Been there, done that. SERE school is an effective way to teach military personnel a number of lessons, including keeping the faith with your fellow prisoners, not all is what it seems, everyone breaks, and evade even if it hurts because capture is worse. Nothing I experienced was that bad. Stop the whining.

Tom

To have a woman tie them up and laugh at their dick size.

The important points here are that the military was TOLD to participate in this action, they didn’t choose to do it. Secondly, as several writers have pointed out, torture has limited effectiveness. In this case, the effectiveness is even less since the majority of the detainees have nothing of value to tell. However, of even greater importance is the fact that the administration really has no one to answer to regarding this policy. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education talked about a study conducted by an academic Theologian who went to a number of groups representing fundamentalist Christians and asked them how they felt about the administration’s policy of torture. Those who responded were entirely in favor. This is who the administration answers to. The rest of us, for the most part, don’t really care enough to comment. So, guess where the ultimate blame lies.

Between this latest revelation, the evidence of rendition flights, and the numerous stories from victims, there should be little doubt left in the American citizens' minds that their government has systematically designed and implemented a policy of torture. It also implies that they can no longer "plead ignorance", and must now take responsibility for their own government's actions. The question now is, will the American people go along with it? And if they do, will they be willing to accept, without complaints, the deserved consequences of their actions?

Folks in Special Forces and alphabet agencies know torture is a sloppy and unreliable way to get quality intel.

There are drugs these days that will make you completely spill EVERYTHING and what's more afterwards you won't even remember you did it.

That's what professionals use, that's what they do.

We train our soldiers to handle the work of non professionals, more to bolster their confidence in what they can take than to prepare them for possible torture.

Anyone with the US military who is involved in doing torture is doing it for other reasons. Those other reasons are the sad biproducts of war. Which I'll let the psychologist and sociologists explain.

Teaching is one thing, using actual torture to teach is quite another.Who thought up those procedures? Soldiers of any rank who swore on the Constitution to uphold the laws and defend freedom? The Geneva Convention by virtue of the fact that the government accepted it became part of the military code,specifically prohibiting torture as a weapon. Alberto Gonzales as a young man may have been ignorant of this fact, but after studying law (after he weaseled out of active service, the taxpayers gave him the education for nothing) he should have known what was in this obligation to the USA in case of an armed conflict. He afterall advised the president of the redundancy of the convention. The bag over the head is typical, it seems to be an American invention, during my military service in WW2 I never came across it or even heard of it. Women served as Nurses and in clerical functions normally far from the actual fighting but not as interrogators of bound and nude men. What has happened since is simply disgusting. We better keep the victims in Gitmo etc. They will never stop hating us. And lets stop talking about bringing them freedom and democracy. Those methods are neither.

Given the "coercive" (i.e., "torture") methods this article describes as being used and the Administration's position that the president can disobey any law or treaty he chooses, I wonder why we don't just go all. What's to prevent us from bringing back the rack, cat-o'-nine-tails, iron maiden, chains, flaying, white-hot poker up the ass, or whatever diabolical means suits our ends? The answer, I'm afraid is damn little. The media and the American public are asleep at the wheel and our politicians for the most part are spineless nabobs who are more concerned about their own welfare than that of their constitutents or -- most distressing -- our nation.

Our principles, such as those in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, used to be considered inviolable. They were models -- imperfect but pretty good ones -- for the rest of the world. Under the rallying cry of "War on Terror," our president and his minions continue to move our nation toward a way of life that is at odds with the fundamental beliefs upon which the United States of America was founded. As a people have we lost our ablity to know right from wrong and stand up for what we believe in? Is this the legacy we will provide for our children?

"And women continue, at greater rates than men, to be fooled by fear tactics into voting Bush and his ilk into power time and time again."

Huh? Where did you get this idea? Women have been consistently, by anywhere from 7 to 11 percent, depending on the election, more likely to vote for Democratic candidates. This is the so-called "gender gap."

I stand corrected. I have to admit I am getting a laugh out of it though - the article focused so much on the training at SERE that I forgot I had read this by the end. But what gets me is that Salon starred my comment. Smart!

Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. My faith in Salon is (almost) restored.

And women continue, at greater rates than men, to be fooled by fear tactics into voting Bush and his ilk into power time and time again.

I think what's missing is sanity. How do you train someone to suffer trauma by inflicting trauma? It's not like learning math. It's like teaching women what do to in situations where they are threatened with rape or actually raped by actually raping them. There is no way to completely control the affect of humiliating violence on an individual. The SERE program traumatizes soldiers and then expects them to go out and perform there duties with honor. The very training can cause PTSD. We damage young men and women as a matter of course for war. But if anybody in the military or the administration thought seriously about this then they'd have to start having real respect for the emotional, physical, spiritual and material costs of war. We'd have to treat war like what it should be, a heart-wrenching last resort and not some kind of glorified game. We'd think twice and seriously about numbing the empathy most humans feel naturely and conflating that damage with masculinity and patriotism.