WASHINGTON: US military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay prison in 2002 reportedly based their interrogation classes on techniques used by the Chinese Communists in the 1950s, techniques which had been labeled as torture by the American government.
These interrogation trainers used “coercive management techniques” that were “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.”
An interrogation expert told Tuesday’s New York Times that a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques,” part of a 2002 Guantanamo training class, was copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of techniques used on American prisoners.
“In 2002, the [military] training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the CIA and the military,” the paper said.
“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.”
Several Guantanamo documents, including the chart outlining the coercive methods, were made public at the Senate hearing on June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.
The documents which show the techniques used at Guantanamo, which included “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.” were brought to light in June during a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting. The committee investigators say they did not know the source. Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D- Michigan, said that every American citizen would be stunned to find out that the chart’s source is actually a verbatim copy from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques.
“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Levin added. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.” Some of those methods were used against some prisoners at Guantanamo before 2005, the year when the use of coercion was banned by the Congress.
Only the CIA is still authorized by US President George W. Bush to use a range of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.
The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was headed “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War” and was written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the US Air Force, who died in 2003.
Biderman interviewed US prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom were filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities. The orchestrated confessions led to allegations the US prisoners were “brainwashed”, and prompted the US military to revamp its training to give its personnel a taste of the harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured, the paper said.
The harshest known interrogation at Guantanamo was that of Mohammed Al-Qahtani, suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the 9/11 attacks.
His interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods used by the Chinese. The terror charges against Qahtani were dropped in May.
