US:MILITARY TRAINERS at Guantánamo Bay based interrogation classes on torture methods used by Chinese communists during the 1950s, according to documents released by Congress.
The New York Timesreported yesterday that one training session in 2002 was based entirely on a 1957 analysis of coercive techniques used by the Chinese on US prisoners of war in Korea.
Members of the Senate armed services committee reviewed the document last month during an investigation of harsh interrogations at Guantánamo but were unaware of its origins.
Severe coercive methods were used in some interrogations at Guantánamo until 2005, when Congress banned their use by the military. CIA interrogators are still allowed to use secret "alternative" interrogation techniques.
The article on which the 2002 training session was based on Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Airforce Prisoners of Warby Albert Biderman, a sociologist who had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea.
"We found that the Chinese communists used methods of coercing behaviour from our men in their hands which communists of other countries had employed for decades and which police and inquisitors had employed for centuries," Mr Biderman wrote.
The coercive methods used by the Chinese included "semi-starvation, exposure, exploitation of wounds, induced illness, sleep deprivation and prolonged constraint". Mr Biderman noted that actual physical violence seldom succeeded in making prisoners compliant but the threat of violence was an important part of the process. "One form of torture was experienced by a considerable number of airforce prisoners of war during efforts to coerce false confessions from them," he wrote.
"The prisoners were required to stand, or sit, at attention for exceedingly long periods of time - in one extreme case, day and night for a week . . . ." The Biderman analysis was used by Guantánamo trainers as part of a course aimed at applying lessons learned by US personnel in resisting torture to the interrogation of suspected terrorists.
Senate armed services committee chairman Carl Levin said that "every American would be shocked" by the origin of the training document. The Pentagon declined to comment on "previous decisions" before the current policy at Guantánamo was introduced. "I can tell you that current department of defence policy is clear - we treat all detainees humanely," said spokesman Patrick Ryder.