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[Update] The title has been changed to better reflect content of diary.
China has become the Nr. 1 auto producer on this globe, the Bush administration has based their harsh interrogation techniques on the Chinese torture methods of the Korean War:
(TIME) – The real verdict on the value of such harsh interrogations can be gleaned from their origins, which top Bush Administration officials didn’t even know about, according to the New York Times. The techniques the CIA drew on ultimately go back to an article written for the Air Force about Chinese torture techniques during the Korean War, entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War.” As the title indicates, the Chinese intent was to produce false confessions, not obtain vital intelligence.
What is now clear is that the CIA was drawn haphazardly into abusive interrogation, haphazardly fell back on vague ideas of torture, and ended up with the vaguest results.
We now know that VP Cheney ordered torture methods to get Al Qaeda operatives to confess to a link between Saddam Hussein and 911 to facilitate approval for the Iraq invasion.
(New York Times) – 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.”
BRAINWASHING FOR POLITICAL PURPOSE
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.”
(TIME) – He’s the special agent who came in from the cold — and waded straight into the debate over the use of harsh interrogation techniques. Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent and perhaps the most successful U.S. interrogator of al-Qaeda operatives, says the use of those techniques was unnecessary and often counterproductive. Detainees, he says, provided vital intelligence under non-violent questioning, before they were put through “walling” and waterboarding.
Amid the politically charged debate over the techniques, Soufan‘s criticism carries special weight because it comes from someone intimately familiar with the little-understood art of extracting information from hard-as-nails jihadists. As a supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005 — and one of the FBI’s few Arabic speakers — Soufan was involved in a string of crucial investigations and interrogations, from the Millennium Bombing plot in Jordan to the U.S.S. Cole bombing in Yemen and a number of Gitmo interrogations. His greatest success was the interrogation of Abu Jandal, bin Laden’s former bodyguard.
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(FAIR) – During the insurrection against the U.S. occupation of the Philippines (1899-1902), the U.S. military tortured suspected members of the Filipino resistance with a similar technique that they referred to as the “water cure.” A Washington Post (9/23/1902) news article on this practice, which referred to it as “the form of torture known as the water cure,” was typical of newspaper reporting of the time–which used the term “water cure” more or less interchangeably with the word “torture.” When a U.S. Army major was court-martialed and then found not guilty after being accused of administering the “water cure” to Filipinos, the Post reported on the verdict (6/7/1902) under the headline “Torture Is Upheld.” Similarly, a Chicago Daily Tribune headline (1/9/1903) referred to “torture orders” in an article about another army major accused of having authorized the use of the “water cure.” Newspaper reports about the use of the “water cure” by U.S. occupation forces in Haiti similarly identified it as “torture” (New York Times, 5/4/1907, 5/9/1921). [Philipinos and White Supremacy – 1899]
Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire:
The Philippine-American War as Race War
Following World War II, when U.S. military tribunals tried Japanese military officials for war crimes for torturing prisoners of war, graphic accounts surfaced about the practice called “the water treatment,” which, as federal judge and laws of war scholar Evan Wallach observed (Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 2007), “differ[ed] very little” from the “descriptions of waterboarding as it is currently applied.” One of the common practices of the Japanese military was described as follows in the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East: “The victim was tied or held down on his back and cloth placed over his nose and mouth. Water was then poured on the cloth.”
This practice, first defined in the New York Times (7/27/42) as “forced drownings,” was referred to by the Washington Post (10/7/46) as “water torture” and by the New York Times (9/6/45) as “the Oriental `water torture.'” Other newspaper accounts (New York Times, 8/16/42, 8/31/42, 12/25/45, 7/26/47; Washington Post, 9/6/42; Chicago Tribune, 6/9/46) unequivocally defined the “water treatment” as a form of torture. Meanwhile, reports of the use of identical practices against American POWs in the Korean War were covered in the New York Times (8/9/53) as “stories of planned and deliberate torture.”
Over a decade later, “water torture” was mentioned in the headline of a Washington Post article (3/15/68) about the Australian army’s admission that a soldier had administered the “water treatment” to a Vietnamese woman suspected of being a guerilla. Six months later, the Post (8/12/68) published a front-page photographic expose of U.S. soldiers administering this same “water treatment” to a Vietnamese prisoner. A follow-up report in the Post (10/29/70) referred to this practice, which resulted in charges against the commander of the U.S. Army troops in South Vietnam, as “an ancient Oriental torture called `the water treatment.'”
Media reports commonly used the term “water torture” to describe the Cambodian Khmer Rouge’s practice of tying prisoners to a board and pouring water over their noses and mouths. In a feature article about the late Cambodian artist Vann Nath, who painted pictures of the Pol Pot regime’s various torture devices (including perhaps the clearest visual precursor of today’s “water board”), the L.A. Times (8/8/97) described the artist’s “contributions to history as a witness to the systematic torture and execution of Pol Pot’s victims. He painted images of acts he witnessed or heard described while in prison: electric shock treatment, water torture.” The San Diego Union-Tribune (12/16/89) also referred to the Khmer Rouge’s methods of interrogating through “water torture.”
In 1983, media reports on the trial of a Texas sheriff who had used a technique remarkably similar to today’s “waterboarding” also used the term “water torture” (UPI, 8/31/83, 9/1/83, 9/7/83). One article published in the New York Times (9/2/83) about the case began, “Two convicted burglars testified today that they had watched in fear as a former East Texas sheriff and his deputies used a water torture.” In another New York Times article (9/1/83), the news that “another former deputy testified that they had handcuffed prisoners to chairs, placed towels over their faces and poured water on the cloth until the prisoners gave what the officers considered confessions” was summarized with the headline: “Ex-Deputy Tells Jury of Jail Water Torture.”
DROP BY DROP:
FORGETTING THE HISTORY OF
WATER TORTURE IN U.S. COURTS (pdf)
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Hi Oui, I am so ashamed of what has been done in our names. I only wished I had the power to do what I deem needs to be done to those who did the most horrid acts of torture. I want to start from the top and go down to catch them all. I do not care about the political part of it I want to make it an act of lawlessness. prosecute them all. I know we need intelligence and we need the right kind of it to make things more secure for us all. It has been proven that torture does not get it.
I have been reading articles where they tortured children of those they held in captivity. Now I ask you what god is that except to breed contempt and hatred. KSM stated he wanted his children to go to their heaven and that if they die a martyr for the cause then so be it. So, then why did they not understand this!!!! [the cia and their cohorts the contractors].
I am simply overwhelmed as to the medical ppl that did what they did to facilitate this behavior..not only the BISCITS but the mds and the ancillary medical persons. This is so shameful. For the most part, most ppl do not understand the chemistry behind what lactic acid produces and the electrolyte insufficiency that became most obvious. I am just wondering what and how many deaths occurred that we have no knowledge of.
This will be like a snowball rolling down hill when it all comes out.
Yes I am truly ashamed of those who did what they did in my name. I want them all to be taken to trial and given what punishment they deserve…..PERIOD!!!!!
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(E&P) April 23, 2009 — With each new revelation on U.S. torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo (and who, knows, probably elsewhere), I am reminded of the chilling story of Alyssa Peterson, who I have written about numerous times in the past three years but now with especially sad relevance. Appalled when ordered to take part in interrogations that, no doubt, involved what we would call torture, she refused, then killed herself a few days later, in September 2003.
Of course, we now know from the torture memos and the U.S. Senate committee probe and various new press reports, that the “Gitmo-izing” of Iraq was happening just at the time Alyssa got swept up in it.
Alyssa Peterson was one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq. A cover-up, naturally, followed.
Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Ariz., native, served with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. Peterson was an Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on Sept. 15, 2003, from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”
The KNAU report also stated that Army spokespeople for Peterson’s unit refused to describe the interrogation techniques and that all records of the techniques have been destroyed.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."to Suicide
Or to “suicide.”
I am willing to believe she died from a gunshot wound.
All else is conjecture.
The dead tell no tales.