Other than show trials, the War on Terror employs nearly every Cold War tactic. Who would have thought we'd miss those kangaroo courts?

For the past several years, I’ve been working on a book on Cold War political trials, the net result being that I end up in many cocktail party conversations comparing the post-9/11 world with the early, “hot” phase of the Cold War. Both conflicts are transnational, civilizational even; wars of ideas as much as actual confrontations. But the similarities belie the differences.

Right after the September 11 attacks, I was convinced we were about to witness the sequel to McCarthyism. There was good reason to believe that the Bush-Cheney administration would hearken back to previous policy responses with a predictable us-versus-them mentality. There is, after all, a pattern of behaviour: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 after the American Revolution, the Palmer Raids after WWI and, following WWII, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the blacklist, and the dangerous bombast of the senator from Wisconsin himself.

Almost eight years on, two unsavoury conclusions can be made. First, during the Cold War, both sides had the courage of their convictions to actually put their adversaries on trial. They may have been egregious miscarriages of justice, frame-ups, or set-pieces of pre-rehearsed theatre, but they were trials nonetheless. They were public and therefore could be endlessly analyzed and criticized. Verdicts could be probed, appeals heard, claims of innocence argued, and demands made for the political rehabilitation of victims.

In the War on Terror, we do not have trials, but rather indefinite detentions. Not blacklists, but extraordinary rendition to black sites. No raucous congressional hearing, but illegal wiretapping. I’ve heard many complaints from civil libertarians about the Patriot Act, but frankly, I would welcome criminal judicial processes with some respect for due process and governed by the law of evidence where information extracted under torture is inadmissible.

The second conclusion is even more disturbing. Cold War tactics are being imitated, but they aren’t the tactics of past American campaigns against socialists. Rather, what has slowly been revealed is that the United States has mimicked the techniques of the former Soviet Union, in particular in the interrogation methods used by the CIA.

Scott Shane of The New York Times made the connection between the practices of the CIA and those of our former Cold War adversaries. At the time, American psychiatrists like Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. and Harold G. Wolff (who were also working as consultants for the Department of Defense) detailed the methods of communist “interrogation” – isolation, sleep and food deprivation, uncomfortable temperatures, and the use of various “stress positions.” All were necessary to produce the “false confessions” that fuelled that great achievement of Stalinist justice: the show trial.

Physical beatings and the use of manacles or chains were actually repugnant to the KGB, who saw themselves as far more sophisticated in their ability to break prisoners. In this respect, they shared the same code of ethics of the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers in the Bush White House, who helpfully defined away torture to only involve truncheons, clubs, or other medieval instruments.

If you read the memoirs of the survivors of the show trials in Eastern Europe – and for a bone-chilling summer reading experience, I heartily recommend the memoirs of Czechoslovaks Artur London and Evžen Löbl or Hungarian Béla Szász – what becomes obvious is that the methods which the OLC legally legitimated and those that the Soviets had earlier perfected are one and the same.

Of course, an important difference is that the Soviet interrogators knew they were producing false confessions for a master script still being written. We apparently laboured under the misconception that we were producing “actionable intelligence.”

Who knew that almost two decades after the end of communism and the Cold War, we might be pining for the simpler, more obvious injustices of McCarthyism?