US military copied Guant�namos coercive training chart from Chinese

The US military trainers who came to Guant�namo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart copied word by word 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

Washington, July 2 : The US military trainers who came to Guant�namo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart copied word by word 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 chart showed the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure," The New York Times reported.

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 US military at the base at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guant�namo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military.

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

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

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart's source in the half-century-old journal article.

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 Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003.

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.

Senator Carl Levin, 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," Levin said.

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Colonel Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guant�namo training chart.

The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including "Semi-Starvation," "Exploitation of Wounds," and "Filthy, Infested Surroundings," and with their effects: "Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator," "Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist," and "Reduces Prisoner to 'Animal Level' Concerns."

The only change made in the chart presented at Guant�namo was to drop its original title: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."

ANI