Report: Some U.S ‘Interrogation tactics’ Drew inspiration from techniques used by Chinese Communists
Between our large trade deficit, outsourcing of jobs, dependence of the United States on China, and us now apparently emulating thier torture techniques, somewhere chairman Mao is laughing at us.
The techniques were lifted from a 1957 report that detailed methods used by the Chinese against captured Americans during the Korean war. The findings of the fifty-one year old report reveal that these techniques would usually elicit false information and confessions from prisoners.
WASHINGTON — 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.
Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.
But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on the condition of anonymity .
A Defense Department spokesperson said they cannot comment on these report but that current policies regarding detainees, treats them humanely.
MY TAKE: So less then 20 years after America and the World brought the Cold War to an end, this is what our current policy is? Some carbon copy of the interogation practices of the tyrannical and vicious goverment of chairman Mao Zedong? And adaptions of policies that yielded false intelligence nonetheless. Wonder how we could have been so wrong about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq- Al-Queda links.
America is a great land with a rich history of human rights and liberities. Even during the revolutionary war, then General George Washington had a policy of treating prisoners of war humanely. We are better and more logical and stronger then to fall so low as to immitate the cruel and discredited techniques employed by Chinese communists.
And on the subject of the Cold War, we won that struggle not just because of our millitary armaments, economic prosperity, popular culture, innovation, and the strains between the Soviets and the Chinese. But because of the ideals of liberity and justice that we espoused and because with the possible exceptions of McCarthyism within the U.S in the 1950s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States constantly occupied the moral high ground in the international arena, while the Soviet Union invaded its soviet bloc nations when they dared stray from the path of the Soviet union. That they perfered the prosperity and human rights practiced and espoused by the United States, to the starvation and barberism that took place under the guise of a “cultural revolution” in the People’s Republic of China. By making ovetures to gain the trust of diossident elements and unions within each country, dismayed, muzzled, and tormented by thier own governments, we gained the trust of dissident soviets, as well as moderate anti- authoritarian elements in such countries as Poland, Romania, Czekoslavakia, Hungary, Chile, and ultimately the Soviet Union; which would lossen the shackles of tyranny and bondage and help fashion a new world.
I am not naive and know that our foes are dangerous and vicious as well as cunning. They have killed and represent evil. But if we lower ourselves to tactics that are both ineffective and harm our favor on the world stage which is already currently in a state of disrepair; we will be lulled into the false sense that we are defeating our enemmy when we are really being supplied with false intelligence obtained under pressure as we amble towards a path of defeat with a sense of false
confidence that we have dealt the enemy a serious blow, when in reality we have in fact been depued by false information that was supplied to us by detainees.
We cannot afford to become what we hate by adopting the brutal and repressive tactics of our enemies. For if we do that we have lost the moral high ground. And with thus in the eyes of more moderate and netural forces who may not sympathize with the radicals and terrorists, but at the same time are wary and have misgivings about the United States and the Western world, are the same as those forces we fight against. Then we could be viewed by the world, just as the pigs and the farmers are viewed in a cautionary by the animals at the end of George Orwell’s “Animal farm”.
But they had not gone twenty yards when they stopped short. An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously.
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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