Interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo 'was based on Chinese Communist techniques'
American interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, including the notorious technique of waterboarding, was based on a communist torture manual from the Korean War, it was revealed yesterday.
The communist methods were outlined, and condemned, in a 1957 U.S. Air Force study of how captured American airmen could resist Chinese questioning which the communists called ‘coercive management techniques’.
As well as the Chinese water torture the manual also included sleep deprivation, prolonged and cramped constraint, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, noise stress, and sexual and religious embarrassment.
Detainees sit in a holding area watched by military police at Camp X-Ray inside Naval Base Guantanamo Bay in 2002
The U.S. condemned the techniques as torture and brainwashing at the time, especially when downed airmen were filmed by their Chinese interrogators, falsely confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.
The air force training manual – known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape - was based on a study of US PoWs who returned from Korea.
Called Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War, it was written by Professor Alfred Biderman, a sociologist working for the U.S. Air Force.
But nearly 50 years later in 2002, Pentagon trainers and the CIA copied the SERE manual verbatim and ‘flipped’ it, turning it into a guide for their own interrogators, it was revealed at a Washington hearing of the Senate Armed Service Committee.
Senators were told the only change made in the Guantanamo manual was to drop its original communist title.
Guantanamo training sessions even referred to an in-depth class on Biderman’s Principles.
Armed Services Committee chairman Senator Carl Levin says every American will be shocked by the origin of the document
The committee also heard that extreme religious cults use Biderman’s Chart of Coercion to control followers.
The harshest-known interrogation at Guantanamo was that of alleged al Qaeda member Mohammed al-Qahtani, who is suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the 9/11 attacks.
Qahtani's interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese.
Terror charges against Qahtani were dropped unexpectedly in May.
Authorities refused to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about his treatment.
President Bush has defended Guantanamo Bay interrogation methods, saying they helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist attacks.
But Armed Services Committee chairman Senator Carl Levin, said: ‘Every American will be shocked by the origin of the Guantanamo training document.
‘What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions. People say we need intelligence, and we do.
'But we don't need false intelligence.’
Before he died in 2003, Professor Biderman said: ‘The thing about interrogation is that you want information. That requires the use of someone's brain, recall, understanding.
'If you do all kinds of things to screw up someone's brain, you won't have a good interrogation subject. You get a nice false confession, good stories. You'll get someone trying to please you.’
