Via a reader tip comes this editorial in the Joong Ang Ilbo:

Mankind has invented an array of torturous tools primarily because of the effectiveness and efficiency of their “persuasive” power.

Waterboarding, claimed recently by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to have been employed to coerce prisoners of war during interrogation with approval from former President George W. Bush, is also a part of the history of torture.

A recently disclosed memo described CIA agents using waterboarding, which involves strapping a prisoner down and pouring water over a cloth covering his nose and mouth, to interrogate so-called “high value” terrorism suspects. Hard-line military officials advocated that the technique has helped to coerce confessions from Al-Qaeda’s most dangerous and determined prisoners.

If gaining information and confessions was the ultimate goal, American interrogators should have taken lessons from the Chinese for their innovative interrogation methods used in the Korean War.

Unlike their brutal North Korean partners, the Chinese made American prisoners criticize their country in writing with the aim of squeezing out valuable military information. They repeated the method until Americans were brainwashed to turn bellicose against their country in their writings.

Whoever the prisoners were and whatever the purpose was, no excuse can pardon the former Bush administration for committing such human rights atrocities.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You have to love the image the Joong Ang Ilbo included with the editorial that makes it seem like the US was cutting off limbs and pulling off finger nails from these captured terrorists.  Just a continuation of the myth making surrounding this issue.    There was a total of three people waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.  I don’t think any of them would be giving up useful intelligence if they were forced to write bad letters about themselves.

Anyway this guy obviously knows very little about history considering the Chinese were the ones that invented waterboarding to get confessions from captured US servicemembers during the Korean War:

Soldiers in Vietnam use the waterboarding technique on an uncooperative enemy suspect near Da Nang in 1968 to try to obtain information from him. (United Press International)

A CIA interrogation training manual declassified 12 years ago, “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation — July 1963,” outlined a procedure similar to waterboarding. Subjects were suspended in tanks of water wearing blackout masks that allowed for breathing. Within hours, the subjects felt tension and so-called environmental anxiety. “Providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role,” the manual states.

The KUBARK manual was the product of more than a decade of research and testing, refining lessons learned from the Korean War, where U.S. airmen were subjected to a new type of “touchless torture” until they confessed to a bogus plan to use biological weapons against the North Koreans.  [Washington Post]

It is interesting that waterboarding was an approved method interrogation method in the CIA training manual in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was the US President.  In the picture above you can see that in 1968 US troops were using waterboarding in Vietnam when Lyndon B. Johnson was President.  So maybe the truth commission so many people are calling for should go back even farther and investigate these two President’s role in waterboarding?

Finally much like with some of the garbage printed in the Korea Times, it is amazing that the Joong Ang Ilbo has someone as incompetent as this editorialist Shin Ye-ri writing for them that didn’t even know that the CIA learned waterboarding from the Chinese that used it on US servicemembers during the Korean War.