Corsetti, Damien, interview 1 - short clip - BendingLikeAPalmTreeInTheWind
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| - | Most people don't break. | 0:00 |
| They, they use that term of breaking a prisoner. | 0:01 | |
| Most prisoners bend like a palm tree in a hurricane. | 0:04 | |
| They'll bend, | 0:08 | |
| they'll bend and then they bounce back | 0:10 | |
| when the wind dies down | 0:12 | |
| and they'll put their resistance back up. | 0:13 | |
| And it's a constant reinforcement of your approach | 0:14 | |
| to keep them bent | 0:17 | |
| and to keep the information flowing. | 0:18 | |
| It was, you know, and after a point you're, | 0:24 | |
| after doing this to them for so long. | 0:26 | |
| And, you know, sometimes it would take weeks | 0:29 | |
| to get somebody to finally start being truthful with you | 0:33 | |
| and giving you information that you wanted to give them. | 0:35 | |
| You would be so frustrated that sometimes | 0:36 | |
| you would put them in stress positions just to punish them. | 0:39 | |
| Not for any other reason, you know, | 0:41 | |
| and this time you wouldn't. | 0:43 | |
| I wouldn't ask questions sometimes. | 0:45 | |
| Sometimes I'd sit there and play cards | 0:47 | |
| in front of them while they were in one of those positions | 0:48 | |
| and laugh at 'em, | 0:50 | |
| and pull their shirt pocket out and use it as an ashtray. | 0:52 | |
| And, really dehumanize the prisoner | 0:54 | |
| was a lot of the main point of that, too. | 0:57 | |
| To say, "Hey, I'm charge and you don't run things here." | 1:01 | |
| There was different things that people would do. | 1:04 | |
| I mean, some people. | 1:07 | |
| There was no water boarding, per se. | 1:08 | |
| Everything like that I never saw take place. | 1:13 | |
| We never had an inclined bench to lay prisoners on | 1:14 | |
| and, however, they had black hoods | 1:17 | |
| that were cotton hoods that had a cinch | 1:20 | |
| that we could cinch down around their neck, | 1:23 | |
| saturate the hoods with water, | 1:25 | |
| and put them under halogen lamps | 1:27 | |
| to where it would really heat up | 1:29 | |
| and make it very difficult for them to breathe. | 1:30 | |
| I did work with some elements of our government | 1:32 | |
| that did forcibly put water down the throats | 1:36 | |
| and faces of prisoners. | 1:39 | |
| But again, it was not, | 1:42 | |
| that was not something that was policy at the prison | 1:44 | |
| and it was definitely not something | 1:47 | |
| that we had any special apparatus for. | 1:48 | |
| It was just, more or less, | 1:50 | |
| liter bottles of Sam Benedetto that we used. | 1:51 |
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