Torture teachers
An Army document proves that Guantánamo interrogators were taught by instructors from a military school that trains U.S. soldiers how to resist torture.
By Mark Benjamin
Read more: Politics, Schools, News, Army, Torture, Abu Ghraib, Mark Benjamin
Photo by AP/Brennan Linsley
Military personnel transport a detainee into a building within the grounds of the maximum security prison at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba, on April 5, 2006.
June 29, 2006 | Human rights advocates have long suspected a link between interrogations in the "war on terror" and a secretive military survival school that trains elite U.S. troops to resist torture. Jane Mayer explored the evidence of a connection between the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school at Fort Bragg, N. C., and real-world interrogators in a July 2005 piece for the New Yorker. Now Salon has the first hard proof of that connection, via one document buried among 1,000 pages obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through the Freedom of Information Act. A March 22, 2005, sworn statement by the former chief of the Interrogation Control Element at Guantánamo said instructors from SERE also taught their methods to interrogators of the prisoners in Cuba.
"When I arrived at GTMO," reads the statement, "my predecessor arranged for SERE instructors to teach their techniques to the interrogators at GTMO ... The instructors did give some briefings to the Joint Interrogation Group interrogators."
"This is the missing link," declared Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights. "It is proof that the SERE training was in fact used, for a time at least, as a basis for interrogations at Guantánamo." "That is what I inferred had happened," agreed retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, former commanding general of the Southeast Regional Army Medical Command, "but I have never seen this documented anywhere." The sworn statement suggests that Fort Bragg was the incubator of the abuse that later migrated from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, and is further evidence of the systematic nature of torture in the war on terror.
The interrogations chief, whose name is redacted, but who is listed as serving at Guantánamo from December 2002 until June 2003, asserts that instructors from the SERE school taught techniques to interrogators at Guantánamo sometime before his arrival, a period when the Department of Defense was developing some of the aggressive and controversial interrogation protocols that later surfaced in Iraq. The statement was produced as part of an investigation by Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt into alleged "degrading and abusive" treatment of prisoner Mohammed al-Khatani, the so-called 20th hijacker.
There are striking similarities between the reported detainee abuse at both Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and the techniques used on soldiers going through SERE school, including forced nudity, stress positions, isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and exhaustion from exercise. The unnamed interrogation chief from Guantánamo notes in his statement that on his watch detainees were exposed to loud music and yelling. "The rule on volume," he said, "was that it should not be so loud that it would blow the detainees' ears out." The chief claimed interrogators would crank up the air conditioning to make detainees cold, and that one prisoner was also given a "lap dance" by a female interrogator "to use sexual tension in an attempt to break a detainee." The interrogator was later told not to do it again. One high-value detainee, he recalled, was subjected to "mental anguish."
The Army declined Salon's request for an interview with a SERE official. But an Army spokeswoman officially denied that such training is taking place. "We do not teach interrogation techniques," Carol Darby, chief spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, insisted in an e-mail. "Interrogation policy and techniques are taught by other military schools."
Darby called SERE school training "sensitive." "We do not discuss the tactics, techniques and procedures taught in that course," she wrote.
According to those who have completed the training, however, the secretive "Level C" SERE course at Fort Bragg, which "inoculates" elite troops against the extreme measures that might be employed by enemy interrogators, is composed of three stages over a period of three weeks. The first week is classroom instruction on tactics for surviving behind enemy lines and evading capture. Then, during the second portion of the training, students are literally set loose in Fort Bragg's sprawling woods for up to a week to try to evade instructors hunting them. After the students are captured, they are taken to a fake concentration camp, where they are subjected to mock interrogations and simulated torture for the final week.
A retired Army Ranger who passed the SERE course in 1994 agreed to discuss his experiences in detail. He asked that his name not be used because he still does business with the federal government. He described the captivity portion of the course as among the most challenging periods of his 20-year career in the Army, which included combat missions. He said the instructors are experts at figuring out people's physical and mental breaking points. "We were told that it will happen," the Ranger said, "that everyone breaks sometime."