20 year old notes detail Guantanamo abuse

Sometime in early 2002, the higher-ups at Guantánamo Bay decided to bring SERE instructors in to train interrogators stationed there. The aim was to teach them methods that could ‘break’ the detainees.

What is SERE? It’s an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training. It was started by the US Airforce in the 1950s in order to train soldiers to maintain ‘honour’ if and when they were captured by “Communist enemies”. It quickly spread to the Army and the Navy as well. Soldiers maintain their honour in captivity by ensuring they tell the enemy nothing more than name and rank, even under torture. The training was, and continues to be, intensely gruelling – designed to bring students to a breaking point, but training them not to buckle under the pressure.

Training techniques at SERE remain classified, but are known to include stress positions, waterboarding, isolation, sleep-deprivation, sensory and dietary manipulation and beatings. Sound familiar?

It is extremely familiar for the men who have been held in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and various other CIA blacksites. Once the US government figured out how to train people to withhold information under torturous conditions, it was only a tiny leap to figure out that those same torturous conditions could be used against people to make them talk. This is called ‘reverse-engineered’ SERE.

It has long been known that reverse-engineered SERE techniques had made their way to GTMO by early 2002. Dr Bruce Jessen, a psychologist contracted by the CIA to help ‘break’ detainees, is most often credited with this idea.

Last week, Truthout posted Jessen’s handwritten notes for SERE training, made two decades before Guantánamo opened its doors. They’re a shocking read, not just because they are so horrific in content – although the content is horrific enough – but because we read them knowing that in 20 years’ time Jessen will be using these same techniques to break down individuals and force confessions – confessions which will then be used to detain these men for as long as possible without due process.

The notes include insights like:

“From the moment you are detained (if some kind of exploitation is your Detainer’s goal) everything your Detainer does will be contrived to bring about these factors: CONTROL, DEPENDENCY, COMPLIANCE AND COOPERATION…your detainer wants you to feel ‘EVERYTHING’ is dependent on him, from the smallest detail, (food, sleep, human interaction), to your release or your very life.”

and:

“Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.).”

The odd thing about this last statement, besides sending a shiver down one’s spine, is that if Jessen knows that this treatment leads to confessions – even when there is nothing to confess – why use it on thousands of individuals to obtain ‘the truth’?

In a shameful volte-face, the American government has taken the techniques believed to be used by its enemies to torture POWs and twisted them to use against thousands of individuals to obtain ‘confessions’.

Obama’s recent signing of the National Defense Authorization Act and the recent Executive Order make these notes even more critical. Because the 172 men who remain in Guantánamo are no longer eligible for criminal trials in the US – in which torture evidence (including confessions) is not allowed – and instead are now subjected to a new military trials system, the reversed-engineered SERE techniques provide a hook on which the US government can hang its indefinite detention hat.