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Chinese Tactics Used At Gitmo

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The New York Times

Published: July 2, 2008

WASHINGTON - WASHINGTON - The military trainers who came to Guantanamo 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 by the military at Guantanamo and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantanamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The CIA is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret "alternative" interrogation methods.

Several Guantanamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on 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 the Air Force Prisoners of War" and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then serving in the Air Force, who died in 2003.

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."

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