"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Along with “24,” guess who else the Bush administraton learned interrogation from?

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 atGuantánamo 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.
....

Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects.

The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “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.”

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

We can now proudly add Communist China to the list of countries that gave us “Enhanced interrogation.” Yes, the same Red China that we fought against in the Korean War, that used these same techniques against our own soldiers. Well, we sure have the moral high ground in the WOT now, don’t we?

Go ahead. Tell me again how this kind of crap is justifiable. Go on. I dare you.

Update by Lee: Remember, everyone, it’s only torture and immoral when they do it, because they do it for the wrong reasons.  It’s righteous and virtuous and completely in the spirit of what America purports to stand for when we do it because we do it for the right reasons.

Anyone remember when moral relativism was something conservatives used to (rightly) criticize liberals for supporting?

Update by Lee: By Radley Balko.

This actually isn’t all that new. It’s covered in Charlie Savage’s book, Takeover. The moral failing here is bad enough. But the ineptitude doesn’t end there. The whole purpose of the Air Force study was to figure out how the Chinese were able to elicit false confessions from American soldiers and pilots during the Korean War. U.S. special forces troops are put through these interrogation techniques during training so they’ll recognize them–not so they won’t give up classified information, but so they won’t submit to giving fake information for propaganda purposes, as happened in Korea.

Those techniques were then adopted at Guantanamo. Which leaves us with one of two possibilities. The first is that this administration is so incompetent that it was foolishly using techniques the military has known for decades lead to false confessions in a bumbling effort to collect real intelligence. That would be bad enough. But at least that would indicate mere incompetence. The second possibility is even scarier: The administration knew the history of these techniques but adopted them anyway, because it wanted confessions it could then trumpet to the public as successes in the war on terror–and they didn’t much care whether or not they were false.”

You be the judge.  My guess is on the latter half of the last sentence.