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Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us
By M. GREGG BLOCHE and JONATHAN H. MARKS
11/14/05 "New
York Times" -- -- Washington — How did American
interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include abuse rising to the
level of torture? Much has been said about the illegality of these
tactics, but the strategic error that led to their adoption has been
overlooked.
The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red
Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were
ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the
point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false
confession.
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).
SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known.
It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of
war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators
forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits
of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning. Prolonged
isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and punitive
control over life's most intimate functions produced overwhelming
stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair,
uncontrollable anxiety and a collapse of self-esteem. Sometimes
hallucinations and delusions ensued. Prisoners who had been through
this treatment became pliable and craved companionship, easing the
way for captors to obtain the "confessions" they sought.
SERE, as originally envisioned, inoculates American soldiers against
these techniques. Its psychologists create mock prison regimens to
study the effects of various tactics and identify the coping styles
most likely to withstand them. At Guantánamo, SERE-trained mental
health professionals applied this knowledge to detainees, working
with guards and medical personnel to uncover resistant prisoners'
vulnerabilities. "We know if you've been despondent; we know if
you've been homesick," General Hill said. "That is given to
interrogators and that helps the interrogators" make their plans.
Within the SERE program, abuse is carefully controlled, with the
goal of teaching trainees to cope. But under combat conditions,
brutal tactics can't be dispassionately "dosed." Fear, fury and
loyalty to fellow soldiers facing mortal danger make limits almost
impossible to sustain.
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.
M. Gregg Bloche is a law professor at Georgetown University and a
visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Jonathan H. Marks, a
barrister in London, is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown and Johns
Hopkins.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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