Torture Policy Origins - the Communists

The Genesis of our torture policies:

WASHINGTON — 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.

We knew that these tactics produced false confessions, and yet we used them to collect "important intelligence." These specific techniques were used by the Koreans to obtain false confessions from Americans which were then used for propaganda purposes - why shouldn't we do the same?

Of course, we knew what we were doing. Our policy was to use torture to make prisoners say exactly what we wanted them to, so we could use those false confessions to push whatever narrative the Bush Administration needed at the moment.

Once again, no European vacations allowed for senior members of the Bush team.