The brutal pedigree of Guantanamo tactics

We’ve known for years that, in the years after 9/11, U.S. interrogators on some occasions squeezed “high value” terror suspects with techniques borrowed – indirectly – from communist regimes.

The direct source was a U.S. military program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, designed to prepare American combat troops for methods of interrogation they might meet if captured.

These included sleep deprivation, prolonged exposure to cold or heat, and stress positions. (Simply being forced to stand for extended periods, for example, becomes unbearably painful.) Such methods had been used to break American POWs during the Vietnam and Korean wars; the idea was to inoculate recruits against standard communist interrogation tactics.

The logic sounded plausible: If ordinary military recruits are required to undergo, say, waterboarding, why should the technique be off limits when dealing with the suspected architects of 9/11 and other atrocities?

But with the pedigree of these methods coming into clearer focus, their use looks ever more reprehensible.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that military trainers at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 taught a class on interrogation using a chart that detailed the effects of sleep deprivation, etc.

The chart, it turns out, was copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force article titled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from the Air Force Prisoners of War.” It’s possible that the trainers didn’t know this; the chart might simply have been floating around the Pentagon.

In effect, interrogators at Guantanamo were being taught to use precisely the same methods as the Chinese communists did during the Korean War – to extort false confessions. The Chinese employed these techniques primarily to turn Amerian POWs into propaganda tools. After being subjected to cold or sleeplessness or muscle cramping long enough, most human beings will sign anything just to end their torment.

The Chinese didn’t invent these techniques. They were perfected by the NKVD – the predecessor of the KGB – in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution. The NKVD turned torture and the coercion of confessions into a fine art; it mass-produced hundreds of thousands of “enemies of the state” who had done nothing worse than, say, travel abroad or fall into the cross-hairs of a malicious secret accuser.

The Gestapo as well as the Chinese communists studied the NKVD’s practices closely. And somehow – with the benefit of historical amnesia, rationalization and skewed moral compasses – people at high levels of the Bush administration came to view some of these methods of coercion as perfectly legal.

There is something worse than losing to your enemy: It is becoming your enemy.