"The Navy had invested too much in me to allow any lasting damage" #SERE

"The Navy had invested too much in me to allow any lasting damage"

by digby

One of the main talking points in favor of the torture techniques developed by the two psychologists (who apparently made 80 million dollars to develop a useless and sadistic torture program) has been that our own military undergo it so how bad can it really be? Anyone should be able to see that 1) we assuredly never inflicted "rectal feeding" on our own troops and 2) the psychology of an American undergoing torture as part of his training is never going to experience it the same way that a captured enemy would experience it.

Here's Naval Officer Ryan Casey on the subject of SERE and torture:

In February 2003, as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq based partly on faulty intelligence emanating from forced confessions by detainees in U.S. custody, I shivered alone in my "POW" cell at SERE school, somewhere in the woods of northern Maine. As a Naval Flight Officer fresh out of flight school, advanced SERE training was the next hurdle in my Navy adventure that had begun more than five years earlier at Annapolis. I hadn't eaten or slept in almost a week, and I had no idea whether it was day or night. As I peered out through the keyhole, a huge, blinking eye stared back at me, watching my every move. Only later did I realize I was hallucinating. But even in this groggy state--and even after the torture--I still knew well enough I was in training, and this would all be over soon. The Navy had invested too much in me to allow any lasting damage, I figured. Of course, real prisoners aren't comforted by such a luxury. And in that unpleasant moment, I remember gushing with patriotic emotion, and taking solace in one uplifting thought: "At least my country doesn't do this to people."

In retrospect, that seems naive. But at the time, the world did not yet know that the U.S. government had enthroned torture as official policy, and constructed an extensive legal fig leaf to support it. To flex American muscle, the Bush Administration transformed the very methods used on officers like me in SERE training into the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program. I felt violated and ashamed for my country.
[...]

The American public is woefully uninformed on torture, and few critics have the credibility to confront this damaging and demoralizing blight to our national character. A HuffPost/YouGov poll in April 2014 showed that 68 percent of Americans think government-sanctioned torture is sometimes justified. Sadly, Hollywood ticking-bomb scenarios and fear-mongering pundits shape the views of too many Americans, and even those whose consciences make them morally queasy on torture choose to cover their eyes and ears because they think it works, and they've been told it is necessary.

But even as President Obama has called torture by its name, his Department of Justice has so far refused to hold the CIA and top Bush-Cheney officials accountable. At Nuremberg, the U.S. led the effort in prosecuting Third Reich officials who provided the legal basis for Nazi war crimes. Today, in contrast, out of political expediency, President Obama has expressed a desire to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards." But abdicating our responsibility to uphold the rule of law only makes government-sanctioned torture during a future war, under a future president, more likely.

America's new confrontation with asymmetric warfare forces us to rethink challenging moral questions of jus in bello; that is, the right conduct in war. Since George Washington was our Commander in Chief, the United States has pledged to treat all prisoners humanely in wartime. As a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, we must uphold these principles and values, not pick and choose which enemies deserve protection under human rights law. Our treatment of even our most heinous enemies reflects on us, not them. This descent into the dark world of torture represents an unprecedented ethical lapse of American ideals, and severely undermines our self-identity as a shining beacon of truth and justice in the world.

My service in the United States Navy has been the greatest honor of my life. But with honor comes responsibility. It is
long past time that we restore America's honor in the world by reckoning with this sad chapter in our recent past.

Read the whole post, which goes into some detail about the SERE program and how it came to be part of America's torture regime. It's a disgrace that people go on television and use the excuse that "if it's ok to use it on our boys, it's ok to use it on terrorists" with a straight face. Our boys know very well that they are not going to be maimed or killed, that they are being protected and only undergoing the experience to train them to have some understanding of what they might face. This is clearly not what happened to those prisoners in those black sites. And they know it.

And it's military officers like Casey who will bear the brunt of all this if they ever get captured on the battlefield. I'm afraid we've pretty much destroyed any chance that they will be treated with anything like decency. I'm sure they're very grateful for their government's commitment to their safety.


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