Manchurian Candidate, Unredacted
If this isn't true, this is (I should think) actionable, so the NYT choosing to publish it (particularly given their ongoing, if erratic, servility to the PTB) is significant as well. But if it is not true, then I should think that the US govt would be able to deny it roundly - and provide proof.
via Hullabaloo--
Ever hear of a program called SERE--?
[...]Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.
The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees. General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.
Some within the Pentagon warned that these tactics constituted torture, but a top adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld justified them by pointing to their use in SERE training, a senior Pentagon official told us last month.
When internal F.B.I. e-mail messages critical of these methods were made public earlier this year, references to SERE were redacted. But we've obtained a less-redacted version of an e-mail exchange among F.B.I. officials, who refer to the methods as "SERE techniques." We also learned from a Pentagon official that the SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy (we've been unable to learn the content of that guidance).
SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and punitive control over life's most intimate functions produced overwhelming stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair, uncontrollable anxiety and a collapse of self-esteem. Sometimes hallucinations and delusions ensued. Prisoners who had been through this treatment became pliable and craved companionship, easing the way for captors to obtain the "confessions" they sought.
SERE, as originally envisioned, inoculates American soldiers against these techniques. Its psychologists create mock prison regimens to study the effects of various tactics and identify the coping styles most likely to withstand them. At Guantánamo, SERE-trained mental health professionals applied this knowledge to detainees, working with guards and medical personnel to uncover resistant prisoners' vulnerabilities.[...]
The reason we haven't been getting good plot-stopping information is (aside from the more general question of whether or not good information can ever be gotten by torture) is that the torture tactics they're using - at the Pentagon's explicit behest - were designed to elicit false confessions of atrocities, and create broken men vulnerable to further exploitation, as we saw dramatized, and Hollywoodized, in 1962's inverted parable of US paranoia misplaced and McCarthy-esque vulnerability, The Manchurian Candidate.
We have met the enemy, and they are us. This is what FDR was talking about, when he (a flawed and imperfect leader, but better than the bankers and industrialists, some of whom have never been named, who with their boughten military men at the War Office and in the ranks of the American Legion, feted Mussolini and plotted against the New Deal and its author) said, Nothing to fear but fear itself--
To say they are "crazy" is a cop-out, an avoidance of the problem of fallen human nature: even if they few at the top are mad, it does not explain all the many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, in this country and in Britain who agree, who see their arguments and ethos as rational and sane and are willing to argue it justified, and defend it as morally defensible.
To say they are merely "stupid" is to ignore the fact of their success. And they have succeeded, thrice, in taking the Presidency - twice after the first Great Warning, of Watergate - and running the country into the ground. (For all intents and purposes, Reagan and Bush I are one indistinguishable reign.) --Have succeeded despite all public revelations of their greed, their fundamental dishonesty, their contempt for the Constitution and the citizenry, for the SPQA in toto.
Will the consequences, will the deeds necessary to bring said consequences about. Thus, the guilt of the benevolent warhawks, Left or Right.
Will the deed, will the consequences, unplanned disaster or negligent byproduct. Thus, the guilt of the mindlessly vengeful citizenry.
Will not to choose, and will whatever results from your abdication. Thus, the guilt of the apathetic and passive bystanders of the Empire.
A nation gets the leaders it deserves. --On this rests the classical notion of Fate, which is akin to the idea of Karma.
via Hullabaloo--
Ever hear of a program called SERE--?
[...]Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.
The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees. General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.
Some within the Pentagon warned that these tactics constituted torture, but a top adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld justified them by pointing to their use in SERE training, a senior Pentagon official told us last month.
When internal F.B.I. e-mail messages critical of these methods were made public earlier this year, references to SERE were redacted. But we've obtained a less-redacted version of an e-mail exchange among F.B.I. officials, who refer to the methods as "SERE techniques." We also learned from a Pentagon official that the SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy (we've been unable to learn the content of that guidance).
SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and punitive control over life's most intimate functions produced overwhelming stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair, uncontrollable anxiety and a collapse of self-esteem. Sometimes hallucinations and delusions ensued. Prisoners who had been through this treatment became pliable and craved companionship, easing the way for captors to obtain the "confessions" they sought.
SERE, as originally envisioned, inoculates American soldiers against these techniques. Its psychologists create mock prison regimens to study the effects of various tactics and identify the coping styles most likely to withstand them. At Guantánamo, SERE-trained mental health professionals applied this knowledge to detainees, working with guards and medical personnel to uncover resistant prisoners' vulnerabilities.[...]
The reason we haven't been getting good plot-stopping information is (aside from the more general question of whether or not good information can ever be gotten by torture) is that the torture tactics they're using - at the Pentagon's explicit behest - were designed to elicit false confessions of atrocities, and create broken men vulnerable to further exploitation, as we saw dramatized, and Hollywoodized, in 1962's inverted parable of US paranoia misplaced and McCarthy-esque vulnerability, The Manchurian Candidate.
We have met the enemy, and they are us. This is what FDR was talking about, when he (a flawed and imperfect leader, but better than the bankers and industrialists, some of whom have never been named, who with their boughten military men at the War Office and in the ranks of the American Legion, feted Mussolini and plotted against the New Deal and its author) said, Nothing to fear but fear itself--
To say they are "crazy" is a cop-out, an avoidance of the problem of fallen human nature: even if they few at the top are mad, it does not explain all the many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, in this country and in Britain who agree, who see their arguments and ethos as rational and sane and are willing to argue it justified, and defend it as morally defensible.
To say they are merely "stupid" is to ignore the fact of their success. And they have succeeded, thrice, in taking the Presidency - twice after the first Great Warning, of Watergate - and running the country into the ground. (For all intents and purposes, Reagan and Bush I are one indistinguishable reign.) --Have succeeded despite all public revelations of their greed, their fundamental dishonesty, their contempt for the Constitution and the citizenry, for the SPQA in toto.
Will the consequences, will the deeds necessary to bring said consequences about. Thus, the guilt of the benevolent warhawks, Left or Right.
Will the deed, will the consequences, unplanned disaster or negligent byproduct. Thus, the guilt of the mindlessly vengeful citizenry.
Will not to choose, and will whatever results from your abdication. Thus, the guilt of the apathetic and passive bystanders of the Empire.
A nation gets the leaders it deserves. --On this rests the classical notion of Fate, which is akin to the idea of Karma.