture, it
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  Speaker 1: seemed like this kind of amorphous blob that happened to
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  Speaker 1: pour SAPs in like other countries. And the more I
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  Speaker 1: started researching UM is their torture manual, I did actually
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  Speaker 1: several articles articles on torture UM. It became very real
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  Speaker 1: and it is a really serious, somber subject that and
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  Speaker 1: it happens to a lot of people actually sadly still
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  Speaker 1: today it is. But you have to do your research.
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  Speaker 1: It's not the kind of thing that you know, it's
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  Speaker 1: not talked about. No, you don't want it all over
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  Speaker 1: the evening news. No, definitely not. It doesn't go well
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  Speaker 1: with dinner at all. Um, but it does happen, and
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  Speaker 1: the things that do happen are are very serious. That
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  Speaker 1: the in the introduction I mentioned May two thousand seven
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  Speaker 1: raid on a Baghdad house and it looked like a
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  Speaker 1: normal house from the outside. Inside they found an Alcada
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  Speaker 1: torture manual and it had these basically how to drawings
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  Speaker 1: of how to remove an eyeball with a drill, how
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  Speaker 1: to how to squeeze a person to death by putting
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  Speaker 1: their head in the vice or using a hot clothes
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  Speaker 1: iron for you know, on the chest right. And they
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  Speaker 1: also found like the instruments of torture, like a house
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  Speaker 1: of horrors, blow torches and drills and all the stuff
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  Speaker 1: you needed to carry out these things. Yeah, that's pretty scary.
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  Speaker 1: So it really kind of raised our our eyebrows around
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  Speaker 1: here when that story broke and kind of got us
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  Speaker 1: looking into this, and um, from some research we found
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  Speaker 1: out that that torture manuals are not all that uncommon
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  Speaker 1: in the world scarily enough. And there's two pretty much
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  Speaker 1: the two um, the two seminal manuals on torture. We're
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  Speaker 1: both written by the American CIA. You know about this, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: a little bit. I mean they did most of this,
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  Speaker 1: in fairness in the nineteen fifties, right, the research, I
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  Speaker 1: think the initial research. Yeah, they basically we're trying to
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  Speaker 1: figure out what worked and what didn't write and I
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  Speaker 1: think what they've found and what's kind of round the
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  Speaker 1: accepted in the torture community is, uh, that it's psychological
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  Speaker 1: torture is really what what gets people talking. Physical torture
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  Speaker 1: doesn't work, right, because if you're physically torturing someone, they'll
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  Speaker 1: say anything just to keep you know, the clamps off
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  Speaker 1: of the nipples exactly. It produces unreliable data. You come
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  Speaker 1: at somebody with the car battery, they're going to tell
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  Speaker 1: you whatever that you want to hear, you know. But yeah,
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  Speaker 1: the first the first edition came out in nineteen sixty three,
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  Speaker 1: after at least the decade of you know, um the
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  Speaker 1: c I A spiking one another's um drinks with LSD
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  Speaker 1: at parties. Might Yeah, and that's they also apparently used
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  Speaker 1: to experiment on UM unsuspecting John's in San Francisco, Brothels.
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  Speaker 1: The good old days, Yeah, pretty much when the CIA
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  Speaker 1: could do absolutely anything at wanted. UM. So they did
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  Speaker 1: all these tests. They they they tested on civilians, they
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  Speaker 1: tested on our a military, they tested on people who
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  Speaker 1: were captured, and took all this experience and actually wrote
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  Speaker 1: it down. And you had the Kubark Manual, right, which
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  Speaker 1: is a torture manual. It is it's it's exactly that's
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  Speaker 1: exactly right. It tells you what to do, what not
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  Speaker 1: to do, why you shouldn't do it, why you should
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  Speaker 1: do it. And Kubark is the code word for UM,
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  Speaker 1: the CIA and Vietnam. Okay, I didn't. I was gonna
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  Speaker 1: ask you if that was someone's name or yeah, it
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  Speaker 1: was the It was the codename used for the CIA
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  Speaker 1: and Vietnam. And that's pretty much when it when it
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  Speaker 1: first came into use. Well, that was the first edition.
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  Speaker 1: The second edition UM was pretty much the the culmination
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  Speaker 1: of twenty years of using Kubark and finding that tweaking,
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  Speaker 1: tweaking the original material based on results from what they
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  Speaker 1: get from the prisoners. The information I would assume, right, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: I mean you can test and test and test, but
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  Speaker 1: when you use something in the field, you're going to
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  Speaker 1: really find out what works and what doesn't. Right, So
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  Speaker 1: that culminated in the Human Resource Exploitation Manual. That's that's
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  Speaker 1: a fun range. That one was from twenty years after
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  Speaker 1: Kubark came out, UM, and it's it's very much based
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  Speaker 1: along the same lines. Basically, you know, the rule of
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  Speaker 1: thumb is, uh, well, you don't turn the screws on thumbs.
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  Speaker 1: You know, physical torture is not good psychological works, UM,
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  Speaker 1: which means like you know, maybe cranking heavy metal music
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  Speaker 1: really loud. Seven blindfolding and the waterboarding was an issue
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  Speaker 1: not too long ago and still is apparently, I know,
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  Speaker 1: UM Congress is uh finds water boarding very distasteful. In
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  Speaker 1: researching this, I found that UM, time and time again,
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  Speaker 1: Congress gets wind of some scandal and UM holds hearings
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  Speaker 1: and outlaws torture and then see he goes, Okay, we're
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  Speaker 1: not We're not gonna do it. Sept for these fourteen
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  Speaker 1: guys who are given special and right now there's fourteen
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  Speaker 1: people who are authorized in the CIA to use water
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  Speaker 1: boarding as an interrogation, so they'll say that we don't
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  Speaker 1: want to torture anymore, but we really want to torture
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  Speaker 1: these guys before we outlaw it, right, And I can
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  Speaker 1: see part of me sees the value in uh in
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  Speaker 1: using torture. I'm I'm a utilitarian in many ways, where
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  Speaker 1: killing one person to save a thousand just makes sense.
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  Speaker 1: But at the same time, there's a real gray area,
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  Speaker 1: like when you start, it's tough to stop it. Where
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  Speaker 1: do you draw the line right? And how do you
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  Speaker 1: separate yourself from the enemy exactly? Yeah, and as the democracy,
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  Speaker 1: we kind of have to set an example for everybody else,
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  Speaker 1: and I believe that's true. Yeah, well, we just barely
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  Speaker 1: scratch the surface. There's several torture articles, but the one
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  Speaker 1: we're talking about is is there a torture manual? And
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: you can read all of them on how stuff works
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  Speaker 1: dot com and hang tight to find out what article
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  Speaker 1: makes one of our colleagues skin crawl. Right after this
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• 6:24
  Speaker 1: want to tell him what article it is and what colleague. Yes,
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  Speaker 1: the colleague is our fellow staff writer, Jonathan Strickland. And
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  Speaker 1: the article is how entomophagy works. Yes, the eating of
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  Speaker 1: bugs will cuisine. Yes. Mr Strickland, who is, like Chuck said,
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  Speaker 1: one of our fellow writers, is also a fellow podcaster.
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  Speaker 1: You can find his podcast, a Tech Stuff also on iTunes.
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  Speaker 1: Good luck with that. But anytime that that's on the
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  Speaker 1: home page that his skin kind of crawls. He freaked
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  Speaker 1: out a little bit. Maybe hides under his desk more
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  Speaker 1: than usual. Right, Yeah, he's uh when I mean, you
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  Speaker 1: see a spider called cross the floor and Stricklin's up
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  Speaker 1: on his desk. Yeah, it's it's pretty bad. He has
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  Speaker 1: Fool's Day or you know, every Tuesday whatever. So if
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