Greetings, this is podcast number 98 of Blast the Right.

Today we're going to show how the right wing is playing directly out of the Soviet Union playbook.

That should be something to throw in their face, huh?

I'll also tell you about the next Blast the Right Live call and show, which will be this Monday, June 18th.

Oh, let's get right into it.

My sources are the New York Times, the White House website, USA Today, ABC News, Amnesty International, and the US government website, intelligence.gov.

Nothing, probably not even the Iraq War itself, has soured world opinion on the United States as much as the Bush administration's embrace of torture.

Actually, something probably has, the Bush administration's denial of that embrace, and it's attempt to redefine what constitutes torture and call what they're doing, enhanced or alternative interrogation techniques.

I've always been under the impression, and maybe I've been hoodwinked about this, I'm curious if you've been under this impression as well.

I've always been under the impression that our intelligence agencies develop these alternate interrogation techniques specifically to be able to make the dubious claim that they don't torture.

In other words, we wanted to be able to assert that these are good old fashioned American, high tech, humane, proper methods of interrogating prisoners that fully comply with the Geneva conventions, the anti-torture treaty, and all other applicable domestic and international human rights obligations.

How could anyone dare to challenge these methods when we thought them up just to avoid torturing people?

Well, here's a bombshell for you to drop on your friendly local right-winger.

We didn't develop these techniques at all, they came straight from the KGB, the Cold War Soviet Union's secret police.

It turns out that the right-wing has been defending, endorsing, even sickening the praises of evil, empire, torture techniques.

Here's how we know this.

During the Cold War, we conducted surveillance fights over the Soviet Union that could be shot down.

We had plenty of spies on the ground over there that could be captured.

We wanted to make sure that the airmen and others at great risk of being caught by the Soviets were prepared for the brutal interrogations they would be undergoing.

So the military set up a training program called survival, evasion, resistance, and escape, or seer.

What seer did was inflict upon the aviators and others the very types of interrogation methods the Soviets would use on them, such as sleep deprivation, extreme heat and cold,

painful stress positions, and waterboarding.

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