Saturday, April 20, 2013

More about Korean War "false" confessions

In my recent essay "Lies from the Korean War, and Why They Still Matter", I made the following observation:

Previous evaluations of “brainwashing”, the MKUltra Program, and our enhanced interrogation techniques have been based on the unstated premise that the Korean War confessions were “false”.


The just-released "Report of the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment" contains the following statement:

The SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) program subjected military personnel to harsh conditions to prepare them to resist torture. The program was developed after the Korean War as a training technique to teach selected categories of U.S. military personnel, such as pilots, how to resist coercive treatment (and torture), which was expected to be inflicted on American prisoners of war in an effort to obtain false confessions of war crimes and other propaganda-related admissions.


From this and other statements in the report, it is clear that the Task Force also considered the Korean War confessions to have been false. What impact this probable misconception has on the report's findings and recommendations is unclear.

It would be nice if they got this right some day.

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