Jack Bauer’s Uncle Joe

Devon’s Blog | May 30, 2007

I think this information is already out there, but it bears repeating. A report by the Intelligence Science Board gives insight into how our coercive interrogation techniques were developed.

The study mentions the careful interrogation techniques used to interrogate German and Japanese troops in WWII, undertaken by highly educated interrogators, fluent in the language, spent six hours preparing for every hour of interrogation. But that isn’t the model. Rather, we based our techniques on those used by the Soviet Union to elicit information from prisoners:

Many of the techniques that have come in for such criticism were based on those used in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training, or SERE, in which for decades American service members were given a sample of the brutal treatment they might face if captured.

Because the training was developed during the cold war, the techniques later adopted by the C.I.A. and Special Operations officers in Iraq were based, at least in part, on how the Soviet Union and its allies were believed to treat prisoners. Such techniques included prolonged use of stress positions, exposure to heat and cold, sleep deprivation and even waterboarding.

A report on detainee abuse by the Defense Department’s inspector general, completed in August but declassified and released May 18, gives new details of how the military training was “reverse engineered” for use by American interrogators. It says that as early as 2002, some SERE trainers and some military intelligence officers vehemently objected to the use of the techniques, but their protests were ignored.

To think that we chose between methods proven useful in eliciting military secrets and methods useful in perpetuating Stalinism, and chose as we did.