Obama admin official: Interrogation techniques we banned actually work (but we banned them anyway)

[one...two...tree 2,762]

So we aspire to be like communists?

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

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.

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.”

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. “I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.”

Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects.

The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Personally I don't think the interrogation techniques are as much of an issue as the suspension of habeas corpus, and the trial-lawyer twisting of legal definitions to dehumanise people and justify their mistreatment.

That a few people were wrongly arrested and shipped off to some black hole prison for "the treatment" gets no more attention other than that "you have to break eggs to make an ommelette". Shameful.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Personally I don't think the interrogation techniques are as much of an issue as the suspension of habeas corpus, and the trial-lawyer twisting of legal definitions to dehumanise people and justify their mistreatment.

That a few people were wrongly arrested and shipped off to some black hole prison for "the treatment" gets no more attention other than that "you have to break eggs to make an ommelette". Shameful.

...or the fact that those who condemned other governments for their torturing of enemy combatants, but justify it when we use it.

[Bobby+Umit 161]

Tortured or beheaded....

Tough choice.

Guess it depends which side your on - and what your willing to do.

but in the end, barbarians will always win.

For either side...

[Caladan 19]

That's not what the guy says, if you read the whole article. He says that there was some actionable information that may or may not have been obtainable by other means (probably -- the first guy to interrogate KSM didn't torture him and had plenty of useful information from him) and that he is not sure whether the program is effective.

Torture has been around for thousands of years because some human beings enjoy cruelty. It doesn't say much about its effectiveness for information gathering.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Tortured or beheaded....

Tough choice.

Guess it depends which side your on - and what your willing to do.

but in the end, barbarians will always win.

For either side...

So Communists win?

[sara..... 371]

i still dont see how this works, trust me when i say if they did that to me i would agree to anything they accused me of and tell any rumors i had ever heard in tea shop, on the street, kids talking u name it they would get it.........so how is that we can really state that this kind of technique works? seems to me a lot of misinformation and false leads would come out of this just to get them to stop.

sara

[one...two...tree 2,762]

i still dont see how this works, trust me when i say if they did that to me i would agree to anything they accused me of and tell any rumors i had ever heard in tea shop, on the street, kids talking u name it they would get it.........so how is that we can really state that this kind of technique works? seems to me a lot of misinformation and false leads would come out of this just to get them to stop.

sara

It doesn't, Sara. The poster of this thread was twisting the truth a bit to make it sound as if Dennis Blair endorses torture.

See Caladan's post.

[_Simpson_ 250]

i still dont see how this works, trust me when i say if they did that to me i would agree to anything they accused me of and tell any rumors i had ever heard in tea shop, on the street, kids talking u name it they would get it.........so how is that we can really state that this kind of technique works? seems to me a lot of misinformation and false leads would come out of this just to get them to stop.

sara

It doesn't, Sara. The poster of this thread was twisting the truth a bit to make it sound as if Dennis Blair endorses torture.

See Caladan's post.

They could try to verify the info that the tortured person gave them.

[sara..... 371]

i still dont see how this works, trust me when i say if they did that to me i would agree to anything they accused me of and tell any rumors i had ever heard in tea shop, on the street, kids talking u name it they would get it.........so how is that we can really state that this kind of technique works? seems to me a lot of misinformation and false leads would come out of this just to get them to stop.

sara

It doesn't, Sara. The poster of this thread was twisting the truth a bit to make it sound as if Dennis Blair endorses torture.

See Caladan's post.

They could try to verify the info that the tortured person gave them.

the problem is thats wasting so much time on false information obtained by these techniques.

u know i was in Pakistan

when nine eleven happened soon after that money was being paid for anyone that could provide a terrorist, the problem with that was that many innocent people were picked up, if there was an enemy of a family was an easy fix and also profitable, if some one was starving and trying to feed their family easy money, there were a lot of people picked up that had absolutely nothing to do with what happened to our country, do u think that any leads those people

gave that were subjected to that treatment were viable?

sara

[almaty 19]

Tortured or beheaded....

Tough choice.

Guess it depends which side your on - and what your willing to do.

but in the end, barbarians will always win.

For either side...

So Communists win?

of course, it is a natural progression of society and history...Marx/Engels

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Personally I don't think the interrogation techniques are as much of an issue as the suspension of habeas corpus, and the trial-lawyer twisting of legal definitions to dehumanise people and justify their mistreatment.

That a few people were wrongly arrested and shipped off to some black hole prison for "the treatment" gets no more attention other than that "you have to break eggs to make an ommelette". Shameful.

...or the fact that those who condemned other governments for their torturing of enemy combatants, but justify it when we use it.

Well that's an illusion that's been perpetuated by successive US administrations. Personally I don't think that there's been a single war since WW2 that was "necessary" and could not have been resolved through other means. That hasn't stopped our politicians wrapping these things in the flag as a way of perpetuating the illusion that we're somehow "better" than the people we're fighting.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Tortured or beheaded....

Tough choice.

Guess it depends which side your on - and what your willing to do.

but in the end, barbarians will always win.

For either side...

So Communists win?

of course, it is a natural progression of society and history...Marx/Engels

Wow! A student!

Socialism (communism) is the inevitable conclusion of the fall of capitalism. Of course Trotsky and Mao took shortcuts by using facism as a foil.

[The_Dude 1,142]

Tortured or beheaded....

Tough choice.

Guess it depends which side your on - and what your willing to do.

but in the end, barbarians will always win.

For either side...

So Communists win?

of course, it is a natural progression of society and history...Marx/Engels

Wow! A student!

Socialism (communism) is the inevitable conclusion of the fall of capitalism. Of course Trotsky and Mao took shortcuts by using facism as a foil.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Tortured or beheaded....

Tough choice.

Guess it depends which side your on - and what your willing to do.

but in the end, barbarians will always win.

For either side...

So Communists win?

of course, it is a natural progression of society and history...Marx/Engels

Wow! A student!

Socialism (communism) is the inevitable conclusion of the fall of capitalism. Of course Trotsky and Mao took shortcuts by using facism as a foil.

So Bush and his Administrations were students of Socialism. It's all starting to make sense.