“[A] number of medical and scientific personnel working at Guantanamo Bay” are members of “what are called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams or BSCT’s – in military jargon they are known simply as Biscuits,” reports Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman before her interview today with Jane Mayer who has a new story — “The Experiment” — in the pages of The New Yorker this week.
SERE was created by the Air Force, at the end of the Korean War, to teach pilots and other personnel considered at high risk of being captured by enemy forces how to withstand and resist extreme forms of abuse.
What the “biscuit” team did — Jane Mayer told Amy Goodman — was “reverse engineer” the SERE process on detainees at Guantanamo and at prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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For a sense of the scope, and depth, of Jane Mayer’s knowledge about Guantanamo Bay, the CIA practice of rendition, the use of torture by the U.S., and more, please refer to my February 2005 diary that references her Feb. story in The New Yorker: “Outsourcing Torture: Secret History (FBI v. CIA).”
My focus in that diary was, “Why has the Bush administration committed to torture instead of skilled interrogation?” Mayer’s lengthy article in the Feb. issue of The New Yorker went a long way towards buttressing our arguments against both rendition and torture because, for one thing, she sought out some of the best and most experienced professionals who told her, on the record, what they thought of the Bush adminnistration’s current practices.
This morning, Ms. Mayer told Ms. Goodman:
In Ms. Goodman’s intro, she quotes from the New Yorker article — which is not available on line:
Those methods included desecration of religious texts such as the Bible, waterboarding, sexual embarrassment and humiliation. The New Yorker writes, “Ideas intended to help Americans resist abuse spread to Americans who used them to perpetrate abuse.”
Ms. Mayer told Ms.Goodman, “To me it was just fascinating in that for a long time I had been wondering why is it the same really strange sort of allegations of abuse are coming up in places as disparate as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan and in places where undisclosed locations where the C.I.A. is holding people.”
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the curriculum.
JANE MAYER: It’s bizarre to many of us who are not part of the military, I think. It’s a curriculum that is designed to create maximum stress and anxiety. They talk about acute anxiety.
The idea is that if we can put our own people through something almost as bad as what they might have to go through if they were taken captive, they will inoculate themselves. It would be like practicing going off a high dive.
So under very, very carefully monitored circumstances, soldiers in danger of being taken captive are put through this classified program in which they — they’re hooded, they’re bound, they’re deprived of sleep, they’re exposed to extremes of temperature, they’re held in tiny little cells, they are starved to some extent.
They are sometimes water-boarded which is a form of torture in which you’re bound to a board and they pour water on your face so that you can’t breathe; you have the sense that you’re going to die of asphyxiation.
And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them. They throw them on the ground, they rip them in the air.
Many of the soldiers are quite religious, and it is very upsetting to see this happen to them. And, you know, for the people that I talked to who knew the program well, when we began reading about Korans being trashed, a number of people said, `Oh, my god,’ you know, they just wondered – they thought, `God, there is a, you know, connection between these things.’
And, in fact, there is a connection, the people who designed this here program and who implement it are the same people who are overseeing and helping in the interrogations of detainees in places like Guantanamo.
Next, Ms. Goodman asked Ms. Mayer about her recent visit to Guantanamo, as part of her assignment from the magazine:
And, you know, even if they’re very dangerous, it seems like a very cumbersome solution. The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about.
But they would not allow reporters to interview the detainees, so it was very hard.
AMY GOODMAN: You write you heard a scream?
JANE MAYER: I heard one scream. We went to the end of a cell block that was empty.
They have kind of a model cell block and at the end of it there was a guy some distance away in an exercise yard who spotted me as a reporter and started screaming, you know, “They lie! They lie!” and saying that he was being abused and there was no medicine, and everybody was sick, and no sleep, and all this kind of thing.
I mean, the people who run Guantanamo, the military, pretty much dismiss complaints by the detainees because they say that they’re all created as part of a political process to sort of fake complaints and get public support.
And, of course, the lawyers for the detainees see it exactly the opposite way.
Goodman concludes the interview with:
I am working on getting a print copy of the magazine. My daughter subscribes, but this issue hasn’t arrived yet.
If it arrives in today’s mail, I’ll transcribe as much as I can.
Today’s full interview.
Cross-posted at Daily Kos.
Tinfoil time.
A few months back, I spotted a little-noticed obit on a U.S Navy doctor — an anesthesiologist — at Guantanamo.
He died at Gitmo in April 2004. His death was not announced by the military until early spring 2005.
Many of us searched and searched, but we could not find a single obituary or other news story on his death, aside from the Pentagon news release.
I found a memorial notice in the Guantanamo base newsletter in April 2004. So there was a service for him there.
He was from Chicago. He’d last practiced in San Diego before going to Gitmo.
He’d been promoted to Admiral.
Then he just went poof.
It still bugs me that there was nothing in any newspaper about him, and not for over a year.
about the tin-foil here. The guy was an admiral, which means he was older anyway. There’s been numerous studies (sorry I don’t have links) of older military guys dying, especially soon after retirement of their 20 years, of cardiac problems. This is due to the high carb diet of military mess halls, which is good for the soldier or sailor as long as you are in training, but once you stop the physical training…
So in this instance, I have to respectfully refer to Godwin’s law.
This is logical enough to be true. The “abused child” became the “abusive parent,” when put in the right situation. All it took was a wink, a nod, and a look the other way by superior officers, or even just neglect by them to investigate in the press of other business. It explains why the same types of abuse cropped up at very different locations without resorting to a conspiracy theory.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
I went through SERE in 1987 at Camp McCall, NC. This one set up by the late Col. Nick Rowe for the Army. A lot of the technigues of torture I’ve seen through the past few years seemed liked an extension of our training. I knew where they were coming from. I never had Bibles torn up in front of me or waterboarding but I do have a bad experience with ice cold water where I have an aversion to it to this day because I was already sleep deprived and half starved (went from 140 to 118 in three weeks, great weight loss program). Altogether, they really worked their magic on my psyche to this day.
Never blogged it before because I signed a non-disclosure form and some of the stuff is classified though not highly classified. Now that it is out, I can give an anecdote.
I do remember the sexual stuff though. One female interrogator laughing at my shrunken genitalia while I sat naked on a stool. I thought to myself “yea, bitch, let’s see how your nipples look after they submerge you in ice-cold water”… but that was before they beat to cockiness out of me (not physically, but rather psychologically, which I found worse).
So, yea, for me, this is not surprising at all.
This was some of the best training that I’ve ever gone through. I was always the little guy proving myself, even after I earned my tab and Green Beret. This training showed me that no matter your size or strength, it’s your mental strength, your “heart” that allows you to survive and keep you alive. So it had some very positive developments as well as the negative stated above, in my character.
This is utterly fascinating.
I hope you diary this and cross-post it all over. Borrow whatever you want from what I quoted from Mayer’s interview/article.
IT DOES STRIKE ME that there’s a world of difference between going through such hell as a part of one’s training — and knowing it will end and that there’s a good, logical reason for the hell — and going through it as a prisoner without any legal or humanitarian rights or prospect of it ending.
what I can legally blog on this, I don’t want want to go to jail like Uncle Karl for disclosing something that I shouldn’t. This comment was a fine line. I think I can say that the training is set up for 3 to 5 days in the POW camp just so that you don’t know when it will end. They know that this is one of the strongest inducments for breaking…now imagine Gitmo, it’s not 3-5 days it’s endless years! So yea, the prospect of it ending or not is a very powerful weapon on the psyche.
What disgusted me at the beginning of all of this is that THESE WERE ALL COMMUNIST INTERROGATOR TECHNIQUES!
Not one person who came out of a communist POW camp did not break, North Korea or Vietnam.
Admiral Stockdale died today, God bless his soul.
medical experiments?
Gawd, I hate this administration.
Thanks Susan!