Gives a whole new meaning to the word "slap happy"

This isn't actually news, but the report on the treatment of "enemy detainees" has been released and it's stunning. They literally took SERE instructors and "reverse engineered" their tactics into methods for torturing people.

Here's the report

From page xx:

"(U) On December 30, 2002, two instructors from the Navy SERE school arrived at GTMO. The next day, in a session with approximately 24 interrogation personnel, the two SERE instructors demonstrated how to administer stress positions, and various slapping techniques. According to two interrogators, those who attended the training even broke off into pairs to practice the techniques." (emphasis added)"

I went through Survival School in the early 1990s when I was reassigned into an airborne position. Survival School is fun: You spend some quality time in Eastern Washington State, hiking around the woods, learning how to survive and get rescued by search & rescue choppers and then the SERE trainers "capture" you and send you to a fake POW camp. At the camp, you are hooded, buried alive, denied sleep, put in stress positions and interrogated. At the end, they raise the American flag and everyone has a beer. Very touching.

As the report makes clear, the units that train airborne military personnel are NOT interrogators. They aren't actually getting any information from the trainees. They are playing a role designed to give airmen experience with what might happen to them if they get shot down and captured by an enemy.

For example, there were pilots in the first Gulf War who got shot down and captured by the Iraqi army. They were tortured routinely as part of their interrogations. One told us about his experience getting his teeth wired to a car battery in a contraption that he called the "Sony Talkman". The Iraqis demanded to know how USAF bombs were being guided to their targets. His method of resistance was to provide false but credible information. He told them that the US military had satellites with lasers so powerful that they could illuminate a target from space that the laser-guided bombs could seek out. The truth was that special forces teams had to infiltrate the territory and illuminate the target from several hundred yards away.

So let me get this straight. We found some guys in the military who are paid to torture, demean and otherwise fuck up military personnel in order to prepare them for a hellish POW experience. We flew them down to Gitmo and trained military policemen in these methods so that they could be used on Gitmo prisoners. These methods that were DESIGNED to be illegal and violations of the Geneva Convention?