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P.H.: It could be argued that the means justify the ends. Aren’t physician members of interrogation teams serving the interests of national security? Haven’t these interrogation tactics allowed the apprehension of criminals or terrorists?
Bloche: Our November 2005 Op-Ed in the New York Times discussed the government’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program (SERE). It is an effort, by our psychologists, to develop interrogation methods based on those employed by our enemies in the Korean and Vietnamese wars. The irony is that the communist interrogators were not looking for the truth. The methods the SERE program looks to mimic were not designed to extract truth, but rather, to generate propaganda. They were seeking confessions. The transcripts of US POWs shows that the interrogators wanted the prisoners to refer to themselves as terrible criminals for propaganda value. The SERE program uses the knowledge of these methods to train Americans to resist interrogation in the event that they were captured.
In 2002, Major General Geoffrey Miller approved the creation of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), designed to improve intelligence gathering. At Guantánamo, the BSCT received input from psychiatrists and psychologists with SERE training when they were fi rst developing interrogation strategies. It’s premature to say that our folks were using North Korean and North Vietnamese interrogation tactics, and we’re not able, at this point, to tie specifi c tactics or interrogation regimens to specifi c doctors. Some of the BSCT doctors did not have SERE training. It’s more a matter of a theory based on the analysis of these methods, and the effort to reverse engineer and implement the theory in the development of the SERE training program.