SPB News for Thursday.

'Communist torture' used at Guantanamo Bay A chart outlining "coercive management techniques" for US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay was copied verbatim from a 1957 US Air Force study of Chinese communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions - many of them false - from US prisoners. The New York Times reported the chart listed techniques for use on prisoners including "sleep deprivation", "prolonged constraint" and "exposure". Reporting the origins of the chart, the paper said it was the latest and most vivid evidence of the way communist interrogation methods the US has long condemned as torture became the basis for interrogations by the military at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is still authorised by US President [sic] George W. Bush to use a range of secret "alternative" interrogation methods. In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods for the CIA and the US military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, the officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware it was created as a result of concerns about false confessions by US prisoners.

CACI Denies Use of Torture in Iraq CACI International, an Arlington-based provider of interrogators to the U.S. military in Iraq, said it "rejects and denies" allegations from four Iraqi men who said they were tortured at Abu Ghraib prison. Similar lawsuits filed in the past four years await trial. The four men say contractors hired by CACI and L-3 Communications Holdings beat and humiliated prisoners.

Bush says US to send more troops to Afghanistan Grappling with a record death toll in an overshadowed war, President [sic] Bush promised Wednesday to send more U.S. troops into Afghanistan by year's end. More U.S. and NATO troops have died in the past two months in Afghanistan than in Iraq, a place with triple the number of U.S. and 'coalition' forces. In June, 28 U.S. troops died in Afghanistan. That was the highest monthly total of the entire war, which began in October 2001.

Chavez wants reserves moved from U.S. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has urged South American leaders to withdraw their assets and move their international reserves from U.S. Chavez, who is attending a regional heads-of-state meeting in Argentina, said in comments broadcasted by Venezuelan state television on Tuesday that keeping central banks' international reserves in the U.S. was detrimental to the interests of South American nations.

Bush to Close Guantanamo? — President Bush will soon decide whether to close Guantanamo Bay as a prison for al-Qaeda suspects, sources tell ABC News. High-level discussions among top advisers have escalated in the past week, with the most senior administration officials in continuous talks