| Some background on the SAS first.
The selection process for SAS included (assuming it hasn't changed) three phases: Endurance, jungle and finally the Combat Survival course, the British equivalent of SERE. In the first phase, one is required to carry tremendous weight while navigating and marching in backcountry Britain through any kind of weather on a very tight timeline. In non-special forces context, a 13 KM (8 mile) march with rucksack is usually considered fairly gruelling (it is the Canadian Forces standard "battle fitness test"). Infantry soldiers pride themselves on doing much more, but the distances done in the SAS selection are frankly ludicrous even for them. Several 20K marches in a single day, and this goes on for weeks.
After that is the jungle phase, where the candidates are shipped off to a rain forest, where they learn to live and survive the crawlies while maintaining a high degree of tactical readiness in the extreme conditions. They also begin the real training of doing the SAS' job, small unit combat drills, explosives, advanced navigation, etc. I explain this because it is clear both of these phases are extremely tough, and only a certain kind of soldier is going to have the fortitude to make it through. In both books, the authors note that the first two phases are considered the real test for getting into the SAS, with Combat Survival as mere coasting to the finish line.
The first excerpt, from Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero:
[...] The last main test is the Combat Survival course. you are taught survival skills for two weeks, and then sent to see the doctor. He puts a finger up your arse to check for Mars bars, and you're turned loose on the Black Mountains dressed in Second World War battledress trousers and shirt, a greatcoat with no buttons, and boots with no laces. The hunter force was a company of guardsmen in helicopters. Each man was given the incentive of two weeks' leave if he made a capture.
[...] For the next phase I was on my own, which suited me fine. Our movement between RVs was arranged in such a way that everybody was captured at the end of the E&E (escape and evasion) phase and subjected to tactical questioning. You are taught to be--and you always try to be--the gray man. The last thing you want is to be singled out as worthy of further questioning. I didn't find this stage particularly hard because despite the verbal threats nobody was actually filling you in, and you knew that nobody was going to. You're cold and wet and hungry, uncomfortable as hell, but it's just a matter of holding on, physically rather than mentally. I couldn't believe that some people threw in their hand during these last few hours.
In the end a bloke came in during one of the interrogations, gave me a cup of soup, and announced that it was over. There was a thorough debriefing, because the interrogators can learn from you as well as you from them. The mind does get affected; I was surprised to find that I was six hours out in my estimation of the time. (pp19-20)
McNab evidently sailed through the UK SERE. Yet his anecdote endorses the problem of Bybee or CIA relying on this sort of interrogation for the legality of what they were planning to do (and had already done) to Zubaydah. McNab is clearly a tougher nut than most, (as later chapters in the book outline his experience at the hands of Saddam's Iraq after being captured during the first Gulf War) but it clearly helped him to know that the whole thing was just an exercise.
Even so, some people do break, though it's not clear in McNab's rendition if they were his fellow SAS trainees, or others taking the program (the British mixed the SAS in with pilots and other sorts who need to take the course).
Finally we see that even for someone as blasé as McNab, a short bout of interrogations had affected his mind.
The next version is rather longer, and comes from Mike Curtis' Close Quarter Battle. Curtis, it turns out would be part of McNab's ill fated Bravo Two Zero patrol behind enemy lines in Iraq, and was the sole member of the patrol to escape capture. However at this point in his career he doesn't know McNab (actually, I've read somewhere he hates McNab).
At the last checkpoint we were briefed by Don Wilson, the sergeant major, and immediately the blindfolds were replaced on our heads. I knew what was happening; we'd reached the final test - the interrogation.
It had worried me for days because I knew that I'd never experienced anything that could come close to preparing me for this. Up until then, everything I had done on Selection - the hills, jungle, navigation, contact drills and weapons training - had been familiar to me because I'd been trained as an infantry soldier. Now I would be tested on my reaction to being captured.
I was cold, tired and hungry. [...] Upon arrival, I was bundled into a building where I lay on the freezing floor for what seemed like hours before being hauled away for what I assumed was going to be the initial interrogation.
[...]
Dragged upstairs, I was forced to sit cross-legged on the concrete floor with my hands on my head and my head pulled back so that I looked up at the ceiling, still blindfolded. I could hear the moans of the others around me [...]
[...]
As each interrogation session ended, I was dragged to a new room and put into a stress position - either cross-legged as before, or standing with my hands high against the wall, looking up, with my feet pushed back and legs apart. After about ten minutes I couldn't feel my hands and then my arms gave way and I bashed my head against the wall.
The interrogators wanted to know all about me. One guy in particular stank of Brut aftershave and I always knew when he was close; [...] I'd hear him say ridiculous things like, 'You're going to fucking die.'
After about twelve hours they dragged me outside and threw me into a wagon. Driven to another building, I guessed the interrogations were now going to begin in earnest. I heard the continuous and monotonous din of white noise. They forced me to strip naked with women interrogators in the room and then made me put on a boiler suit and a pair of black plimsolls. The suit and pumps were several sizes too small and my feet were killing me.
I sensed other prisoners in the room. A machine in the room made a continuous droning sound and I felt as if my head was inside a vacuum cleaner. As my mind began playing tricks, I tried to concentrate on other things to take me away from the noise and pain. [...]
My hands were numb and my back in agony as I held myself against the wall.
Suddenly, another guy in the room screamed , 'I've had enough of this, get me out of here.' I didn't know if it was a ploy or the real thing.
[...]
My eyes were stinging and my throat was burning. I needed a brew badly. The Geneva Convention states that prisoners must be fed at least once every twenty-four hours and be allowed to sleep for at least an hour. Blindfolded, I was made to stand and given a piece of bread and a cup of water. Afterwards they let me lie on the concrete floor to rest. Soon I was yanked up into another stress position. The loud drone continued.
I didn't feel hungry or tired; I'd gone past both. Instead I had an overwhelming feeling of despair. I'd now been interrogated for what I guessed was thirty-six hours; I started to think that the other lads had come off hours earlier and there was only me left.
The grilling grew more spiteful. A man and woman screamed abuse into my ears, attacking my Welsh accent, my size, my manhood - anything that might get under my skin. I kept to the 'Big Four' - name, number, rank and date of birth.
When it all began I'd known it was a test. How hard could it be? I'd asked myself - it's not for real? But after a week on the Brecon beacons - cold, dehydrated, exhausted and disorientated - my mind began playing tricks and reality became blurred. No matter how many times I tried to tell myself to switch off completely and not to listen, I was so hyped up that I heard what they were saying about me.
[...]
'You're probably a fucking Taff Guardsman, aren't you?' he spat. 'What about how you Taffs burned on the Galahad, eh? [n.b. a British Navy ship sunk during the Falklands war] Now there's a decent bonfire, for you boyo.'
I flinched.
He knew he was getting to me. [...]
After another hour on the cold concrete I faced a new interrogator - an old guy with a handlebar mustache who stank of tobacco. Straight away he began screaming into my face, almost nose to nose, and I could see his yellowing teeth and smell his putrid breath.
I finally cracked.
'Fuck off!' I yelled, pushing him away, and in that instant I knew that I'd blown it.
[...]
Only ten lads had reached this final stage of Combat Survival and three others were also to fail, each at the hands of the same interrogator who broke me. (pp240-245)
This shows the flip side problem in that SERE training isn't all that safe. In 36 hours, it cracked a battle hardened (Curtis saw extensive combat in the Falklands) SAS recruit who was even conscious of it just being an exercise. It also cracked three other SAS recruits who had survived the two more physically gruelling phases of training. None of this is to condemn SERE training. It is likely a necessary evil and risk that the military puts certain members through such things. Training is inherently dangerous, but the point here is that it isn't a good test of the safety of interrogation tactics when applied to involuntary subjects who don't know the limits of what can be done to them.
I also highlighted the bit about Curtis receiving protections due under the Geneva conventions, including presumably his hour's sleep, which CIA was not offering to its guests. Even so, in 36 hours he went from being merely tired and cold to "feeling despair" and losing his grip on reality. His "cracking" of course is not a deep psychological episode, merely losing his temper and he would go on to retake and pass Selection, so I don't think he suffered any long term harm from this. It still shows that even as a training exercise it has the potential for averse effect.
I realize there is an apparent contradiction here, that I am simultaneously complaining that SERE training isn't like reality and that it is also more harmful than CIA or OLC believed - the contradiction is that human individuals react differently to this sort of stress, so both problems are true of the Bybee memo. SERE training is both too safe to be a good test of CIA's techniques and dangerous enough to be proof the techniques were not safe to use. |
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