Althouse: Rio!

October 2, 2009

Rio!

It's Rio!

205 comments:

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Anonymous said...: I know Jeremy's quick, but I'm going to try to preempt him this time:

Fuck you, you racist motherfuckers. Suck my dick.; 10/2/09, 8:55 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: The American President's involvement in an Olympic bid was unprecedented.

Also, the American President is not equivalent to other heads of state.; 10/2/09, 9:06 PM
former law student said...: You sort of refuted your own point there, FLS. We don't do what Korea does either in "torture" or "training".

You sorta proved you don't know what you're talking about. Maybe you should prepare to back up your assertions before you make them.

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.

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.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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 Albert 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.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

See? We used Korean POW techniques in SERE, then used SERE techniques on detainees.; 10/2/09, 9:27 PM
Joan said...: Certain events unfold like clockwork around here. Anyone mentions "American exceptionalism" and FLS trots out the torture meme. Someone criticizes Obama, and Jeremy "has a hard time not seeing racism."

These guys really need some new material.

I'm happy Brazil got it because that means a lot of events will be televised live for us, or only tape-delayed a few hours. It sucks when the events happened yesterday by the time you're watching them.

As for the Obamas involvement, I thought the speeches they made were too personal ("pick Chicago because we love it!"), and that goes a long way towards explaining why Chicago wasn't selected. That, and the poor boy who was just murdered on video.; 10/3/09, 3:08 AM
Beth said...: Penny, how has our Mardi Gras been "politicized"???; 10/3/09, 12:07 PM