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Chinese Torture - from Guantanamo to Abu Graib via Shannon Airport
 international |
anti-war / imperialism |
news report
 Wednesday July 02, 2008 12:07 by Edward Horgan
We only do it for money
The special torture techniques used by the CIA, US military, Special Access Programme (SAP) teams, and interrogation 'contractors' at Guantanamo, Abu Graib and elsewhere, were developed from Chinese torture techniques used during the Korean War, including so-called Brain-Washing. Today's New York Times reveals that the origins of the US Guantanamo and Abu Graib torture programmes went even lower than most people expected. There were based to a significant degree on Chinese torture techniques used during the Korean War. Special US military training teams went to Guantanamo in 2002 to train interrogators on these techniques, and these techniques were then transported on to Abu Graib prison and elsewhere by a special secret programme known as the Special Access Programme, which was revealed by Seymore Hersh in his book, Chain of Command.
Special hearings of the US Senate recently were given details of these torture training session that were held on Guantanamo, but did not realise the Chinese origins of the techniques.
The article states that:
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.”
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.
We in Ireland of course would never stoop so low as to engage in such reprehensible measures. Our complicity in this torture programme at Shannon airport is purely coincidental.
Irish complicity with torture is not undertaken with the intention of hurting or inflicting pain on anyone. The purposes of Irish complicity with the US torture programme, is simply to promote Ireland's economic interests, and to help to maintain jobs at Shannon airport.
These are very laudable purposes.
During World War II very many German people and other East Europeans were 'gainfully' employed in places like Bergen Belsen, and Auschwitz. Surely we cannot blame all the station-masters and train drivers and guards between Paris and Auschwitz for helping the transport of Jewish prisoners to the Death Camps? They were only earning a living, obeying orders.
Likewise, the station-maters, aircraft refuellers and guards at Shannon airport.
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Comments (3 of 3)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3This is an interesting excerpt:
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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 C.I.A. and the military. ...
Senator 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. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”
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Senator Levin's statement that "we don’t need false intelligence” stands in stark contrast to knowledgeable sources such as former U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who insists that the "Office of Special Plans" in the Pentagon deliberately and systematically falsified the intelligence in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. Clearly, false intelligence can be a very useful foreign policy tool. Useful to justify unjust wars, that is.
In any case, I hope this is the end of allegations that our protests against the CIA abduction aircraft landing at Shannon are "anti-American". If anything, it seems that we are anti-Chinese?
Best,
Coilín.
Denis Staunton takes up the story in todays Irish Times.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2008/0703/121....html
Human rights volunteers are urgently needed to help monitor the abuse of Shannon airport by the US military and CIA torture planes.
The Irish Government has persistantly refused to have any of these aircraft checked or inspected to ensure that they have not been used for the transport of prisoners for torture, or for other unlawful purposes.
After saying waterboarding wasn't torture in Slate.com some time ago, Christopher Hitchens took up a challenge to undergo it himself. Unsurprisingly, he's now changed his mind, and will regale us with his experiences in next month's Vanity Fair (but the Guardian has some stuff on it today). I suppose at least he had the grace to take the plunge, so to speak, and then admit he was wrong.
With regards to the torture techniques, certainly the brainwashing ones have been in existence in the US since at least the 1950s. Clinton publicly admitted that CIA mind-control experiments occurred in hospitals and universities, and apologised as well. Sometimes, the young children of military personnel were used for these experiments. The Unabomber was experimented on at Harvard, and left behind a promising life as a brilliant mathematician to blow things up, probably as a result of that. It's nothing new. The only surprise is that there hasn't been a full-on revolution in the US as a result of this behaviour.