07:51 pm
The Manchurian President
We’ve all heard the whispers. Every four years, the extreme right starts suggesting that the current Democratic candidate for President is a traitor. He’s not a patriot, they say — he’s actually a Communist/athiest/internationalist/Muslim.
Every four years, they find a new variation on this theme: Bill Clinton was recruited by the Soviets when he visited the USSR. Al Gore will cede American sovereignty to the United Nations. John Kerry was recruited by the Viet Cong during the war. Barack Obama was recruited by a Muslim terror cell while attending an Indonesian madrasa. It’s just like that movie — you know – The Manchurian Candidate.
Today, we found out who the real Manchurian Candidate really was: George W. Bush.
No, I’m not suggesting that our President was kidnapped or brainwashed by anyone. It’s actually much worse than that. He’s not Laurence Harvey — he’s Angela Freaking Lansbury:
Here’s the story from today’s Times:
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.
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.
You read that correctly: our government authorized the use of techniques developed by the Chinese to torture American servicemen in Korea. And as Andrew Sullivan points out today, the North Vietnamese adopted a similar approach in Vietnam — meaning that they were used on John McCain.
That’s awful enough. But here’s the kicker. As Matt Yglesias notes,
[T]he main purpose of these Chinese torture techniques was to elicit false confessions. That’s not very surprising as the main use of torture in interrogations has always been to elicit false confessions.
But still, to literally rip your techniques off from a study called “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War” requires some level of obliviousness I wasn’t aware of. Or else maybe they were looking for false confessions?
There really are only two conclusions here. Either the Bush Administration is mind-bendingly stupid, or they are unconscionably evil. Then again, there is one more possibility: they’re both. But regardless of which of these equally distressing options is correct, one thing is crystal clear: they are a cancer on our values and our freedoms.
How can any conservative support a regime whose policies represent the absolute antithesis of the values of those who fought and often died to defeat communism?
How could anyone with a conscience support a government that steals the methods of our former enemies — who used them against our own soldiers to force false conventions — and then applies them to “extract” the truth?
For a long time, I resisted those who called Bush, Cheney, and their cronies evil. I criticized those who demanded their impeachment, arguing that it would only garner them sympathy.
Not anymore. Impeach them. Better yet, indict them. Prosecute them for war crimes and crimes against humanity. And then toss them into jail and throw away the key.
For the first time in my life, I am deeply ashamed of my country.
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