The Chinese Torture Test

Yesterday the New York Times reported:

The military trainers who came to Guantanamo 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.

Link to Article

So we are using almost 50 year old communist techniques that were determined to produce false confessions? I wonder how many of those terror alerts and warnings that have caused fear and stress were based on false confessions? During those 50 years, Americans were appalled and angered by the Chinese torture techniques that were used against our soldiers. Are these once condemned acts now American policy?

It appears that we have gone from a nation respected for its protection of human rights to a country that practices torture and rendition. Bush has chosen to defend our country with methods that are ineffective and evil, instead of holding our country to high the principles that make it worth defending. This comes from an administration whose campaign was based on moral Christian beliefs. I doubt Jesus would approve of these tactics.

Next week when I go through the TSA airport security gauntlet, I will wonder if humiliating passengers is really necessary to fight terrorism or is it a method of putting fear into voters?