Chinese Democracy: Our Gitmo Rulebook

Well this is embarrassing:

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.

Conservatives have long supported the Bush administration on coercive interrogation, with some even defending the selective use of torture. After some torturous contemplation of my own, some time ago I determined that waterboarding was not torture at one (maybe two) dunks but definitely torture at ten (and maybe four) dunks. Raising the question of whether clearly not-torturous waterboarding was of any real use to us. And that set me down a road culminating in a total rejection of torture as an instrument of interrogation. (Although I still interpret torture narrowly. The key is repetition and duration.)

But that’s all fairly academic stuff when stacked up against our rote repetition of shoddy Communist Chinese interrogation rules. If there’s anything that embarrasses conservatives, it ought to be taking cues from Red China at the peak of its anti-American brutality. True enough, our post-9/11 situation is different from their mid-Korean War situation. The trouble is that the outcomes ought not to be the same — a lot of time wasted brutalizing people for all too little gain. We are meant to believe that the gain, in our case, has been small but very significant — new terrorist attacks prevented and so on. And maybe so. But with so many people in Gitmo, not to mention whatever offsite facilities are still in operation, we the people have effectively no ability to judge on our own conscience whether whatever’s going down is worth it. This is a problem that must be corrected.

Imagine if we went public with the number of people being harshly interrogated and the level of severity involved. It might be that the American people would be revolted and demand a stop to the practice, damn the dirty torpedoes. But it might be that there are really only five or ten people in the whole world who it’s worth interrogating severely/coercing/torturing. And if that’s the number, I bet the American people say to themselves “Well, that’s horrible, but worth it.” Regardless, what we want to avoid is a situation in which we are torturing people to find out whether or not it’s worth torturing them.

Sadly, I expect this is exactly the sort of wiggle room that the administration wants. Despite our valid concerns about what secrets practicing terrorists might hold, we should be so unhappy about following in communist China’s footsteps that we’ll change our policy out of pride as well as shame. It’s important to remember that we can and should refrain from doing some things to some people because we want to refrain, not because we have to.

UPDATE: Hitchens’ firsthand account of waterboarding — he volunteered for a second round — seems to vindicate my comments above, if only in the most (appropriately) ungenerous terms. And again the mind reels at seeing this material between the sylph-draped covers of Vanity Fair. Anyway, this seems to me the clincher:

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured.

Torture is not — bear with me as I try this thought on for size — evil simply because suffering is inflicted. It is evil because it creates a sadomasochistic relationship out of the suffering (and in an incredibly short period of time, too). It lowers torturer and tortured, and the conveyance of that lowering is their relationship. It’s particularly horrifying to us that this relationship is involuntary. But it needn’t be.