The military call it Gitmo, the journalists Guantanamo, the world – a human rights disaster where the individual ceased to exist. The Geneva Conventions were summarily tossed aside. This is a war where rules and conventions no longer apply said Albert Gonzalez in his Memorandum to President Bush in 2002.
And for the next seven years, the infrastructure to support such a war were erected. Wire cages, secret detention centers around the world and a president who “overrides treaties, conventions and laws in time of war.”
Beyond the reach of Obama's executive order to close Guantanamo is America's own convoluted indoctrination methods of fear. I’m talking about the US military's secretive torture school, the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape).
“SERE is a repository of the world's knowledge about torture, the military equivalent, in a sense, of the lethal specimens of obsolete plagues kept in the deep-freeze laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control,” writes Jane Mayer in her book The Dark Side.
For the past forty years, Congress has been financing this school with the aim of teaching those caught by the enemy to resist torture and interrogation. Michael Nance, a former SERE instructor, said in his Congressional testimony in 2007 that outlawed torture techniques like water boarding are still taught. And in a 2005 sworn testimony by a former chief of the Interrogation Control Element at Guantanamo revealed that SERE instructors taught their techniques to Guantanamo interrogators.
However, enemy combatants do not employ the torture techniques taught by SERE on US soldiers writes David J. Morris, a SERE graduate. Instead, the school indoctrinates a profound fear of the other. In 2007, 44% of enlisted Marines condoned torture.
Morris writes about his own experiences at the school in Slate and condemns its instruction.
“When I forgot my prisoner number, I was strapped to a gurney and made to watch as a fellow prisoner was water-boarded a foot away from me. I will never forget the sound of that young sailor choking, seemingly near death, paying for my mistake.”
Morris goes onto dismiss SERE's techniques as archaic and systemic of America's underlying fears. Michael Durant, the helicopter pilot shot down in Mogadishu in 1993 survived his 11-day captivity by manipulating and befriending his captors, not by employing SERE techniques says Morris.
Obama's executive order on January 22 needs to go beyond Guantanamo. Serious issues need to be addressed over torture and the infrastructures that support it – infrastructures that are far reaching and wide.
