Pay Any Price (27 page)

Those were some of the same problems that plagued the intelligence community in its assessments of Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. Then, many in the government assumed that there was top-secret information to corroborate the public assertions of the president, the CIA director, and others on the Bush team about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction—and that those outside the inner circle simply didn't have access to it.

Perhaps the most important reason that the use of abusive tactics spread was because it fit perfectly with how the Bush White House wanted to prosecute the new “global war on terror.” From the outset, President Bush and Vice President Cheney saw the fight against al Qaeda as a national security issue rather than a criminal problem to be dealt with by law enforcement. For Bush, that decision allowed him to disassociate himself from his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton. But Cheney had even deeper motivations; he wanted to roll back the reforms imposed on the executive branch in the 1970s, when he served in the White House under President Gerald Ford. Although torture had never been condoned in the United States, Cheney wanted to demonstrate that there were virtually no limitations on presidential power in a time of war.

In the end, Mitchell and Jessen got their way because too few either knew the full story or objected. Many in the government went along because they were following orders, or because participation meant the chance for promotion or wealth, or it meant the excitement of being an insider in the war on terror.

Zimbardo believes that once Mitchell and Jessen's theories became accepted wisdom within the CIA and Pentagon, “they sucked in” other psychologists, especially in the military. “They got these psychologists to identify the vulnerabilities of high-value detainees, who had phobias of snakes or dogs. I know some of these [psychologists], and they are not experts. They know something about people's vulnerabilities, but nothing about interrogation.”

“You can be seduced to do this,” Zimbardo added. “It's easy for people to delude themselves into thinking that they will be the ones who will do it the right way. Self-delusion is a powerful force for evil.”

 

Malcolm Nance, a former navy senior chief petty officer and Arabic speaker who spent much of his career in intelligence, was the director of training at the U.S. Navy's SERE program at Coronado Naval Station in San Diego in the years just before 9/11. Nance said that SERE trainers knew that the SERE tactics could not be used to collect accurate intelligence. “You are bringing them to a state of compliance, not a state where they will give you intelligence,” Nance said. He said that at the navy SERE program, a PowerPoint presentation given during each training session to the students makes it clear that the torture techniques they endure in SERE school are terrible for finding out the truth.

The navy SERE PowerPoint presentation could not have been clearer:

 

Why is torture the worst interrogation method?

Produces unreliable information

Negative world opinion

Subject to war crimes trials

Used as a tool for compliance

 

“The first slide we teach is that none of these techniques work,” said Nance. Exposure to the simulated torture at SERE makes trainers and other personnel involved with the program “100% diametrically opposed to this use of torture,” continued Nance. “You can't go through SERE and not become a human rights advocate. You don't want any part of it. This is a lethal virus.”

But after 9/11, after Mitchell and Jessen won over the Bush administration and were given multimillion-dollar contracts with the CIA, the attitude within SERE changed, Nance said. SERE trainers who knew that the tactics would not elicit accurate information agreed to get involved in the new American torture regime. Nance, who had already left by then, said he “started hearing from my guys at SERE that they were reorienting things to be more offensive.” Nance said that a friend of his who was at the navy SERE school at the time told him that in 2003, officials from the Joint Prisoner Recovery Agency, the Pentagon unit that is an umbrella organization overseeing all SERE programs, came to the navy SERE school in Coronado to obtain the navy SERE “Red Books”—the program's manuals.

The navy program—conducted at Coronado and North Island near San Diego, and Brunswick, Maine—was known within the military for being far more intense and brutal than the SERE programs in any other service, and so Mitchell and Jessen convinced the CIA to use the navy tactics as the basis for their enhanced interrogation techniques. The navy's “Red Books” had a guide on how to conduct waterboarding, walling, facial and abdominal slaps, and other techniques that have now become infamous. “The Red Books were how-to guides to do everything bad,” recalled Nance. The visiting officials even measured the waterboard at the navy SERE facility at North Island, which was modeled after the waterboard used against American POWs by the North Vietnamese. The navy had built it at North Island to the exact measurements vividly recalled by former American POWs. (The CIA eventually used a gurney instead at its black-site prisons.)

 

Nance was especially bothered by one of the tactics the visiting officials took from navy SERE: talking about the rape of a child, then forcing the prisoner to listen to an endless tape of a baby crying and screaming. “I thought that was the worst,” said Nance. “It's hard for the staff to go through. We put in earplugs.” Nance said all of the tactics that eventually formed the basis for the enhanced interrogation program came directly from the navy's version of SERE; it was the only service that used them all.

Nance said that the navy SERE program was under such tight controls and monitored so closely by top navy officials that the decision to allow the direct transfer of its methodology for use in abusive interrogations had to have been known at the highest levels of the naval service, and approved by the chief of naval operations (CNO). “SERE is very carefully controlled. The CNO's office had to know what was going on,” said Nance.

Few if any people inside SERE objected, largely because they believed that this was an exciting opportunity to be at the cutting edge of the war on terror, rubbing shoulders with what insiders call “Tier One operators”—CIA case officers and U.S. Special Operations personnel. “They had an advisor from SERE at Gitmo,” said Nance. “I think you would find there have been SERE instructors all over the world advising the processing of prisoners.”

In fact, in late December 2002, two instructors from the navy SERE school arrived at Guantánamo and began training interrogators there on how to administer the SERE tactics, according to a Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse.

 

“They threw everything they knew out the window,” Nance added. “They were all gung ho to get in to the Tier One world.”

Both Andy Morgan and Malcolm Nance said that the statements included in the Justice Department's legal opinions, which claimed that the tactics could not be considered torture because thousands of American service personnel had been subjected to them without any permanent damage, were false.

In a footnote to a 2005 Justice Department legal opinion, since declassified, Steven Bradbury, then the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, wrote that the tactics had been used safely on SERE students for years. The opinion, written by Bradbury in the form of a memo to John Rizzo, then the senior deputy general counsel of the CIA, states in the footnote that Rizzo had told Bradbury that at least two former SERE trainers—whose names are redacted—had assured him that SERE training had never inflicted any significant physical or psychological damage on trainees.

“Through your consultation with individuals responsible for such training, you have learned facts relating to experience with them, which you have reported to us,” Bradbury wrote in the footnote. “You have advised us that these techniques have been used as a part of a course of training without any reported incidents of prolonged mental harm or of any reported severe physical pain, injury or suffering. With respect to the psychological impact, [redacted] of the SERE school advised that during his three and a half years in that position, he trained 10,000 students, only two of whom dropped out following use of the techniques. . . . [Redacted] who has had over ten years' experience with SERE training, told you that he was not aware of any individual who completed the program suffering from any adverse mental health effects.”

The assertions that SERE tactics were safe provided a critical underpinning to the Justice Department's legal opinions. In order to authorize the enhanced interrogation techniques, the Justice Department's lawyers were trying to skirt U.S. and international laws banning torture. To do so, they had to be able to define the techniques as something other than torture.

Morgan said that he believes the assertions from the former SERE trainers described in the Office of Legal Counsel memo, particularly on the potential for psychological damage from SERE training, were false, designed to gain the government's approval of the use of enhanced interrogation tactics. “They would have had to know at the time they wrote that memo that the central assertions were not true.” Whoever provided Bradbury with that information made inaccurate assertions “when they said that the SERE tactics couldn't lead to damage,” he added. “That was well known in the psychological field at the time.”

Among other things, Morgan noted that only a small number of military personnel who go through SERE training are subjected to waterboarding, one of the harshest SERE techniques reverse-engineered by the CIA. In SERE school, waterboarding is reserved for those very few students who attempt to “John Wayne” their way through the course, by trying to refuse all cooperation with their interrogators, which is not the approach SERE seeks to teach. Frequently those students are navy SEALs or other Special Operations soldiers trying to prove how macho they can be, and they are waterboarded only to demonstrate that anyone can be broken. “When they say that thousands of people going through SERE have been waterboarded, that is not true,” said Morgan. What's more, the waterboarding and other tactics used at SERE are part of a highly controlled simulation—most crucially, the students know that the trainers are only pretending to be interrogators. (A Senate Armed Services Committee report released in late 2008 agreed with Morgan's assessment, concluding that the use of SERE techniques for interrogating detainees was “inconsistent with the goal of collecting accurate intelligence information.” The techniques, the report added, were “based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to elicit false confessions.”)

After the Office of Legal Counsel memos became public, Morgan said that he tried to convince SERE psychologists to join him in speaking out by calling out the claims in the memos. “My biggest disappointment with the community of DOD psychologists was that there could have been a rebuttal,” Morgan said. “But they were afraid to speak out, because they would lose their positions. They all feel that it would be disloyal to make a statement. I spoke at one of the conferences of SERE psychologists about it, but they didn't want to speak out.”

Not long after the Abu Ghraib scandal led to a firestorm of protest over the Bush administration's use of the tactics, Morgan learned firsthand why so many people in the system were frightened to speak out. The White House was watching SERE very closely.

Morgan said he received a message through a colleague that Samantha Ravich, an aide to Dick Cheney (the same aide who met with Dennis Montgomery), wanted access to his confidential medical and psychological research data on the effects of waterboarding on SERE students. Morgan said he concluded that Cheney's office was only looking for information that it could use to publicly defend the use of waterboarding, so he refused to respond to the request.

He said he has always refused to publish any of his data specifically on waterboarding because it is badly skewed by the bias of who is selected for waterboarding at SERE—a small handful of navy SEALs “who are being blockheads” and purposely seeking a confrontation with their SERE instructors. “The data showed that the SEALs were found to rebound from waterboarding, and I won't publish that because it is biased by who is involved and the situation they are in,” said Morgan. “It is not scientific data that is interesting, because it is so biased. I realized that publishing that would be like lighting a match. I don't know how Ravich found out that I had it, but I didn't want to give it to Cheney's office.” Probably, some SERE officials, eager to cooperate with the enhanced interrogation program, told the White House about Morgan's unpublished research.

Many in the SERE community, especially SERE psychologists, recognized that participation in the Bush administration's interrogation regime was the path to wealth and power. The fact that so many within the SERE community were so willing to participate in the torture program deeply disturbs Nance, because they knew better than anyone else what they were doing was wrong and that it wouldn't work. He now believes that his former colleagues at SERE who participated were complicit in war crimes. “We teach that these are war crimes,” said Nance. “We teach about Pinochet in Chile. We were using tactics that the Israeli Supreme Court had ruled to be torture.”

 

At the time of his death in 2008, Scott Gerwehr was an enigma. He was a secretive man living a highly compartmentalized life, and no one fully knew him, perhaps not even himself. When he slid his motorcycle underneath a truck on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and died at the age of forty, he was mourned widely and sorrowfully because he was many things to many people. He was the gregarious center of gravity of a tight-knit group of longtime friends in Santa Monica, the Peter Pan character in a crowd reminiscent of the cast of
Friends,
a short, stocky, and bald-headed slacker and computer geek who loved to work from home on his laptop, a gamer addicted to World of Warcraft, a liberal who expressed distaste for George Bush during long talks around the UCLA campus or in coffee shops near the ocean.