According to The New York Times, the idea for the aggressive interrogation techniques used by the CIA on terrorism suspects came from a military training program known as SERE, an abbreviation for "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape." The Times reports the SERE program was "created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans."
What exactly is SERE? In brief, it's survival training. Each military branch offers its own version of the program to teach soldiers, sailors and aviators how to survive in hostile environments, evade and resist the enemy, and if necessary, escape. Resist, in military shorthand, means to withstand the punishment of captivity, including torture, and to find ways to fight back.
One theory behind this rough training, as I learned during my research for The Survivors Club, involves something called stress inoculation. Training operates like a vaccine: A small challenge to your system is supposed to prepare and defend you against much greater adversity. In other words, if you're exposed to enough hardship and pressure, you'll build your immunity. The more shocks to your system, the more you can withstand.
Only in harsh and realistic conditions, the military believes, can trainees begin to understand what it's like to be shot down, captured or brutalized by the enemy. The more miserable and uncomfortable, the better. Every single one of the ex-POWs I've interviewed believes this training was invaluable in surviving their ordeals.
Here's how air force survival training typically works. They take you to the remote woods of Washington state, deprive you of food and sleep, chase you around like an animal, and when they capture you, they drag you to a place called the Resistance Lab. Translation: prisoner of war school. It's located on an isolated patch of Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane and it's strictly off limits to outsiders. What really goes on behind the concertina wire is classified.
According to current and former military men and women, everything inside POW school is modeled on real enemy encampments, including guard towers, razor wire, concrete cells, and metal cages. To scare you, they've even got fake graves marked with crosses. The goal is to simulate hell on earth like the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam or al-Qaeda's torture chambers in Iraq. If they even allow a visit to the latrine, you relieve yourself in a miserable hole in the ground.
Highly trained professionals serve as jailors and interrogators, putting prisoners through carefully choreographed chaos that's designed to disorient and break them down. If you're afraid of dogs, they may terrify you with snarling German shepherds just inches from your face. If you're scared of snakes (or insects), they may throw you into a pit of writhing creatures or bugs. If you're claustrophobic, they may stuff you into a series of smaller and smaller boxes or bury you underground in barrels. Throughout the experience, they wear you down with sleep deprivation, semi-starvation, and blaring music, including Sesame Street songs around the clock. They interrogate you constantly, employing enemy techniques copied from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. (According to The New York Times, those techniques include fake-drowning or waterboarding) They say they don't use excessive force, but it can be physically rough. No one likes to admit it, but bones and eardrums have been broken in the service of preparing American men and women for the reality of captivity.
Hungry, exhausted and under relentless physical and psychological pressure, many trainees lose track of time and some begin to believe they're experiencing the real thing. That's the ultimate goal: to make you crack and fail in your mission and then show you how to put yourself back together again.
The first phase is called hitting the wall--the moment when you believe you can't take another step, when you can't survive another minute, when you're willing to do anything just to stop the misery. The course is carefully designed so that everyone hits the wall. In that critical moment, when you're begging for food and rest, the trainers push you even harder. The purpose is to prove that you're stronger than you know and that you can keep going. Success isn't about your size or strength. Survival is all in your mind.
This SERE-course graduate knows the difference between training to resist thuggery and condoning thuggery. Does that make me a dirty peacenik?
Peacenik was, perhaps, a poor choice of words. I merely was trying to differentiate the pragmatists who desire peace but expect war from the cute and fuzzy bunnies that think the entire world is just a meadow full of daisies.
People like me realize that, in the dark woods that surround the meadow, there are mean things with big teeth that like the taste of bunnies.
Here is to those who are willing to defend those that despise them.
Author, Journalist, Founder and CEO of TheSurvivorsClub.org
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what was the point of this post?
And then to equate the basic training our soldiers receive to that of torturing a prisoner of war
His argument is, "our troops don't mind if they are tortured" Because in his opinion they have already been subjected to it. Its a laughable assertion
This training is far from basic. Our troops are actually waterboarded and much worse at these facilities, they endure hell on earth so that they can better serve and protect you and me.
The reality is that war is ugly and those who don't follow the rules often win. I will remind you that in the 1770s 13 colonies violated the prevailing standards of warefare by shooting at officers and employing guerilla tactics such as firing from a concealed position. Or do the rules only apply when you like the reason for breaking them?
ABC poll
57% of Americans think Obama taking country in wrong direction.
I'm one of them.
Keep your eye on the ball folks, though the shrill Fox-Limbaugh-Malkin machine will keep trying to distract and evade: What the draft-dodging neo-con cowards introduced was NOT a part of the proud American professional military tradition (as SERE training is) -- it was a betrayal of it. And MANY in the military, and in the CIA, pushed against it in ways large and small. Google Maj.Gen. Antonio Taguba and Capt. Ian Fishback, to name just a couple.
Like most Americans, Dem, Repub and Indep, I have great respect for our fighting men and women. To even discuss them in the same breath as the deskbound-Deciders in the previous junta's "Unitary Presidency" does our military heroes a disservice.
But it a great political tool that liberals and leftist democrats will use until it breaks.
With respect however, you're wrong here on the facts:
First, evidence has grown in the last several months (ICRS, former CIA personnel, etc.) that, when you look at not only Gitmo and the 'Ghraib but also Bagram AFB and the "black sites", many detainees were treated far worse than even the memos prescribed. There were many deaths from repeated beatings, for example.
Second, it was not just "terrorists" that were detained and abused without legal authority or process -- it included innocents rounded up by rival tribesmen for example, and later released.
Third, no, it's not just "liberals" who believe in the rule of law -- I ain't one, and I believe in it, too. So too do Maj.Gen. Antonio Taguba, Capt. Ian Fishback, and Sen. John McCain, among many others in the mil-intel tradition. Look'em up.
The Bushies betrayed your fine professional tradition, sir. Don't let the Fox noise machine fool you on that. "Liberals vs. soldiers" here is an absolutely false dichotomy. Look up those names and you'll see.
What the US does to prisoners is a separate story: the US does not torture. We've violated that simple statement and the results will be felt internally by a disillusioned populace and externally by forces energized to defeat us. If our goal is to create more enemies to keep us in the war business, then we're doing a fine job. Have our tactics in GITMO and other places lessened the threat to the everyday soldier, or have the tactics added danger to an already dangerous job?
bingo bango bongo.
I see nothing wrong with strenuous survival training.....Why I was reading were a student is waterboarded as a requirement at the Virginia Military Institute before they graduate. Sorry PC-folks, but survival training is a must in this less-than-perfect world we live in.
It wasn't, nor was it intended to be, any fun.
I was waterboarded, had a bag tossed over my head with a snake in it, tied standing up in a pit where the water level was just at my nostrils, etc.....
It showed where I was vulnerable and how to get my head around managing that vulnerability.
I accept that the peaceniks are not comfortable with a country that produces men like myself and, I too, want a peaceful world for my child. There needs to be the realization that there are bad people out there that no amount of talking will convince them to seek other courses. Consequently there needs to be the capacity to wage swift and savage war when attempts at peace fail.
I'm proud of my time at the sharp end of the spear and salute those that follow along and have the courage to do the hard things.
It is in response to American violence that many of your so-called "bad people" arose. We have manufactured them by killing off the more moderate opposition, leaving in many cases only the most ruthless. Many times the "bad people," like Saddam Hussein, were put in place by the CIA to destroy a nationalist labor movement, and were considered good people, until they stopped doing America's bidding, then they became "bad people." You really need a good education, huffpo is too brief a forum for a complete accounting of the history of the empire here.
I'm hardly ignorant of world history. I simply reject the idea that I have any culpability for mistakes of the past. That represent reflexive anti-americanism and , quite frankly , narcissistic behavior at its worst. You obviously come from a failed culture where it was indoctrinated into you that talk and action are synonymous. If you think the world need to be a different place then Do... don't talk.....
Everyday is a new day.
In the first place, the problem I have with bushco is the policy of torturing prisoners, not training special forces to defend us. In the second place, America has been involved for the last century or so in running a world empire, exploiting other countries in harmful ways. Following WWII, this empire expanded to include the known world outside the "communist" countries. The methods the US used to maintain this empire have been anything but nice, and have included assassination, massacre of civilians, cooptation, and training of foreign pro-US ruling elites in these countries in torture to be used to suppress democratic and nationalist movements within their own countries.
Quoted from a welcome speech to new canidates for Special Forces Training. By the NCOIC of the Special Forces Assessment Branch
There are plenty of life-threatening aspects in "normal" miitary training as it is. Also objectionable is
the U.S. military's recent embrace of the near- equivalent of Ultimate Fighting, as shown on the Military Channel- injuries sustained there could easily lead to permanent disability, if not death- morally unjustifiable, and furthermore, a liability to not only the soldier's family but the taxpayers as well