Este blog já mostrou alhures que a prática do waterboarding, usado pela CIA na “war on terror”, encontra suas raízes lá na Inquisição Espanhola.

Pois agora vem o NYT mostrar que as técnicas de interrogatório usadas tanto pela CIA quanto pelos interrogadores militares na base de Guantánamo são copiadas das técnicas chinesas de interrogatório usadas pelos chineses na Guerra da Coréia:

“WASHINGTON - 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.“

O que é verdadeiramente interessante é que muitas das técnicas são talhadas para se extrair falsas confissões:

“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 Alfred 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.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.” (grifo meu)

Diante dessas peraltices, o Senador democrata Carl Levin afirmou:

““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.”” (grifo meu)

Será que não?   O país provavelmente não, mas esse pode não ser o caso da máfia aboletada na Casa Branca.  Eu não fico propriamente surpreso com isso.  Diante de necessidades iguais, comportamentos iguais.

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Nada há de novo sob o sol.