ON P.O.W. INTERROGATIONS 2.0

FALSE POSITIVES

Remember the classic suspense movie "The Manchurian Candidate"?

The original one from 1962 with Frank Sinatra and Angela Landsbury, not the remake from 2004 with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep? 

The scenes that stuck with me the most when I first watched this movie years ago, were about American prisoners of wars in the Korean war being systematically interrogated by North Koreans, with overseers from Communist China and Russia in the background.

In what has to be one of the strangest bits of life imitating art, the New York Times reports that:

"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."

Make that life imitating art imitating life.  The piece goes on to add:

"In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military.

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

Another factoid from the piece:

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

Cut and Paste works every time, even though actual results may vary.