by Damozel | It seems that under the Bush Administration, Chinese interrogation methods designed to elicit false confessions during the Korean War became the basis for the training of interrogators at Guantanamo. (NYT).
It seems there was a certain chart used in training the interrogators came to light during June 17 hearings by the Senate Armed Services committee.
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 only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”(NYT).
The chart was derived from a 1957 article called '"Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003.' He got his interviews from American prisoners who had returned from North Korea, some of whom had 'confessed' to various atrocities, including germ warfare.(NYT).
Apparently, training sessions for interrogators included 'an in-depth class' on what were referred to ---inaccurately, it seems to me --- as 'Biderman’s Principles'(NYT)
Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, finds this revelation 'stunning.' He thinks 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.”.(NYT)
According to the article on which the chart is based, one method that Chinese Communists used to extract false confessions from American personnel was to require soldiers to stand for extremely long periods, sometimes in extreme cold. .(NYT) American military and CIA interrogators have used this method against terrorism suspects.
Of course we all knew about this. As Dr. Steven Taylor remarks at Poliblog:
Anyone even passingly familiar with the debate over detainee treatment will be aware that those were amongst the public techniques that were used by the United States on those in its power. Indeed, I specifically recall former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld scoffing at the issue of standing for extending periods of time as being problematic because he himself prefers to work standing up (and even has a special desk that allows him to do so).
Other methods included on the chart were: '"Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”'(NYT)
Speaking from Guantanamo, Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder said he couldn't comment on the D.O.D.'s doings prior to current policy. '"I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.”(NYT)
There are of course drawbacks to using any sort of coercion to draw out a confession, even from someone you have solid grounds to suspect was probably guilty. For example:
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured. (NYT)
A number of bloggers have reacted to the New York Times story.
Suzanne, writing for the ACLU blog, asks -- and it's certainly what I am wondering --: 'Setting aside the ethical arguments against torture, a simple question remains: If the military knew these interrogation tactics elicited false confessions and useless information, then why bother.'
At MoJo Blog, Jonathan Stein points out: 'We didn't just copy communist tactics. We copied communist tactics specifically intended to elicit fabulous tales.'
It's just so odd that no one thought to wonder about the source for all the hot 'new' ideas on interrogation. Jonathan Stein is equally bemused: 'Really? When the military was copying old communist torture tactics verbatim, no one thought, Hey, this doesn't seem like a very American way of doing things?
.
Andrew Sullivan remarks:
It's an astonishing story - especially for any anti-Communist conservative who fought the good fight during the Cold War. But they won't mention it. I guess when a Republican administration copies communists, conservative writers need to copy Stalinists.
I guess so.
Dr. Steven Taylor at Poliblog says:
If a technique would be considered torture if used on one of our soldiers, that should be a perfect test to determine if it is torture when we use it on those we have captured.
Americans should be shocked and outraged that our government adopted interrogation techniques used by the Chinese Communist circa 1950 (not to mention ones used on our own soldiers). Yet, I suppose it will be greeted with a yawn. After all, they are just trying to keep us safe, yes? That little sentence seems to cover a multitude of sins.
And no: the fact that we have apparently stopped using these techniques does not make this a non-story. For one thing, we really don’t know what is and is no being done (especially by the CIA, as many of the limitations that have been written into law of late have been focused on the military, not the intelligence apparatus). Second, the very fact that we were blithely using this article in this way until at least 2005 is not a comfort...
At Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008, Retired Senior Officer of Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces Col.W. Patrick Lang --- who actually went through SERE training and experienced waterboarding --- says:
I wrote some years ago in these pages that I thought the methods in use at Gitmo and other places sounded a lot like the resistance to interrogation training that had been done in the '60s in the US armed forces. The supposedly sophisticated methods of psychological manipulation then said to have been used against French POWs in Indochina and Americans in Korea had inspired a lot of that kind of that training. SERE training was intended to prepare people for the illegal bestialities that it was expected would be inflicted on American prisoners if they fell into the hands of the communist enemy.
It was clearly understood that such methods were to be expected of an enemy devoid of decency. I experienced such training and it was no fun at all....
Clearly, some sadist or group of sadists with a vivid imagination took advantage of the national trauma of 9/11 to use the old communist enemies' methods as a model.
Whoever did that inflicted a grave injury and disgrace on the United States. The culprits should be punished as an example to future generations of sadists.
At Obsidian Wings, Eric Martin feels 'profound and bitter shame.' And he rightly points out:
Anyway, there's a presidential election this November. One of the candidates, John McCain, wants to continue to permit our government to engage in a policy of torture gleaned from observing the methods employed by brutal Communist regimes. The other candidate, Barack Obama, doesn't.
Tough choice.
Cernig at Newshoggers agrees:
The same techniques were used to elicit a false conviction from John McCain when he was incarcerated during the Vietnam War - yet he's just fine nowadays with accepting the Bush administration's parsing of such methods as somehow not being, precisely, torture....
America under Bush tortures people - bad people and people it believes are bad who later turn out to be innocent. It gets confessions - many false - from those people. It parses - lies by ommission and misdirection - about whether it actually does torture or not.... And John McCain, despite having had these things done to him, would continue that program.... He may have spoken up against waterboarding, but he's just fine with following the Bush lead in defining other torture techniques as 'enhanced interrogation".... Do you really need another reason why he shouldn't be president?
At The Moderate Voice, Shaun Mullen examines a further whorl in the pattern:
It is safe to say that the wheels have come all the way off the Bush administration’s legal wagon regarding the justification for indefinite detentions of alleged terrorist suspects when a three-judge appeals court panel with one of the most conservative judges in the land resorts to quoting Lewis Carroll.
In ruling that accusations against Huzaifa Parhat, an ethnic Uighur from a Muslim region of western China held for over six years were based on unverifiable claims, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia compared those claims to the absurd declaration of a character in Carroll’s poem “The Hunting of the Snark:
“I have said it thrice: What I tell you is three times true.”
I commented earlier on Christopher Hitchens' waterboarding epiphany. If waterboarding's not torture, he concludes, after having voluntarily endured a very little of it himself, then there is no such thing as torture.
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