Firebugs and SERE

Firefighters have to be experts in fires. They study how fires start, how they spread, what they feed on, how fire works. They study all of this in order to become more effective at fighting fire. They study all of this because, one day, it might save their lives.

Every once in a while, however, we read of a fireman (nearly always a man) who begins employing all of this training to start setting fires. Many of these arsonists were firebugs long before they ever signed up to become firefighters. For them, the training they received just enhanced and reinforced what they already were. Others may have developed a morbid fascination on the job, learning more about fire from their experience and training they become firebugs. And still others may have their heads spun by the heroic dynamics of what firefighters do, becoming firebugs through something like Munchausen by Proxy.

Fire departments and volunteer companies have, out of necessity, gotten pretty good at spotting and screening out these firebugs in firefighters' costumes, but they don't catch all of them. Sometime in the next six months or so, you'll see another story in the paper describing another such case. It happens.

During the Cold War, American spies and soldiers who were captured by the Soviet Union or its proxies were subjected to physical and psychological torture. America began studying the KGB's interrogation methods for the same reasons that firefighters study fires: to learn how to fight against it, and how to survive when fighting against it. This study produced what became America's SERE training. That stood for "survive, evade, resist, escape." Training Americans to understand KGB torture so that they would be better able to survive, evade, resist or escape it was as rational and prudent a step as training firefighters to understand fire for all the same reasons.

But as America's understanding of these KGB methods grew, U.S. military and intelligence agencies began to attract and produce their own version of firebugs in uniform. Unlike the fire departments, who try to filter out these madmen, the CIA institutionalized their efforts. Historian Alfred McCoy describes how, almost from its inception, the CIA's SERE training was also perverse-engineered to provide training in how to adopt, conduct and inflict KGB-style interrogations. (A longer version of McCoy's essay is here, at Tomgram. For primary sources and complete documentation, see "Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past" from the National Security Archive.)

From 1950 through to the present day, licensed psychologists have played a role in this perverse-engineering of SERE training, refining and perfecting the KGB model and devising the superior American-model torture machine. Psychologists have belatedly begun to worry that this shameful and disgraceful behavior by some of their peers might bring wider shame and disgrace to their profession. The role of psychologists in the torture and abuse uncovered at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay focused this worry, and the governing council of the American Psychological Association has begun considering a policy requiring its members to respect international standards barring such torture and abuse.

This is portrayed as a "controversy," but such a minimal standard doesn't rise to the level of controversy. The American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association already have such policies in place. Those professional standards merely echo the existing American legal standards of the Geneva Conventions. The APA is merely debating whether or not its members should be allowed to keep their professional licenses while in prison.

The APA's internal struggle over these minimal proposed standards has been well-documented in a series of reports:

• "Collective Unconscionable: How psychologists, the most liberal of professionals, abetted Bush's torture policy," by Arthur Levine in The Washington Monthly

• "Psychologists Aiding and Abetting Torture," by Deborah Kory in Tikkun

• "Psychological warfare," by Mark Benjamin in Salon

• "Hypocritical Oath: Psychologists and Torture," by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

• "Rorschach and Awe," by Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair

The articles linked above document how the APA task force assigned to consider a policy barring members from abuse and torture was stacked against the proposal. Six of its 10 members had ties to the military -- including Navy Capt. Bryce Lefever, whom we met earlier. Lefever, you'll recall, said the following to Warren Richey of The Christian Science Monitor:

"There's something to be said for sending the message that the gloves are coming off," says Capt. Bryce Lefever, a Navy psychologist and former SERE school instructor. "You don't take a knife to a gunfight."

Captain Lefever says it is unfair to compare US antiterror interrogations with Soviet interrogation techniques. "Their abuse was a systematic practice to conceal the truth," he says. "If Padilla was abused, then it was for a righteous purpose -- to reveal the truth."

Jose Padilla was abused. In a Navy brig. Padilla was subjected, for more than three years, to the perverse-engineered KGB methods. Lefever claims to oppose torture, but he defends its application to Padilla as "righteous." He claims psychologists like himself who are involved in SERE training are in no way complicit in any alleged abuse or mistreatment of prisoners, but he opposes the APA policy forbidding such abuse or mistreatment. In both cases, the latter fact proves the former claim to be a hollow, disingenuous sham.

Think again of the firefighter analogy. Arson, like any violation of the Geneva Conventions, is already against the law, but suppose that firefighters wanted to reinforce this legal prohibition by proposing professional standards forbidding firefighters from going out and torching vacant buildings for kicks. What would you make of any alleged firefighter who opposed such professional standards?

The firefighter analogy, like all analogies, is imperfect. When battling a forest fire, for example, it may be wise and necessary and proper for firefighters to set a backburn -- fighting fire with fire. That is, I'm sure, a favorite rationalization of all those who, ever since the Cold War began, have been involved in the perverse-engineering of America's SERE training and the co-opting of the KGB method and who are desperate to convince themselves that this is wise and necessary and proper, when they know it is none of those things. We're just "fighting fire with fire," these firebugs say, as another city block goes up in flames. The ultimate, inevitable result of their misappropriation of techniques first studied as tools of evil takes its name from another firefighting analogy: blowback.

Comments

[beckya57]

I'm a clinical psychologist (and a psychiatric nurse practitioner), and I quit APA years ago. It used to have a conscience, but it's morphed into this establishmentarian outfit that's hungry for power. IMO, that's the underlying dynamic in this story.

[Hob]

You left out the other perverse rationalization that pops up now and then: "Our guys had to go through SERE training; we're not doing anything to these prisoners that we didn't already go through, and it didn't do us any lasting harm."

Which if taken literally would mean that the abuse serves no purpose at all, unless we assume that the prisoners have no endurance compared to our guys. But of course we're not doing the same thing for the same amount of time - we're doing it for weeks, months, years, and they have no guarantee that we'll ever stop. "My dad spanked me once and I'm OK - so it's no big deal for me to hit my kid 100 times a day for a year."

[Jeff]

the governing council of the American Psychological Association has begun considering a policy requiring its members to respect international standards barring such torture and abuse. (Empghasis mine)

You could have stopped right there and it would be horrid enough. It sure looks like the sado-masochists are running this institution.

[Bugmaster]

Hmm, so if I'm reading Fred's post correctly, he seems to be saying that the American military's fascination with torture arose as the result of the SERE training. I think this claim has some truth to it, in the sense that SERE training certainly helped legitimize torture even further, but I think it'd be naive to assume that the CIA (or some other TLA) was innocent and pure until they got inadvertently corrupted by the KGB. I bet they were torturing people long before SERE came along.

[Pope Easier Rhino I]

I continually wonder how Solzhenitsyn feels about all this. After all, it's hard to believe that the CIA (et al) wouldn't have cribbed from The Gulag Archipelago. And Solzhenitsyn was at least held up as a shining example for conservatives during the Reagan years, although perhaps he didn't agree. It would be slightly hypocritical of him to decry torture in one instance while supporting it in another, but never let it be said that no one is hypocritical.

Sorry if this has been posted twice.

[larry p]

It doesn't surprise me in the least that significant numbers of people in the psychological community get off on torture. My experience in the mental health world has convinced me that at least half of all mental health practitioners are incompetant charlatans. It apalls me that the mental health organizations have never done much of anything to police aberrant behavior in their profession. So I'm not surprised that the profession as a whole has a significant portion of moral mutants to boot.

The really sad part is, if mental health were taken seriously in this country, as it should be, delusional morons like Pres. Bush would have received appropriate treatment for their maladies. But rather than receive appropriate treatment, "W" has been enabled to inflict his sickness on the world.

[the opoponax]

I bet they were torturing people long before SERE came along.

Well I don't know what year SERE officially began, but CIA practices with questionable ethics go back at least to the 50's.

Through knowing some things about the CIA, I do have to say that a lot of the especially fucked up stuff does come directly from Cold War tactics. I don't know that you can "blame" the KGB, though. In my opinion, the problem isn't that the CIA learned unethical tactics via the KGB, but that the intelligence agencies are still chock full of Cold War thinking. Especially dangerous are all the folks who trained up in the mid-80's with the expectation that they were going to be the first line of defense against the Red Menace, and then, crap, just as they were finishing their training, the Iron Curtain had to go down and end the whole thing... Now those guys are in positions of real power, and they want to USE all that training, dammit!

In my opinion, all the intelligence agencies ought to be purged of anyone who entered prior to 1990. And not replaced with neocon sycophants.

[Pseudowolf]

Well, I don't know if you consider this too little, too late, or whatever, but according to MSNBC, the APA has ruled that its members will be banned if they participate in planning, designing, or assisting in torture in interrogations and/or if they fail to report such abuses.

From the article:
"The Washington, D.C.-based American Psychological Association, under pressure to respond to reports implicating mental-health professionals in prisoner-abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, has banned members from any involvement in interrogations that involve torture. The ruling, which came to a vote on Sunday, bars psychologists from knowingly planning, designing, or assisting in the use of torture. The ruling specifically lays out more than a dozen specific practices, including simulated drowning and forced nakedness, and aims to draw a clear line between providing care to detainees and playing advisory roles to interrogation teams. Anyone in violation could be expelled from the 148,000-member organization and possibly lose their state licenses, according to the new ruling, if they fail to report abuses or take part in them personally."

And the link to the rest of it:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20364983/site/newsweek/

[Raka]

Any bets whether NMR and/or our anonymous protester comes back? I actually feel kinda bad for them. It's pretty common to believe that monstrous acts can only be committed by monsters, who are by no means "people". This leads to zero-sympathy policies for strangers who are accused of monstrous things, and perversely also leads to denial and protection of familiar people who actually have behaved monstrously. After all, the perpetrator is kind to children and small animals, and dedicates his life to his country, and is a good fellow to share a beer with, and, and... so obviously, they either did not do the things they are known to have done, or if they did, those things must not be so bad.

The worst excesses of ruthlessness and the worst weaknesses of sympathy, all in a tidy and altogether human little package.

[Kate]

Time for my favorite quote ever:

"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I think that should be printed out and displayed in the mess halls of the guards of every prison, everywhere... i had a teacher who posted it on his blackboard (with other choice quotes) back in my highschool days (many long years ago now), and it's one of those things that I find more truth in the older I get.

[starroute]

I've been reading Glenn Greenwald's blog entries the last few days on the way the foreign policy establishment uses the word "serious" to exclude peaceniks and other dirty hippie types, and though it's clear he's onto something, I'm not sure that equating "serious" to "warmongering" fully covers what's at stake.

Rather, I'm convinced that in this case, "serious" is a code word for being prepared to commit morally indefensible acts in defense of American hegemony, with the vague rationale that it's all for the greater good somewhere down the line.

Now, I might willing to admit, at least for the sake of argument, that there could be occasions where national leaders could find it necessary to lie, cheat, or kill in order to avert worse evils. But real problems arise when lying, cheating, and killing become standard policy in preference to more aboveboard methods. And the slippery slope sends you still further into the abyss when even academic policy types feel they have to establish their street cred by letting the rest of the gang know that they also buy into this order of criminality.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm haunted by the notion that in order to be considered serious in our society, you have to signal that you've already gone over to the dark side -- and the more fully you've gone over, the more serious you are.

By that standard, of course, approval of torture is both the ultimate mark of seriousness and also one of the easiest to display, since you don't even have to concoct any actual evil plans.

And all us earnest, high-minded, morally concerned, truth-telling hippies? Well, we obviously just don't get it.

[Evan]

"Training Americans to understand KGB torture so that they would be better able to survive, evade, resist or escape it was as rational and prudent a step as training firefighters to understand fire for all the same reasons."

Why do If find the words Defense Against the Dark Arts suddenly springing to mind?

[Geds]

It's weird. I find myself thinking of something Paul wrote in one of his epistles.

It was something to the effect of, "I didn't know what sin was until the Law told me."

[Bugmaster]

Oddly enough, as I was reading Harry Potter, I kept thinking, "Defense Against the Dark Arts ? What a nice euphemism. They're teaching these kids battle magic, they should have the guts to label it as such". The Aurors -- the ultimate Defenders Against the Dark Arts -- are classic battlemages, trained primarily in offensive and defensive spells, with just enough support spells to get them through the fight. The reason they're so effective at stopping the Dark Arts is not only because they have specific counters for the Dark spells, but also -- if not primarily -- because they're walking killing (or, at the very least, efficiently neutralizing) machines.

[the opoponax]

Personally, while I get the importance of DODA in the overall plot of Potter, I've never understood why such a course would be a requirement for the equivalent of a high school education. Is dark magic really that ubiquitous, that EVERY schoolchild has to know it to such a degree? It would be the equivalent of not being able to graduate muggle high school without a mandatory 4 years of judo, or something.

Though in addition, I thought the major protagonists' immediate desire to become aurors a touch weird, as well. They're magical law enforcement. The Potterverse equivalent of the feds. Of all the things you could do with magic, why on earth do Ron, Harry, and Hermione want to be aurors? I get that they want to be on the front lines of the fight against Voldemort, but the fight against Voldemort is over before they've graduated from high school. Why not fight Voldy in book 7, then finish school and go do whatever it is they really want to do?

[NewsCat]

I think one of the most heartbreaking parts of Jane Mayer's New Yorker article on torture was when she quotes someone explaining that the KGB methods were sucessful but only at getting a confession.

It's like "didn't anyone in the CIA think about that?" That sure we can go all Winston Smith on your ass and get you to admit you love Big Brother...but get you to give up information. Information that we might not know that you know. (Heck sometimes people mention small details they don't even know are useful...and yes there's a Harry Potter example as well in there...sometimes even prisoners don't know what their interogators would find useful.)

It's just...I don't know how to take it that my country tortures people and does it so incompetantly. I'm sure some people at the CIA do know the difference between "confession" and "information" but do the top deputies? Do the people who control the process know such differences?

[NewsCat]

Oh yeah, so my Harry Potter example of useful information that often times is overlooked...

So when Kretcher the house-elf betrays Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix he does it not by giving away their location (he can't). But by giving up small bits of information that his owner didn't think was important enough to block him from telling...ie who Harry loved best.

Yeah it's a Harry Potter example but still...the lesson is that information...ie intelligence is often found in little scraps that people don't even realize are important. But you won't get that kind of info if you are pushing people's heads underwater.

[Fred]

Seconding the Solzhenitsyn quote above, there's this from Gaiman and/or Pratchett:

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of human history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."

[Evan]

Why not fight Voldy in book 7, then finish school and go do whatever it is they really want to do?

This is off-topic, of course, but... according to Rowling in a web-chat she did a few weeks ago, that's basically what happens. They all finish school; one of the characters does become an auror, and works to catch the last remaining death eater hold-outs and to purge the ministry of muggle-haters and other baddies. The others all end up doing totally different things with their lives. (I won't say who or what, lest it spoil the ending of book 7 for anyone.)

[the opoponax]

I was under the impression, from similar interviews, that both Harry and Ron became aurors.

Hence the above comment.

[Jesurgislac]

By the end of Book 7 I didn't care what happened to Harry or Ron. (The epilogue was the biggest let-down since ST V.) What I wanted to know was, what happened to the house elves? And the goblins? Is Hogwarts still humans-only? Has Kreacher told Harry Potter where to stuff his sandwiches?

[Evan]

Here's that webchat I mentioned: http://the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/7/30/j-k-rowling-web-chat-transcript

It's not totally clear what happens to the elves and the goblins, but she implies things do get better for them.