Reverse-Engineering Torture

By Patrick Appel
Publius writes:

...the Levin-run Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse is now out (pdf exec summary). And it deserves some press attention. It confirms that senior administration officials authorized torture. Specifically, they authorized the "SERE" techniques -- which had been originally used decades ago to train American troops to withstand Communist torture -- to be used on detainees. In other words, they used illegal medieval methods designed to obtain false confessions, and made them the centerpiece of our intelligence-gathering. In this respect, Abu Ghraib was the sick poisoned fruit of a very rotten tree.