Dick Cheney is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life

Well, now we know that the implementation of the Bush torture policy was based on so called Chinese brainwashing techniques from the 1950s.

What we also know is that these techniques were never about getting truth from prisoners, it was about making them lie.

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.

In fact, it was not just the 1950s, and it was not just the Chinese.

The North Vietnamese used these techniques to get John McCain to make an, "anti-American propaganda "confession".

This is where torture has taken us.

•  Tip Jar

  If you don't know the reference in the title, you need to watch more classic movies.

  Besides Angela Lansbury is hot in that movie.

  by LunkHead on Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 07:46:49 AM PDT

  •  "Angela Lansbury is hot in that movie"

    In a likely-to-cut-your-yarbles-off kind of way....

    by ArtSchmart on Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 07:56:54 AM PDT

    •  To Quote Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox

      Some of them want to abuse you,
      Some of them want to be abused

      <insert cow picture here>

      by LunkHead on Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 07:59:45 AM PDT

  •  Angela Lansbury was hot in Manchurian Candidate??

    Must be a guy thing...Call me crazy but I prefer Liev Schriber in the remake. Now THAT'S hot!

    by Leigh3352 on Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 08:36:27 AM PDT

•  THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!

  All I'm saying is, in the future Cardassians will also use this torture method.

  by greatn on Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 07:50:39 AM PDT

  •  I Dunno, I Always Considered ST:TNG to Be Torture

    When was on, my favorite SF show was ALF.

    by LunkHead on Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 07:52:18 AM PDT

•  No one should be surprised

  Lynne Cheney, who is as splendid and brilliant a woman as I have ever known in my life and without question one of the best and most patriotic influences on our national discourse, argued years ago that American history courses should be state propaganda, that they should show America in a good light.

  These so-called conservatives come from the most virulent strains of Trotskyism, Leninism and Maoism. They are and have always been unable to see information through any other lens than propaganda, unable to analyze it in any other way than a sales pitch for one power or another. This is the most extreme manifestation, but par for the course considering their influences.

  Tipped and rec'd. This needs to get out into the popular consciousness.

  by oldjohnbrown on Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 08:06:44 AM PDT

  •  Need Snark tag

    like this:
    <snark>Lynne Cheney, who is as splendid and brilliant a woman as I have ever known in my life and without question one of the best and most patriotic influences on our national discourse,</snark>

    by LunkHead on Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 08:30:36 AM PDT

    •  Nah

      That just takes all the fun away.

      by oldjohnbrown on Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 08:58:33 AM PDT