Over the past few years, Americans have been repeatedly told by the Bush administration that we do not torture.

Now, in a recent New York Times article no less, we learn that the CIA and U.S. military after 9/11 adopted the methods of the Communist Chinese to interrogate detainees rounded up in the War on Terror net.

The Chinese, we are told, prefrerred these "passive methods," such as forcing prisoners to stand "for exceedingly long periods," rather than physical violence. Chinese methods of torture were documented and published in an article in 1957 by Alfred D. Biderman, who "interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea...."

Biderman made a chart to accompany his article. He entitled it, "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance." American military trainers took the same chart, minus its title, and used it to train interrogators at Guantanamo.

Bush administration officials have been quick to dismiss these "enhanced interrogation techniques" (the term developed by the Nazis in the 1930s, and in German is Verschärfte Verneh-mung) and others such as "waterboarding," as torture.

A few months ago, journalist Christopher Hitchens allowed himself to be waterboarded and then wrote about the experience.

Watch the video, read his account, and decide for yourself if Verschärfte Verneh-mung is what civilized people call torture, or if it's just another soft term employed by people becoming more hardened in desenstivity towards other human beings. 

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