Chinese import
Gitmo interrogation modeled after communist techniques
TORTURE, COERCION, BRAINWASHING — call it what
you want. What we now know about interrogation methods used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay is embarrassing to a nation that
values human rights and humaneness.
Or so we thought.
Now comes another embarrassing disclosure; perhaps
outrageous is a more accurate description. We refer to last week's New York Times report that Guantanamo interrogation methods
were based “verbatim” on a “1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean
War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.”
Those methods were a subject of discussion last month
by the Senate Armed Services Committee, members of which viewed a Guantanamo training document showing the effects of such
things as “coercive management techniques,” “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint”
and “exposure.” What wasn't known at the time but later revealed to the New York Times is the chart's link to
the half-century old Air Force study.
That article was entitled “Communist Attempts
to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” The information in the article, the Times reported, was
obtained from American POWs returning from North Korea, “some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators
confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.”
Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., rightly said
after reviewing the Air Force article that “every American would be shocked” at who wrote the book used to train
Guantanamo interrogators.
In fact, according to the Times, the chart presented
at Guantanamo for training differed from its model only by changing the original title: “Communist Coercive Methods
for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”
Said Sen. Levin, “What makes this document doubly
stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions. People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don't
need false intelligence.”
Speaking of false intelligence, the lesser lights who
enterprise this embarrassing and outrageous misadventure ought to be subject to some “coercive management techniques”
themselves. They obviously need convincing that the principles we celebrated this past Fourth of July weekend are not to be
ignored.
Article's URL:
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/318-07072008-1559560.html
