Chi-Coms, Guantanamo and More!

Sometimes one has to wonder whether a primary thrust of the Bush administration all along has been the complete and utter destruction of the very concept of irony. Our latest example comes from the revelation that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay have been basing some of their techniques on those employed by the Chinese Communists on captured U.S. personnel during the Korean War! And not just that, but specifically those the Chinese used to illicit false confessions! As The New York Times reports:

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.

I mean, it seems somewhat appropriate right? We hold these folks on a U.S. military base in one of the world's last communist countries and so we use techniques from another communist nation to interrogate folks. If the camp were in the south of Spain we'd use old Francoist methods I assume. Anyhow, the full Air Force document is available here and is an intriguing read. In fairness, the study was not of practices involving physical torture, however it really should go without saying that copying the methods of Maoist China is a bit . . . unseemly. Or that's what namby-pamby liberals might say. Tough real Americans will immediately recognize that this is a brilliant plot as surely we now have a "Guantanamo Candidate" within al Qaeda who will rise to power and then destroy the organization from the inside. Or did until the New York Times lost another war for the good ol' USA!