did you know?

That some men being held in Guantanamo Bay have been there for seven years, and all have yet to be tried, regardless of arrival date? It's true. Their "freedom" is wholly contingent upon the whims of various branches and agencies of the American government. And that's not a good place to be.

"The other will play out in a makeshift courtroom overlooking Guantánamo Bay itself, where military prosecutors are pressing ahead with plans for what, later this month, would be the first of the trials the administration has been seeking for nearly seven years."

“Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War”

Are now American capitalist attempts to elicit false confessions from prisoners of war. You know, this is one of those times when I am caught off guard by these feelings of surprise. I did not think that the military could really shock me. But it did.

You see, what they have been teaching people in Guantanamo for at least six years, and I don't know where else or for how long, are techniques developed by the Chinese military and used in the Korean War. Supposedly, not too many people in the American military were aware of this, as "The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: 'Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.'” So that's what's been going on for I don't know how many years. And they've been teaching that these things work. These techniques, like starvation, forcing people to stand for super long periods of time and exposing them to filthy living environments were documented, by the United States Army in 1957, as succeeding in bringing about false confessions. FALSE CONFESSIONS. The military seems to have been working against its own conclusions, which I guess isn't all that surprising in and of itself.

What is surprising is that all anyone did was change the title of this chart. Other than that, it "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." It's just so fucking stupid. It was that simple - change the title of a chart, and turn it from something that was supposed to demonstrate failed and discredited interrogation methods into an instructional device on how to extract worthwhile and accurate information from people. Fuck.