'China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo'

Why am I not shocked. Article here.

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.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods. . . .

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities. . . .

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.” . . .

From Attaturk at Firedoglake here.

Remember when the right-wing (and some competitors) tried to accuse Obama of lifting or slightly modifying Deval Patrick speeches? Well, here's some real plagiarism for you, George Bush's DOD copied Chairman Mao's little red torture book. A technique used specifically to elicit FALSE CONFESSIONS! Something for the reelection campaign -- surely that's what Jesus would do? . . .

And here is the Bush Administration, nineteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, seventeen years after the official end of the Cold War, long after China stopped being the "red menace" and morphed into the capitalist hybrid it is today, using the same torture methods we so vehemently condemned for so long because we were the United States of America! . . .