Plagirizing Commie Symps

Oh, and a-holes -- can't forget to add they are a-holes:

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.

Remember when the right-wing (and some competitors) tried to accuse Obama of lifting or slightly modifying Deval Patrick speeches? Well, here's some real plagiarism for you, George Bush's DOD copied Chairman Mao's little red torture book. A technique used specifically to elicit FALSE CONFESSIONS! Something for the reelection campaign (like trumped up terror warnings) no doubt-- surely that's what Jesus would do?

We made much, deservedly so, of the torture methods used by the Russians, Chinese, North Korea and, ironically considering this was done at GITMO, Cuba during the "Cold War". John McCain himself has used the story of his torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese -- using the playbook passed down by the Soviets and Chinese -- as not only a key, but they key, to his life story. And despite the over wrought nature of some of its use of it this week, there's little doubt it is the most compelling and sympathetic thing about him which is why his recent cave on the issue of CIA torture is so disappointing.

And here is the Bush Administration, nineteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, seventeen years after the official end of the Cold War, long after China stopped being the "red menace" and morphed into the capitalist hybrid it is today, using the same torture methods we so vehemently condemned for so long because we were the United States of America!

Well, we still are -- except now, thanks to Bush and company, we are not what we used to be. 9/11 changed everything alright, now we are the country that hypocritically copied torturing communist a-holes. Thanks so very much Dear Leader.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

(pic of Mao & Dubya swimming the Yangtze by Teddyone)