Wow, We Get Everything From China

In 1957, a sociologist named Albert Biderman wrote an article called "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War," about the routine practice of Chinese interrogators coaxing false confessions of war crimes and such out of downed American pilots shot down over North Korea.

Imagine where the techniques Biderman set forth in 1957 have popped up?

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.

That's right. Not only have we imported "interrogation" techniques from the Chinese, we've imported the ones that were notorious to produce false confessions! Can we all agree that, aside from any human rights issues related to these techniques, that if they produce false confessions they should be scrapped?