The Resistance portion of SERE, useful training or an exercise in sado-masochism?

[hedgehog]

Poll question: The Resistance portion of SERE, useful training or an exercise in sado-masochism?

Many US military personnel are tortured during training to harden them against similar tactics should they be captured. This training has been used a justification for applying the same techniques to prisoners. "If we do it to our own, then we can do it to the enemy"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival,_Evasion,_Resistance_and_Escape

[merh]

1. The OIG report found that the interrogators went beyond the SERE training

OIG’s review of the videotapes revealed that the waterboard technique employed at was different from the technique as described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was in the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed. At the SERE School and in the DoJ opinion, the subject’s airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contest, the Agency interrogator continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique differed from that used in SERE training and explained that the Agency’s technique is different because it is “for real” and is more poignant and convincing.

[hedgehog]

3. Recognizing the truth of what you say, do you think it's a good

idea for anyone in our military to even play at torture, so to speak? It can't be good for the trainers, my guess is that it may give the trainees a false sense of what to expect*, and it serves as a justification for real torture.


* There is a hell of a lot of difference between being waterboarded when you know it's going to stop and being waterboarded when you don't know what's coming next.

[merh]

5. I don't think debating that issue is useful to the torture debates.

I can't speak to what someone allows another to do to them in the name of training or future safety. I know I wouldn't put up with it, I'm not big on pain.

[Hippo_Tron]

2. Resisting interrogation if captured is arguably an exercise in sado-masichism

Is this kind of training good for the mental and physical well-being of soldiers? Probably not...

Is it good for keeping our military secrets secret? I would imagine so, or they probably wouldn't do it.

[hedgehog]

4. If it's good for keeping secrets, then why did the CIA use the same

techniques as interrogation tools? Not calling you out, just pointing out how the right tries to have it both ways.

[Hippo_Tron]

6. Torture gets you a lot of information, a lot of it wrong some of it right

The question is how do you tell the wrong from the right and that's really hard to do, thus torture is a crappy interrogation technique but it is nonetheless an interrogation technique. If you want my guess, there's a number of sadistic assholes that work at the CIA who really enjoy doing this shit. They don't represent the whole organization but they are there. Bush and Cheney wanted "intelligence" that justified their war in Iraq and so they let these sadistic assholes beat it out of people. They also wanted a political issue that they could use to call the Democrats weak on national security if they objected.

I also think that given the history on this matter, we expect the people we fight to torture our POWs as they have in previous wars. While again, torture is mostly ineffective interrogation technique I think we assume that our enemies don't know how to do anything else (maybe a bad assumption). Thus they are going to torture us and even if it's not a great tactic, we might as well make it even more ineffective with this training.

[hedgehog]

7. My question is, do we have sadistic assholes in the armed

forces who use the possibility that our troops might be tortured to get in a little torture themselves under the guise of training?

[Hippo_Tron]

8. If it isn't necessary I think a better explanation is that they see it as a rite of passage

Sort of like fraternity hazing. "I'm better off because I went through it and they should go through it too" being the sort of mentality.

[hedgehog]

11. I think you are correct, and I think that is a very frightening thought.

George Bush has that mentality.

[mix]

10. Where is the evidence that torture produces "right" information on occasion?

I would like to see it.

SERE training was created to counter torture techniques that were aimed at producing one thing: propaganda, not "actionable intelligence."

http://www.torturingdemocracy.org/

[Hippo_Tron]

13. If you torture somebody, they will tell you anything to make it stop

Some of it could be the truth, although perhaps none of it will be. How you tell the difference between the truth and not the truth is something you can't do through torture.

[Bravo Zulu]

9. I went through SERE training before going to Viet Nam,

they didn't water board me or anyone in my class, there were probably a couple hundred of us and only a few trainers, I doubt if they would have been able to water board all of us and fit in all the survival training we needed, I think the republicans are lying about torturing US Military personnel!

[hedgehog]

12. You probably know more about this than I do, but when the draft

was dropped, basic training was reformed. When there was a supply of draftees, basic training provided a refuge for a lot of sadists. Rules were changed and the sadists claimed that the caliber of our military would suffer. Instead, look at the endurance of the people who've been sent back to Iraq and Afghanistan over and over.