TIME has an explosive article detailing the Pentagon's Role in Torture Tactics:
Opponents of last week's release of memos detailing CIA interrogation techniques argue that they will provide enemies of the United States with a training manual to prepare their operatives for capture. The irony is that the U.S. military appears to have done the exact opposite, taking a training program that had been designed to prepare American soldiers to withstand torture by communist regimes seeking to extract false confessions, and twisting it into a highly controversial interrogation manual.
The story of that mutation emerges in disquieting detail in a new report by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. It shows how U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and camps in Afghanistan based some of their interrogations on techniques taken from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program. These techniques included water-boarding, walling (slamming detainees into a flexible wall), sleep deprivation, hooding and using dogs to inspire fear...
The final irony: The torture techniques around which the SERE training was devised were used by Chinese interrogators during the Korean War, not to gather actionable intelligence but to force false confessions from captured U.S. soldiers — confessions that could then be used in anti-American propaganda.
SASC Report: "Harsh Interrogation Tactics" Used to Find Iraq Al Qaida Link
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Connecting CIA Torture to Abu Ghraib
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1 comment:
While I was in D.C this semester for my internship, I went to a couple of demonstrations and programs sponsored by Witness against torture. They are a group dedicated to shutting down Gunatanamo Bay and releasing all of the prisoners. They demonstrationed outside the white house since he was inagurated in office and they would do this for his first 100 days. They should be getting ready to finish now.
I am definately with them and give them my support. At least Obama has done something to move the process of shutting down Guantanamo Bay.
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