LEARNING FROM THE BEST….The New York Times reports today that many of the coercive interrogation techniques used at Guantánamo Bay were taken from a chart in a 1956 Air Force study called “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War”:
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.”
….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 only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”
Unfortunately, Drudge is reporting that one of Barack Obama’s boyhood friends says that Obama once allowed an American flag to touch the ground and didn’t seem very concerned about it, so we really don’t have time for this kind of thing. Priorities, people.
[UPDATE: Just kidding about the flag thing, folks. The fact that it sounds sorta plausible in the wake of the Wes Clark pseudo-outrage tells you something, though. Sarcasm is getting harder and harder these days.]
In case you’re curious, the chart is below the fold. The full 1956 article is here.
