Textbook

According to this article in today's NY Times, the Guantanamo Bay interrogators went to an unusual source for learning about "effective" interrogation techniques: the Chinese Communists, who used those same techniques on American soldiers captured during the Korean War.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. [Emphasis added]

Nice, eh? Our former enemies provided the textbook for the only too willing students preparing to question those "enemy combatants" being "detained" in Guantanamo Bay and more secret prisons in other parts of the world.

The current administration has justified the use of torture (although, to be fair, they prefer other euphemisms for that term) because our security demands it. Unfortunately, they failed to read the fine print of the article from which the chart was cribbed. Most of the confessions obtained back in the 1950's were false confessions, issued only to stop the torture.

The chart was produced at a recent Senate hearing without the source of that chart being identified. Once the Times received a tip on its source and that tip was passed on to the senators on the committee, the outrage began.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.” [Emphasis added]

Exactly. Most of us have been feeling that George Orwell's nightmarish vision of 1984 was the template for the Bush administration. Instead, it turns out to be that of Lewis Carroll.

202 days