US using torture/"interrogation" techniques lifted from old communist manuals

[syndicalist]

The New York Times and others broke this story with accompanying documents, although I had heard of this as long ago as perhaps a year or so, on NPR's Fresh Air or a similar radio program (will provide link when I find it). Basically, the story is that the US was and is using interrogation/torture techniques lifted from old communist manuals (see

Comments

I remember that joke.

[ladypolitik]

There was an old joke that whenever, during the Cold War, the USSR would do something -- like, say, launch a satellite into space, or develop some new technology (like detonating the Tsar Bomba bomb, which had 1.4% the power of the Solar System's sun) -- the official US reaction would be outrage, followed by reassurances to the public that capitalism was still top dog. Then, after the US policy makers expressed outrage the USSR had done such a thing, the US would quickly try to learn how the USSR had done it, so they could do it themselves.

Maaaaan, those were *the* days.

On a similar note, remember how in the aftermath of WWII, the Nuremberg principles outlined the definition of war crimes in such a way that, ultimately, a war crime constituted any crime that Germany committed and the Allies didn't (so that for example, German commanders who orchestrated the firebombing of non-military, civilian concentrations and infrastructures--like London--were set free with American military defense testimony, because Britain and the U.S. had firebombed non-military urban centres, too)?

...Good times!

Re: I remember that joke.

[syndicalist]

Well, I don't have the whole text of the law of the Nuremberg Principles in front of me -- it's an off day, what can I say -- but, yeah, that was how they were implemented (victors' justice), but basically, like you imply, they are supposed to grant no country an exception:

"To initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

-- International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, 1946

My recollection is they state a soldier has not just the right, but a duty, to disobey illegal orders. Which means all the US soldiers in Iraq are essentially complicit in illegal actions, although the chief war criminals -- the kind who were hanged at Nuremberg -- are in the executive branch.