Testimony: SERE experts advised interrogators

[unhappycamper]

Testimony: SERE experts advised interrogators
By Erik Holmes - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Sep 26, 2008 8:06:50 EDT

Air Force survival, evasion, resistance and escape, or SERE, experts from Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash., advised special operations interrogators in Iraq on how to use harsh — and some would argue illegal — interrogation methods against detainees. On at least one occasion in 2003, they used their skills on an Iraqi detainee, according to testimony at a Sept. 25 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The interrogation of detainees extends far beyond SERE experts’ mission — teaching airmen and other military members to resist harsh interrogation techniques, according to testimony by Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force intelligence officer and interrogator.

“Survival instructors are not interrogators,” he said. “The legal, operational and even moral concerns about the employment of SERE methods went largely unrecognized.”

As far back as December 2001, the Defense Department turned to the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which oversees the military’s SERE training, for advice on how to interrogate detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq, said committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

Many in the JPRA were uncomfortable with this role, according to recently declassified documents released by Levin, because JPRA and SERE experts use interrogation techniques developed by communist China during the Korean War that are illegal under the Geneva Convention. They use the methods to train American personnel how to resist them, not to collect intelligence.

Rest of article at: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/09/airforce_sere_092508w/%2e