These aren’t a lot of “ignorant savages”, and one of the basic rules of war is “know your enemy”. The structure of al Qaeda is almost identical to a venture capital operation. Terrorist ops pitch ideas, and if the “board” likes them, they get funding and technical assistance. If you are out there looking for a chain of command structure, you aren’t going to find it, because it is a collection of individual groups operating independently under the name al Qaeda because it annoys the US and gives the group extra media coverage. At some point a group of Somali pirates, who are old-time “entrepreneurs of the ocean”, will decide to link themselves to al Qaeda just to watch the Western politicians soil themselves. Another group will grab the “Robin Hood” label, and all will be your standard seaborne thieves. I wouldn’t be surprised if some cheeky bastard said it was the Somali stimulus package because it seemed to be working for the pirates on Wall Street.

The Gestapo and KGB got almost no usable intel from torture, so they used it to get show trial confessions. Every study shows this. When it didn’t work for the KGB, they sent the individual to a psychiatric unit for failing to understand the value of cooperation. Stalin just killed people on suspicion of anything, or, if it was felt there was a need “to show progress”.

Torture is a crime. Criminals are supposed to be prosecuted. That is the end of the discussion. The reasons for committing the crime can be brought up in the sentencing phase after conviction. People who shoot burglars are charged, and have to justify their action. Doing nothing is not an option.

Visitors are welcome at a museum and briefing room at the Survival School, but not at the resistance training site. But two Spokane professionals who met at the school in the 1970s offered some insight into the resistance training used at that time.

Mark Mays was an Air Force captain – the first psychologist hired for the Survival School. Bob Dunn, now a Spokane trial lawyer, was an Air Force staff sergeant and a SERE instructor from 1973 to 1979.

The Vietnam War had ended, and the Air Force wanted to learn more about the prisoner of war experience endured by American pilots by exploring the “environment of captivity,” Mays said.

Survival School trainees had to spend time in a dark box, where they experienced sensory deprivation, he said.

“Some found it very difficult,” Mays said. “Sometimes, when people got stressed, they’d pull them out of the box. They were hooded, and there was background noise. They knew it was pretend, but they could still get upset. Some got claustrophobic.”

Training to be a SERE interrogator involved hours of academics, Dunn said. He studied the French-Vietnamese conflict, the Nazi methods of interrogating Russians and Jews, and other examples from Vietnam and Korea.

Dunn met Jim Shively, the late assistant U.S. attorney from Spokane who was shot down and tortured in Vietnam and incarcerated in the Hanoi Hilton, the nickname for the central camp where U.S. prisoners of war were held.

He was a guest instructor,” Dunn said. “Every session ended with a Jim Shively movie on what happened at the Hanoi Hilton. It’s still classified.”

Most of the techniques now being used against al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo and other sites are learned in the SERE program – including waterboarding, sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation, Dunn said. But the training is for a far different purpose, he added.

“It’s no secret that resistance training is to introduce the student to potential tactics the enemy might use,” Dunn said. He doesn’t approve of some of the techniques now being used against suspected enemy combatants – in part because they are ineffective, he said.

Abusive interrogation techniques captured in digital images at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were “way over the line. I shook my head when I saw those photos,” he said.

Brutal treatment can get people to talk, but the quality of the information is questionable, Dunn said.

“I did 2,000 interrogations,” Dunn said. “Some people can be cajoled. Others must be threatened. Every interrogation is unique. The more critical question is, who’s watching the interrogators? ”

That was Mays’ task as a supervising psychologist.

“My job was to supervise the interviewers so they didn’t get out of hand,” Mays said.

At that time, the potential for abuse by interrogators had already been explored in a famous Stanford University psychological experiment in 1971 where student volunteers were divided into guards and prisoners in a mock jail on the Palo Alto campus, Mays said.

Within days, the “guards” became highly abusive to their “captives” – stripping them naked at night and sexually threatening them – and the experiment had to be halted.

“It found the big change was in the people who had control,” Dunn said.

In contrast, the Fairchild SERE program was well-structured and disciplined, Mays said.

“This was not ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was an attempt to run a fire drill for people, to help them learn what to expect if captured,” he said. “It was wise and appropriate.”

bold highlights mine.

CAPT JAMES A. MULLIGAN, USN (RET.)

Captain Mulligan had served in the Navy for 24 years when he was shot down over North Vietnam on 20 March 1966. Stationed aboard the USS ENTERPRISE as Executive Officer of VA-36, he was flying his A-4 Skyhawk just south of Vinh, when he was struck by a Surface to Air Missile (SAM), and was forced to eject. He was immediately captured by North Vietnamese regulars, and then transported to Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi, the infamous Hanoi Hilton. As one of the more senior Navy POWs, he endured torture, abuse, and miserable conditions for nearly seven years, until his release in February 1973.

What prepared him to survive a captivity experience, which included 42 months of solitary confinement? In response to that question, Captain Mulligan cites the process of receiving a liberal education, i.e., undergoing the intellectual preparation necessary to find out who he was. He recalls that the first time he ever heard the Code of Conduct, he thought to himself, “Why do we need this? Why is this necessary? Isn’t this basic to who and what we are? Doesn’t everybody know this?” The answer, as he discovered during his years in the Navy was, no, not everybody does understand what integrity, commitment, and loyalty mean. For Captain Mulligan, imprisonment in North Vietnam was a supreme test of those values embodied in the Code of Conduct, values of right and wrong. Captivity was an experience in which a prisoner had to live off of whatever was in his head. When it was all over, Captain Mulligan was able to recall some of what he felt on the day of release, as described in his book, The Hanoi Commitment

On 18 July 1965, Admiral Jeremiah Denton,USN,was shot down during a combat mission over Vietnam. A POW for 7 1/2 years, he provided the first direct evidence of torture by the enemy.
WHEN HELL WAS IN SESSION

“Found worms in my oatmeal this morning. I shouldn’t have objected because they have been sterilized in the cooking and I was getting fresh meat with my breakfast.. I’m still losing weight and so are most of us…
Ruth Marie Straub, Army Nurse: WE BAND OF ANGELS

The answer, as he discovered during his years in the Navy was, no, not everybody does understand what integrity, commitment, and loyalty mean.

And when the leaders of a Nation fail to understand what these principles mean, you are in a whole World of serious hurt!

Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constritution for the United States of America.

PDF’s can be downloaded from:
Chapter 1 – HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Chapter 2 – THE LONG LOOK BACK

Chapter 3 – THE LESSONS OF WARTIME IMPRISONMENT

Chapter 4 – MORAL AND ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF SURVIVING CAPTIVITY

kids can be pretty bloodthirsty creatures. i remember reading with great relish details of the spanish inquisition techniques in high school world history class. otoh, it might have been so fascinating simply because, at the time, it seemed impossible that any modern-day human being could [or would] bring themselves do any of those things.

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I guess recent history is a dead subject in the USA then? Or most Americans just have very bad memories. 🙂

Bryan: As I recall… all the DI’s from basic (boot to you) on up were having a great time! I never met an instructor that had any concept of negotiation, compromise, or simple exhaustion! LOL

Yeah. I got dumoped in the simpson desert a 5 day walk from the nearest town with an Aboriginal guide who wasn’t allowed to communicate unless I was about to get myself killed. Getting sick as a dog was OK. Then a couple months in New Zealand in winter was a hoot. I almost lost a finger to frostbite during a 2-day blizzard. Then on to sunny Fiji for training similar to the Phillipines! The parts I saw have never been put on any travel brochures I assure you. That was special as I’d been assigned to Cambodia, and my team and I needed to discover that everything can kill you or just make you wish it had. 🙂 We spent a few months on mock missions to hone our skills. We were pretty pleased with the results, and they DEFINITELY saved our asses when we got to Cambodia, at least until the Cap, forward scout and medic were killed in an ambush that almost got us all. I still dream about that day, though not as often as I used to.

I wish I could take all these big mouthed moronic, sick fools back to that place and time. That would be justice.

hercule poirot always solved mysteries by engaging the various suspects in conversation [and using his little gray cells].

hard to go wrong listening to people [unless maybe those people are named cheney, bush, rumsfeld, et al].

i had to laugh [bitterly, of course], first at the suggestion that our enemies apparently didn’t know what waterboarding was until we started releasing olc memos, and again when a commenter at paul krugman’s blog pointed out that all the ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques that have been revealed so far have been written about in solzhenitsyn’s gulag archipelago.

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You had done a lot of “volunteering” before you made it to the Cascade Mountains of Washington, and if you screwed up, you were out of the entire program and got to finish your enlistment as a clerk or a cook.

As far as the survival schools went, the Jungle school was the toughest physically, because in the Philippines they had local tribesman as the aggressor force pursuing you through the jungle, and those guys didn’t get tired, and weren’t bothered by the heat.

As Suvorov said “Train Hard, Fight Easy”.

Did you go through Fairchild survival school (336) Bryan? I hear that’s the toughest for you flyboys. 😉 😀 I only know about it from meeting a Guardian Angel team and we compared notes. 🙂

Ignorance really is bliss, isn’t it? 😉

You are probably right about Darth Liz. LOL

No one would believe you if you told them, so why bother? It, for damn sure, should not have been included in interrogation policy and it shouldn’t be openly discussed. Something else the Hedgemony has done to compromise the safety and security of the troops. Of course, given the way they threw the Reservists under the bus over Abu Ghraib, this should come as a shock to no one. Cheney and his buddy from their Nixon days, Rumsfeld, couldn’t give less of a crap for the troops. They were just peasants to be used and discarded like kleenex.

Liz Cheney was in the State Department, and she may be implicated as well as her father, so this may be self-interest as well as a defense of her father.

AND they don’t force you to sign an NDA for the sake of the enemy not knowing anything about it, it’s so that any candidates don’t have any forewarning. It would kind of defeat the purpose if everyone knew the details of what will happen to you there. I remember reading with some amusement many years ago a news item about some Politician in the USA who wanted one of the SERE Schools rebuilt because… it was too dusty! LMAO