China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
Here's an interesting article about interrogation techniques used at Guantánamo that were developed by China over 50 years ago.
New York Times
July 2, 2008
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
By Scott Shane
WASHINGTON ?? 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 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.
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 condition of anonymity.
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.
Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been ??brainwashed,? and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies?? harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.
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.?
A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. ??I can??t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,? Colonel Ryder said. ??I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear ?? we treat all detainees humanely.?
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.?
The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators ??the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.?
The sessions included ??an in-depth class on Biderman??s Principles,? the message said, referring to the chart from Mr. Biderman??s 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as ??Biderman??s Chart of Coercion,? have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members.
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.
??It saddens me,? said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called ??thought reform? and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a ??180-degree turn.?
The harshest known interrogation at Guantánamo was that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qahtani??s interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese.
Terror charges against Mr. Qahtani were dropped unexpectedly in May. Officials said the charges could be reinstated later and declined to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani??s treatment.
Mr. Bush has defended the interrogation methods, saying they helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist attacks. But the issue continues to complicate the long-delayed prosecutions now proceeding at Guantánamo.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?hp
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
This really goes against everything that the west stands for but it??s not surprising when its coming from a foreign influence i.e. Neo-Cons.
The neoconservative movement is not conservative at all. I see a lot of people misjudging their movement as conservative. The neoconservatives are at the far-left of the spectrum. There is nothing conservative about a campaign in the Middle East and uprooting regimes around the world. Their movement has distinct Trotskyite roots.
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
A sad day when we take techniques from communist torture handbooks, but not all to surprising with the direction this country has taken. I'm curious as to how helpful the information obtained actually is, considering it was originally used to get false confessions.
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fugitive
This really goes against everything that the west stands for but it??s not surprising when its coming from a foreign influence i.e. Neo-Cons.
Gee...Last week I was just telling my wife the same thing about facists. You know...the brainwashed progressives that mistakenly call themselves democrats. Granted...some of them are really misunderstood marxists, but labels can be so constricting.
Sure would like to see the author's links to proof of his accusations, but likely it's the same slight of hand these modern day "editorialists" commonly rely. (journalists answer questions with fact. Editorialists cherry-pick 'facts' to support a cause or a point of view)
Regardless of what interrogation techniques we use, none of the terrorists in our custody has ended-up like Daniel Pearl. (while being video taped, the journalist was beheaded and the video was then distributed worldwide) Hmm, I wonder if we'll give the terrorists the same media coverage, when they hang. That would be just.
Fearful of these interrogation policies affecting you...? When was the last time a US citizen was tortured as a matter of any administration policy...? When was the last time you heard of a terrorist group giving our soldiers or our civillians any form of rights? Who was the last innocent beheaded, after his rights were upheld at trial?
Fuck the terrorists, and really...fuck those that support the terrorists "constitutional rights".
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rusty Trichome
Fuck the terrorists, and really...fuck those that support the terrorists "constitutional rights".
what he said!!!:thumbsup:
whiskeytango
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
I fail to see the logic of invading Iraq because of 9/11. Amidst the anger and chaos neocons seized the chance to invade for their own agenda. What has the war in Iraq done to benefit your country? 4,000 soldiers killed that's more than 9/11. Trillions of dollars spent. If the Republican Party is conservative then answer me why they're printing money out of thin air, leaving the Mexican border open and spreading democracy to people who don't want it.
In other news indigenous European fertility rates are at 1.2 that means for every generation there is a decline of 40%
France today is 25 percent non-White (mostly Muslim). Five to six million Muslims live in France that??s 8-9.6% and those numbers are from 2005.
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More are on the way. Today, the Muslim birth rate in Europe is three times higher than the non-Muslim one. If current trends continue, the Muslim population of Europe will nearly double by 2015
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No one wants to talk about racial or religious issues, but it merits consideration that the vast majority of immigrants to the European Union are Muslims from North Africa, the Middle East and Turkey. By the year 2150, barring a major shift in either native European fertility rates or immigrant nationality, Europe will be a largely Muslim continent with whites and Christians as minorities composing less than 20 percent of the population. Much of Europe has come to terms with that possibility, but a significant portion of the population is uncomfortable about the prospect of a change in Europe??s continental character, warranting wider spread support for xenophobic political parties across the continent.
Yale Daily News - White Europeans: An endangered species?
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fugitive
I fail to see the logic of invading Iraq because of 9/11.
I'm sure it's not just the logic you fail to see. As I'm sure you were not part of the intelligence community, with all the insight that goes into a decision like the one President Bush was confronted with...I'm not worried about why. I'm more concerned with...why not sooner...? In response to embassy attacks abroad, Ol' Clinton lobbing a few ICBM's into tents in the Afghan desert to deflect from his blue dress problems is disconcerting at the very least. No foresight or justice on that administrations' mind, that's for sure. In multiple attacks, terrorist kills scores of US serviceman and diplomats, and he just didn't seem to give a shit.
Oh, and by the way...wasn't it Saddam Hussein that was paying Palestinian homicide bombers' families $10,000 to blow up busloads of innocent Israeli citizens? An admitted and proud sponsor of international terrorism. Now that he's gone, notice that shit doesn't happen too much any more?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fugitive
If the Republican Party is conservative then answer me why they're printing money out of thin air.
Likely because the democrats wouldn't have it any other way. Democratic earmarks are attached to virtually every bill, budgetary or otherwise. The word 'blackmail' comes to mind after reading some of the bills.
Regarding the immigration issue...<shifts uneasily in chair> I really have no clue, but I've been clueless before so it's not too traumatic.
However, I don't choose an elected official based on one issue.
Sorry, I seem to have devolved from the original topic...
