Mythical principles of legality and humaneness

As you probably all know by now, there is new evidence that Guantanamo interrogation techniques were modeled after those China used on American POWs during the Korean War, as reported in a 1957 article by Air Force sociologist (!) Alfred Biderman entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” Blogs on the left have perhaps unfairly jumped on the word false,

The article (pdf) was published at the tail end of the 1950s panic about “brainwashing,” which had been of intense interest to the CIA and the military, as Alfred McCoy recently recounted in his book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, which is worth a quick read. The Biderman article is 10 pages long and also worth reading for its insights into the methods of breaking a human being’s will as well as for such ironies as “For the interrogator, forced standing has still further advantages. It is consistent with formal adherence to mythical principles of legality and humaneness important to the Communists.” (Donald Rumsfeld: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?”)