I saw a blurb yesterday somewhere in my travels and have been going nuts tryin to find it.

to read the entire document, your horror is going to grow page by page.

It's all in there, step by step, stress positions, sleep deprivation, etc.

It's an old truism, but one really does become precisely what one hates.

...I think the proper date for the doc's 1956, not 1960 (the various stamps and hand notations which look to indicate distribution up and down the food chain and the rather murky cover date seem to corroborate this).

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

just the CIA's coversheet. My error.

it isn't the finshed version, so there must be more out there. The post I read said 60's and 70's. Still can't remember the site!

link

..."brainwashing" here is an historical artifact of the period in which the document was written, more than anything substantive. The term simply didn't have the connotation in the context of these documents that it has for us (specific allusions to the Manchurian Candidate, etc).

I know a little about the history of this in the context of Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape [SERE] training (which seems to be where all of the techniques applied by US personnel were in the main derived from) and the larger context for all of this, so far as I know it, is primarily the Korean War, where US forces faced really organized coercive interrogation on a large scale for the first time. (US unconventional warfare forces had been subjected to this sort of thing during prior conflicts, but no one had seen really organized stuff on this scale previously.) There was great surprise that US service members could be maneuvered into making the public statements against their nation's interest that they manifestly did - the popular reaction was that their fundamental motivations must have been somehow changed in order for patriotic Americans to make such statements (i.e., that they were "brainwashed").

Out of all of this mess came the various SERE schools for at high risk of capture personnel. Gradually, after the summary experience of a lot of folks in enemy hands everyone's come to the consensus position that, given enough time and enough control over the mental and physical environment of detainees, anyone can be broken and made to divulge information and make statements against interest - it doesn't mean that they've changed their fundamental beliefs or allegiances (i.e., that they've been "brainwashed"); it just means that they couldn't resist that day.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.