By GottaLaff
Cringeworthy:
It was media mayhem in Copenhagen Friday. The Chinese press reportedly flooded a meeting between President Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, with many of Robert Gibbs' "people" left in the dust. Even CNN's Rick Sanchez seems upset. CNN
By GottaLaff
I heard this on Thom Hartmann's show yesterday and couldn't believe my ears. Well, yes I could:
A fight is brewing between Capitol Hill and the Pentagon over allegations that Chinese government agents were allowed to interrogate some detainees at Guantanamo Bay.Jay Alan Liotta, principal director of the Defense Department office responsible for detainee policy, told a House subcommittee on Thursday that he would not publicly comment on whether officials from China or any other nation were granted access to foreign citizens held at the detention facility.
He offered to release that information to the committee during a closed, classified session. Lawmakers weren’t happy about his answer. [...]
Members of Congress have been routinely denied access to the Guantanamo detainees.
“The American people have a right, without compromising national security, to understand what happened at Guantanamo, particularly in this case of the Uighurs,” said Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., chairman of the subcommittee that conducted the hearing. “The answer that it should be in a classified setting is absurd.”
Ranking Republican Dana Rohrabacher of California agreed, saying he recently was denied access to terrorism detainees. [...]
Three former Uighur detainees submitted testimony through legal counsel on Thursday alleging that all 22 detainees of the Chinese Muslim minority group were interrogated by Chinese government officials during a seven- to 10-day visit in 2002.
There is obviously so much more information to come on this subject, but note the recent pace at which it's been released. As it is reported, I promise to pass it along.
By GottaLaff
The weirdest part of this breaking story is that, per MSNBC, the Chinese crew mooned the Americans:
Five Chinese ships have maneuvered dangerously close to a US navy vessel in the South China Sea, the US government has said.
US officials said the incident came after days of "increasingly aggressive" acts by Chinese ships.
These violated international law on respecting other users of the seas, a Pentagon spokesman said.
A protest was expected to be delivered to the Chinese military attache at the Pentagon on Monday.
The incident happened on Sunday as the USNS Impeccable was on routine operations in international waters 75 miles (120km) south of Hainan island, a US statement said.
The ships had "aggressively manoeuvred" around the Impeccable "in an apparent co-ordinated effort to harass the US ocean surveillance ship while it was conducting routine operations in international waters", according to the Pentagon.
The US ship sprayed the Chinese vessel with water from fire hoses to try to force it away, it said.
But it said the Chinese crew stripped to their underwear and carried on approaching to within 25ft (8m).
By GottaLaff
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.”Well, that was wise. They wouldn't have wanted to be accused of plagiarism.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. [...]
Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects.
The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”
The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”
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