Thursday, July 03, 2008
Editorial: The Manchurian interrogation chart
Communist brainwashing techniques are hurting the U.S. from within, though not the way Hollywood once imagined.
From the RoundTable blog
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An independent, unnamed interrogation expert tipped off The New York Times recently to the origins of coercive methods the military taught, and in a few cases used on prisoners, post-9/11 at Guantanamo.
The methods were taken verbatim from a chart in a 1957 Air Force study on techniques the Chinese Communists used during the Korean War to get American POWs to confess to atrocities.
Back then, the United States referred to the techniques as torture, which is what they were and what they remain today, irrespective of who uses them.
The effects then on American prisoners were known quite properly as brainwashing. Many of the confessions the POWs made were false.
Yet military interrogators used some of the methods on a few suspected terrorists at Guantanamo between December 2002, when the "coercive management techniques" were taught, and December 2005, when Congress banned their use by the military.
President Bush continues to authorize the CIA to use secret "alternative" interrogation methods based, The Times reports, on the same military training program, known as SERE -- Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. What the military and CIA seemed to have forgotten in drawing on SERE was that the program was developed to help captured U.S. personnel resist enemy attempts to get them to make false confessions.
The Times' source pointed the newspaper to a 1957 article by sociologist Alfred Biderman, now deceased, titled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War." Biderman had interviewed POWs returning from North Korea and drawn up the chart that, perversely, ended up in an interrogation training class at Gitmo.
Among the tortures Biderman wrote about were forcing American prisoners to stand "for exceedingly long periods," exposing them to extreme cold and depriving them of sleep -- not the needle-under-the-fingernails kind of torture that inhabits the popular imagination, but cruelly intolerable.
And as with all forms of torture, ineffective if what the interrogators are pursuing is the truth.
Yes, the Chinese forced confessions they could use effectively for propaganda. But U.S. interrogators are not supposed to be interested in that. The Bush administration continues to insist these same techniques are regrettably necessary to get information to prevent another 9/11.
A White House in the habit of shutting out unpleasant truths remains blind to this one: People being tortured eventually will say anything, true or not, to stop the torture.
Proponents would hang the nation's security on that thin thread, and betray all that it is supposed to mean to be American.
