Toward Democracy

Manchurian Candidate USA

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

A scant two days before the USA's annual celebration of independence, the New York Times had the poor taste to rain on our patriotic parade. An article by reporter Scott Shane revealed that in December 2002, military trainers at Guantanamo Bay used a chart in the training of interrogators showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged restraint,” and “exposure.”


"Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military." - Scott ShaneSo what’s new, you say? Serves the #&%#@’s right,?  But wait. 

“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.”

Who knew?

Seeing the light of day at a June 17 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, the 1957 article from whence the chart came was titled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War.”

Guess we learned something from the Communists after all.

The New York Times report can be seen here.