Mountain Man: I bet you can squeal like a pig. Weeeeeeee!
Bobby: Weee!
Mountain Man: Weee!
Bobby: Weee!
-
Mountain Man: What do you want to do now?
Toothless Man: [grinning] He’s got a real pretty mouth on him, don’t he?
Mountain Man: Ain’t that the truth.
Toothless Man: [to Ed] You gonna do some prayin’ for me, boy. And you better pray real good.

My full post is here: http://dastinct.blogspot.com/2008/07/gitmo-2.html

and I paste it below.

GITMO torture designed to illicit FALSE confessions

Why did we really institute policies to torture “detainees”? An interesting read from Scott Shane on GITMO torture in the NYT today sheds some light on that question.

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.

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

Lets recap:

1. The Chinese developed torturous “brainwashing” techniques during the Korean War and used them on American prisoners. This caused much concern, not just because of torture, but because it was successfully used to illicit FALSE CONFESSIONS. As John McCain’s confession showed, those same techniques remained successful during the Viet Nam War.

2. The US Air Force did a study of those techniques in 1957.

3. Near the end of the Korean War the Air Force used that study to create SERE, a training program for military personnel (primarily pilots) for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.

4. In 02-03 SERE trainers went to GITMO to present to interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.”

Did we really forget that the reasons those techniques were developed was to illicit FALSE confessions?

Certainly that seems highly unlikely. A significant part of the SERE training was resistance; learning how to resist torture when it was being used to illicit FALSE confessions. Surely the SERE trainers knew that when they went to GITMO to teach US interrogators the Chinese torture techniques. Just as surely those who tasked the SERE trainers to GITMO knew that as well.

These are not simply War Crimes; but the now obviously false claim that they were used to get actionable intelligence makes it clear that they are also crimes against American Democracy; High Crimes and Misdemeanors if you will.

Could this start a new defense for criminals. I know I robbed the bank and my gun accidentally went off and killed a guard but going forward I am going to catch up on my house payments.

This is actually a tried and true strategy of despots – use torture victims to corrobate fearmongering accusations of plots against the state, leading to still more people to arrest (on false charges) and hence more people to torture, for still more fearmongering accusations, leading to more raids and more people to torture, etc, etc., creating a frenzied atmosphere of paranoia and constant, mind-numbing sense that the enemy is among us and about to blow us up.

As a historical note, this is precisely what Pinochet and Galtieri did, thus creating the plausible appearance of a communist conspiracy against their rule. There never was such a conspiracy, but they got enough tortured people to point the finger at other people who could also be tortured to confirm the alleged conspiracy, that a lot of people in the general public were gulled into thinking that the commies would take over if the generals restored civilian rule.

I can see Dick and shrub taking this particular page from their fascist playbook, quite consciously. Heck, the School of the Americas probably wrote the manual on some of these tactics. Simply making the shite up, as you put it, only goes so far. You need a face or at least a name to the source of the fear to make it palpable. These are not good or sane people..

;>)