Ex-Navy Instructor Promises to Hit Back If Attacked on Torture
Jack Linthicum
strongly with the opinions of professional interrogators like Colonel
Stewart Herrington, and victims of torture like Senator John McCain.
If you want consistent, accurate and reliable intelligence, be
inquisitive, analytical, patient but most of all professional, amiable
and compassionate.
Ex-Navy Instructor Promises to Hit Back If Attacked on Torture
By Spencer Ackerman - November 7, 2007, 2:11PM
Malcolm Nance, good-spirited though he is, is a pugnacious guy. Nearly
20 years' service in the Navy, including time instructing would-be
Navy SEALs how to resist and survive torture if captured. Intelligence
and counterterrorism expert. Several years in Iraq as a security
contractor. So don't expect him to suffer in silence if his
credibility is attacked during testimony to a House panel tomorrow
about his personal experiences with waterboarding.
"God forbid if there's even the slightest hint about my credentials,"
Nance says over tea in a Washington coffee shop. "You will see a
spectacle on C-Span. I'll impugn [my attacker's] credibility in
public. Let's see him give 20 years in the military, give up his
family life, and then he can come talk. If not, shut the hell up."
Nance has become newly controversial for writing on the
counterinsurgency/counterterrorism blog Small Wars Journal about his
experiences teaching waterboarding for the Navy's Survival, Evasion,
Resistance, Escape (SERE) program.* He's been subjected to the
procedure personally, and unequivocally called it torture in a much-
discussed post. Subsequently, a House Judiciary subcommittee contacted
him during a business trip in the Middle East and asked him to testify
at a hearing on so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques that
kicks off tomorrow morning.
Since he wrote the post, however, a number of comments have appeared
on conservative blogs questioning Nance's military service record.
(Small Wars Journal had to delete a number of particularly ad hominem
comments.) Nance doesn't want to dignify the attacks -- "it's vet-
versus-vet warfare," he laments. But he says he heard from a staffer
for the Democratic majority on the committee that a Republican aide
has been "questioning my credentials" to members in preparation for
the hearing. In response, Nance sent the committee "17 years' worth of
evaluations" from the Navy and told staffers how to find more material
if needed. Emphatic about not getting swiftboated, he warns would-be
assailants, "I'll chew your ass out."
Assuming that Nance gets through the hearing without having his
integrity dragged through the mud, subcommittee members will get an
earful about the unacceptability of reverse-engineering SERE torture-
resistance techniques in order to design torture regimens to use on
detainees in the war on terrorism.
"Our body of experience shows a friendly approach is most successful"
in interrogation, Nance says. SERE's historical memory goes back to
the French and Indian Wars in understanding torture methods that
captured U.S. troops might face and devising strategies to resist
them. He relates the story of Hans Joachim Scharff, a master Luftwaffe
interrogator who spurned abusive techniques used by the Gestapo (also,
interestingly, termed "enhanced interrogation") in favor of rapport-
building. Scharff's legendary success is still studied by U.S.
interrogators. Unfortunately, he says, "after Guantanamo, I thought,
how can anyone at SERE ever teach the Geneva Conventions again?"
A trove of accumulated institutional familiarity with torture led to a
slide that Nance shares, from an old (and unclassified) SERE
PowerPoint presentation to trainees. It asks outright, "Why Is Torture
The Worst Interrogation Method?" The first answer: "Produces
Unreliable Information."
Nance remarks, "Two centuries of knowledge were thrown out the window"
when the administration decided after 9/11 that, to use Cofer Black's
famous phrase, "the gloves come off." What administration officials
mistakenly thought, Nance says, is that "these were actually gloves,
not empirical data. Dude, it's not a glove. It's a fact. But they
thought it was one more tool in the tool box."
The result, Nance says, is that al-Qaeda now has, essentially, its own
SERE school in U.S. detention facilities, as released detainees have
given numerous accounts of their interrogations. What's more, he warns
that the world is about to see an uptick in the use of torture as
"cops in Bogota, everyone" now believes that the U.S. has lent torture
its imprimatur -- or, at least, isn't in a credible position to
criticize foreign countries' human rights abuses. He says he's
testifying in part to help his old comrades in SERE, which he sees as
a vital tool for training U.S. troops. "SERE needs to be increased,"
Nance insists, "but what needs to be stopped is the transfer of SERE
techniques to official interrogations."
* http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/
Weatherlawyer
Jack Linthicum wrote:
>
> Ex-Navy Instructor Promises to Hit Back If Attacked on Torture
> By Spencer Ackerman - November 7, 2007, 2:11PM
>
> counterinsurgency/counterterrorism blog Small Wars Journal about his
> experiences teaching waterboarding for the Navy's Survival, Evasion,
> Resistance, Escape (SERE) program.* He's been subjected to the
> procedure personally, and unequivocally called it torture
>
> him during a business trip in the Middle East and asked him to testify
> at a hearing on so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques that
> kicks off tomorrow morning.
>
> Since he wrote the post, however, a number of comments have appeared
> on conservative blogs questioning Nance's military service record
>
Keep up the good work Mr Linthicum. Not many of your contemporaries
have the decency to tell the truth about the USA and water torture as
it used to be known in the days before Spencer Hines and Swiftboatmen.
I can remember clearly the overnight bloodlust that was endemic on all
boards American when the terrorists struck at the heart of New York.
Suddenly all the problems in that city were forgotten and all New
Yorkers were overnight heroes. Rudy Giuliani was hero number one and
Bush was up there too, grandstanding alongside him. And The USA went
nuts for the monkeys.
Of course the lackey Hines was posting shit for the greedy oil pirate
long before the terrorist attack. He is a shill for the election of
chimps but the picture is all one. I remember too that they were crass
inductors for the chimpanzee just before the election when they hit on
spamming newsgroups and any place that decent people -mostly USAns
gathered online.
And they were tolerated because Nettiquette demanded decent people do
nothing.
Glad to see some counter insurgency against the chimp and the things
that have really irked the rest of the world in the days before
euphemisms allowed kidnap and torture. (Not that the dirty trick dept.
of the USA and many other major powers no doubt weren't already up to
their knees in it.)