One more reason this demonstration is taking place. The headline may be factually correct as it pertains to the content but misleading nonetheless considering America’s history of sadism and torture in which SERE is an extension of tradition. Linking God to torture is a gruesome, sickening devise. And I wonder if SERE training includes the raping of fellow soldiers with strap-ons and rifles?
Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us
By M. GREGG BLOCHE and JONATHAN H. MARKS
November 14, 2005 New York Times
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).
via The New Leninism: The Theory & Practice of Bushevism by Justin Raimondo.