Is there a torture manual?

fellow staff writer, Charles W. Bryant. How are you, Chuck. I'm doing well, Josh. You seem not yourself today and feeling it may have something to do with our subject and subject matter exact torture, which is not fun. You know. At first, torture, before I wrote this article torture, it seemed like this kind of amorphous blob that happened to pour SAPs in like other countries. And the more I started researching UM is their torture manual, I did actually

several articles articles on torture UM. It became very real and it is a really serious, somber subject that and it happens to a lot of people actually sadly still today it is. But you have to do your research. It's not the kind of thing that you know, it's not talked about. No, you don't want it all over the evening news. No, definitely not. It doesn't go well with dinner at all. Um, but it does happen, and

the things that do happen are are very serious. That the in the introduction I mentioned May two thousand seven raid on a Baghdad house and it looked like a normal house from the outside. Inside they found an Alcada torture manual and it had these basically how to drawings of how to remove an eyeball with a drill, how to how to squeeze a person to death by putting their head in the vice or using a hot clothes

iron for you know, on the chest right. And they also found like the instruments of torture, like a house of horrors, blow torches and drills and all the stuff you needed to carry out these things. Yeah, that's pretty scary. So it really kind of raised our our eyebrows around here when that story broke and kind of got us looking into this, and um, from some research we found out that that torture manuals are not all that uncommon in the world scarily enough. And there's two pretty much

the two um, the two seminal manuals on torture. We're both written by the American CIA. You know about this, yeah, a little bit. I mean they did most of this, in fairness in the nineteen fifties, right, the research, I think the initial research. Yeah, they basically we're trying to figure out what worked and what didn't write and I think what they've found and what's kind of round the accepted in the torture community is, uh, that it's psychological

torture is really what what gets people talking. Physical torture doesn't work, right, because if you're physically torturing someone, they'll say anything just to keep you know, the clamps off of the nipples exactly. It produces unreliable data. You come at somebody with the car battery, they're going to tell

you whatever that you want to hear, you know. But yeah, the first the first edition came out in nineteen sixty three, after at least the decade of you know, um the c I A spiking one another's um drinks with LSD at parties. Might Yeah, and that's they also apparently used to experiment on UM unsuspecting John's in San Francisco, Brothels. The good old days, Yeah, pretty much when the CIA could do absolutely anything at wanted. UM. So they did

all these tests. They they they tested on civilians, they tested on our a military, they tested on people who were captured, and took all this experience and actually wrote it down. And you had the Kubark Manual, right, which is a torture manual. It is it's it's exactly that's exactly right. It tells you what to do, what not to do, why you shouldn't do it, why you should do it. And Kubark is the code word for UM,

the CIA and Vietnam. Okay, I didn't. I was gonna ask you if that was someone's name or yeah, it was the It was the codename used for the CIA and Vietnam. And that's pretty much when it when it first came into use. Well, that was the first edition. The second edition UM was pretty much the the culmination of twenty years of using Kubark and finding that tweaking, tweaking the original material based on results from what they

get from the prisoners. The information I would assume, right, yeah, I mean you can test and test and test, but when you use something in the field, you're going to really find out what works and what doesn't. Right, So that culminated in the Human Resource Exploitation Manual. That's that's a fun range. That one was from twenty years after Kubark came out, UM, and it's it's very much based

along the same lines. Basically, you know, the rule of thumb is, uh, well, you don't turn the screws on thumbs. You know, physical torture is not good psychological works, UM, which means like you know, maybe cranking heavy metal music really loud. Seven blindfolding and the waterboarding was an issue not too long ago and still is apparently, I know,

UM Congress is uh finds water boarding very distasteful. In researching this, I found that UM, time and time again, Congress gets wind of some scandal and UM holds hearings and outlaws torture and then see he goes, Okay, we're

not We're not gonna do it. Sept for these fourteen guys who are given special and right now there's fourteen people who are authorized in the CIA to use water boarding as an interrogation, so they'll say that we don't want to torture anymore, but we really want to torture these guys before we outlaw it, right, And I can see part of me sees the value in uh in using torture. I'm I'm a utilitarian in many ways, where killing one person to save a thousand just makes sense.

But at the same time, there's a real gray area, like when you start, it's tough to stop it. Where do you draw the line right? And how do you separate yourself from the enemy exactly? Yeah, and as the democracy, we kind of have to set an example for everybody else, and I believe that's true. Yeah, well, we just barely scratch the surface. There's several torture articles, but the one

we're talking about is is there a torture manual? And you can read all of them on how stuff works dot com and hang tight to find out what article makes one of our colleagues skin crawl. Right after this stuff you should know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things to think about, like, say, what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket, or

whether to buy the three or six megapixel camera. But thankfully we don't need to think about online fraud because for every purchase you make, Visa keeps an eye out for fraud with real time fraud monitoring and by making sure you're not liable for any unauthorized purchases. How's that for peace of mind, safe, secure Visa. So, Chuck, you want to tell him what article it is and what colleague. Yes, the colleague is our fellow staff writer, Jonathan Strickland. And

the article is how entomophagy works. Yes, the eating of bugs will cuisine. Yes. Mr Strickland, who is, like Chuck said, one of our fellow writers, is also a fellow podcaster. You can find his podcast, a Tech Stuff also on iTunes. Good luck with that. But anytime that that's on the home page that his skin kind of crawls. He freaked out a little bit. Maybe hides under his desk more than usual. Right, Yeah, he's uh when I mean, you see a spider called cross the floor and Stricklin's up

on his desk. Yeah, it's it's pretty bad. He has a weak constitution. We have fun with him every April Fool's Day or you know, every Tuesday whatever. So if you want to know about the eating of bugs. Read how intomafage he works. How stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you