There’s even more evidence that Bush was wrong on torture approach

Who would have thought that Chinese communists would become a model for U.S. interrogators? What a disgrace.

The New York Times reported last week that U.S. military trainers at the Guant�namo Bay prison in 2002 taught a set of interrogation techniques that originated with a 1957 Air Force study of how Chinese communists forced confessions, often false, out of American prisoners in the Korean War. U.S. interrogators went on to use techniques described as torture in the study, including stress positions and exposure to cold, against some prisoners at Guant�namo before Congress banned coercive methods by the military in 2005.

But earlier this year, President George W. Bush rejected a chance to make a clean break from torture. He vetoed a bill that would have put CIA interrogators under the same rules as the military’s.

Torture is not only an affront to American values. Interrogators from the FBI, CIA and military have testified that it doesn’t produce reliable intelligence.

Recently, a bipartisan group of 200 retired generals, religious leaders and former top U.S. government officials — including George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state — called on Mr. Bush to issue an executive order unequivocally rejecting torture.

If the president isn’t worried about his own reputation if he rebuffs this group, he should be worried about the nation’s. Even the possibility that U.S. interrogators could use torture degrades America’s moral authority, one of its most potent weapons in the war on terrorists.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-ed07208jul07,0,4204549.story

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