Raw Story:The US military agency which runs the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program -- from which the enhanced interrogation techniques used on detainees were derived -- warned as early as July 2002 that those techniques constituted "torture" and would produce "unreliable information."
The SERE program was designed to teach US service personnel how to resist various forms of physical abuse designed to elicit false confessions in case of capture, but it was never intended to be a reliable model for effective interrogation.
[...]
[T]he Washington Post has obtained a document which makes it clear that the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency which runs the SERE program was fully aware of the potential problems in using SERE as a model for detainee interrogation procedures even as those procedures were being put into place in 2002.
Not only does the document call torture torture, but it warns against using the methods, arguing that "a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners... could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured US personnel."
A point made again and again and again and completely ignored by the flag-waving, "support the troops!" morons who think torture's just the best idea since wool socks. If we torture and say it's not, then they can torture and do the same. What happens when an enemy waterboards some poor Lance Corporal? Is it torture then? Or have we gone so far down this propaganda rabbit hole that we'll allow people to torture us, just avoid calling what we've been doing torture?
