U.S. torture tactics borrowed from Communist China?

Sleep deprivation. Prolonged constraint. Exposure.

Those are some of the techniques approved for use by U.S. military personnel on Guantanamo Bay in the early days, back before 2005, when Congress banned coercion by military personnel.

Now, the New York Times, citing an unnamed interrogation expert, contends that the U.S. Army borrowed those tactics from a 1957 Air Force study of the techniques used by Chinese Communists to elicit confessions from American prisoners during the Korean War. Apparently there were videotapes of U.S. prisoners confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Speaking of interrogation techniques, Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens reports in the August issue that he tried waterboarding -- at his editor's request -- to determine whether it qualifies as torture. His conclusion: it does.

The thing is, this looks like a direct steal from the Wall Street Journal, which reported last January that three friends had tried waterboarding in the New Mexico desert.

According to the Journal article, Jean-Pierre Larroque, a Peace Corps volunteer, and two friends were having a heated debate about waterboarding over a pizza dinner and decided to test it out. They came to the same conclusion.

"This leaves no mark, no trace. It's almost like the ideal way of torturing

someone," said Larroque. "This is torture 2.0."

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: Brennan Linsley/AP

Comments

[freeman]

Yeah, waterboarding is turture, duh. Maybe Bush learned about it in Texas when the Feds convicted a Texas sherrif of using it on prisoners. What do you think he'd say of it if it we're done to his daughters?

[Sal B]

If the president says waterboarding isn't torture, it isn't. If common sense says it is, maybe not. If a famous writer says it is torture, it must be.

[thebob.bob]

And what was it about the N. Koreans made them members of the "axis of evil", their torture methods? Hey, why not. The Bush Crime Family has got every other crime family in the world beat, hands down. Why not borrow from the best?

[tell. truth]

then Hitler is innocent of Holocaust

If that is the case, then Hitler is innocent of Holocaust . He and Germans simply follow English Massacres at London (1189)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_England#Massacres_at_London_and_York_.281189.E2.80.931190.29

Or the storm troopers can be excused since they merely follow Spanish Jews persecution and massacres (1300 to 1391) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Spain#Official_persecution_and_massacres_.281300_to_1391.29

US Senator Carl Levin seems to agree There is more at Google news;
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ncl=1225545114&scoring=n

[Tom in California]

Of course, what Hitchens and these three guys experienced isn't even close to the real thing. Even though the physical sensations may be similar, they all know from the beginning that this is just an experiment, that they won't really be harmed, and that they can call it off whenever they like.

In real world application, tortured detainees are helpless and have no control over their circumstances. They have no reason to believe they will not be killed by their captors. (As indeed, some prisoners have been killed.) Obviously, their pain and distress would go far beyond anything Hitchens or this guy in the youtube video experienced. Just as obviously, torture will yield little usable intelligence, because persons exposed to this kind of criminal abuse will fabricate anything they can think of to get their torturers to stop.

In the war crimes trials after the second world war, we sentenced Japanese officers convicted of waterboarding allied prisoners to lengthy terms of imprisonment. We should do the same with practitioners of torture today. That mean's not only the soldiers, contractors, and CIA agents who do the deed, but also the criminals at the top of the power structure who authorized and directed the practices. That means Addington and Yoo. Ashcroft and Gonzales. Cheney and Bush. May they rot in prison, as they so richly deserve!

[Joe]

We do not and have never used torture. We have used interrogation techniques. I've seen these used as our training tools on escape and evade courses in the Marines and Army. The Air Force had a similar course, but I never saw it performed. The paper uses "unnamed Sources", that means they have been made up. Don't be fooled by these liars. They have an agenda. It is harmful to the U.S. and they are not going to stop the trash journalism. Enough said.