Buried deep inside the final section of the New York Times of Sunday, June 4, was an amazing story about how current CIA interrogation techniques were copied from Soviet interrogation techniques of the 1950s. In other words, the techniques used in Guantanamo and elsewhere – disrupted sleep, exposure to extreme heat and cold, hours in uncomfortable stress positions, and “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner’s face is covered with cloth and water is poured from above to create a feeling of suffocation – are all copied directly from Soviet cold-war practices.

In 1956, a group of American doctors working for the Defense Department published an article titled “Communist Interrogation” in The Annals of Neurology and Psychiatry, in which they stated:

“The effects of isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger produce disturbances of mood, attitudes and behavior in nearly all prisoners. The living organism cannot entirely withstand such assaults. The Communists do not look upon these assaults as “torture.” But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

The article’s description of the judicial proceedings the Communists subjected prisoners too accurately describes the situation in Guantanamo as well:

“Prisoners are tried before “military tribunals,” which are not public courts. Those present are only the interrogator, the state prosecutor, the prisoner, the judges, a few stenographers, and perhaps a few officers of the court.”

Furthermore, the Bush administration’s argument that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al Qaeda detainees turns out to be a rehash of Soviet arguments concerning their prisoners:

“In typical Communist legalistic fashion, the N.K.V.D. rationalized its use of torture and pressure in the interrogation of prisoners of war. When it desired to use such methods against a prisoner or to obtain from him a propaganda statement or “confession,” it simply declared the prisoner a “war-crimes suspect” and informed him that, therefore, he was not subject to international rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war.”

Back in the 1950s, Defense Department doctors argued that while Soviet techniques amounted to torture, they were ineffective at producing good intelligence:

“The cumulative effects of the entire experience may be almost intolerable. [The prisoner] becomes mentally dull and loses his capacity for discrimination. He becomes malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate. By suggesting that the prisoner accept half-truths and plausible distortions of the truth, [the interrogator] makes it possible for the prisoner to rationalize and thus accept the interrogator’s viewpoint as the only way out of an intolerable situation.”
There is nothing to be added to this remarkable bit of research, except to note that it odd that the TImes would do research that would uncover such a bombshell, yet bury deep inside the paper.

NYT article here.

1 Comments

by the improvising guitarist @ 06 Jun 2007 07:53 am

<i>…odd that the TImes would do research that would uncover such a bombshell, yet bury deep inside the paper.</i>

And that’s the thing. Not that a collection of political opportunists, doped-up on power and privilege, would instigate, engineer and enact such systems, but that the institutions of information would be complicit, by their silence, in that.
I can’t wholly blame a monolithic military-industrial complex—on the ground, humyn interactions are far too complicated and contradictory—but what myths/narratives are compelling the NYT to be so timid (and why do we have to tune into Comedy Central™ for an op-ed)? What story (of America in the post-9/11 condition) is so sacred that it needs protection (from information, analysis and thought)?

S, tig