| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Unpleasant Truth,
This review is from: Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America (Paperback)
"Langguth is a novelist as well as a newspaperman, and he must have realized before he began this book that he could not simply lay out the facts of our complicity in police terror in Latin America: he had to find a way to make us as angry as he is about the harm our government has done, or his book, like so many exposes, might be further used to inflate our old boast that the USA is a wonderfully free, democratic society to allow such publications. He chose to tell flatly, laconically, as if it were as early Sinclair Lewis novel, the story of Dan Mitrione, the American police advisor in Uruguay kidnapped and executed in 1970 by the Tupamaros, and to alternate this small-town Midwesterner's experience with what was going on in the more glamorous and various worlds of Washington, the CIA, the Brazilian and Uruguayan military commands, and the revolutionary underground. He succeeds in creating interest and suspense, and in making one share his moral repulsion; indeed, one wished, as naively as when one was young, that this book would make something happen." by Jose Yglesias, The Nation --from book's back cover
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Torture and Totalitarianism,
By
This review is from: Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America (Paperback)
When one reads Langguth's HIDDEN TERRORS: THE TRUTH ABOUT US POLICE OPERATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA, one is struck with the similarities between what was happening there and then and what is happening here and now. As we shall see, that similarity is not coincidental. For instance, there is the same attempt to justify torture by using the "ticking bomb scenario" (pp. 141-2). But when one examines the actual behavior of Latin American police trained by American "advisors" and at times, the advisors themselves, one finds that the reality has nothing to do with any such threat to human life and very little to do with the quest for intelligence.
Take for instance the case of Jean Marc Von der Weid, a Brazilian activist whose father was a Swiss banker and whose mother was from a prominent Brazilian political family. He first became involved in politics in 1968 after a high school boy was killed by the police in the course of a peaceful demonstration. As police methods of quelling demonstrations became more brutal, he went into hiding. Eventually he was caught and taken to a local police station where six other suspect were waiting. "They were told to stand with their feet far from the wall, and then to lean forward and press their palms against it. For half an hour they were beaten on their kidneys with clubs. It was not a punishment for refusing to answer questions. No questions had been asked. It was a preliminary lesson, to impress upon them the consequences of being arrested." (pp. 162-3). Needless to say, no policeman stopped to wonder if they might not even have the right suspects-- a person who had done nothing whatsoever and was picked up by mistake would have received the same treatment. Afterwards, Jean Marc was shipped to a prison where he was beaten with clubs and shocked with electric wires for twenty-four consecutive hours. "At first, the torture was purely administrative, the first step in the prison's routine." Jean Marc's captors did not even discover his identity until the third day, yet they were torturing him from the start (p. 163). Then there was Marcos Arruda, a geology student who had protested foreign control over Brazil's mineral wealth. Unable to find employement commensurate with his abilities because of his activism, he went to work at a Mercedes-Benz factory. In 1970, he began to get involved with trade union demonstrations against the deplorable working conditions in the factory. In the course of this, he became involved with a woman named Marlene Soccas, who was a member of the resistence to the US-backed dictatorship. Ultimately Marlene was captured and tortured continuously for four days. The police got her to point Marcos out to them. When they brought him to headquarters, they beat him for hours before they asked a single question (p. 211). Then they started using electrical torture. The torture went on until Marcos went into convulsions, which did not stop. "For the next month and a half, Marcos could not stop shaking." The police sent him to a military hospital. They had gotten no information from him, but they were sure they were justified in torturing him. As a policeman who appeared at his bedside said, "You are not a worker. You are a geologist. That means that you were in the factory to spread subversion. When you get better here, you'll go back to that place again." It was obvious that the goal of the police was to get him to confess to a crime he did not commit. When he was taken back to the prison, they used his girlfriend Marlene to torture him, beating her in the next room while Marcos was forced to listen (pp. 208-216). One wonders how a human being could stand all this, without going insane, and indeed, many did, making them entirely unreachable for intelligence purposes, something which did not seem to bother the police. Fernando Gabiera, a labor organizer, was sent to a prison where he was kept in an isolation cell for two months. "But he did hear occasional stirrings in the next cell.. Fernando tapped on the wall. At last he persuaded the man to put his mouth to a crack in the wall and speak to him. "I'm alive," the man whispered. It was the only thing Fernando understood. The man was mad." (p. 202) To those who have read Alfred W. McCoy's A QUESTION OF TORTURE: CIA METHODS OF INTERROGATION FROM THE COLD WAR TO THE WAR ON TERROR, these methods are all too familiar. And indeed, it was the CIA who trained the Brazilian policemen who tortured the individuals mentioned above. They also trained an American AID official who has become famous through his capture and assassination by the Tupameros and consequent portrayal in a film I have reviewed, STATE OF SIEGE-- Dan Mitrione. Unfortunately, Langguth evidently did not know the full truth about this man, who looms so large in his narrative, until the book was ready to go to press. What he learned was from a book written by the Cuban Manuel Hevia Cosculluela is included at the end in "A Cuban Footnote". Hevia describes Mitrione personally preparing the basement of a house he had rented in Montevideo, Uruguay, for a torture demonstration, making sure that it was soundproof. As subjects, he used beggars including one woman, none of whom had committed any crimes. Hevia's book is not available in English, so I have to rely upon what I read in the English translations in Langguth's book and that of McCoy, who quotes him as saying, "The special horror of [Mitrione's torture class] was its academic, almost clinical atmospere." (McCoy, p. 72) Langguth quotes Mitrione as saying to Hevia (whom he thought was working for the CIA-- in fact, he was a double agent) that the object of torture is to humiliate the subject, to make him understand that he is completely helpless, to isolate him from the reality outside his cell," presumably including the reality of whatever activity he had been involved in, and which caused him to be arrested. Even after he had gotten information from a subject, Mitrione favored prolonging the torture session, "Not to get information now, but as a political instrument to scare him away from further rebel activity." (Langguth pp. 312-313). Quite obviously, the object of the torture described in this book was not the acquisition of intelligence to save human lives, but the spreading of terror in order to prop up a totalitarian regime. What then are we to think when we read in NEWSWEEK that the CIA is presently torturing thousands of detainees in the so-called "War on Terror" who have no further use as sources of intelligence, simply because "they are scum and deserve to be waterboarded every day for the rest of their lives"? (NEWSWEEK, October 8, 2007).
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent review of some of the "collateral damage" of the Cold War,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America (Paperback)
This book is really divided into two parts. Half of the book revolves around the story of a man named Dan Mitrione. The book presents Mitrione as a Indiana police chief who becomes an overseas advisor for our government to South American police departments battling political activists. The political activists they are battling for the most part are engaged in communist activities bent on revolution. The other half of the book is the history of these political movements and effects of the policy of the United States and their police advisory program designed to prevent the spread of left wing governments in South America. This program clearly used a right wing approach towards the revolutionaries, an approach which included the promotion of military juntas to take over for weak elected leaders and the spread of torture as a useful tool to suppress political dissent. Mitrione's own role in the spread of torture is downplayed but the footnote in the book hints at what his real role likely was in South America, until he was executed in 1970 in South America while being held hostage. The author does an excellent job of depicting the amoral lengths our intelligence services went to in deploying their assets and agents in the war against communism. These assets and agents taught South American police services to suppress revolution through intimidating intelligence gathering and aggresive counter revolutionary tactics such as torture and murder."Hidden Terrors" is a little told tale of our foreign policy during the cold war, how even well intended policies can be manipulated and abused by ideologues in any government. Some of the information in this book is outdated as it was written in 1978. Our government has released more documents in the last 30 years, included documents on the clear intelligence connections of Dan Mitrione, but the information in this book is still fascinating, rarely discussed, and little known. Definately worth reading.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
