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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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From: bentway	4/24/2009 8:40:37 PM
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Military agency called harsh interrogation methods 'torture' and 'unreliable 04/24/2009 @ 7:38 pm rawstory.com Filed by Muriel Kane The US military agency which runs the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program -- from which the enhanced interrogation techniques used on detainees were derived -- warned as early as July 2002 that those techniques constituted "torture" and would produce "unreliable information." The SERE program was designed to teach US service personnel how to resist various forms of physical abuse designed to elicit false confessions in case of capture, but it was never intended to be a reliable model for effective interrogation. Experts on the program, such as former military interrogator and SERE instructor Colonel Steven Kleinman, have been speaking out recently about "the difference between a model that would train people to resist harsh interrogation ... and intelligence interrogation which is designed to elicit cooperation." Now the Washington Post has obtained a document which makes it clear that the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency which runs the SERE program was fully aware of the potential problems in using SERE as a model for detainee interrogation procedures even as those procedures were being put into place in 2002. The document cautions that "a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners ... could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel." It also spells out several reasons why torture is generally ineffective, emphasizing that it permanently destroys any desire on the part of the prisoner to cooperate with their interrogators and also noting that it produces physical responses to pain which make it difficult for even a skilled interrogator to judge the truthfulness of a prisoner's answers. Raw Story reported earlier today on the case of al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in late March 2002. During the first couple of weeks after his capture, Abu Zubaydah spoke fairly freely about al Qaeda with his FBI and CIA interrogators and even named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of 9/11. However, the CIA, believing that Abu Zubaydah was withholding information about imminent al Qaeda threats, brought in two psychologists with SERE experience to attempt to break him mentally. From that point on, Abu Zubaydah ceased to provide reliable intelligence and instead became the source of increasingly grandious stories about alleged al Qaeda plots -- stories that did nothing to make Americans safer but were of use only to Dick Cheney in keeping the American public in a state of terror.

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