An astonishing revelation

Monday, July 7, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

It is hard to believe that the news coming out of Guantanamo Bay could get any worse.

But it has.

The New York Times reported last week that the chart on interrogation techniques taught in a 2002 military training workshop at the Guantanamo Bay detention center was lifted verbatim from a 1957 U.S. Air Force study of “coercive management techniques” that Chinese communists used during the Korean War to extract confessions — many of them false — from American prisoners of war.

The methods detailed included sleep deprivation, forcing prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods” in “extreme cold,” and subjecting prisoners to semistarvation, exploitation of wounds and “filthy, infested surroundings.” For decades the United States has viewed these techniques as torture.

The 2002 workshop’s chart was among documents the Senate Armed Services Committee reviewed in June. Some of the techniques were inflicted on Guantanamo prisoners before Congress banned the military’s use of coercion in 2005.

Senate committee members were not aware that the chart presented them last month is identical to the one from the Air Force’s 1957 report, the Times reports. The author of that report, who died in 2003, interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had admitted to Chinese interrogators that they had engaged in germ warfare and other atrocious acts.

It was later revealed that these soldiers had been coerced into making these false confessions through the Chinese communists’ tortures. These methods are notorious for eliciting flawed and erroneous information.

Even more astonishing is that President Bush has still authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to use some of these methods today.

How on Earth did the U.S. government become an entity that trains its military officials to inflict degrading and painful acts on people from whom they are seeking information? The United States is a nation that seeks to overturn oppression, not impose it.