For literally years now, I've been using this blog to argue that the torture regime put in place under the Bush administration in response to the threat of terrorism (in Cheney's words, our trip to the "dark side") is essentially the same regime once created by our communist foes. And that as such, we have become the very thing we once fought so hard to oppose.
Ever time I write a post like that, I get a flurry of emails from angry readers suggesting that I either misunderstand the program or misunderstand the threat we face. Or both.
You can scratch that first critique of your list.
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.
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 Albert 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."
... The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."
Let that sink in, and sink in deep. We modeled our interrogation programs after a regime designed explicitly to extract false confessions. Got that? False confessions.
There have always been two components to the anti-torture argument: it is immoral, and it does not work. I shouldn't have ever had to argue the first point. And now, I should never have to argue the second point again.
What began with George Washington ended with George Bush, and what was lost will never be able to be recovered. Two hundred years of tradition have been lost forever, and our nation's reputation will never be the same again.
"Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause... for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country." -- George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775
It did not have to be this way. It does not need to be this way. This must end. This is not who we are.
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