November 14, 2005

SERE's Misapplications

M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan Marks, writing in the New York Times:

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees. General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

Some within the Pentagon warned that these tactics constituted torture, but a top adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld justified them by pointing to their use in SERE training, a senior Pentagon official told us last month.

When internal F.B.I. e-mail messages critical of these methods were made public earlier this year, references to SERE were redacted. But we've obtained a less-redacted version of an e-mail exchange among F.B.I. officials, who refer to the methods as "SERE techniques." We also learned from a Pentagon official that the SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy (we've been unable to learn the content of that guidance)...

...By bringing SERE tactics and the Guantánamo model onto the battlefield, the Pentagon opened a Pandora's box of potential abuse. On Nov. 26, 2003, for example, an Iraqi major general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was forced into a sleeping bag, then asphyxiated by his American interrogators. We've obtained a memorandum from one of these interrogators - a former SERE trainer - who cites command authorization of "stress positions" as justification for using what he called "the sleeping bag technique."

"A cord," he explained, "was used to limit movement within the bag and help bring on claustrophobic conditions." In SERE, he said, this was called close confinement and could be "very effective." Those who squirmed or screamed in the sleeping bag, he said, were "allowed out as soon as they start to provide information."

Three soldiers have been ordered to stand trial on murder charges in General Mowhoush's death. Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it's the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.

Torture is a moral disgrace. On top of that, from a utilitarian perspective, it is often of dubious intelligence-gathering value. So why is the President squandering so much political capital fighting this despicable fight? Because Dick Cheney stays up at night thinking of the KSM ticking bomb hypo? But we know what will happen if a terrorist likely has information that Manhattan is about to be nuked. All efforts, the law be damned, will be taken to get the requisite information. And the interrogator will likely be pardoned, if even charged with any crime. But we don't codify CIA torture carve-outs, so that they enjoy an added imprimatur of legitimacy from the legislature courtesy of Ted Stevens, the better to sully our moral authority on the global stage. Why is this so hard to get? And why can't someone get Bush's ear on this and pull him out of Cheney-Addington bunker-land?

Is all this jumping-through-hoops unlawful combatant stuff and legalistic mumbo-jumbo just a way for the higher-ups to feel better about how the detainees are aggressively interrogated? While the debate about what goes "over the line" seems disturbingly public in our relatively open society, I am more concerned about the guys who get sent to other countries for the dirty work.

Posted by: Chuck Betz at November 15, 2005 07:34 AM | Permalink to this comment

short answer: curch commission, with a big helping of "Winter Soldier".

Neo-cons, neo-imperialists, whatever ways you want to describe the war party, remember these Leftist attacks on the nation's ability to defend itself. For the same reason we oppose the ICC, a lack of trust in the motives of those proposing the initiative, we oppose the McCain amendment. We will oppose any measure that restricts the US' ability to act in any way. We believe that these measures will be used by leftist members of Congress as well as a future leftist Presidential administration to prosecute and persecute military and intelligence operatives, officers, and leadership for doing the things necessary to protect the country.

Barring a Presidential grant of pardon to all members of the military and intelligence communities, this is a very real threat. Those of us in the war party have a justified fear of the anti-american impulses of the left, and the way that they will pursue their pathologies against the national security apparatus. Just as leftist anti-american lawyers severely restricted Clinton's actions against Osama et al. those same lawyers and their intellectual descendatns will restrict a future president's actions as much as possible while attempting to persecute those who defend the country.

Many pieces of legislation, as well as many treaties, that are relatively motherhood when conducted between honorable parties are very dangerous when one cannot trust one's counterparties. I submit that no party of the Left as currently constructed can be trusted with the nations' national security, just as the goodwill of foreign governments cannot be assumed in joining the ICC. I can easily see Chavez pursuing all memebers of the US military through the ICC, especially as a currently allied nation that has a relatively hawkish administration is pursuing CIA officers for an incident that involved a Communist journalist and her ill-fated rendezvous with insurgents that she supported.

Your belief in multilateral institutions as well as the good sense and goodwill of other nations appears to be excessive based on past and current behaviour of those actors.

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Posted by: Netpowersoft at November 29, 2005 04:55 AM | Permalink to this comment