Via today's Salon interview with Naomi Klein comes a link to the short film she made with Alfonso Cuarón, Shock Doctrine:
The other way that I look at torture is as a metaphor for disaster capitalism. Disaster capitalism is an attempt to push through policies in the chaos and disorientation that follow a disaster -- policies that wouldn't stand a chance during normal, non-disastrous circumstances. The move to turn New Orleans public housing into condos after Katrina is a classic example. So is the current campaign to push through a highly contested oil law in Iraq, even as the country spirals into civil war.
What I argue is that this attempt to take advantage of the window of opportunity opened up by crisis has some uncomfortable similarities to the techniques for psychological torture laid out in declassified CIA interrogation manuals, which I quote in the book. For instance, the infamous 1963 Kubark manual talks about how to put a prisoner in a state of shock, using various regression techniques like sensory deprivation and sensory overload. Then it states that "there is an interval -- which may be extremely brief -- of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock."
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