34.
   Then Raymond’s mood took a turn for the worse. He sat down and covered his eyes. Tears began to roll down his snout. He pulled a huge book out of nowhere and opened it. Its loose pages, each one inscribed with the name of a Latin American country fell from its binding and rained down on us. “There is hardly a country in Latin America that hasn’t had its government overthrown, its resources handed over to multinational corporations, its citizens abused. I’ve been hearing a lot lately about how some of you Americans are shocked, shocked that the CIA is torturing people. Well, guess what? You’ve been torturing people for some time now. Shall I tell you about the torture manual? The Kubark Manual first appeared in Vietnam in 1963. It was synthesized into the Human Resource Exploitation Manual in Central America in 1983. What diseased mind came up with that horrific little euphemism? Makes you want to puke. The CIA declassified part of it in 1997. In one part, it is carefully noted that approval from Headquarters is necessary when inflicting bodily harm with medical, chemical or electrical methods. Can you imagine what was not declassified? One thing the CIA learned in the twenty years between the first manual and its second edition is that psychological torture is more effective than physical torture and the threat of physical torture is the most effective of all. Toss a few severed body parts into the victim’s cell et voila! Your Congress reigned in the CIA in the 1990s but after 9/11, it became a free for all. When the curtain was pulled back and the world saw Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”