It’s not that U.S. interrogators were winging it with detainees at Guantanamo Bay, without any guidelines or suggested tactics; it’s that the interrogators were given the wrong model to follow. Trainers ended up using, “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.”
The military trainers who came to Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
As Matt Yglesias responded, “I’ve seen lots of commentary on the revelation that Bush administration torture techniques have been modeled on the work of the ChiComs but not much specific focus on the fact that the main purpose of these Chinese torture techniques was to elicit false confessions…. [T]o literally rip your techniques off from a study called ‘Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War’ requires some level of obliviousness I wasn’t aware of.”
Indeed, it makes that much more difficult to deny the use of torture when you’re relying on a guide of abusive tactics used by the Chinese during the Korean War — the very tactics the U.S. has always labeled “torture.”
And in the broader context, let’s not forget that Bush administration policy relied on Soviet-style secret prisons, and then utilized Chinese torture techniques, used to elicit false confessions.
How patriotic.
The phrase “historical amnesia” seems entirely appropriate.
In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.
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.”
For what it’s worth, you might be wondering how we came to learn about all of this (at least I was). As it turns out, materials from Guantanamo, including the coercive-methods chart, were “made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.”
No one realized, however, that that the chart originated in a journal article on Communist tactics five decades ago. An “independent expert on interrogation” recognized it, and alerted the New York Times.
And the shame of the Bush administration continues….