Criminal

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 NYT has the documents, if you'd care to make the comparison with your own eyes. The chart in the PDF from the committee hearings is not the sharpest scan, unfortunately, but it's not difficult to figure out what it says, especially with the original at hand.

These are a few of the techniques, designed for the purposes of brainwashing and eliciting false confessions, that our country has borrowed from Mao's China:


1. Isolation

Effects (Purposes?)
Deprives Victim of all Social
Support of his Ability to Resist
Develops an Intense Concern
with Self
Makes Victim dependent on Interrogator

Variants
Complete Solitary Confinement
Complete Isolation
Semi-lsolation
Group Isolation


2. Monopolization of Perception

Effects (Purposes?)
Fixes Attention upon Immediate
Predicament; Fosters Introspection
Eliminates Stimuli Competing
with those Controlled by Captor
Frustrates all Actions not Consistent with Compliance

Variants
Physical Isolation
Darkness or Bright Light
Barren Environnient
Restricted Movement
Monotonous Food


3. Induced Debilitation; Exhaustion

Effects (Purposes?)
Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist

Variants
Semi-Starvation
Exposure
Exploitation of Wounds; lnduced lllness
Sleep Deprivation
Prolonged Constraint
Prolonged Interrogation or Forced Writing
Over Exertion


7. Degradation

Effects (Purposes?)
Makes Costs of Resistance Appear More Damaging to Self-Esteem than Capitulation
Reduces Prisoner to "Animal Level" Concerns

Variants
Personal Hygiene Prevented
Filthy, Infested Surroundings
Demeaning Punishments
Insults and Taunts
Denial of Privacy


Those are some highlights. It keeps going.

Yes, it really is this bad. This is the broken mess that these people have made of human decency and international law.

Unlike on goddamn television shows, when prisoners are methodically physically abused and psychologically broken in the real world, producing confessions with no truth value is not only the normal result but usually the POINT.


State agents don’t have any ambition to rape their own children.