By: Seán Kreyling
The DoD has officially acknowledged that many of the most controversial detention and interrogation techniques “exceeded the limits established in Army Field Manual 34-52, Intelligence Interrogation” and in fact were borrowed from an Army survival training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (or SERE for short). SERE was designed to train US military personnel how to deal with opponents’ harsh, abusive, coercive interrogation techniques - not how to conduct interrogations.
The SERE School was originally established by the US Air Force after the Korean war. Later, the US Army added two sites - one at Fort Bragg, NC run by the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in order to prepare military personnel at high risk of capture and learn from the Vietnam experience.
This report, along with the document obtained in 2005 by the ACLU, clearly establishes that a “blurring of the lines” has occurred between what US military is taught at SERE (i.e., to resist interrogation by opponents who do not abide by the Geneva Conventions) …and what it is taught regarding the treatment of US captives ( i.e., Geneva Conventions, FM 34-52, US Code of Conduct, etc.).
In other words, through the blurring of these lines, we may have actually become our worst enemies - in more ways than one.
The full unclassified DoD report can be found here: Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse (U).
MORE:
[Salon] The Torture Teachers
[The New Yorker] The Experiment
[Time/CNN] Detainee Abuse Was Well Planned
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