A FASCINATING PATTERN HAS EMERGED around the whole issue of torture. It turns out that the methods which were encouraged by the Bush administration were created by reverse engineering another U.S. military program called "SERE" (for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape).
"It doesn't sound so stupid, now."
The purpose of the SERE program was to give members of our military a better chance at resisting torture techniques if they were captured.
But wait, it gets better.
The specific techniques SERE was designed to counteract were the techniques used during the Korean war to get false confessions from our soldiers for propaganda purposes.
These torture techniques were never intended to get reliable information from their victims. They were intentionally designed to get false information—confessions of war crimes which never happened. We called it brainwashing at the time.
The SERE program simulated these techniques under controlled conditions in order to train personnel to resist them.
The Bush administration subsequently used the knowledge base the SERE program had acquired of these same techniques to design its own programs of torture.
The obvious question, already being asked by Rachel Maddow among others, is what made the Bush administration think that techniques which had been designed to get false information was would be a smart choice if you wanted accurate information.
The answer, of course, is that it made no sense at all. In fact, it's almost unbelievably stupid.
Unless...
Unless you didn't want accurate information.
These techniques were not originally designed to provide just any false information at random. They were designed to extract false evidence which fit the political agenda of the torturers.
In the case of Korea, this was false evidence of American atrocities.
But imagine you're a member of the Bush administration during the period in question.
You want to play the terrorist card for all it's worth.
You want intelligence that backs up all of your claims about weapons of mass destruction, about the level of terrorist threat at home in the U.S., about connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, etc.
It would be really nice, at the same time, to find justification for all those prisoners at Guantanamo.
What would be better than confessions? Confessions which just happened to corroborate all of the claims you've been making, or want to make, to Congress and the American public?
If you only could find a set of techniques guaranteed to produce the kind of confessions you were after...
Something, say, that had been tested before by another government. Something that you were pretty sure would work at least fairly often.
And then, you think of those soldiers who "confessed" in Korea.
It doesn't sound so stupid, now.
At least, that's what I think today.
