Does an interrogation class covering "coercive management techniques" like sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint, and exposure sound like something that would be conducted in modern America, or 1950s communist China. The answer is both!
During the Korean War, the US Air Force studied Chinese "torture" tactics used to obtain often false confessions from captured Americans. Recently, CIA and Guantanamo interrogators have become students of the tactics, according to the New York Times.
Google is
helping the CIA get its blog on. The internet search engine giant will supply the technology for a Wikipedia-style intelligence site: Intellipedia.
Agents will post information about targets on a secure internal forum where they can read, edit, and tag their own content, as well as the content of other spies.
CIA Director Michael Hayden
told Congress that waterboarding was necessary, but probably not legal under the current statute, on Thursday. Hayden confirmed that the technique of simulated drowning is not currently part of the CIA's interrogation program, but was used five years ago on three top al-Qaeda suspects.
On the same day, US Attorney General Michael Mukasey told lawmakers he would not open a criminal investigation into the CIA's use of waterboarding. He maintained that because the
Justice Department authorized the program, it cannot prosecute someone who followed that advice.
The US continues to face international ridicule for not rejecting waterboarding, the technique that entails strapping a suspect down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning.
