Chinese Torture - from Guantanamo to Abu Graib via Shannon Airport

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report

Wednesday July 02, 2008 12:07

by Edward Horgan

We only do it for money

The special torture techniques used by the CIA, US military, Special Access Programme (SAP) teams, and interrogation 'contractors' at Guantanamo, Abu Graib and elsewhere, were developed from Chinese torture techniques used during the Korean War, including so-called Brain-Washing.

Today's New York Times reveals that the origins of the US Guantanamo and Abu Graib torture programmes went even lower than most people expected. There were based to a significant degree on Chinese torture techniques used during the Korean War. Special US military training teams went to Guantanamo in 2002 to train interrogators on these techniques, and these techniques were then transported on to Abu Graib prison and elsewhere by a special secret programme known as the Special Access Programme, which was revealed by Seymore Hersh in his book, Chain of Command.
Special hearings of the US Senate recently were given details of these torture training session that were held on Guantanamo, but did not realise the Chinese origins of the techniques.

The article states 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.”

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.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

We in Ireland of course would never stoop so low as to engage in such reprehensible measures. Our complicity in this torture programme at Shannon airport is purely coincidental.

Irish complicity with torture is not undertaken with the intention of hurting or inflicting pain on anyone. The purposes of Irish complicity with the US torture programme, is simply to promote Ireland's economic interests, and to help to maintain jobs at Shannon airport.
These are very laudable purposes.

During World War II very many German people and other East Europeans were 'gainfully' employed in places like Bergen Belsen, and Auschwitz. Surely we cannot blame all the station-masters and train drivers and guards between Paris and Auschwitz for helping the transport of Jewish prisoners to the Death Camps? They were only earning a living, obeying orders.

Likewise, the station-maters, aircraft refuellers and guards at Shannon airport.