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.
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