What merit lies in false confession? When cornered between a rock and a hard place, man will acquiesce to practically anything.

When by nature, torture is accepted as perpetual mental or physical pain whose sole purpose is to obtain an outcome, how is accuracy and legitimacy tested? What Ulysses of a man can resist the continuous exploitation of his wounds, verbal rape or sleep deprivation? When the ends precede the means, the only item left dangling is counter-productivity.

It’s been revealed this morning what perhaps most already knew: Guantanamo Bay makes no sense.

As the NY Times broke this morning, military trainers there attended an interrogation class based upon Chinese techniques used on US prisoners during the Korean War shortly after 9/11. The practices were a long litany of established torture procedures: “prolonged constraint,” “exposure,” “semi-starvation,” and the most titillating, “exploitation of wounds.” The intended effects were to make the victim dependent on the interrogator, weaken the mental and physical ability to resist, and lastly, to reduce the prisoner to ‘animal level’ concerns.

Calling the use of torture at Gitmo an outrage is one step removed from the real offense, however. The issue should be, as was pointed out in the extensive investigation by  McClatchy Newspapers earlier this year, why are many of the prisoners there in the first place?

The wrongfully imprisoned majority and the few who actually belong there have been exposed to the same brutal methodology: A chart used in the training class was allegedly copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War.

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, 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.”

Let’s look at a case study.

In May of this year, Saudi citizen Mohammed al-Qahtani had been held in confinement for more than six years without being charged of a crime.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported in 2006, citing the Army’s own interrogation logs, Qahtani, in addition to being subjected to documented beatings and other physical abuse, was put through an S&M routine calculated to drive him to a catatonic madness.  Sounds like it worked:

“Qahtani had been subjected to 160 days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on 48 of 54 days, for 18 to 20 hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called ‘invasion of space by a female;’ forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash and told that his mother was a whore.”

After 49 days of 20-hour-per-day interrogation, on May 12, 2008, all charges against Qahtani were dismissed.

Mohammed al Qahtani offered this final concluding statement:

To be honest with you, I just want to summarize the most important things to you. I just want to mention to you that there are other things that happened like torture and abuse. I do not want to put the image of the United States down. To be honest with you, I have been here five years and I have mentioned any of these things to the outside because I do not want to ruin the reputation of the United States military. That’s not proper. Let’s be more serious and more practical. I just want to mention to you about the torture and the things that happened to me. I just want to talk about what was said regarding me in the past and also prove to you that in the future I will not pose any threat to you or the United States.

Now let’s just look at the legal implications. A week after September 11^th, Congress authorized the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

On a conflicting note, Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions state:

Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.

Article 13 elaborates:

Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining power…seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody is prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention.

In particular, no prisoner of war may be subjected to physical mutilation or to medical or scientific experiments of any kind which are not justified by the medical, dental or hospital treatment of the prisoner concerned and carried out in his interest.

Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.

In US court cases where federal and state law are at conflict, federal law is always supreme. Similarly, in cases where US and world law are at odds, it’s obnoxious to think any arbitrary set of temporary rules cooked up on the spot could have the ability to supersede precedent.

As Carl Jung once said, the healthy man just does not torture.