July 1-2, 2002: SERE Instructors Conduct Two-Day Training Seminar on Waterboarding for CIA Interrogators

Officials from the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) conduct a two-day seminar with select CIA interrogators and other agents on the methodologies of waterboarding. The JPRA officials are instructors in the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Evasion) program, which teaches US soldiers how to resist torture. SERE instructors are not trained interrogators, and the SERE techniques, originally based on Chinese Communist methods used to force false confessions from American prisoners during the Korean War (see Mid-April 2002 and July 2002), have never been shown to produce reliable information from their victims. [Agence France-Presse, 4/22/2009]