Advertisement

Help
You are here: Rediff Home » India » News » PTI
Search:  Rediff.com The Web
Advertisement
  Discuss this Article   |      Email this Article   |      Print this Article

Guantanamo interrogation inspired by Chinese
Related Articles
Guantanamo Bay trials are ulawful, says UN human rights expert

Get news updates:What's this?
Advertisement
July 02, 2008 12:10 IST

American interrogators at the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison facility were using techniques inspired by the ones used by Chinese during the Korean war to get confessions from US prisoners, a media report said on Wednesday.

The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure," the New York Times said.

All these methods were once described by the Americans as torture.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart 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 recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the US long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at GuantanamoBay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency, it said.

Some methods, the paper said, were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantanamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military.

The CIA is still authorised by President Bush to use a number of secret "alternative" interrogation methods.

Several Guantanamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed, it said.


© Copyright 2008 PTI. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of PTI content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent.
 Email this Article      Print this Article

© 2008 Rediff.com India Limited. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer | Feedback