About the Author
The Author
Andrew Heyman lives and works in Seattle Washington USA. His true vocation is political writing and agitating for the radical idea that a society that is governed by, and serves the needs of the people is best.
Andrew is also the member of a wonderful family with his loving wife, Pam, and the proud father of 2 wonderful children, Josie and Adam. They all keep him from becoming immersed in blogging to an unhealthy degree, and remind him of why he cares about what is going on in this world in the first place.
You can email him at kiacyclic-AT-gmail.com.
US Interrogators Turn to Classic Study on Torture for Tips
I have no doubt that there will still be those who are going to dismiss the latest evidence that the US government has in fact been torturing prisoners in the War OF Terror. I am also sure that anyone who speaks-out against this corruption of basic human rights will be labeled as aiding the terrorists and being a threat to national security.
And of course the New York Times will once again be attacked for printing the truth:
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.
So in the past the US government classified our methods as torture, but today when it is the government itself who is performing them, they are magically transformed into "tough" ones that are still "safe" and "legal."
Bullshit.
You may be asking yourself, "Well maybe we took a few things from the Chinese, but surely the worst was not included." I hate to break it to you, but according to the Times:
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.”
So let's not pussyfoot around the reality of what we are doing. This is what we have become:
This latest revelation in our government's on-going crime is hardly surprising. In fact the only thing surprising at this point is that no one is being held accountable for it, aside of course from some low level reservists at Abu Ghraib.