At one point during the five and a half years John McCain spent as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, he was tortured and beaten so badly he tried to kill himself. After four days of this brutality, he gave in and agreed to make a false confession, telling lies to end the unbearable pain. Later, he would write, "I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine."
Similar techniques were utilized in the Asian war preceding Vietnam - Korea. The Communist Chinese used them to interrogate American POW's and force them to confess to things they didn't do, such as germ warfare. A chart of the Chinese methods, compiled in 1957 by an American sociologist, lists the methods, including sleep deprivation; semi-starvation; filthy, infested surroundings; prolonged constraint, and exposure. The effects are listed, too: makes victim dependent on interrogator; weakens mental and physical ability to resist, reduces prisoner to "animal level concerns," and others. On July 2, The New York Times reported that the chart had made a surprise return appearance, this time at Guantanamo Bay, where in 2002 it was used in a course to teach our military interrogators "Coercive Management Techniques," to be used whe n interrogating detainees held there as prisoners in the war on terror.
In other words, we had adopted the inhumane tactics of enemies past. Tactics we once were quick to call torture. Tactics created not to get at the truth, but to manufacture lies that we then characterize as credible. How can we expect this to be an effective way to extract real information from terrorists?
Since 2005, Congress has banned the use of such methods by the military, but we have no way of knowing
http://www.truthout.org/article/the-company-we-keep
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