Guess where current U.S. Interrogation techniques came from. . .?

From the Communist Chinese techniques used on American prisoners to elicit false confessions during the Korean War!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

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. . .

. . . The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. 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. . .

. . . “What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” [Senator] Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.” . . .

. . . Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects. . .

. . . The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

End article excerpts

As Mike Tennant put it, “Thus we are confronted with the supreme irony: Those neocons such as Limbaugh, Hannity, Kristol, etc., who are most vociferously opposed to communism–and especially Chinese communism–are also most vociferously supportive of our government’s use of torture techniques invented by Chinese communists!”