Coercive Management Techniques

A chart of the Chinese methods, compiled in 1957 by an American sociologist, lists the methods, among them, “Sleep Deprivation,” “Semi-Starvation,” “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” “Prolonged Constraint,” and “Exposure.”

The effects are listed, too: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” “Reduces Prisoner to `Animal Level’ Concerns,” and others.

On July 2, The New York Times reported that the chart had made a surprise return appearance, this time at Guantanamo Bay, where in 2002 it was used in a course to teach our military interrogators “Coercive Management Techniques,” to be used when interrogating detainees held there as prisoners in the “war on terror.”

In other words, we had adopted the inhumane tactics of enemies past, tactics we once were quick to call torture. Tactics created not to get at the truth but to manufacture lies that we then characterize as credible.

History of waterboarding

WASHINGTON (IHT) July 2, 2008 – The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From the Air Force Prisoners of War” [pdf] and written by Alfred Biderman, a sociologist then working for the air force, who died in 2003.

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 prompted 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 CIA 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.

(New Zealand News) July 21, 2008 – Britain should no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture on terrorism suspects, an influential committee of MPs said in a report released.

Britain had previously taken those assurances on face value but after the CIA acknowledged “waterboarding” three detainees, Britain should change its stance, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said in its annual report on human rights.

“Outsourcing terror” allegations

Miliband was forced to apologize to parliament in February after it emerged two US planes carrying terrorism suspects on rendition flights had landed and refuelled at a US base on the British Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia in 2002 despite previous government denials based on US assurances.

Last night on the O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly and guest Laura Ingraham slammed Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) for declaring in Berlin yesterday that the U.S. will “reject torture and stand for the rule of law.” “Enough is enough with this torture nonsense,” O’Reilly whined, declaring it “rank anti-American propaganda” to claim the U.S. has tortured people.

(ThinkProgress) – According to the Times, “several members of the conservative legal community” in Washington D.C. are urging Bush to issue “pre-emptive pardons” to those involved so as to “not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills”:

Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.