Chinese Torture - from Guantanamo to Abu Graib via Shannon Airport

by Deirdre Clancy Thu Jul 03, 2008 19:57

After saying waterboarding wasn't torture in Slate.com some time ago, Christopher Hitchens took up a challenge to undergo it himself. Unsurprisingly, he's now changed his mind, and will regale us with his experiences in next month's Vanity Fair (but the Guardian has some stuff on it today). I suppose at least he had the grace to take the plunge, so to speak, and then admit he was wrong.

With regards to the torture techniques, certainly the brainwashing ones have been in existence in the US since at least the 1950s. Clinton publicly admitted that CIA mind-control experiments occurred in hospitals and universities, and apologised as well. Sometimes, the young children of military personnel were used for these experiments. The Unabomber was experimented on at Harvard, and left behind a promising life as a brilliant mathematician to blow things up, probably as a result of that. It's nothing new. The only surprise is that there hasn't been a full-on revolution in the US as a result of this behaviour.

by Edward Horgan Thu Jul 03, 2008 12:46

Denis Staunton takes up the story in todays Irish Times.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2008/0703/121....html

Human rights volunteers are urgently needed to help monitor the abuse of Shannon airport by the US military and CIA torture planes.
The Irish Government has persistantly refused to have any of these aircraft checked or inspected to ensure that they have not been used for the transport of prisoners for torture, or for other unlawful purposes.

by Coilín - Self-Appointed Citizens Thu Jul 03, 2008 11:28

This is an interesting excerpt:
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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.
Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.
In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a
**source of interrogation methods** both for the C.I.A. and the military. ...
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.
“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”
-----

Senator Levin's statement that "we don’t need false intelligence” stands in stark contrast to knowledgeable sources such as former U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who insists that the "Office of Special Plans" in the Pentagon deliberately and systematically falsified the intelligence in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. Clearly, false intelligence can be a very useful foreign policy tool. Useful to justify unjust wars, that is.

In any case, I hope this is the end of allegations that our protests against the CIA abduction aircraft landing at Shannon are "anti-American". If anything, it seems that we are anti-Chinese?

Best,
Coilín.