There is no one stupider than the political animal who mistakes his ideology for truth. That goes for the “left” and the “right.” If you don’t think that a right-wing politician would use the power of government to destroy individual constitutional rights, you haven’t been paying attention during the Bush years. If you don’t think that a left-leaning democratically elected leader would use right-wing laws to justify torture, you haven’t been paying attention to 20th-century history.
Everyone who supports the use of torture and intimidation in a “war on terror” is a jackass.
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo 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.”
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 New York Times]
Related:
Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From the Air Force Prisoners of War (pdf)
Documents Released at Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on SERE Tactics (pdf)
