April 16, 2002: SERE Psychologist Proposes Torture Program

Pentagon psychologist Bruce Jessen, who serves as the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA)‘s senior psychologist for its SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training program, releases an internal draft report for reverse-engineering SERE training techniques to be used against enemy detainees. SERE training teaches soldiers to resist torture inflicted on them by enemy captors. Jessen’s report, a follow-up to a previous report authored by him and fellow military psychologist James Mitchell (see January 2002 and After), calls for the creation of a secret “exploitation facility” that would be off-limits to oversight bodies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and would be kept clear of reporters. Jessen’s plan also describes the fundamentals of an “enhanced interrogation” methodology. According to a 2009 press report, it advocated techniques “strikingly similar to those that later surfaced at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere: nudity, stress positions, hoods, treatment like animals, sleep disruption, loud music and flashing lights, and exposure to extreme temperatures.” The techniques also include waterboarding, used 266 times against two high-value al-Qaeda detainees (see April 16, 2009 and April 18, 2009). The report notes: “Typically, those who play the part of interrogators in SERE school neither are trained interrogators nor are they qualified to be. Their job is to train our personnel to resist providing reliable information to our enemies.” However, senior JPRA and Pentagon officials will ignore Jessen’s caveats and authorize the application of SERE methods to the interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees (see April - June 2002). Three months later, JPRA will begin training CIA agents in SERE-derived techniques (see July 2002), including a two-day session on waterboarding (see July 1-2, 2002). Shortly after the training sessions, Pentagon general counsel William Haynes will ask JPRA for more information on SERE techniques. Haynes’s deputy, Richard Shiffrin, will later confirm “that a purpose of the request was to ‘reverse engineer’ the techniques.” [Agence France-Presse, 4/22/2009] In 2009, the press learns that Mitchell and Jessen are paid $1,000 a day to train military interrogators (see April 30, 2009).