Legal Commentary

Training Interrogators to Produce False Confessions

By TChris

When the Bush administration decided to get into the torture business, it adopted methods used by Chinese interrogators during the Korean War -- despite evidence that the techniques lead to false confessions.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

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.

In Bushworld, a false confession is better than no confession. [more ...]

If trainers really didn't know that coercion and torture lead to false confessions, they were seriously negligent in their duty to educate themselves before trying to educate others.

In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape] program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Unaware? Nobody thought to ask where the chart originated?

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003.

Somebody surely knew the chart's origin:

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

You'd think the person who dropped the title would have paused to ask how effective the Communist techniques were for arriving at the truth. Senator Carl Levin:

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

False intelligence, maybe not, but false confessions come in handy to justify the seizure and detention of innocent people.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 02, 2008 (boomark / email).