obama and the torture memos

I thought I had missed my chance to write a timely blog post when I was too busy to post something on the Obama administration's release of the "torture memos" back in April. But if the past eight years of the War on Terror--oops! I mean, "overseas contingency operation"--have taught us anything, it's that you never have to wait that long for torture to be back in the headlines again.

The latest installment of the story involves the Obama administration's attempts to stop the release of additional photographic evidence of "detainee abuse" (torture) from Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama initially told the ACLU he would approve the release of the photos...then changed his mind after seeing them. Which begs the question: what the hell is in these photos?

Reading these latest articles, I immediately thought of the memorable interview Errol Morris gave at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, after the premier of his Abu Ghraib documentary Standard Operating Procedure--in which he mentioned that the photographs that have now become perhaps the most iconic images of the War on Terror actually documented only a small slice of what went on in the notorious prison. Morris reminded the audience that there were far more sinister folks running around Abu Ghraib than 22-year-old Lynndie England. This shady cast of characters included military intelligence, private contractors, and CIA interrogators like Mark Swanner, who, evidence strongly suggests, was directly responsible for the death of at least one detainee.

There is another little-noted factoid about the toture memos that bears emphasis, which is that they provide concrete evidence of the link--documented by a few enterprising reporters as early as 2007--between the CIA, private contractors, and a military training program called SERE.

SERE--which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape--is a specialized "school," or training unit, offered to US Army, Navy and Air Force personnel who are deemed to be at high risk for capture in enemy territory. The training course consists of some standard military wilderness survival drills, but the part that becomes relevant in this discussion is the "resistance" component, in which soldiers are subjected to what is basically a mock torture scenario, based on the experiences of American POWs in the Pacific theater of WWII and in the Korean War.

SERE has been around since the mid-1950s, and has been the subject of a few scandals itself, including one at Fairchild AFB in Washington state. After the First Gulf War, the SERE curriculum was modified to include something called "sexual assault resistance training" (ugh.) But, this being the US military, apparently some of the scenarios weren't quite "simulated" enough.

Of course, it can be argued that the very existence of something like SERE in itself encourages torture, by reinforcing a reductive, "it's us or them" mentality among US soldiers. Why not torture? is the implicit logic. After all, they would do the same to us. It can also be argued that programs like SERE are of little to no use to military personnel, and are really just another form of the ritualized brutalization that passes for "training" in the US military.

But in any case, it was not long after 9/11 that two former SERE instructors--who had conducted many "mock" interrogations but never any real ones--decided the time was ripe to go into business for themselves. James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two military psychologists with no combat experience, had the brilliant idea to "reverse-engineer" the SERE training program. Instead of (supposedly) teaching miltary personnel to resist torture, they would teach them to inflict it. They formed a security company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, and began working for the CIA as private contractors as early as 2002--training civilian (CIA) and military personnel who later served at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram AFB and other torture hotspots around the world.

And so it was that the Mitchell-Jessen theory of interrogation--based on the idea that the best way to obtain information was to induce "sheer terror" and "learned helplessness," in which the subject of the interrogation is reduced to feeling complete and utter dependence on the interrogator for everything--became the norm practiced in almost all theaters of the War on Terror for the next seven years.

(Side note: if you ever wondered how so specific a tactic as waterboarding entered the US torture lexicon, here is your answer. It was used by the Japanese on American POWs in WWII, and later adopted as a standard part of the SERE POW "training" regimen. In fact, we even executed some Japanese army officers as war criminals for it--despite what the National Review may claim to the contrary.)

Many articles that have discussed the Mitchell-Jessen connection, including this one from the New York Times, have implied that the CIA looked to these crackpot psuedo-psychologists because it simply had no other choice. According to this narrative, "the agency had almost no experience interrogating the kind of hostile prisoners it soon expected to hold." It turned to Mitchell and Jessen in desperation, out of a sincere desire to protect the American people, and without full knowledge of the macabre nature of the SERE program.

That is a nice way of letting the Agency off the hook, but it's frankly just bullshit. In fact, I would venture to guess that the Mitchell-Jessen school of torture seemed acceptable to CIA personnel because it so closely paralleled the techniques described in the Agency's own torture manuals from the 1960s through the 1980s (which of course, they "don't use" anymore.)

There is a striking similarity between Mitchell's idea of "learned helplessness" and the "debility-dependency-dread" model outlined in documents like the Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual - 1983, which was used to train many a Latin American death squad, including Honduras's Battalion 316. That document is itself sometimes a word-for-word copy of an earlier CIA interrogation manual, code-named KUBARK, which was written in the early 1960s.

Why do SERE and CIA interrogation tactics look so similar? Because both were developed from the same source material: the experiences of the early Cold War, particularly the Korean War, and the numerous questionable behavior modification and social psychology experiments that were all the rage in the 1950s and 1960s, from the Milgram experiment to CIA brainwashing attempts involving LSD and electricity. This same crud--a mix of fifty-year-old pychobabble and an unwavering belief in the efficacy of overwhelming force--has been floating around both the US military and the US intelligence community for decades. It's never really gone away; it's just been waiting for a revival of direct US imperial intervention to raise its head again.

And as for those torture photos, the ones Obama didn't want to release? Well, they probably looked something like this. (WARNING: Graphic content, NSFW, etc.--but really, what did you expect?)