“A perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” was how one former CIA official described the decision by high-ranking members of the Bush administration to utilize torture methods against detainees that had been proven ineffective years earlier by the US Army. According to the New York Times, administration officials held a series of meetings in 2002 to figure out how they could employ tougher techniques against suspected al Qaeda figures without breaking the law. Among those present at the meetings were President George Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft and CIA Director George Tenet. It was then that a little known Army training program—SERE, or Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape—came to light, and the officials decided it was just what they were looking for.
SERE was first developed in the early 1950s to help American soldiers deal with being captured and tortured by North Korean and Chinese Communist forces during the Korean War. Administration officials concluded, why not use the SERE methods of preparing soldiers for being tortured to actually torture those believed to be a threat to the United States.
The problem was that those in the Bush administration making the decision to rely on SERE methods didn’t bother to do their homework, for had they done so, they would have discovered that many of the techniques, including waterboarding, had been proven long ago not to work. For example, in the case of Americans held by Communists in both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, being tortured caused the American soldiers to give false confessions. The Bush decision-makers also would have found out that a former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading the CIA to use torture methods had never conducted a real interrogation.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
George Tenet, pushed for use of torture
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