"Torturers"....How we got there.... from NY Times

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.

I'm on a new quest...in search of 'unreasonable' women

so here's the start..

Molly Ivins - thank you for your recommendation of "An Unreasonable Woman - a true story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Poluters and the fight for Seadrift, Texas" about and by Dian Wilson ... truly An Unreasonable Woman

Request your "An Unreasonable Woman" ... free button

Join/support CODE PINK for Peace


Thanks to Tom Dispatch for the introduction:

"A Felon for Peace" - A Tomdispatch Interview with Ann Wright

Buddhist story about courage:

A notorious bandit came to the Buddha one day and informed him that he was the most fierce and brave bandit in all the world, and was going to demonstrate it by killing the Buddha. “Ah,” said the Buddha. “If you are that powerful, you can grant me two wishes before I die.”

“All right,” said the bandit, “but be quick. Time is short, and I have many more people to kill.”

The Buddha pointed to a young sapling tree growing nearby, and said “Cut off the smallest branch on that young tree.” The bandit laughed, and with one quick swipe of his sword, it was done and the tiny branch fell to the ground. The Buddha picked it up.

“Now, old fool,” said the bandit, “what is your final wish?”

The Buddha handed the tiny branch to the bandit, pointed to the tree, and said, “Now put it back on.”

Legend has it that the bandit achieved enlightenment in that instant.

This is not mine... and I don't take credit... I'd give credit, but it was a quote within a quote..and I don't know who to give credit too...

That said:

What Do You Call It?

1. What do you call it when a group of people take the law into their own hands and kill people without a fair trial?
~ A lynching
What do you call it when the United States takes the law into its own hands and kills people without a fair trial?
~ Operation Enduring Freedom

2. What do you call someone who explodes a bomb and kills innocent people?
~ A terrorist
What do you call someone who drops a bomb from a plane and kills innocent people?
~ A brave American pilot

3. What do you call a weapon that can kill thousands of people?
~ A weapon of mass destruction.
What do you call a weapon that has killed 1.5 million, including more than 500,000 children?
~ Sanctions

4. What do you call an attack on the Pentagon, a command and control center in the United States?
~ A cowardly attack
What do you call the destruction of an Afghan village by U.S. bombs?
~ An attack on a Taliban command and control center

5. What do you call it when about 3,000 people were killed in the September 11th attack?
~ An atrocity
What do you call it when about 5 million people were killed in the Vietnam war?
~ A mistake

6. What do you call someone who stands up in front of a crowd and tells stories?
~ An entertainer
What do you call someone who stands up in front of a crowd at the Pentagon and tells stories?
~ Donald Rumsfeld

I been reading a lot of comments pro-con on the Miers appointment to the Supreme Court.. the pros: "she could be a LOT worse" the cons: "anyone who thinks Bush is brilliant and is his confidant is BAD".. "croynism over competency"

I think I like Steve Clemons measured take:

It will be interesting to hear to what degree Miers holds sacred the delicate but vital system of checks and balances that make this nation a democracy and which the Bush administration has spent so much political capital trying to undermine.

All that said, there could have been far worse choices for the Supreme Court -- so I am of mixed views on Miers.

Nonetheless, I think that it should become standard practice for ALL committees of the United States Senate tasked with considering the credentials of an Executive Branch political nominee to read the following short passage ALOUD at the opening of a confirmation hearing:

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers, "The Appointing Power of the President," No. 76

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. . . . He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.