Made in China

NYT reports on evidence from the June 17th Senate Armed Services Committee hearings. To wit: training materials for interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo were lifted directly from a 1957 Air Force study of techniques used by China to extract confessions from US prisoners during the Korean War.

"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 Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities."

Now there's globalization for you.

Senator Carl Levin stated that "every American would be shocked" at the origin of these techniques, but look closely at his reasoning:

“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.”

Apparently, it's not that we imported a morally suspect product from China, it's that the product is defective.