Community Blogs Login | Register | Search Blogs
Post from PBC Editor's Blog:
Jane Mayer on Torture and Truth
By PBCeditor - Jul 21st, 2008 at 1:07 pm EDT
Comments |  Mail to a Friend
Bad? Brilliant?
You can rate this post.
Register or login now and
tell us what you think.

The Good Fight

We've just put up a three-part video interview with Jane Mayer, the author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. In this part, Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, explains that when the CIA and the US military went in search of knowledge about harsh interrogation techniques, they turned to a small Pentagon program inside the Pentagon the goal of which was to train captive US servicemen, under interrogation by an immoral enemy, to give up misleading information. Little wonder, then, that the harsh interrogation techniques employed by the US against suspected terrorists have yielded so little good (and plenty of bad) intelligence. To view the other two segments, go here and click on the Multimedia tab.


Reader Comments
  
Question about SERE
Reply
By JohnD Jul 22nd 2008 at 11:21 am EDT
What I don't get is why going to the SERE program for torture tips necessarily led to the US employing techniques that produced false testimony. Surely the torture techniques practiced (simulated?) in the SERE program are as close to the real thing as possible, consistent with the goal of training US servicemen to give false information under REAL torture. The important training is of the US servicemen, not the torturers. If we'd been training the suspected terrorists the same techniques I can see why the interrogations would have produced false confessions, but that clearly wasn't the case. Sounds more like torture per se tends to produce bad intel.
  
Buzz
Reply
By matthew Jul 24th 2008 at 1:01 pm EDT
This book is generating a lot of buzz right now, especially in the netroots. It will be interesting to see whether conservatives come up with any kind of intellectual framework to deflect criticism of the outrageous acts and practices showcased in the book.

I guess they have Fox News already.