The Bush administration employed “False Confessions” techniques copied from Chinese communists.

News that President George W. Bush will attend the opening ceremony of the Olympics next month in Beijing, Communist China, means that he will have a sort of ideological homecoming. The New York Times reported July 2 that Bush Administration interrogation techniques for detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other secret prisons were copied, in many cases word-for-word, from torture techniques employed by Chinese Communists against American prisoners during the Korean War. Salon magazine has reported that these techniques were approved by the Bush White House.

Times’ reporter Scott Shane broke the story, noting that Guantanamo interrogators were trained in 2002 to employ the same interrogation techniques that were outlined in a 1957 chart that analyzed Chinese brutality against American prisoners of war during the Korean conflict. “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.”

Note that these were interrogation tactics designed specifically to elicit “false confessions.”

Biderman’s 1957 article detailed some of the torture techniques used by Chinese Communist interrogators, including “complete solitary confinement,” “darkness or bright light,” “exposure [to cold],” “sleep deprivation,” and “prolonged constraint.” All of these have also been widely and credibly reported (such as here, here, here, and here, for a few of the many examples) to have been used against detainees at Guantanamo and other CIA prisons around the globe. Biderman went on to describe another tactic widely used by both the Bush interrogators and the Chinese Communists:

“[O]ne form of torture was experienced by a considerable number of Air Force prisoners of war during efforts to coerce false confessions from them. The prisoners were required to stand, or sit, at attention for exceedingly long periods of time-in one extreme case, day and night for a week at a time with only brief respites. In a few cases, the standing was aggravated by extreme cold…. Most frequently, although not invariably, the extent to which the interrogators in North Korea and China were willing or permitted to inflict physical punishment was very limited. Generally, it appears to have been limited to cuffs, slaps and kicks, and sometimes merely to threats and insults. Returnees who underwent long periods of standing and sitting, however, report no other experience could be more excruciating.”

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the New York Times. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.” We don’t need false confessions, true enough, unless you need to round up the usual suspects and take political credit for stopping terrorist plots that would never have occurred anyway.

President Bush vetoed a bill to ban waterboarding and other torture methods by the CIA in March, describing them as “safe and lawful techniques,” even though some prisoners died under interrogation and the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution bans “cruel and unusual punishments.” As part of his reasoning for vetoing the bill, President Bush claimed torture interrogations had enabled prevention of numerous hypothetical attacks:

“The program helped us stop a plot to strike a U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into Library Tower in Los Angeles, and a plot to crash passenger planes into Heathrow Airport or buildings in downtown London. And it has helped us understand al Qaida's structure and financing and communications and logistics. Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al Qaida and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland.”

How many of the incidents Bush cited above were credible threats and how many were purely the imagination of a detainee who told interrogators what they wanted to hear in order to stop the torture, we may never know.

The Bush Administration finally admitted earlier this year to “waterboarding,” a torture technique used by Imperial Japan, which is just as likely to elicit false confessions as those detailed above. Even neo-con warhawk Christopher Hitchens now agrees that waterboarding is torture, at least since he recently agreed to undergo it himself.

President Bush promised the nation in October 2007 that “this government does not torture people.”  His statement then was precisely as truthful as his repeated promises to the nation several years ago that “any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order.”

The New York Times reported the Bush administration’s official response to the revelations that it had copied Communist Chinese interrogation methods were met with a deliberate misdirection:

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. ‘I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,’ Colonel Ryder said. ‘I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.’

Ryder’s misdirection was based upon the fact that the military now runs the Guantanamo facility, and the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 limits treatment of detainees to policies in the U.S. Army Field Manual. However, the CIA is still employing such treatments in its secret prisons in Afghanistan (at Bagram Air Force Base), Iraq, and other secret spots around the world. This was precisely why President Bush felt compelled to veto the 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill, which would have banned CIA use of Chinese-based torture techniques.

More importantly, Ryder pointedly omitted mentioning that the Bush Administration is using the torture-extracted confessions as evidence in criminal prosecutions involving detainees, including at least one case where it is seeking the death penalty. The specter of show trials where helpless prisoners were tortured into false confessions and then convicted on that “evidence” in highly publicized show trials was strongly and vocally condemned by Americans when Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung were conducting the trials.

Will Americans stand silent now that these same show trials are being conducted by their own government?

Some Americans might reply that they don’t care if a few innocent foreigners are tortured and imprisoned if it results in catching and silencing genuine terrorists. But patriot pamphleteer Thomas Paine once explained that “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense was a catalyst for American independence, captured the sentiment of the Founders. James Madison likewise wrote in his Memorial and Remonstrance in 1785 that:

“[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it.”

The open question is, as we have just celebrated the anniversary of those brave patriots who signed the Declaration of Independence, will Americans forget the lesson Madison mentioned? Or will they act to deny the principle of show trials before they become entangled in precedents?

Thomas R. Eddlem is a writer and radio talk show host. Visit his website at www.dangeroustalk.com.

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