What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we’re all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it’s yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn’t anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? “Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.” And yet… it’s clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever “confessions” can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it’s also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It’s hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it’s could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

I have two types of sources for Nonviolence.org. The first is mainstream news. I search through Google News, Technorati current events, then maybe the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Washington Post.

There are lots of interesting articles on the war in iraq, but there’s always a political spin somewhere, especially in timing. Most big news stories have broken in one month, died down, and then become huge news three months later (e.g., Wilson’s CIA wife being exposed, which was first reported on Nonviolence.org on July 22 but became headlines in early October). These news cycles are driven by domestic party politics, and at times I feel all my links make Nonviolence.org sound like an apparatchik of the Democratic Party USA.

But it’s not just the tone that makes mainstream news articles a problem–it’s also the general subject matter. There’s a lot more to nonviolence than antiwar exposes, yet the news rarely covers anything about the culture of peace. “If it bleeds it leads” is an old newspaper slogan and you will never learn about the wider scope of nonviolence by reading the papers.

My second source is peace movement websites

And these are, by-and-large, uninteresting. Often they’re not updated frequently. But even when they are, the pieces on them can be shallow. You’ll see the self-serving press release (“as a peace organization we protest war actions”) and you’ll see the exclamatory all-caps screed (“eND THe OCCUPATION NOW!!!”). These are fine as long as you’re already a member of said organization or already have decided you’re against the war, but there’s little persuasion or dialogue possible in this style of writing and organizing.

There are few people in the larger peace movement who regularly write pieces that are interesting to those outside our narrow circles. David McReynolds and Geov Parrish are two of those exceptions. It takes an ability to sometimes question your own group’s consensus and to acknowledge when nonviolence orthodoxy sometimes just doesn’t have an answer.

And what of peace bloggers? I really admire Joshua Micah Marshall, but he’s not a pacifist. There’s the excellent Gutless Pacifist (who’s led me to some very interesting websites over the last year), Bill Connelly/Thoughts on the eve, Stand Down/No War Blog, and a new one for me, The Picket Line. But most of us are all pointing to the same mainstream news articles, with the same Iraq War focus.

If the web had started in the early 1970s, there would have been lots of interesting publishing projects and blogs growing out the activist communities. Younger people today are using the internet to sponsor interesting gatherings and using sites like Meetup to build connections, but I don’t see communities built around peace the way they did in the early 1970s. There are few people building a life–hope, friends, work–around pacifism.

Has “pacifism” become ossified as its own in-group dogma of a certain generation of activists? What links can we build with current movements? How can we deepen and expand what we mean by nonviolence so that it relates to the world outside our tiny organizations?

And it is in the vein that I will pass along the latest poll by MS-NBC, that has found that 70% of American people think Hussein and 9/11 are linked. This is perhaps the biggest lie of my lifetime. I fear for the very soul of my nation, that so many of my fellow Americans would deny all evidence to allow themselves to go along with this myth. There has been no evidence of any connection. Most of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, opposed to the U.S.-backed ruling Saudi family. Al Qaeda is a group of religious fundamentalists trained in part with CIA money who have always been opposed to the secular socialist regime of Saddam Hussein. There’s no mystery who the hijackers were or why they chose the U.S. as their target. Conspiracy theories aren’t needed to explain the events of two years ago.

So why then do we believe Saddam blew up the World Trade Center towers? Maybe there are too many of us who love our lives of convenience, who love our big cars, our big homes, our opulent lifestyles and maybe we know that deep down our lifestyle is based on control of Middle East oil. Or perhaps Saddam Hussein has become the demon we pour all our worldly fears and guilt into, so that we think all the world’s troubles must come from him.

Whatever the reason, the results are a kind of mass hysteria. Seven our of ten Americans believe in a conspiracy theory so divorced from any evidence that history surely prepares to mock us. Every so often I’ll read of the outlandish conspiracy theories running through the Arab world—like the one that the planes were manned by Israelies and that all the Jews who worked in the towers were warned not to come to work—and I’ll wonder how a people could live in such a state of unreality. But then I see American’s myths: just as incredible, just as based on our own demons. We have based a war and a foreign policy on the boogie-men of our subconsciences. We have killed for our fears. What if we were to wake up to reality: could we still justify the war and occupation of Iraq with the imperiousness and surety that we’ve shown so far?

“Had the administration accurately depicted the consensus within the intelligence community in 2002–that Iraq’s ties with Al Qaeda were inconsequential; that its nuclear weapons program was minimal at best; and that its chemical and biological weapons programs, which had yielded significant stocks of dangerous weapons in the past, may or may not have been ongoing–it would have had a very difficult time convincing Congress and the American public to support a war to disarm Saddam.”