From Brainwashing to Terrorist Interrogation

        When 20 US POWs chose to stay in Communist China after the Korean War, the US intelligence community went nuts. Reports of brainwashing had been floating around for awhile, but now it was a confirmed phenomenon. The CIA and various military branches were determined to replicate and improve upon whatever tactics the enemy had up their sleeve.
        So they created MKULTRA and a number of other questionable programs that did unethical and illegal things to people to try to control their minds, their behavior. The most common experiments involved LSD or other drugs, sensory deprivation, and stress positions. They ended up working out ways to break people down, deconstruct personalities, and cause "regression."
        Somehow, these organizations decided that the ability to cause a psychotic breakdown was a great technique in an interrogator's arsenal. Good enough to be pretty much the only one. So the KUBARK manual was created, explaining how to use stress positions, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, circadian rhythm disruption and other techniques to disorient a prisoner. It also advised hypnotism.
        The KUBARK manual (it came out in the early 60s) was then the basis for the next 40 years of interrogation manuals, including the ones used at the controversial School of Americas. It also was the basis for the SERE  (Survive Evade Resist Escape) program, which was designed to put military officers and special forces operators through intense simulations of Soviet/Communist capture and interrogation (read: torture). The SERE students underwent the techniques described in the KUBARK manual, which were based on the research from MKULTRA.
        When we started capturing terrorists post-9/11, no one knew what to do with them (except the FBI, apparently, but everyone decided to ignore them and go the unethical route). So the CIA hired SERE trainer and director John Mitchell to interrogate prisoners. Hence waterboarding, hooding of prisoners, disorientation, "rap torture"....all the specific techniques we saw used in Guantanamo, secret prisons, and Abu Ghraib.
        This is just dumb. I don't understand how anyone made the leap between "research to learn how to break someone down" to "effective interrogation technique." There is literally zero research on the effects of these methods on convincing a prisoner with a secret to betray it. There is no reason to believe that the disorientation, humiliation, and physical stress that are still a standard part of interrogation procedure (see John Yoo's memos for this) have any positive effect whatsoever on the gaining of actionable intelligence.