Score one for the Tacoma Tribune…
The Tacoma News Tribune has a great editorial response to the excellent and very depressing article by Scott Shane in last Wednesday's New York Times on the origin of some of the interrogation techniques used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The gist of the article is that whether knowingly or unknowingly, the chart of interrogation techniques is based on a 1957 US Air Force report on the effectiveness of Chinese torture during the Korean War. The "Trib" nails it;
"The Chinese didn't invent these techniques. They were perfected by the NKVD – the predecessor of the KGB – in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution. The NKVD turned torture and the coercion of confessions into a fine art; it mass-produced hundreds of thousands of "enemies of the state" who had done nothing worse than, say, travel abroad or fall into the cross-hairs of a malicious secret accuser.
"The Gestapo as well as the Chinese communists studied the NKVD's practices closely. And somehow – with the benefit of historical amnesia, rationalization and skewed moral compasses – people at high levels of the Bush administration came to view some of these methods of coercion as perfectly legal.
"There is something worse than losing to your enemy: It is becoming your enemy."
