The Abyss Has Drilled Fracking Laser Holes in Our Skulls with Its Stare...

Gary Farber:

We've always known that our current torture regime came from back-engineering the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training given some U.S. military personnel intended to enable them to resist the horrible tortures used by the KGB, Chinese Communists, and other historical enemies of the U.S. whose morality we condemned for their willingness to engage in torture. That's old news. Now we have documentation of exactly whom we've copied: yes, the Chinese Communists. Isn't that lovely? Scott Shane reports:

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....

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 Alfred 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....

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”...

How evil have we become?

The abyss has drilled fracking laser holes through us with its stare.

Remind me why we were the good guys in the Cold War, and WWII, again? The guys who wrote the Nuremberg Principles?

Please tell me; I really could use a reminder now.

And I'd like to know how we can regard ourselves as the same people any more. I'd really, really, like to know.

Comments

[jerry]

“Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War”

Every now and then Brad, you bring out the "I'd stop calling them Orwellian if they'd stop using 1984 as a manual."

It's time once again.

And as Gary Farber suggests, this whole thing goes right straight to the heart of our American tradition in believing in we are the white hats and trying to live up to that.

[PeeDee]

Sadly, I don't think the rest of the world is as surprised as you are. I'm not sure that America was ever the "good guy", other than in the expurgated version taught me throughout primary and secondary school history and civics (and Hollywood). The more one actually looks, the more one realizes that the self-respect and political coherence of the "United States of Amnesia" as Vidal puts it depends on continually renewing the myth of white hats and sweeping all contrary evidence under the table (or into graduate courses).

So the educated political actors are always painfully aware that they are embedded in a system that is founded upon false premises on the part of the public. There are just too many inconvenient examples to ignore.

What does one do? Playing along must leave a bad taste in the mouth, on the evidence amply compensated for by the sweet perks of political success. If one speaks up (eg. Chomsky, Zinn, Churchill) one is marginalized. Even to develop enough hope to bother at all, and not to simply settle for temporal reward or slit ones wrists is an accomplishment.

I simply left; but the whole US ethos sickens me now. It seems to be "Let's do whatever we like; and rely upon persuading everyone that we're well-intentioned." This seems very similar to 'the end justifies the means'. The only thing that will change this is changing the incentive structure. The US has been given the benefit of the doubt for far too long, but I think the court of world opinion is catching on to this game and looking for a way out from under the Orwellian curtain.

[Mike]

"Remind me why we were the good guys in the Cold War, and WWII, again? The guys who wrote the Nuremberg Principles?"

Because we won, Brad. Only because we won... and didn't have to stand trial for war crimes. ;-)

[Doctor Jay]

I am not quite so pessimistic about America as other commenters.

For example: 'I simply left; but the whole US ethos sickens me now. It seems to be "Let's do whatever we like; and rely upon persuading everyone that we're well-intentioned."'

No, it's not the "whole US". It's the Bush Administration. And their sycophants, which amount to roughly 28% of the US population. Unfortunately, they are still in charge of things. And yes, that attitude is a strand of our DNA. But it isn't the only strand, and it isn't necessarily our destiny. I'm not giving up the fight for America's soul. And I'm not leaving.