CIA, US Military Learned Torture from China?
BY MATT SULLIVAN / RCFP
Last month the New York Times published an article by Scott Shane, “China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo”, that revealed that military trainers at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 used a chart of interrogation techniques that 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 implication being that the US military and the CIA have so little experience with torture that they had to rely on these outdated sources for their how-to manual.
Shane’s article in the Times is a classic example of the common intelligence agency practice of “limited hangout”. Intelligence agencies, when caught in a lie, when the cover is blown, will expose some part of the operation in order to distract the public from the larger underlying operation. In this case, by exposing the captured Chinese documents, the CIA and MI is attempting to keep a lid on the larger underlying truth that the US has long studied and practiced torture and has a vast and well funded ongoing research operation dedicated to developing torture methods and techniques.
The CIA torture, interrogation and mind control infrastructure has a long and storied history. After WWII the OSS, precursor to the CIA, recruited Nazi researchers and their programs to come to the US under operation PAPERCLIP and other programs. These torture and mind control research efforts were greatly expanded during the Cold War and were practiced in horrific real-world conflicts during the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s and were again employed in Central America in the 1980s.
There is no question that the CIA and US military have extensive theoretical research and practical experience and the suggestion that the US had to resort to the use of 1947 Chinese torture posters for instruction is ridiculous and insulting.
