'Communist torture' used at Guantanamo Bay

Shock and awe all over the blogosphere about how the US learned its torture techniques from the very best:

A CHART outlining "coercive management techniques" for US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay was copied verbatim from a 1957 US Air Force study of Chinese communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions - many of them false - from US prisoners. ...

Reporting the origins of the chart, the paper said it was the latest and most vivid evidence of the way communist interrogation methods the US has long condemned as torture became the basis for interrogations by the military at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. ...

The CIA is still authorised by US President George W. Bush to use a range of secret "alternative" interrogation methods.

Why the surprise? Alert commentators saw this one coming years ago. Georgie Anne Geyer was one of them:

Every once in a while, in very different parts of the world, I hear varieties of the same refrain about how to choose – or not choose – your enemies.

It always goes something like this: “Be careful who you fight, for you may become like them.” When you go a little deeper, you find that this makes sense. The passions of conflict are so strangely interwoven that it is not uncommon for one party to a conflict to unwittingly take on the characteristics of the other.

So I wondered last week whether we had not, in fact, absorbed some Soviet-style behavior during the Cold War.

Of course DC took on the characteristics of its old Red enemies. It even appropriated some of their core policies, which we've commented on before:

Like its old rival, the Soviet Union, the US projects itself as a “proposition nation” uniquely committed to equality, human rights, and diversity. The Soviets had likewise asserted that their forces represented the triumph of the Enlightenment virtues of liberation and equality.

Khrushchev launched a campaign to bring communism to the African nations emerging out of the 19th century’s colonial empires, hoping to utilize resentment against the West to set up client states throughout the continent.

Interestingly, the more immediate result of Khrushchev’s focus on communist revolution in the former colonies in Africa was felt in the US. The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, despite the private prejudices of many top leaders, committed the US to a Civil Rights agenda at home to diminish the appeal of “African Socialism” at home and abroad.

If a government adapts totalitarian ideas, totalitarian strategy, and totalitarian goals, what can you expect from it, sooner or later?

Totalitarian behavior, of course.