Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of the Cold War

TIMOTHY MELLEY

Manchurian Candidate Redux On October 2, 2005, three months after the coordinated bombing of the London transportation system and three days before the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved John McCains Detainee Treatment Act, British Home Secretary Charles Clarke attempted to explain terrorism via a specter of the Cold War. Islamic terrorists, Clarke argued, should not be seen in the classic mould of revolutionaries fighting for a political cause. Rather, they are like educated youths brainwashed into joining cults. Indeed, Clarke added, perhaps anti-brainwashing techniques could be used to deprogramme terroristsconverting them back to productive citizens essentially by running brainwashing protocols in reverse.1 If this Manchurian candidate theory of terror illustrates the tenacity of Cold War concepts in contemporary responses to terrorism, it also hints at the bizarre persistence of brainwashing in the work of the covert state. What Clarke may not have known is that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was testing precisely his ideawith much less therapeutic aimsin its interrogation of high value terrorism suspects. The agency began with Abu Zubaydah, the man it erroneously believed to be al Qaedas head of logistics. Shot and captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, Zubaydah was flown around the world for three days by different aircrews so that almost no one in American intelligence would know his whereabouts. (This procedurea Cold War counterespionage tacticillustrates the strange anachronism of so many elements of the U.S. war on terror. On the one hand, al Qaeda hardly has the technological capability to track CIA rendition flights; on the other hand, Zubaydahs eventual destinationa secret Thai prisonwould be published only a few years later in one of Jane Mayers invaluable New Yorker articles on President Bushs program of enhanced interrogation.)2 In Thailand, Zubaydah was first interrogated by Ali Soufran and Steve Gaudin,
Grey Room 45, Fall 2011, pp. 1841. 2011 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents with extensive experience in Islamic terror. A surprisingly voluble Zubaydah disclaimed membership in al Qaeda but divulged information implicating Khalid Sheik Mohammed in the 9/11 attacks and leading to the arrest of Jos Padilla for planning a radiological attack in the United States. Days later, however, the investigation took a turn for the worse when the Bush administration handed it to a special CIA unit. Heading the CIA team was former military psychologist James Mitchell, who immediately got Pavlovian on Zubaydah, demanding that he be treated like a dog in a cage.3 Mitchell meant this literally. Zubaydah was stripped naked and placed inside what he came to call his tiny coffin. Deeply disturbed, the FBI agents protested, and FBI director Robert Mueller soon barred bureau personnel from participating in what he saw as an illegal and counterproductive interrogation. Meanwhile, an increasingly uncooperative Zubaydah was shuttled from coffin to frigid cell, deprived of sleep for up to 96 hours straight, placed in agonizing stress positions, blasted with loud music, and eventually waterboarded 83 times, as often as three times a day. Weeks of this Clockwork Orange kind of approach, as one CIA officer called it, produced exactly the response Mitchell and his staff had hoped for. Zubaydah confessed to membership in al Qaeda and to a horrifying array of terror plotsincluding plans to blow up American banks, supermarkets, malls, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, and nuclear power plants. On investigation, however, all of these confessions proved fictitious. Zubaydah, it turned out, was not even a member of al Qaeda.4 Why, then, had the most critical early investigation of the war on terror been placed in Mitchells hands? Mitchell had no knowledge of Islam or the Middle East, no counterterrorism experience, and no Arabic language skills. He had never conducted an interrogation. In fact, he had never witnessed a real interrogation. His particular skill lay in the simulation of torture. Before contracting privately with the CIA, Mitchell was a military psychologist involved in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program. Never intended for use on foreign detainees, SERE was developed at the end of the Korean War to protect American troops from enemy brainwashing. The theory was that a program of simulated capture and coercive interrogation might inoculate U.S. troops against Communist mind control in the event of their real capture.5 In its interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, then, the CIA had essentially subjected him to its own notion of midcentury Chinese brainwashing. But how could brainwashing have come to be the model on which the United States built a crucial part of its twenty-first-century antiterror program? And how,
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for that matter, could commentators and politicians like Clarke have come to see brainwashing as both a cause of terrorism and a potential solution to it? Brainwashing, after all, would seem at best a strange footnote in the history of the Cold Wara marginal anxiety at the lunatic fringe of the Korean War era. Yet brainwashing turns out to be a quintessential fantasy of the postwar period. The subject of scores of novels and films, congressional hearings, and government research projects, brainwashing has for sixty years been a persistent vehicle through which citizens and government officials have imagined global ideological conflict. Insofar as cold warfare implies a conflict of ideas and persuasion fought not on the battlefield but through propaganda, psychological warfare, and other ideological weapons, brainwashing is the essence of cold war. It is no accident that U.S. military leaders explicitly embraced the notion as both a metaphor for psychological warfare and a literal weapon in the U.S. arsenal. In popular discourse, the notion of brainwashing staged crucial questions about the nature of U.S. democracy in the age of the national security state. Was the postwar public sphere a marketplace of ideas where individuals shaped themselves according to the liberal individualism of the eighteenth century? Or was it a field in which new social institutions including covert government agenciescontrolled human thought and action? From its humble beginnings in 1947, the covert infrastructure of the United States has grown into a giant version of what David Wise and Thomas Ross in 1964 called the invisible government. The U.S. covert sector now contains sixteen intelligence agencies employing an unknown number of personnel and costing over $75 billion annuallymore than the total spent on intelligence by all other world governments combined. An additional 29 U.S. agencies and 1,391 private corporations perform top secret work, and 850,000 Americansroughly one in every 181 U.S. workers hold a top secret clearance.6 With its own bureaucracies (the intelligence services), laws (rules of engagement, authorization memoranda), and territories (Guantnamo Bay, rendition sites), the national security state has become the institutional sedimentation of what Giorgio Agamben calls the state of exception.7 A major consequence of this institutional shift is the emergence of a covert sphere, my term for the part of the public sphere devoted to the conceptualization of state secrecy, cold warfare, counterterrorism, and covert action. If, as Nancy Fraser writes, the public sphere designates a theatre . . . in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk, then the covert sphere is a more specific theater for deliberation of U.S. foreign policy from the Cold War to the present.8 The covert sphere is a cultural imaginary whose peculiar epistemology is shaped
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both by state secrecy and by the exceptional public interest in state secrets. Although this sphere is the result of a mushrooming covert state sector, it is not a set of government institutions. Nor is it what Michael Warner so usefully calls a counterpublic. It is, rather, an arena for discussing andmore to the pointfantasizing such covert institutions, which operate largely outside public view. At first glance, the covert sphere seems a relatively minor lacuna in the public sphere, the necessary exception to public deliberation. Yet, this exception turns out to be central to U.S. foreign policy and its domestic representation since the Cold War. What are the consequences of this growing contradiction at the heart of U.S. democracy? In an era of covert action, citizens are offered a modified social contract in which they trade democratic oversight for enhanced security. In doing so, they tacitly acknowledge that their elected leaders will deceive them about some actions taken on their behalf. The growth of this arrangement since the Cold War has institutionalized certain forms of deception and suspicion in U.S. political culture. Major decisions involving peace and war, Ross and Wise observed almost 50 years ago, are taking place out of public view. An informed citizen might come to suspect that the foreign policy of the United States often works publicly in one direction and secretly through the Invisible Government in just the opposite direction.9 Once a significant portion of government work becomes top secret and plausibility of denial becomes an official state policy, the belief that political power is wielded by powerful, invisible actors can hardly be called paranoid. The covert sector, in fact, has made a certain kind of paranoia a condition of good citizenship.10 Yet, covert government is not secret. For all its operational secrecy, the covert state is the subject of incessant speculation and representation. We know covert institutions exist; we speak of them endlessly; and we even think we know the kinds of things they do. Their secrecy is like that of Victorian sexuality in Foucaults famous account: purportedly repressed but endlessly discussed.11 The covert state is a relative of what Michael Taussig calls the public secretthat which is generally known, but cannot be articulated. Public secrets are the basis of our social institutions, Taussig claims. They invite active not-knowing and require knowing what not to know.12 They are, in short, ideological blind spots, a paradoxical knowledge that is also nonknowledge, a form of disavowal that illuminates the sources of value and power in a society. Thus, the relation of the covert sphere to the larger public sphere is not that the former represses knowledge whereas the later circulates it. Rather, the institutional constraints on certain types of knowledge produce a shift in emphasis on the forms of discourse in public circulation. The resulting half-knowledge is
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what facilitates public acceptance of initiatives that seem necessary even though their specific details are usually not debated in the rational forms central to Habermass description of the bourgeois public sphere. The covert sphere smoothes over the profound contradiction of an increasingly secret foreign policy; it helps the public assent to the application of power in ways that it can imagine on the level of fantasy but cannot actually oversee or know in an operational sense. How does the public know the secret work of the state? First, the latters secret affairs continually leak into the public sphere. The secret work of the state is revealed not only by aggressive elements of the public (journalists, historians, activists) but also by the states own agents and their enemies, for a wide variety of motives (including deliberate state attempts to control public opinion).13 Second, and more important, a vibrant fictional discourse incessantly represents the covert sector. The primary cultural consequence of a war waged in secret, after all, is that fiction becomes one of the few permissible ways the public can knowor imaginethe covert work of the state, which it must ultimately approve sight unseen. Unlike the rationalcritical public sphere of Habermas, then, the covert sphere is dominated not by the major discourses of the public spherejournalism, history, the essay, and other approaches grounded in the idea of truth as correspondence to factbut rather by fiction, which is not so easily disabled by the covert states epistemological barriers. The story of brainwashing provides an excellent illustration of this dynamic.14 Brainwashing became a meaningful cultural fantasyand continues to be one because it combines the thematics of secret agency and ideological conversion at the heart of cold warfare. Its victims are said to live in an utterly deceptive fiction implanted into their minds by covert agencies. Through this fantasy, brainwashing has not only allowed the public to imagine the work of the security state; it has also shaped the very nature of the security states own protocols. What is most compelling about the story of brainwashing is its effects on the architects of U.S. security policy, who themselves (like the public) turn out to be trapped in the epistemology of the covert sphere. Yet, partly for this reason, the history of brainwashing is strangely divided by the fault line between the covert and public spheres, and thus I must offer two renditions of this history, beginning first with the popular, or public, versionwhich, of course, is not the whole story. A Struggle for Mens Minds Communist mind control became an American concern during the late 1940s. The United States Chamber of Commerce so worried about thought-control, notes
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Stephen Whitfield, that its Committee on Socialism and Communism proposed in 1946 and 1948 to remove liberals, socialists, and Communists from opinion-forming agencies, including libraries, schools, newspapers, and the entertainment industries.15 Among the most memorable moments of Ellen Schreckers outstanding history of McCarthyism is an anecdote about Harold Medina, the trial judge in Denis v. U.S., which effectively outlawed the Communist Party as a criminal conspiracy. Years after the trial, Medina explained that whenever he looked at the spectators during the trial, he consciously forced himself to keep his eyes moving so that he wouldnt let himself be placed in a trance by the hypnotists that the party might have placed in the courtroom.16 Despite such widespread fears of Communist mind control, the more specific concept of brainwashing has been almost universally associated with the Korean War. The term was popularized by the journalist Edward Hunter, who published a Miami News article on it in September 1950, roughly three months after the start of the Korean War. A year later, Hunters book Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Mens Minds (1951) warned of a vast Maoist system of ideological reeducation.17 The Chinese, Hunter claimed, had combined coercion and mind-numbing repetition into a technique capable of reengineering the views of its entire population. If this theory seemed initially worrying, it caused a serious panic in 1952, when a group of U.S. Air Force POWsmost famously, Colonel Frank Schwablepublicly confessed to dropping anthrax, typhus, cholera, and plague on North Korea. Thirty-five other captured pilots substantiated these confessions in great detail. To make matters worse, 5,000 of 7,200 U.S. POWs signed confessions or petitioned the U.S. government to end to the war, and 21 POWs refused repatriation entirelyactions a disgusted Dwight Eisenhower attributed to a U.S. propaganda disadvantage with the East. A basic truth, Eisenhower noted privately, is that the minds of all men are susceptible to outside influences. In keeping with this theory, Eisenhower dramatically enhanced U.S. capacities in once-scorned avenues such as public relations, propaganda, and psychological warfare. The United States, he told a San Francisco crowd in October 1952, was locked in a struggle for mens minds, and what was needed was a psychological effort put forth on a national scale.18 But most of this campaign would not be conducted in front of the nation. Eisenhower specifically asked for subversion and propaganda weapons with no govt connection.19 Ikes theory of outside influence, in other words, did not become a plank of his public policy. After all, the notion that individuals were products
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of social influence flew in the face of Cold War domestic ideology, which saw American individualism as a bulwark against Communist conformity. An open campaign of influence, moreover, would discredit the ideology of American exceptionalism. Hence, Americans viewed brainwashing neither as a form of social influence nor as a propaganda tool but as a deadly threat to the rugged individual autonomy that would win the Cold War. This view was held not only by the public but also by military and intelligence officials, who took seriously the idea that Communist states had developed a terrifying form of mind control. In 1953, for instance, the CIA Psychological Strategy Board recommended that U.S. politicians be monitored for signs of a changed personality so that they could be quarantined and tested for Soviet drugging.20 After the British launched their version of SERE training, the United States soon followed suit. The end of the war did not calm these fears. Hunter, for one, pressed the notion of brainwashing even harder. In 1956, he published a second and more popular volume that made brainwashing seem much more powerfula form of mass hypnosis that could turn one into a living puppeta human robot . . . with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a captive body. What made brainwashing so efficacious, Hunter warned, was its one-two combination of East Asian mystique and Soviet science. The research of Russian behaviorist Ivan Pavlov, Hunter claimed, had made it possible to make [a man] react like [a] dog that rolled over at its trainers signal until he was no longer capable of using free will. Used en masse, brainwashing could produce a slave race that, unlike the slaves of olden times, can be trusted never to revolt, always amenable to orders, like an insect to its instincts.21 Although Hunter had essentially modernized the ideas of demonic possession, mesmerism, and hypnosis in an orientalist fiction, his concept gained traction for several reasons.22 First, anti-Communists assimilated it to the broader concept of Communist indoctrination. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, for instance, railed against the Communist thought-control machine that allowed Communists to wield influence entirely out of proportion to their actual number and control[ed], in various degrees, the thinking of many Americans.23 Second, the notion of an easily influenced subject echoed scholarly and popular accounts of waning individualism, such as David Riesmans Lonely Crowd (1950), William Whytes Organization Man (1956), and Vance Packards Hidden Persuaders (1957).24 If people were becoming other-directed, as Riesman argued, no more histrionic example could be found than the brainwashed. Third, prominent doctors, including the celebrated trauma
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specialists Joost Meerloo and William Sargant, lent credibility to the theory of brainwashing. In Rape of the Mind (1956), Meerloo, a Columbia University psychologist and expert witness at the trial of Colonel Schwable, called brainwashing psychic homicide and argued that it destroyed its victims ability to know what is true and real.25 A year later, Sargants Battle for the Mind likewise described brainwashing as a plausible and terrifying operation based on the science of Pavlov. Crucially, however, Meerloo and Sargant also made Eisenhowers point: human beings are easily influenced. Social conditioning, they argued, is pervasive and ordinarya result not only of coercive interrogation but also of social life, particularly in mass-mediated society and certain religious settings.26 Once a scientific literature had developed around the notion of brainwashing and had explicitly compared it to other forms of socialization, the concept became a popular shorthand for theorizing social influence in general. By 1960, brainwashing had been the subject of 200 popular articles, including pieces in Time and Life.27 Thereafter it entered an astonishing array of popular fictions. In the wake of Richard Condons 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashing became a staple feature of dozens of covert-sphere films, including John Frankenheimers 1962 film of the same name.28 Brainwashing and operant conditioning also became themes in literary fiction by Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Ken Kesey, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Ralph Ellison, E.L. Doctorow, and Ishmael Reed.29 The discourse was thereby converted from a conservative hysteria about foreign enemies to a liberal attack on corporate power, political conformity, and social conditioning. The problem with mainstream Americans, Norman Mailer railed in The Armies of the Night (1968), was that [t]he authority had operated on their brain with commercials, and washed their brain with packaged education, packaged politics. In such accounts brainwashing was converted from an enemy tactic to a state function designed to produce patriots and Cold Warriors. Anyone who has passed through the educational system of America is in unconscious degree somewhere near half a patriot, Mailer explained. The brain is washed deep, there are reflexes: white shirts, Star Spangled Banner, saluting the flag.30 Ironically, as celebrated fiction associated brainwashing with terrifying depictions of electroconvulsive therapy and invasive psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association gave the concept its ultimate stamp of approval by including it in the Diagnostic Standard Manual, where it was frequently applied to the puzzling and often radical transformation of belief undergone by some cult adherents.31 But the
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concept never left the domain of the covert sphere. Since the end of the Cold War, cult specialists like Margaret Singer and Steve Hassan have assimilated the theory to the emerging threat of postCold War terrorism, where it continues to be a surprisingly persistent topic. Studies of charismatic religious cults like the Unification Church, writes the psychiatrist (and CIA consultant) Jerrold Post in an important anthology on terrorism, contribute usefully to our understanding of the dynamics of the terrorist group.32 For Steve Hassan, terrorist cults operate primarily through mind-control techniques [such as] hypnosis, sleep deprivation, . . . and the programming of phobias into the minds of members.33 Like Cold War scenarios, these more recent associations between brainwashing and terrorism have made their way into popular culture. Perhaps the most important postwar American novel of terrorismDon DeLillos 1991 Mao IIexplicitly juxtaposes the mass cultural symbolism of Reverend Sun Myung Moons Unification Church with the lone agency of the terrorist. Given this history, should we be surprised that public officials like Secretary Clarke explain terrorism as the result of systematic, intentional indoctrination? Brainwashing has been an appealingif terrifyingfantasy because it functions as a crude theory of ideology. Its birth in the early Cold War speaks to the most important social transformations of that era. The growth of mass society at midcentury created the need for a theory of social influencea way of understanding how messages and institutions affect individual behavior and identity. The Cold War, meanwhile, confronted Americans with the profoundly different worldview of Communist peoples. While both of these factors demanded a theory of social influence, the Cold War ruled out the use of Marxist concepts or structural analysis. Brainwashing offered a solution to this conflict; it explained ideological difference and conditioning as the result not of social institutions but of malevolent intentionsthus preserving a crucial feature of liberal individualism at a moment when it seemed threatened by both Communism and mass culture. Little Shop of Horrors But this is not the whole story. Brainwashing also acted as a hinge between the public and covert spheres; it articulated the nature of cold warfare not only for the public but also for covert institutions. The history of brainwashing that emerges from declassified documents reveals a number of problems with the more public history I have just sketched. For starters, the idea of brainwashing did not originate in the Korean War. The
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term brainwashing appears in CIA documents dated January 1950roughly six months prior to the start of the Korean War and nine months prior to the Miami News article in which Edward Hunter supposedly coined the term. Second, as is increasingly well known, Hunter was not simply a journalist; he was a CIA propaganda specialist, a former member of the Office of Strategic Services, and the eventual editor of the psychological operations journal Tactics. Thus, the public concept of brainwashing was from the beginning a creation of the CIA, which secretly invented and disseminated the idea as part of a propaganda campaign.34 The plot gets thicker, however. Even as one arm of the CIA worked to foment public alarm about Communist brainwashing, another arm worked secretly to develop a real mind control weapon of its own. The most important study of the latter effort is still John Markss Search for the Manchurian Candidate (1979), a gripping cautionary tale about the costs of state secrecy in the early Cold War. As Marks shows, the CIA started preliminary work on drugs and hypnosis shortly after the Agencys creation in 1947. These efforts intensified after the 1949 trial of Hungarian Cardinal Jzsef Mindszenty, whose zombie-like confession to treason seemed the result of a mysterious Communist mind control technique. Not long after the trial, CIA director Rosco Hillenkoetter directed unvouchered funds to project BLUEBIRD, a mind control initiative later renamed ARTICHOKE. These projects explored whether drugs or hypnosis could, in the words of project documents, [control] an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.35 BLUEBIRD charged CIA officers to investigate what a 1950 document called unorthodox methods, including brain damage, sensory stimulation, hypnosis, so-called black psychiatry, Pavlovian conditioning, Brainwashing or any other methods having pertinence for such procedures as interrogation, subversion or seduction.36 The term brainwashing thus preceded the publication of Hunters groundbreaking article on the subject, suggesting that the CIA later disseminated the term to fuel public anxiety about Communist methods. More important, however, is the revelation that the agency itself sought to develop its own brainwashing method. In October 1950, three months after preliminary tests, the CIA conducted advanced brainwashing tests in Japan on what appears to have been a group of twenty-five North Korean prisoners of war. These tests took place only four months after the start of the Korean War, a month after the publication of Hunters brainwashing story, and a full two years before the 1952 American panic about purported Chinese brainwashing of U.S. POWs. In other words, the CIA, not the Chinese, might have
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begun brain warfare in the Far East. In a near-perfect example of Cold War demonologyMichael Rogins term for the simultaneous demonization and imitation of a dreaded enemythe CIA attempted to beat the Chinese brainwashers to the punch, working on North Korean POWs for what agency documents call defensive purposes.37 None of this allayed the fears of U.S. intelligence about brainwashing. By 1953, CIA officials were so worried about a mind control gap with the Soviets and Chinese that CIA director Allen Dulles made a rare public statement, attributing Eastern bloc consolidation to mind control. We in the West are somewhat handicapped in understanding brainwashing, Dulles claimed, because there are few survivors and we have no human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques. Human guinea pigs were soon found, however, after Dulles secretly authorized the MK-ULTRA project, which tested the effects of sensory deprivation, hypnotism, drugs, and electroshock on often unwitting prisoners, recovering drug addicts, hired prostitutes, and even fellow CIA operatives.38 Eventually, these experiments mushroomed into what the historian of torture Alfred McCoy called a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, a scandalous program of behavioral research that itself cost a billion dollars a year.39 The fascinating and horrifying tale of this mind control project is usually narrated as a story of colossal failure, because the CIA never found a truth serum or a mechanism for reliable human control. But this impression is an artifact of the CIAs own propaganda wing. That is, MK-ULTRA seemed a failure only because it did not produce the kind of magical and total mental control described by the propagandist Edward Hunter and his alarmist cohort. But Hunters vision of total control was itself a fiction designed to stir public fear. When judged against less histrionic standards, MK-ULTRA, for all its grotesque excesses and empty results, did succeed in two ways. First, it revealed the mystery of Communist brainwashingwhich is that there never was any mystery. Brainwashing is accomplished through torture. This conclusion was independently confirmed by three civilian researchersAlbert Biderman, Edgar Schein, and Robert Jay Liftonwho showed that Maoist brainwashing was not a new method, just a brutal combination of isolation, physical deprivation, and the nearly interminable revision of a personal confession.40 Second, and more important, MK-ULTRA led to a U.S. model of brainwashing that, like its Communist counterpart, is also essentially a form of torture. The U.S. model, now euphemized as enhanced interrogation, was consolidated in the CIAs compact 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. (KUBARK is
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the CIAs cryptonym for itself.) There is nothing mysterious about interrogation, KUBARK explains, quoting Hinkle and Woolf.41 According to psychological research, the manual explains, effective interrogation requires regression of the [subjects] personality. And the best way to regress a human being is through extreme sensory deprivation, self-inflicted pain, and a confusion technique designed not only to obliterate the familiar but to replace it with the weird until this interrogation becomes mentally intolerable.42 This method became the basis for the U.S. militarys SERE program of simulated interrogation. To state the implications of this brief history another way, the only reason Abu Zubaydah confessed to being a member of al Qaeda and to plotting the destruction of American monuments is that he had been brainwashed by the CIA. If this claim seems melodramatic, it seems that way only because the CIAs propaganda wing succeeded so spectacularly in popularizing the notion of a magically effective brainwashing process. One of the most important aspects of the CIAs bipolar brainwashing effortpart propaganda, part black psychiatrywas the power of its propaganda fictions over its own operations personnel. Allen Dulless deep concern about brain warfare was, in other words, partly due to the effectiveness of the CIAs own propaganda campaign. But how could Edward Hunter and company have implanted a fear of brainwashing in the minds of CIA insiders like Dulles? The answer lies in the hypercompartmentalization of the CIA, which makes many intelligence actions operationally secret for virtually everyone, including agency executives and political leaders. The mechanisms of state secrecy are not only a barrier to public knowledge. They also constrain covert agents. While agents have a much greater inside knowledge of certain limited matters, there is no special inside position from which the entire covert machinery of the state is visible. Strategic Fictions Here, then, is the brief history of brainwashing: the concept began as an orientalist propaganda fiction created by the CIA to mobilize domestic support for a massive military build-up. This fiction proved so effective that the CIAs operations directorate believed it and began a furious search for a real mind control weapon. The search resulted not in a miraculous new weapon but a program of simulated brainwashing designed as a prophylactic against enemy mistreatment. This simulation in turn became the real basis for interrogating detainees in the war on terror. In this way, the demonology of the Cold War took a surreal and bodily turn, as the institutions of the United States first imagined, then simulated, then projected onto
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a new enemy, their worst fears of Cold War Communism. How do we explain the dizzying relation here between fiction, simulation, and torture? Why does the covert story of brainwashing sound like the plot of a postmodern novel? The institutions of the national security state were themselves committed to the production of strategic fictions, simulations, and deceptions. These commitments first took shape in 1947 when the newly formed National Security Council (NSC) approved memo NSC-4, directing the CIA to launch a program of covert psychological operations. A year later, George Kennan (then head of the State Departments Policy Planning Staff) insisted that the United States embrace both covert political warfare and propaganda as a major weapon of policy.43 Although Kennan argued he was championing organized public support of resistance to tyranny in foreign countries, his primary mechanism was NSC-10/2, which gave the CIA charter to engage in economic warfare; preventive direct action, . . . sabotage, . . . demolition and other forms of covert action under the umbrella of plausible deniability. In the next three years, the CIAs operations section grew by almost 2,000 percent. Even NSC-68, which launched a massive military buildup, was explained by its author, Paul Nitze, as a shield behind which we must deploy all of our nonmilitary resourcesthat is, as a cover for psychological warfare.44 While primarily directed abroad, NSC-68 advocated a domestic campaign to strengthen American moral fiber. Even before this campaign was approved, the State Department had developed plans for what Assistant Secretary of State Edward Barrett called a domestic psychological scare campaign.45 Whether Hunters September 1950 and 1951 writings on brainwashing were a specific part of these initiatives, they must be understood as part of the U.S. governments general embrace of what Allen Dulles called brain warfare. Once one understands brainwashing as a strategic fiction, one is struck by how much of the early scientific evidence marshaled for it was fictional. Sargant, for example, based his analysis not on clinical cases but on distant historical summaries and contemporary literatureparticularly the dystopian fiction of Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell. Meerloos Rape of the Mind cites the same authors and concludes with Meerloos own speculative fiction, Totalitaria and Its Dictatorship, a detailed fantasy of future conformity and repression.46 The same dynamic can be seen in much recent psychological discourse on terrorism.47 To take but one example, a week after Home Secretary Clarkes remarks on brainwashing, the Oxford psychologist Kathleen Taylor, the author of a book on the science of brainwashing, wrote the Guardian to explain how the London transport
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bombers might have become terrorists. Her theory involves an elaborate fictional scenario in which a charismatic revolutionary, named Mr. X, uses psychological techniques to transplant a set of new ideas into the brain of a young man named Adam. At the end of this story, Brainwashed Adam is no longer able to think clearly enough to reject [Mr. Xs] twisted terrorist logic. In the representations of the covert sphere, proof tends to come in the form of fiction.48 The centrality of fiction in the discourse on brainwashing reflects the problem of knowledge within the institutions of the Cold War and the war on terror. In both conflicts, a distant and inscrutable enemy became the subject of extraordinary public concern, and the state responded through a massive program of covert action. The result, in both cases, was a political theater with a certain postmodern qualitya confusion of what is real and what is merely strategic fiction. In making this claim, I do not mean to suggest that brainwashing is a postmodern phenomenon or that brainwashing narratives have postmodern aesthetic features. My argument, on the contrary, is that the Cold War security state transformed the conditions of social knowledge in a way that would later become a topic of central interest in postmodern narrativein texts invested in demonstrating their own artifice and raising doubts about the nature of the real, the authentic, and the natural. As Ann Douglas observes, The extreme skepticism about the possibility of disinterested knowledge and language that postmodernism sponsors . . . makes the most sense when taken as a straightforward description of the extremes of official dishonesty characteristic of the cold war era.49 Consider the way the brainwashed were thought to suffer the ontological uncertainty that would later typify postmodernism. In Rape of the Mind, for example, Meerloo claims, the panic of the brainwashee . . . is the total confusion he suffers about all conceptsa confusion that can be transmitted to other members of society until no one knows how to distinguish truth from falsehood.50 Charles Mayo, of Mayo Clinic fame, testified to the United Nations in 1953 that new forms of torture could make a man the seemingly willing accomplice to the complete disintegration of his integrity and the production of an elaborate fiction.51 Edward Hunter told a Senate subcommittee in 1956 that brainwashing puts a mans mind into a fog so that he will mistake what is true for what is untrue, what is right for what is wrong. Testifying to Congress again in 1958, Hunter warned that brainwashing produced just the sort of moral relativism that would later come to be popularly identified with postmodernism.52 One of the striking features of this early testimony on brainwashing is how eerily it articulates what would become the
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hallmark of postmodern narrative: extreme epistemological skepticism verging on ontological confusion. The brainwashed subject, moreover, is almost an anticipatory caricature of the postmodern subjectbereft of agency and other individuating qualities, socially constructed through-and-through. The point of such comparisons is not to associate the postmodern with brainwashing per se but to find some of postmodernisms roots in the institutions of the Cold War. The conflicting demands of the Cold War state fueled an astonishing conflation of reality and fantasy in nearly every aspect of the brainwashing story the secret funding of strategic journalism, scientific analysis of dystopian fiction, the purported implantation of a fictional consciousness in hapless victims. Even if we return, finally, to the grim legacy of brainwashingthe business of psychologically enhanced interrogation, or torturewe remain in what Alfred McCoy calls a kind of total theatre, a constructed unreality of lies and inversion: To make their artifice of false charges, fabricated news, and mock executions convincing, interrogators often become inspired thespians. The torture chamber itself thus has the theatricality of a set with special lighting, sound effects, props, and backdrop, all designed with a perverse stagecraft to evoke an aura of fear.53 The central principle of the KUBARK manual is to create radical ontological uncertainty in the subject by advancing and slowing clocks, preventing knowledge of day and night, feeding the prisoner at bizarre intervals, drugging and moving the prisoner during sleep, inquiring why he tried to hang himself (when he did not), and so on.54 Successful psychologically oriented interrogation produces the hallmark effect of postmodern metafiction: the complete upending of a stable sense of reality. When Hinkle and Woolf noted in 1956 that this form of interrogation swiftly produces a loss of objectivity, they might as well have been describing the intellectual goals of postmodernism, which is rooted in a critique of objectivity and Enlightenment modernity.55 To trace the philosophical or aesthetic implications of a real form of bodily violence might seem callous. After all, enhanced interrogation can lead to psychosis or permanent trauma. According to his lawyer, Abu Zubaydah has suffered hundreds of seizures and seems to have permanent physical and psychological disability. Yet, enhanced interrogation is itself the institutional legacy of cold warfare relying on strategic fiction, simulation, and psychological influence. By developing its model of enhanced interrogation in response to a fantasy about Communist
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brainwashing, the U.S. intelligence community forgot that this form of interrogation was never an effective way to produce truth; it was, on the contrary, an extraordinary machine for the production of fictions. The monstrous plots to which Zubaydah confessed were every bit as fictitious as the biological weapons Schwable and company admitted dropping on Korea. But we should not conclude therefore that brainwashing is completely ineffective. On the contrary, it proved a highly effective propaganda weapon for the Chinese. And the theory of brainwashing was an equally effective domestic propaganda weapon for the United States. Strategic considerations aside, brainwashing also became an ideological vehicle through which the public could imagine the covert state. The very concept of brainwashing suggests this cultural function. The major effect of brainwashing is not only the remote control of the victim but the wholesale fictionalization of the victims world. This fictionalization is implicit, for instance, in The Manchurian Candidates signature scene: a spectacular revolving shot reveals that a womens club talk on hydrangeas is in fact a Communist demonstration of mind control. The brainwashed soldiers in this scene are emblems of the Cold War American public. They believe themselves safe amid the trappings of suburban bourgeois domesticity, completely unaware of the dangerous enemy agents who literally surround them. They are Cold Warriors who do not know they are Cold Warriors, because the Cold War takes place beneath the pleasant surface of middle-class American life. The notion of brainwashing is partly a way of conceptualizing the public navet that results not only from enemy deceit but from state secrecy. This function of the brainwashing narrative is alive and well in the age of counterterror. One has only to consider the spectacular appeal of David Webbaka Jason Bournethe CIA assassin created by novelist Robert Ludlum and catapulted to Hollywood fame by directors Doug Limon and Paul Greengrass.57 Like Raymond Shaw of The Manchurian Candidate, Bourne is an amnesiac assassin who is both the agent and the victim of a government program designed to turn him into a lethal human weapon. But if the assassin of Richard Condons 1959 Manchurian Candidate was the unwitting victim of enemy mind control, then the postCold War situation has changed radically. Bournes amnesia is a casualty of the secret CIA Treadstone program, a late-twentieth-century version of mind control. And Bourne is merely the latest in a long series of amnesic assassins used as tools by the U.S. security state. By the twenty-first century, the popular fictions of brainwashing routinely represent the technique as a U.S. tool for producing assets who will do whatever it takes for the nation. No red tape, explains the Treadstone programs director. We
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dont have to wait for someone in Washington to make a decision while the bad guys get away. Even more important, Treadstone allows both the states assassins and the American public to live guilt free, untroubled by disturbing memories of foul (but necessary) deeds. Like Raymond Shaw, Jason Bourne allegorizes the conditions of knowledge in postwar American empire. On the one hand, he is an innocent, patriotic kid, cast perfectly as all-American boy Matt Damon. On the other hand, he is a ruthless assassin. Unlike Shaw, Bourne initially embraces covert work as a vague abstraction. You chose the program, his CIA trainer reminds him, giving the word program all its Cold War resonance. But once converted into a killing machine, Bourne is troubled by intrusive memories of horrible deeds. In all these regards, he acts remarkably like the U.S. public, which knows it has acceded to the covert abrogation of democracy but cannot remember precisely how and is nonetheless shocked when reports of government subterfuge and violence surface in mass media. Like the public, Bourne knows he has done unspeakable things, but he does not know quite what they are. The states literal erasure of his memories is a metaphor for the effects of state secrecy on the democratic public sphere; it thematizes the public disavowal of covert action through a fantasy in which even an assassin cannot remember his actions. While such plots critique state secrecydepicting covert agencies as menaces whose destruction we enjoythey also make the covert sector a subject of endless discussion, fantasy, and entertainment, and they suggest that it cannot or should not be known. In this way, the fictions of the covert sphere produce what Michael Rogin calls spectacle as amnesiaan incessant emphasis on secret government that has the paradoxical effect of rendering it mere fiction and thereby guaranteeing a kind of public amnesia about its sordid details.58 Such fictions return us, finally, to the most important site of fiction in the story of brainwashing: the cell of the detainee. Among the remarkable features of the Abu Zubaydah story is how shocked FBI personnel were at CIA interrogation methods, which have been codified since 1963. At first glance, the bureaus horror seems to reveal an epistemological barrier between the public and covert agencies of government. Yet that horror is also a version of Bournes divided identity and of public reaction to similar revelations of state violence, such as the Abu Ghraib scandal or the CIAs use of torture. This pattern suggests that shock is itself an ideological effect of the covert sphere. The fictions of the covert sphere at once make the secret work of the state visible and consign it to the realm of fantasy. They offer a paradoxical knowledge that is also half-knowledge. This half-knowledge makes government
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secrecy tolerable while still preserving official public ignorance, and this ignorance permits the public to be shocked when the details of secret programs leak into the public sphere. Such dynamics illuminate a final cultural function of brainwashing narratives. The fantasy of an esoteric and magical techniquea painless conversion effected through hypnosis or drugsis much easier to stomach than an open defense of torture. Brainwashing suggests that the dirty details are best forgotten, seen as something forced on innocent soldiers like Bourne, not adopted by a democratic state as a weapon of war. By understanding cold warfare through fiction, the U.S. public can disavow its own democracys heart of darkness.

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Notes

1. Clarke Wants Terrorists Treated like Victims of Cult Brainwashing, Daily Telegraph, 2 October 2005, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1499694/Clarke-wants-terrorists-treated-like-victimsof-cult-brainwashing.html. The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved the Detainee Treatment Act on 5 October 2005. The act prohibits U.S. personnel from exceeding the Army Field Manuals limits on coercive interrogation. However, on 30 December 2005, President George W. Bush used a signing statement to avoid enforcing the law. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 320321. 2. Mayer first reported this and other related news in Jane Mayer, The Black Sites: A Rare Look inside the C.I.A.s Secret Interrogation Program, New Yorker, 13 August 2007, http://www.newyorker.com /reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer; and Jane Mayer, The Experiment: The Military Trains People to Withstand Interrogation. Are Those Methods Being Misused at Guantnamo? New Yorker, 11 July 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/11/050711fa_fact4?currentPage=1. 3. Mayer, The Dark Side, 156. 4. Mayer, The Dark Side, 139181. In his trial transcript, Zubaydah freely confesses to being an enemy of the United States and to organizing terrorist events directed at military targets. But he also claims to dislike the targeting of civilians and claims never to have been a member of al Qaeda. He reports profound mental health consequences from his treatment. Verbatim Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for ISN 10016 [Zayn Al Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a.k.a. Abu Zubaydah], C05403111, Tribunal at U.S. Naval Base, Guantnamo Bay, Cuba (1334 hours, 27 March 2007), 130, http://www.aclu.org/national-security/verbatim-transcript-combatant-status-reviewtribunal-csrt-hearing-abu-zubaydah. U.S. officials progressively downgraded his status from a top member of al Qaeda to a mere travel agent. See, also, Joby Warrick and Peter Finn, Internal Rifts on Road to Torment, Washington Post, 19 July 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2009/07/18/AR2009071802065_pf.html. 5. Mayer, The Dark Side, 157. The military advertises SERE as a Resistance Training Laboratory where completion of training is a badge of honor among elite U.S. forces. See David J. Morris, Empires of the Mind: SERE, Guantnamo, and the Legacies of Torture, VQR, Winter 2009, 211221, http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2009/winter/morris-sere/. 6. David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Random House, 1964); and Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America, Washington Post, 1921 July 2010, http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/#article-index. With the exception of one former year, the total national intelligence budget became public only in fiscal year 2007. Because the distribution of funds among intelligence agencies is still secret and because much intelligence work is overseen by the Department of Defense, the public figure almost certainly understates total expenditures, perhaps dramatically. 7. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005). 8. Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 7398. See also Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
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a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge: Zone/MIT, 1992). In offering the notion of a covert sphere, I do not mean to paint the public sphere as a transparent, democratic ideal that has been sullied solely by the rise of Cold War secrecy. Nor do I mean to draw too bright a line between the public and the covert. Government has always had secret components, and, as so many of Habermass interlocutors have shown, the democratic public sphere has long been secret or elusive for large elements of the public. In Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (1959; Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988), Reinhart Koselleck argues that secret societies such as the Illuminati were the very mechanism that permitted the emergence of democracy. My point is simply that the astonishing growth of clandestine institutions since 1947 has changed the structure of public knowledge, not merely reducing it but transforming the ways in which the public knows or imagines the work of its own government. 9. Wise and Ross, 4. 10. For a fuller version of this argument, see my Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 11. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978). 12. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2, 57 (emphasis in original). 13. Leaks come in many forms. Increasingly, they come in the form of tell-all memoirs and spy novels. See Scott Shane, Ex-Spies Tell It All, New York Times, 15 March 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2005/03/15/books/15spyb.html?_r=1. 14. For the more public side of this history, see my Brainwashed! Conspiracy Theory and Ideology in the Cold War United States, New German Critique 103, vol. 35, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 145164. That essay concentrates on the mass cultural sources of brainwashing and is a companion to this one in its national security implications. For an excellent cultural history, see David Seed, Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control: A Study of Novels and Films since World War II (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004). 15. Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996), 15. 16. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 198. See, also, 190; and Whitfield, 4849. 17. Edward Hunter, Brain-Washing Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party, Miami News, 24 September 1950; and Edward Hunter, Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Mens Minds (New York: Vanguard, 1951). 18. Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhowers Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), 5354. 19. Osgood, 5152. 20. Briefing for the Psychological Strategy Board with Attachment Entitled Briefing for Psychological Strategy Board, 13 May 1953, in CIA MK-ULTRA Documents, 4 CD-ROMs, disk 2, MORI ID no. 146086, National Security Archive, George Washington University.
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21. Edward Hunter, Brainwashing: The Story of the Men Who Defied It (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1956), 1213, 24, 309. 22. For a more detailed explanation of these effects, see Melley, Brainwashed! 23. J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (New York: Pocket, 1958), 75. See also Schrecker, esp. 161. 24. David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); and Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Pocket Books, 1957). 25. Joost A.M. Meerloo, Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956). 26. William Sargant, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (London: Heinemann, 1957). 27. Seed, 48. 28. In addition to the Bourne films, the list includes Blindfold (1965), Codename Icarus (1981), Jacobs Ladder (1991), Conspiracy Theory (1997), Mennos Mind (1996), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), The Sleep Room (1998), Time Lapse (2000), Alias (20012006), Blind Horizon (2003), Second Nature (2003), The Manchurian Candidate (dir. Jonathan Demme, 2004), Torture Room (2007), My Own Worst Enemy (2008), Dollhouse (2009), and XIII (2009). 29. For more detail on this assertion, see Seed; and Melley, Empire of Conspiracy. 30. Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York: Signet, 1968), 103, 281. 31. This diagnosis remains in the current DSM-IV. See 300.15 Dissociative Disorder Not Specified, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 532. 32. Jerrold M. Post, Terrorist Psycho-Logic, in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson, 1998), 34. Pape and Sageman powerfully undermine the brainwashing hypothesis. See Marc Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004); and Robert A. Pape, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (August 2003): 343361. 33. Dominic Streatfeild, interview with Steve Hassan, Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2007), 276. 34. Narrative Description of the Overt and Covert Activities of [Redacted], 1 January 1950, in CIA MK-ULTRA Documents, disk 2, MORI ID no. 190882, National Security Archive. See also John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (1979; New York: Norton, 1991). 35. Marks, 2325, 31. In his 1951 study, Hunter in part attributes his discovery of brainwashing to the impression this trial made on him. See Hunter, Brain-Washing, 10. 36. Narrative Description of the Overt and Covert Activities of [Redacted]. 37. Marks, 25. Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology
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(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), xiii. 38. Marks, 139. 39. Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Holt, 2006), 7. 40. Albert D. Biderman, The Image of Brainwashing, Public Opinion Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1962): 547563; Edgar H. Schein, with Inge Schneier and Curtis H. Barker, Coercive Persuasion: A Sociopsychological Analysis of the Brainwashing of American Civilian Prisoners by the Chinese Government (New York: Norton, 1961); and Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China (1961; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 41. CIA, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation (July 1963), 1, National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/01-01.htm. For Hinkle and Wolffs findings, see Allen W. Dulles, A Report on Communist Brainwashing, Memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover, 25 April 1956, NCOIC, http://ncoic.com/brainwsh.htm. 42. McCoy, 51. 43. Osgood, 38. 44. Osgood, 3940. 45. Scott Lucas, Freedoms War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 84. 46. Meerloo, 117. 47. In one essay, for instance, Jerrold Post relies on a fictional scenario (consider a youth). Jerrold M. Post, Terrorist Psycho-Logic, in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theories, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1990), 36. 48. Kathleen Taylor, Thought Crime, Guardian (Manchester, UK), 8 October 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/08/terrorism.booksonhealth. 49. Ann Douglas, Periodizing the American Century: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism in the Cold War Context, Modernism/Modernity 5, no. 3 (1998): 76. 50. Meerloo, 2829. 51. Meerloo, 20. 52. Marks, 134. 53. McCoy, 10. 54. McCoy, 51. 55. Dulles, A Report on Communist Brainwashing. 56. Joseph Margulies, Abu Zubaydahs Suffering, Los Angeles Times, 30 April 2009, http:// articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/30/opinion/oe-margulies30. 57. Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Identity (New York: Turtleback, 1988); Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Supremacy (New York: Turtleback, 1989); Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Ultimatum (New York: Turtleback, 1991); Doug Limon, dir., The Bourne Identity (Universal, 2002); Paul Greengrass, dir., The Bourne Supremacy (Universal, 2004); and Paul Greengrass, dir., The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal, 2007). 58. Michael Rogin, Make My Day! Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics, Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 99123.
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