Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Chicom-ano Cuba

This really stings. The NYT reports on the origins of a training chart used in Guantanamo which is:

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 Albert 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.
It really should be sufficient that behaving in a cruel manner to helpless captives is counter to American values that such a thing not happen or even be considered. When you add in the disqualifying nature of the title of a chart, "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions..." some alarm bells ought to go off. Since it is only now coming out to the American public what the purposes of the interrogation methods we're using are, it is no surprise there hasn't been more outcry. (well, maybe not) People have been trying to tell us that torture provides false confessions and disinformation for years, now.

I don't know that even this will raise the level of fury over the US torturing - enhanced interrogating if you must - there seems to be a core that just flat out doesn't give a damn. We do need intelligence, the lifeblood of good decisions is information, that would be in this case qualified to be, good information. Take out the issue of the barbarism of mistreating helpless human beings and you still have the pragmatic issue of not getting bad information to act stupidly on. I am somewhat befuddled that this particular Administration misses that piece of the puzzle five years into the Iraq War. Well, unless maybe intelligence had nothing to do with that.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chuck, bless you for your youth, but the Good Ol' US of A stole torture tricks from the world war 2 Japanese and forgave the monsters from punishment, so guess why???? American history is the lie you choose to believe...Napolian. We were never the Good Guys. But today we are more open..maybe!

Chuck Butcher said...

Anyone who has read history knows about tortute techniques, questioning both Japanese and Germans certainly expanded that knowledge base. The Chicom had an agenda of not leaving clear signs of it.

Zakariah Johnson said...

Hopefully George W. Bush will need to be careful about where he vacations once his immunity of office is removed. He will never be held accountable in this country for what he has done to our national honor. But there are some judges in the E.U., notably one in Spain, who will not be so conflicted about what is right, wrong, and legal. Careful where go on that post-Presidential lecture tour, W.

Chuck Butcher said...

I have exactly zero hope that anything will happen here. Bush will have SS for life and they'll not let him go anywhere at risk.