Forgotten lessons on torture

THERE ARE several obvious reasons, both ethical and practical, for the United States to reject the use of torture. But a sad new reason was added during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month, when it was revealed that US military trainers instructed Army and CIA interrogators at Guantanamo in 2002 on "coercive management techniques" derived from Chinese communist practices.

Trainers and trainees alike were unaware that these techniques - keeping detainees awake, exposing them to extreme temperatures, or forcing them to stand in one position for an extended period - were drawn from a 1957 article on Chinese interrogation methods by a sociologist in the Air Force. The original study was titled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War." Its chart of Chinese torture techniques had been used to teach Americans how to resist physical pressure of the kind that elicited flagrantly false confessions from American POWs during the Korean War.

The scandal in this disclosure - first reported in The New York Times Wednesday - is not that military authorities forgot where their torture techniques came from. The scandal is that Bush administration officials were so willfully blind to lessons learned about torture a half-century ago that they authorized interrogation methods that are not only barbaric, but that have been proven to produce unreliable confessions.

Vice President Dick Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld are old Cold War warriors. They belong to a generation of American officials who defined the struggle against communism not simply as a geopolitical clash between superpowers but as a contest between the rule of law and the law of the ruler, between civilized values and communist immorality. When they condoned torture, they made it seem that both sides came out of the Cold War as losers.