www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html
Guantnamo 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."
Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantnamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The CIA is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret "alternative" interrogation methods. Several Guantnamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed. But committee investigators were not aware of the chart's source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity. 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 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.
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. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantnamo training chart. "I can't speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current DOD policy on interrogations," Colonel Ryder said. "I can tell you that current DOD policy is clear -- we treat all detainees humanely." 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 CIA 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 Guantnamo was to drop its original title: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."
Next Page This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: July 3, 2008 An article on Wednesday about coercive interrogation methods taught at Guantnamo Bay that were copied from a 1957 journal article about Chinese techniques misstated the given name of the author of the article.
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