Won't somebody tell me
Answer if you can
Won't somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?
-Blind Willie Johnson
The New York Times confirms today what we already knew - the torture archipelago that stretches from Diego Garcia to Guantanamo was inspired by Chinese torture techniques used on Americans in the Korean War and...Vietnam:
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.
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 only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."
Red Wind, Alien Abductee, and others around the internets have already documented this little atrocity today.
But I'm pondering a couple of different implications of the routine use of torture that was specifically designed to extract false information.
We already know that evidence of WMD's in Iraq cited by Colin Powell in his appalling performance before the UN was, in fact, false information extracted under torture:
The "operative", we now know, was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi. He was waterboarded and given Bush-approved hypothermia treatment, i.e. frozen till he could take it no longer. It was only then that he told of al Qaeda's links with Saddam's WMDs. Guess what? Libbi subsequently retracted his confession. According to ABC News, the CIA subsequently found al-Libbi "had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment." So I now realize that part of the reason I believed the WMD case for war against Saddam was because the Bush administration had been secretly torturing suspects and got false confessions. The biggest intelligence failure in recent US history - the WMD case in Iraq - was partly created by the torture policy.
Ponder for a moment the recursive nature of torture. There is a direct line from the torture that produced the invasion of Iraq to the prison floor of Abu Gharib.
Now ponder the soul of John McCain.
These are exactly the same techniques that were used to torture John McCain. They elicited false confessions from him, just like they elicited false confessions from everyone else this stuff gets tried on.
What kind of man, having personally experienced this kind of treatment and fully understanding the purpose of this kind of torture, would support it as a cornerstone of their quest for political power? How can anybody take such a person seriously?