[Infowarrior] - China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

[Richard Forno]

July 2, 2008
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
By SCOTT SHANE

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

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.

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.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at  
Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by  
the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use  
a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive  
methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing  
June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in  
the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The  
New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on  
condition of anonymity.

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 Alfred 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. In what critics describe as a remarkable  
case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program  
appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of  
concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

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.”

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could  
not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. “I can’t speculate on  
previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D.  
policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that  
current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.”

Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by  
the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly  
long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive  
methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence.  
Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by  
American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects.

The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including  
“Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested  
Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on  
Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and  
“Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop  
its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting  
Individual Compliance.”

The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two  
SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to  
Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to  
interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures  
utilized during our training.”

The sessions included “an in-depth class on Biderman’s Principles,”  
the message said, referring to the chart from Mr. Biderman’s 1957  
article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as “Biderman’s  
Chart of Coercion,” have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web,  
where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning  
prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957  
issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an  
interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had  
been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.

“It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the  
Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American  
parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques  
by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.”

The harshest known interrogation at Guantánamo was that of Mohammed al- 
Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th  
hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qahtani’s interrogation involved  
sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other  
methods also used by the Chinese.

Terror charges against Mr. Qahtani were dropped unexpectedly in May.  
Officials said the charges could be reinstated later and declined to  
say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani’s  
treatment.

Mr. Bush has defended the use the interrogation methods, saying they  
helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist  
attacks. But the issue continues to complicate the long-delayed  
prosecutions now proceeding at Guantánamo.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major  
role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000,  
was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous  
hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he  
confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was  
tortured.