SERE

Documents reveal the CIA was allowed to deny detainees sleep upward of 80 to 180 hours at a time.

In order to learn more about the mysterious “prolonged diapering” technique formerly employed by the CIA — possibly the technique nebulously referred to in the 2004 inspector general report as an eleventh and previously unacknowledged interrogation method — I turned to the International Committee of the Red Cross’s February 2007 report on the treatment of [...]

This is my favorite rejection under the Freedom of Information Act ever.
In May, following a wealth of disclosures about the role of the Survival Evasion Resistence Escape program, which trains U.S. troops to resist torture, in shaping the Defense Department and the CIA’s interrogation programs under the Bush administration, it appeared that one of the [...]

Imagine what would happen if Mir Hussein Moussavi disappeared into Evin prison this afternoon and then a few days later Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged to say that Moussavi, under the kind of harsh questioning necessary to protect the Islamic Republic from outside subversion, had confessed to being a paid agent of the CIA. Then imagine Ahmadinejad [...]

Ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan’s account of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah is roughly this: he and several other interrogators from both FBI and CIA objected to the application of torture techniques from at least April to June 2002 (after which point Soufan left the interrogation team) from a former SERE psychologist and CIA contractor named [...]

“Do you know a guy named… K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asks Ali Soufan, referring to a former CIA official who alleged that — at an interrogation he never portrayed himself as attending — Abu Zubaydah broke after his initial waterboarding.
“Last week he retracted that,” Ali Soufan responded.
Graham: “Can you say there was no good [...]

Philip Zelikow details an argument that was “deployed against me” when he opposed torture in the Bush administration: “We briefed the following members of Congress — name name name name name name name — and they didn’t have a problem with this.”
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) brought the point up to argue against the political argument [...]

More on that last point, building on something Soufan just said. The top CIA interrogator at the Abu Zubaydah interrogation was “100 percent in sync with the FBI view” about how to interrogate the al-Qaeda detainee without torturing him “because he’s a professional interrogator.” The head of the CIA team interrogating Abu Zubaydah, he further [...]

So in my piece today I wondered how it could be that the CIA could come to view stress positions as a mechanism to induce sleep deprivation in detainees. The obvious culprit is the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, because in the May 10, 2005 “techniques” memo, then-Office of Legal Counsel chief Steve [...]

So much for the quid pro quo explanation. Jay Bybee, the former Office of Legal Counsel chief who issued the 2002 torture memos and who has since become a federal judge, issued a statement saying he mostly stands by his work. The New York Times:
Given the widespread criticism of the memorandums, he said he would [...]