M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks, professors of law and bioethics, write in today’s New York Times that U.S. interrogators have adopted methods once used in Communist countries to obtain “confessions.”

The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession.

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE’s teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went “up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques” for “high-profile, high-value” detainees. General Hill had sent this list – which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees’ phobias – to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

This is rich–when people in the Pentagon warned that the tactics constituted torture, Rummy’s advisers justified them by saying they were taken from the SERE program.

Bloche and Marks continue,

When internal F.B.I. e-mail messages critical of these methods were made public earlier this year, references to SERE were redacted. But we’ve obtained a less-redacted version of an e-mail exchange among F.B.I. officials, who refer to the methods as “SERE techniques.” We also learned from a Pentagon official that the SERE program’s chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the “behavioral science consultants” who helped to devise Guantánamo’s interrogation strategy (we’ve been unable to learn the content of that guidance).

The SERE program attempted, in a controlled environment, to recreate the brutal conditions suffered by American prisoners in Korea and Vietnam. The point of this, originally, was to find strategies to help prisoners cope. But SERE-trained mental health professionals applied the techniques for real at Guantánamo. There, it was not so well controlled. For example, one Iraqi major general died from asphyxiation while being “interrogated.”

Please note:

Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America’s image. That’s because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner’s will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

Time and time again, righties defend torture in the assumption that it is needed to obtain life-saving information. Yesterday I quoted this from an Opinion Journal editorial–“And we know for a fact that information wrung from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others has helped prevent further attacks on U.S. soil.” The editorial writer presented this “fact” without documentation, as if it were self-evident. But the White House’s own list of terrorist attacks foiled since 9/11 present only three planned attacks on U.S. soil, and we have absolutely no way to know how those plans were discovered and stopped. The intelligence could have been gained through wiretaps, for all we know. (And of course we’re assuming the White House list is honest, which is unlikely with this White House.)

Next time you encounter a rightie who insists valuable information is being gained from torture, challenge him to prove it. He can’t.

Bloche and Marks continue,

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model’s embrace by the Pentagon’s civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 – when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying – this policy had visceral appeal. But it’s the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.

Clearly, the righties who so frantically defend torture are caught up in that visceral appeal. They see themselves as pragmatic and tough, but in fact they are just the opposite. Theirs is a purely emotional reaction born of fear and hysteria.

For a detailed account of how the torture techniques migrated from Guantánamo to Iraq and Afghanistan, see “The Torture Question,” PBS Frontline, which you can watch online here.

Update: Remember when Bush said “We do not turture?” Well, that statement has been clarified.

In an important clarification of President George W. Bush’s earlier statement, a top White House official refused to unequivocally rule out the use of torture, arguing the US administration was duty-bound to protect Americans from terrorist attack. …

During a trip to Panama earlier this month, Bush said that Americans “do not torture.”

However, appearing on CNN’s “Late Edition” program, Hadley elaborated on the policy, making clear the White House could envisage circumstances, in which the broad pledge not to torture might not apply.

Like, maybe, on Tuesdays?

… “The president has said that we are going to do whatever we do in accordance with the law,” the national security adviser said. “But… you see the dilemma. What happens if on September 7th of 2001, we had gotten one of the hijackers and based on information associated with that arrest, believed that within four days, there’s going to be a devastating attack on the United States?”

He already had information that there was going to be a devastting attack on the United States, and he ignored it.

Republican Senator Kit Bond, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Newsweek magazine that “enhanced interrogation techniques” had worked with at least one captured high-level Al-Qaeda operative, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to thwart an unspecified plot.

I discussed this yesterday. But the White House reckoning of what constitutes a “plot” is a tad ephemeral. Note item 3 on the official White House list— The Jose Padilla Plot, in which American citizen and petty criminal Padilla may have had intentions to build and detonate a bomb. Some plot. Padilla has been kept prisoner since June 2002 even though no charges have been brought against him, a bare-assed violation of the Fifth Amendment. The point is that we have no way of knowing if the White House’s “plots” were for real, or are just smoke.