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Okay, this is a good one. A while back, I ran into an article that talked about just how similar the torture and interrogation techniques that the US has been using in the GWOT were to the kinds of techniques that the Soviets used in their gulags. Actually, they were identical. The list of techniques that Solzhenitsyn described as being used against him and others in the gulag included sensory deprivation, stress positions, inducing hypothermia, dietary control, noise, etc., etc. How could this be? Just dumb luck perhaps? A case of independent invention of similar techniques?
No!
It turns out that the techniques the US military approved for use in the GWOT came out of the SERE program that used known communist torture and interrogation techniques to train officers to resist abuse if they were captured.
Read on, McDuff:
Can we please send these ignorant soulless bastards to the Hague for their war crime trials now, please?
No!
It turns out that the techniques the US military approved for use in the GWOT came out of the SERE program that used known communist torture and interrogation techniques to train officers to resist abuse if they were captured.
Read on, McDuff:
Originally Posted by :
November 14, 2005
Op-Ed Contributors
Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us
By M. GREGG BLOCHE and JONATHAN H. MARKS
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.
Okay, now everything makes sense. The weasels currently in charge decided to apply actual Stalinist interrogation techniques that are great for torturing people and extracting false confessions, but useless for getting actual information. Their incompetence truly knows no bounds. We've gotten all the great PR that Stalinist torture brought the Soviets combined with a completely ineffective information gathering regime.November 14, 2005
Op-Ed Contributors
Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us
By M. GREGG BLOCHE and JONATHAN H. MARKS
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.
Can we please send these ignorant soulless bastards to the Hague for their war crime trials now, please?
Or at least get them out of office ASAP. I'm fairly willing to settle for that, personally.
Originally Posted by Aurelian:
Can we please send these ignorant soulless bastards to the Hague for their war crime trials now, please?
Shouldn't the USA do their dirty laundry all by themself? I think they are able to do so!Can we please send these ignorant soulless bastards to the Hague for their war crime trials now, please?
If not - well that is what Hague is made for!
Interesting, especially when one remembers how much people freaked out when someone on these boards compared the US detainee facilities as 'gulags'. Well, they're a lot more like gulags than we ever imagined.
Sad,, it makes me sick
ichi
ichi
Nothing really surprising. It was fairly obvious that the Bush Administration was using this sort of policy. Abu Ghraib blew some of it open.
It will take time before they are called up on it at home. Most Americans have been reluctant to believe their executive office was behind this, but that is beginning to wear thin.
It will take time before they are called up on it at home. Most Americans have been reluctant to believe their executive office was behind this, but that is beginning to wear thin.
Originally Posted by Franconicus:
Shouldn't the USA do their dirty laundry all by themselves?
They will, don't despair. But it might take quite some time and things are probably going to get a lot worse before they get better. There may not be a military-judicial reckoning in which the perpetrators of chemical warfare, torture and other offenses will be prosecuted, but there is bound to be an electoral reckoning.Shouldn't the USA do their dirty laundry all by themselves?
There was an interesting piece by Francis Fukuyama in the Autumn issue of The American Interest in which he more or less announced the tipping point that we are seeing today as both Republicans and pro-war Democrats begin to openly doubt or criticise the war in Iraq.
A large majority of Americans demanded and supported the war in Afghanistan, Fukuyama says, but the same does not apply to the one in Iraq. No one asked for that war and no one is particularly supportive of it. The rationale for it has gradually narrowed down to neoconservative considerations of power projection that have no electoral base and are bound to backfire electorally.
Within the Republican Party, the Administration got support for the Iraq war and other controversial policy initiatives from the neoconservatives(who do not have their own political base but who provide considerable intellectual fire power) and from what Walter Russell Mead calls 'Jacksonian' America - American nationalists whose instincts lead them toward a pugnacious isolationism. Sidelined for the most part were the internationalist Republicans like Brent Scowcroft who populated the Administration of George H.W. Bush.
Failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the tenuous prewar connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda left the President, by the time of his second Inaugural Address, justifying the war exclusively in neoconservative terms; that is, as part of an idealistic policy of political transformation of the broader Middle East. The jacksonian base, which provides the bulk of the troops actually serving and cying in Iraq, has no naturl affinity for this kind of policy.
Jacksonians are more inclined to argue as candidate George W. Bush did during the 2000 election: 'I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. I think out troops ought to be used to fight and win wars.' If this key republican group begins to perceive the war as a policy failure, then there will be little support in the future for the kind of expansive democracy-promoting foreign policy that the President laid out in his January 2005 Inaugural.
Whether the U.S. withdraws from Iraq in the near future or not, I have the feeling that the remaining term of this Administration is going to be characterised by extremely bitter confrontations. Washington is going to be preoccupied with the Middle East to the detriment of other regions and other pressing foreign policy issues, of its relations with its (purported) allies, and of its capacity to react adequately to emerging internal challenges. There is huge budget trouble ahead and plans for social and economic reform will have to be shelved.Failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the tenuous prewar connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda left the President, by the time of his second Inaugural Address, justifying the war exclusively in neoconservative terms; that is, as part of an idealistic policy of political transformation of the broader Middle East. The jacksonian base, which provides the bulk of the troops actually serving and cying in Iraq, has no naturl affinity for this kind of policy.
Jacksonians are more inclined to argue as candidate George W. Bush did during the 2000 election: 'I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. I think out troops ought to be used to fight and win wars.' If this key republican group begins to perceive the war as a policy failure, then there will be little support in the future for the kind of expansive democracy-promoting foreign policy that the President laid out in his January 2005 Inaugural.
And I suspect that this President is not going to be a sitting duck. He is going to be an extremely angry duck, cackling and pecking at his opponents and possibly at some of his closest collaborators for robbing him of the 'historic stature' he had hoped to attain during his second term.
Anyway, just my two euros.
Originally Posted by Aurelian:
Okay, this is a good one. A while back, I ran into an article that talked about just how similar the torture and interrogation techniques that the US has been using in the GWOT were to the kinds of techniques that the Soviets used in their gulags. Actually, they were identical. The list of techniques that Solzhenitsyn described as being used against him and others in the gulag included sensory deprivation, stress positions, inducing hypothermia, dietary control, noise, etc., etc. How could this be? Just dumb luck perhaps? A case of independent invention of similar techniques?
No!
It turns out that the techniques the US military approved for use in the GWOT came out of the SERE program that used known communist torture and interrogation techniques to train officers to resist abuse if they were captured.
Read on, McDuff:
Okay, now everything makes sense. The weasels currently in charge decided to apply actual Stalinist interrogation techniques that are great for torturing people and extracting false confessions, but useless for getting actual information. Their incompetence truly knows no bounds. We've gotten all the great PR that Stalinist torture brought the Soviets combined with a completely ineffective information gathering regime.
Can we please send these ignorant soulless bastards to the Hague for their war crime trials now, please?
You have to understand they didn't need to develop them. The US has known about them for over 40 years. CIA agents and Special forces soldiers are trained and graded on how well (and long) they can with stand all the mental tourtures you listed. So it's childs play to apply them when told to do so.Okay, this is a good one. A while back, I ran into an article that talked about just how similar the torture and interrogation techniques that the US has been using in the GWOT were to the kinds of techniques that the Soviets used in their gulags. Actually, they were identical. The list of techniques that Solzhenitsyn described as being used against him and others in the gulag included sensory deprivation, stress positions, inducing hypothermia, dietary control, noise, etc., etc. How could this be? Just dumb luck perhaps? A case of independent invention of similar techniques?
No!
It turns out that the techniques the US military approved for use in the GWOT came out of the SERE program that used known communist torture and interrogation techniques to train officers to resist abuse if they were captured.
Read on, McDuff:
Okay, now everything makes sense. The weasels currently in charge decided to apply actual Stalinist interrogation techniques that are great for torturing people and extracting false confessions, but useless for getting actual information. Their incompetence truly knows no bounds. We've gotten all the great PR that Stalinist torture brought the Soviets combined with a completely ineffective information gathering regime.
Can we please send these ignorant soulless bastards to the Hague for their war crime trials now, please?
Originally Posted by solypsist:
We Don't Use Torture?
there's no way any of these confessions are reliable via these methods.
Saddam's opponents always 'confessed' too.We Don't Use Torture?
there's no way any of these confessions are reliable via these methods.
I must confess, some of the threads and posts in the Backroom are sheer torture, and that's the truth!
ichi
ichi
I don't think anyone needs to be educated in torture. It's a sick side of humanity which always surface when given the opportunity, regardless where in the world.....
Originally Posted by bmolsson:
I don't think anyone needs to be educated in torture. It's a sick side of humanity which always surface when given the opportunity, regardless where in the world.....
Oh but they're talking about sistematic implementation of known torture methods, not about spontaneous bursts of violence and perversion.I don't think anyone needs to be educated in torture. It's a sick side of humanity which always surface when given the opportunity, regardless where in the world.....
Originally Posted by :
Can we please send these ignorant soulless bastards to the Hague for their war crime trials now, please?
Americans will never face that kind of trial in Europe. Dont be ridiculous please.Can we please send these ignorant soulless bastards to the Hague for their war crime trials now, please?
Be nice if they sometimes did, tho'. Maybe some accountability would make them less keen to ditch ethics...
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