Exploring the Bush Torture Regime’s SERE Origins
Spencer Ackerman has an excellent article on the findings of a Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry into interrogation policy, exploring the torture system’s origins in the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency’s SERE torture resistance training. Note that those who applied these methods were specifically warned that they were illegal and unlikely to work:
By September 2002, Pentagon officials and Guantanamo interrogators had grown “frustrated” with their inability to collect as much useful intelligence from interrogations as they had expected from Guantanamo detainees, according to the report. A JPRA-sponsored training session for interrogators that month introduced the concept of exploiting “phobias” and playing off cultural sensitivities of Arabs and Muslims. JPRA instructor Joseph Witsch warned a superior, “We are out of our sphere when we begin to profess the proper ways to exploit these detainees,” but the training continued. Witsch later acknowledged to a Pentagon working group on interrogations, “The physical and psychological pressures we apply in training violate national and international laws. … I hope someone is explaining this to all these folks asking for our techniques and methodology!”
Several Pentagon officials were asking for precisely that. A “Behavioral Science Consultation Team” established at Guantanamo and in frequent contact with SERE advisers counseled a Guantanamo working group on whether the interrogators had “authorization to use interrogation approaches that had not been taught to interrogators” at the U.S. Army’s intelligence center and were not contained in its Field Manual on interrogations. One SERE adviser told the BSCT, “Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low.” Yet the working group approved a decision — over some BSCT and SERE reservations — to recommend the use of expanded techniques on a high-value detainee named Mohammed al-Qatani that were “influenced by SERE,” according to the report.
As Cato Vice President Gene Healy says “Imagine if, shortly after 9/11, someone had told you that the US government would adopt an interrogation policy based on Chinese Communist techniques designed to elicit false confessions. You’d have thought that person was pretty cynical.” But that’s what they did. Really. SERE training is designed to help stiffen soldiers’ resistance to the sort of torture the North Vietnamese used to “break” John McCain and force him to “confess” to all manner of crimes. It specifically arises out of the experience of American detainees in the Korean War to imitate tactics applied by Communist regimes for the purpose of deriving false confessions. And why shouldn’t it? That’s what torture is good for.
23 Responses to “Exploring the Bush Torture Regime’s SERE Origins”
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April 22nd, 2009 at 11:40 am
and I think that’s exactly why KSM was waterboarded 182 times during March 2003–to extract a false account of an Iraq-al Qaeda link, that Bush could then use publicly as the final piece of evidence justifying his imminent invasion of Iraq. KSM was captured on March 1, 2003, 19 days before the invasion began.
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:41 am
This post is a non-sequitur because it discusses things that I don’t want to talk about.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:00 pm
A real question: If the information our soldiers gave was false and misleading and of no value to the enemy, why did we begin training them to resist the torture? If they resist, presumably, they get tortured more. And even if they don’t find relief by talking… what’s the difference? If they are giving bad intelligence, who cares?
If people being tortured give up valuable information, then it would make sense to train them to resist. But if they do not give valuable information… just tell them to talk. Right?
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Sam M,
The point isn’t that all information gained through torture is always and necessarily bad/untrue. Rather, because a person being tortured will say anything to get the torture to stop, you’re at least as likely to get false information as you are to get anything true, with no way of differentiating one from the other. This means that, if you have a systematic policy of getting information through torture, then your intelligence is going to be so unreliable as to be useless.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Khaled,
I understand that. My question is, if the torture tactics being used by North Korean and Vietnamese captors were getting our captured soldiers to convey information that was so unreliable as to be useless, why did we begin training our soldiers to resist the torture? From a strategic standpoint, this makes no sense, as you typically train your soldiers to offer misleading or useless information. But if these tactics are already yielding misleading or useless info, why bother?
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I wouldn’t be surprised if the resistance training is more to defend the pysche of our troops than to prevent the leaking of valuable info. Of course, the commies who came up with these techniques weren’t looking for valuable info, they were looking for false confessions and propaganda for The Party. And so were we, apparently.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:29 pm
A real question: If the information our soldiers gave was false and misleading and of no value to the enemy, why did we begin training them to resist the torture?
The point of the torture, as practiced by the N. Koreans and N. Vietnamese, was not to acquire actionable intelligence but to produce propaganda.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:32 pm
A real question: If the information our soldiers gave was false and misleading and of no value to the enemy, why did we begin training them to resist the torture?
Why don’t you ask Comrade McCain? After all, he confessed to war crimes against North Vietnam, the traitor.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:33 pm
If the information our soldiers gave was false and misleading and of no value to the enemy, why did we begin training them to resist the torture?
That’s not taking into account the other element — the use of torture to turn captured military into propaganda tools.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Adam Serwer put one aspect of this well: “It should be self-evident that the non-simulated use of simulated torture is torture”
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=04&year=2009&base_name=the_sere_paradox
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:41 pm
“Imagine if, shortly after 9/11, someone had told you that the US government would adopt an interrogation policy based on Chinese Communist techniques designed to elicit false confessions. You’d have thought that person was pretty cynical.”
I wouldn’t have. Remember the Church committee in the 1970s? 9/11 was new.
What’s unimaginable and new is that Obama decided to go against the CIA and release the memos. The lefties who said Obama was too centrist and timid during the primary were flat out wrong.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Sam M,
Others have mentioned the mental health and propaganda issues. On top of that, you also have the possibility of prisoners taking action against each other, whether or not prisoners will attempt to escape if possible, and so on. In short, there are lots of reasons besides interrogation that captors may engage in torture, and so lots of reason to provide training on resistance.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Which is why torture regimes in American prisons are frequently used to compel testimony from the accused. Ask Eliot Spitzer, among other prosecutors and/or police officers.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Sam M hits on a problem that the people who first designed SERE programs back in the ’50s had to grapple with.
It makes sense, logically, that if you resist you get tortured more, so why resist and why train your men to resist? Part of the answer is that, after Korea, many experts who studied the POW experience in that war believed (or claimed to believe) that if Americans initially resisted efforts to exploit them abusively, the Communists would give up and leave them alone. In short, that the Communists had a grudging respect for resisters. Converserly, if you ‘gave in’ they had contempt for you and treated you worse. In reality, this pattern was not at all clear, but it was useful as a humanitarian justification for SERE training, and for demanding that men resist. The message was: If you resist, captivity won’t be so bad for you. It was a way to boost morale among men who feared they might be captured by, basically, brutal savages with irresistible interrogation methods. And if they didn’t fear capture, under adverse combat conditions they’d be more likely to fight to the bitter end rather than retreat, which was something the more conservative cast of military mind wanted to encourage after Korea (a war which had seen massive US retreats, esp. in early stages).
The other reason there was such official interest in getting men to resist more effectively was that POWs in Korea who didn’t resist effectively were seen as having harmed the country in two main ways: by giving false confessions and making propaganda recordings denouncing the US (which were seen as gravely hurting US efforts to win sympathy/allies in the non-aligned world — a key goal at that stage of the Cold War) and by turning against other prisoners, contributing to breakdowns in cohesion among groups of prisoners, fostering mutual distrust, etc., making it easier for their captors to control them. This was seen as bad in part because individual POWs ended up getting hurt (sometimes by fellow prisoners), this was also bad for the US image (being seen as having non-steadfast soldiers was a source of concern compared to notoriously disciplined Communist armies), and also in part because the WWII model of ‘proper’ POW behavior was still influential — the idea that prisoners should really be spending their time working together, plotting escapes and sabotage, harrassing the enemy, forcing him to tie down moe troops on guard duty, etc., a model from which the prisoners in Korea were seen to have backslid.
In short, SERE was not only about protecting intelligence. There were other goals.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:11 pm
William Gibson nailed this in his last book by the way.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
CIA apparently had the bright idea that because the SERE techniques were used in training American troops, they couldn’t be torture, even though they were being used precisely to train troops to resist torture.
People who think like that are pretty clearly way beyond the reach of rationality.
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I think the reason torture is used is that homo sapiens sapiens simply likes to inflict pain.
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:27 pm
I find it interesting that the pro-torture brigade is very quiet on this blog today. I wonder if the giant avalanche of evidence of Bush admin crimes that’s been coming down in the past week or so is finally starting to shame some of them.
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Americans captured during the Korean War were the first to give ‘confessions’ of nonexistent war crimes (’germ warfare’ was the usual) and 14 of them chose (apparently freely) to remain in North Korea. This was an immense shock. It was called ‘brainwashing’. These guys hadn’t been tortured by having their fingernails pulled out or similar inquisitional practices. They hadn’t been water-boarded. What had happened to them? How did the communists ‘break’ them when the Japanese and Germans hadn’t?
This was a really big deal back then. The fear of ‘brainwashing’ was the central theme in the original book and then movie ‘the Manchurian Candidate’. The theme of having Americans ‘taken over’ was a major theme in many horror/SciFi fiction–’The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’.
Probably seems like just part of the weird world of the Baby Boomers to most of y’all. But it was scary as hell at the time. (Recall that ‘brainwashing’ was backed up by a billion fanatical Chinese and Russian nukes; we were a frightened nation.)
A big de-briefing of Korean War POWs led to the realization that the GIs that succumbed to their captors had been coerced into identifying with their captors. Today we’d call it the ‘Stockholm syndrome’.
First, the military structure of rank and responsibility was consciously attacked by the prison camp administrators. ‘See–no sargeant! No captain! Everybody the same!’ Punishments were given for acting the part of your military role/rank.
GI’s who seemed vulnerable were co-opted by clever tricks. One was the fake execution. You’re a GI captured by NKoreans, OK? You’re ordered to take a shovel and march a couple of miles to an empty field that looks like it’s full of graves. The lieutenant in charge of the squad that marched you there has you dig a grave. You know what comes next, right? They force you to send a lot of time making your grave deep enough, long enough, wide enough. You have lots of time to die many times in your mind. Then, finally, you’re told to stand at the head of the grave. A pistol is pressed to your head. And ‘click’ there’s no shell in the gun. Before you can react, the lieutenant spins you around and gives you a huge hug. You’re marched back to camp and given a real meal–possibly the first in months.
Where do your loyalties lie after that?
That’s ‘brainwashing’ and it was the thing that we were trained to resist.
Hope that clears up a bit of the mystery about ‘SERE’. When I took it in ‘65 it was simply ‘Escape and Evasion’ but the lesson was the same: you will be isolated and treated horribly by experts and you may–under great pressure–confess to idiotic ‘crimes’. But you WILL (in that great military emphasis on ‘WILL’) depend on your buddies and the military command in the camp and they will depend on you. And you will get through that experience together.
I am not masquerading as Sen McCain. Our family names are only one letter different. I was not captured. Those guys who were and who–as the Sen did–’confessed’ to comically idiotic ‘crimes’ were doing what they were trained and expected to do. I grind my teeth in angry frustration that someone could criticize them for what they did in order to live.
Kind of a long post; thanx for listening to an old guy.
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Let me paste the American Military Code of Conduct, because it is related to SERE training, which has separate iterations in the services but is basically the same for all:
I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way
of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.
I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never
surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to
resist.
If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will
make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither
parole nor special favors from the enemy.
If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners.
I will give no information or take part in any action which might be
harmful to my comrades. If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will
obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me, and will back them up in
every way.
When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give
only my name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering
further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or
written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to
their cause.
I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom,
responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my
country free. I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.
SERE training was designed to 1. train military personnel in evasion techniques – living off the land, going a long time in the wilderness without provision, etc. 2. once captured, the ability for all to resist questioning in the face of abuse leading towards torture. 3. For officers to train in leading and organizing the enlisted under them into a command unit in the face of attempts by the prisonkeepers to break them apart and destroy unit cohesion.
All of these things were issues that came up in Korea and Southeast asia, and the military designed a program to prepare people who were most likely to get captured (pilots, specops, aircrew, etc) for both evasion and captivity. The code of conduct was developed for the same purpose, and SERE is basically training in how to follow the code of conduct.
So, knowing how things work in the Pentagon, it is actually pretty easy to see how the whole SERE relationship to Guantanamo etc. came to be. There was a report to SECDEF or the CIA or straight to the NSC that interrogations were not successful. A general or admiral who had attended SERE back when they were an operating aviator or spec ops guy said, “hey, those SERE guys were pretty good at getting me to spill the beans when I was there, lets ask them…” And thus, we had SERE, which was used to break our own military guys, get tied in to the intelligence effort. Sleep deprivation, water techniques of various sorts, and confinement inside of boxes are all part of the gig at SERE training. When I read the memo’s my jaw dropped because of the familiarity of the techniques AND the safety techniques that are applied to prevent injury.
So, in true bureaucratic fashion, we solved our problem with the a lowest common denominator answer. No original thought, just the solution of “well it worked for them, so it should work for this.” Then, to cover the bases, have the ol’ hack lawyer up at justice write some memo to justify everything in relation to our treaty obligations in relation to Geneva.
This thing is just disappointing on a lot of levels. One, its obviously not legal and even if you disagree with the fact that it is torture, the treatment of these prisoners is in a grey area that the U.S. should not be treading in. Two, the fact that we do SERE training to military personnel is not a justification for anything – you volunteer for the training… it is like sending a Dominatrix into an elementary school to whip a bunch of schoolkids for being bad and saying its not a crime because she does it legally to dirty old men who pay. Three, this is typical, and I hate to overuse the word hack, but hacky decision making by the DoD and NSC… the lack of original thought in the Pentagon and in the OEOB is consistantly disappointing. I’m sure if they had gathered a group of thinkers and subject matter experts together, they could have come up with a way to extract intelligence that didn’t violate international law.
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I wonder if the giant avalanche of evidence of Bush admin crimes that’s been coming down in the past week or so is finally starting to shame some of them.
I’d like to believe that, but my sense is that what you are seeing is more a result of these people pausing as they try to figure out who among themselves to scapegoat.
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:06 pm
I don’t think it’s shame, so much as demoralization. It’s dawning on them that the mountain is too big.
April 24th, 2009 at 12:11 am
[...] recall that the SERE people asked to provide information to interrogators about how to do torture specifically warned the would-be torturers that their techniques would be illegal to apply and unlikely to produce reliable [...]