NY Times: China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

For all those who like to wallow in the "America is superior, love it or leave it" mode of thinking, the New York Times has some news which may jar your viewpoint. It seems that our Gitmo techniques are based on those that the Chinese Communists used on US prisoners during the Korean War.

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. [...]

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."

And this part should highlight just how ridiculous the claims of Cheney and others supporting the use of torture really are.

The 1957 article (pdf) 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.

Amazing what you'll confess to when experiencing manipulation and pain that drives you out of your mind. That another country would base military and foreign policy on the words that result from such methods is mind-boggling. That the United States would do it is heart-breaking. We know better than that or we should.