On the trail of US torture

Michael Otterman's powerful book, American Torture, traces the history of American torture from Nazi Germany to Guantanamo Bay. It is an immensely disturbing story made all the more chilling by his disclosures that today these interrogation techniques are officially sanctioned under the guise of national security and that sets of rules have been developed to govern its practice. This book should be compulsory reading for everyone with concerns over human rights."

- Rod Barton, former Director of Intelligence, weapons inspector, and advisor to the CIA

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
WASHINGTON — 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.

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 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.”