Reviled Techniques from Communist China Aimed at Getting False Confessions From US Troops Used As Basis For Bush Administration 'Enemy Combatant' Detention and Interrogations

I've been hearing this for a couple weeks at least from Amy Goodman at Democracy Now.

Funny how those supposedly wacko ideas from the left turn out so often to be true.

It's only my hectic schedule and inability to find a mainstream source on this (not that I don't trust DN, but some readers might have a problem with the source) that kept me from blogging on this before now. 

Well, finally mainstream catches on.  

Excerpt NY Times report "China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo".

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. 

Now what we need to remember is that the "Red" China techniques that included waterboarding (which administration members say was used on only a limited number of 'detainees' at Guantanamo) as well as long term tortures of forced stress positions, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes, religious humiliation, etc of which nearly every released figure from Gitmo has complained of experiencing.  Were for purposes of extracting 'false' intelligence in confessions that could be used as propaganda.

And the Bush administration did get some 'false' confessions and intelligence from such techniques.

Excerpt 2 from above:

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.”

We didn't, but the Bush administration did in order to get information they could pass off to Americans so they could get evidence to allow them to go into Iraq and possibly, this year, Iran.

Testimonies elicited by 'harsh interrogation' continue to dog terror trials in the US.  The case against the 20 hijacker has recently been shelved because of concerns that he was tortured, and the "mastermind" of the Cole bombing is now claiming he was' waterboarded' into a false confession. 

Fine, now those we do catch can't be prosecuted because of the Bush administration's approval of harsh interrogation techniques?  Thanks, Bushies. 

Of course, I recommend reading the entire NY Times article linked above.

Also recommended:

Pro Publica: The Psychologists Behind Abusive Interrogations of Detainees

Also see Christopher Hitchens Waterboarded 

(Hat tip -- ð -- Mark Wolf At Rocky Talk Live for the link immediately above.) (Funny symbol is something I found in the special characters widget for this blog system that looks somewhat like a hat tip. I have no idea what it actually means or where it's from.)

tags: sere  enemy combatants  guantanamo  harsh interrogation  torture  china  

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