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, More…
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 More…
For a forthcoming piece, I was combing through the International Committee of the Red Cross’s formerly-confidential 2007 interviews with the 14 detainees who, until September 2006, the CIA kept at its undisclosed “black site” secret prisons. (Mark Danner disclosed the document in a recent New York Review of Books More…
I think I messed up in my piece last night when I wrote:
“Zubaydah will have contact only with a new interrogation specialist, whom he has not met previously, and the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (”SERE”) training psychologist who has been involved with the interrogations since they began,” wrote Jay
A wealth of new details emerged Tuesday about how techniques designed to help captured U.S. troops resist torture formed the basis for the post-9/11 interrogation policies of the Bush-era Pentagon.
Instructors of those techniques proved to be eager in 2002 and 2003 to disseminate them to an emerging crop of More…
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