If that powerful McClatchy series whet your appetite for Gitmo news: the New York Times‘ Scott Shane reports today on “a chart of ‘coercive management techniques'” (like “Exploitation of Wounds” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings”) and the effects of these techniques (like “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability To Resist”), a chart that was used by military trainers at Guantanamo in 2002 and was “recycled” 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 absence of the chart’s original title, “Communist Attempts To Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners Of War,” was the only difference in the version used in 2002.
Just the “latest and most vivid evidence,” Shane writes, “of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogation methods by the military” at Guantanamo and by the CIA. The chart was released during the recent Guantanamo-related Senate Armed Services Committee hearings but the 1957/Communist Chinese provenance was “pointed out to the New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.”
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.