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July 2, 2008
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
By SCOTT SHANE
WA****NGTON — 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 do***ents, 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 do***ent.
“What makes this do***ent 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 do***ents released last month include an e-mail message from two
SERE trainers re****ting 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 brainwa****ng. 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-Na****ri, 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. Na****ri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed
to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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