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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Guantanamo interrogation class built on China's Korean war brainwashing?

The shock of this article is certainly that the US was training at Guantanamo with torture techniques practiced by the Chinese in the Korean war (condemned as torture and brainwashing at the time,) but let's be sure not to miss the more important point, that these torture techniques were known to produce false confessions.
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 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.

Kinda makes you wonder about all those claims by the Bush administration of terror attacks prevented.

(PS. I think it's also notable that even these Chinese tactics, condemned as torture at the time, don't include waterboarding.)

2 Comments:

  • Kinda makes you wonder about all those claims by the Bush administration of terror attacks prevented.

    It's always hard to judge due to the incredible secrecy of the Administration, but my read is that the majority of the "very useful intelligence" came from KSM, who was delusional and seriously mentally ill. In the recent McClatchy report, it came through repeatedly that nobody was really examining the effectiveness of the interrogations. If somebody "talked", it was "successful".

    As always, if we do it, it isn't torture.

    I'd say more, but Al-Qaeda might be reading this blog.

    By Blogger Todd Dugdale , at 9:27 AM  

  • I see the potential "prevented attack" like this.

    We capture detainee x. We torture and get a confession of something, true or not. It doesn't happen (maybe because it was a false confession) and we claim credit that by detaining this guy we've broken the ring on this attack.

    The thing is, I doubt that any false confessions are out of whole cloth. They are probably ideas that were abandoned that are exaggerated to stop the torture, but that means that there may be some trail out there to support a false confession.

    You never end up knowing if it was real or not, but it didn't happen, so it was prevented.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 10:44 AM  

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