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Colonel: SERE tactics used on Iraqi detainees

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.

And on at least one occasion in 2003, they used their skills on an Iraqi detainee, according to testimony at a Thursday 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 Conventions. They use the methods to train American personnel how to resist them, not to collect intelligence.

The methods include water-boarding, slaps to the face and belly, isolation, stripping and immersion, Kleinman said.

“When presented with the choice of getting smarter or getting tougher, we chose the latter,” Kleinman said. “Why did the special operations community find it necessary — and appropriate — to request interrogation support from an organization whose mission was, and is, to teach resistance to interrogation?”

JPRA’s involvement came to a head in September 2003, when Kleinman led a three-man team to Iraq, under orders from Joint Forces Command, to advise a special operations task force that was having trouble getting information out of detainees. The other two members of the team were retired Air Force master sergeants, SERE specialists working at Fairchild, one as a civilian employee and the other as a contractor.

While observing interrogations in Iraq, Kleinman said, he saw “a number of abuses,” including physical abuse and stripping detainees naked.

The scene Kleinman described to the committee is like something out of a spy thriller or an episode of “24.”

The first time he saw significant abuses, Kleinman said, he and the other two team members walked into an interrogation room painted black. A spotlight was shining on the detainee, who was kneeling. One of the interrogators was holding a metal bar, he said, though the man did not hit the detainee with it.

The interrogators asked the detainee questions and slapped him hard in the face after every answer. They had been doing this for about 30 minutes, Kleinman testified.

As the ranking service member in the room, Kleinman stopped the interrogation.

In the following days, Kleinman said his two team members began pushing to get more involved in the interrogations and made recommendations on how to use SERE techniques against the detainees.

Concerned that the interrogation methods were illegal, Kleinman said he called his boss, JPRA commander Air Force Col. John Moulton, now retired, to object.

Moulton said he would check with legal advisers and Joint Forces Command superiors. Kleinman and Moulton spoke again 24 hours later, and Moulton told him, “We are cleared hot to use SERE methods,” Kleinman testified.

After that conversation, he said, he told the other two members of the team that he had a difference of opinion with his superiors and would not use SERE methods against detainees.

But Kleinman, an experienced interrogator, said he decided to demonstrate how to properly and legally interrogate someone.

A detainee was carried, struggling, into a damp 6-by-6 cell in an underground concrete bunker. After the man was carried in, the two other team members — the Air Force SERE experts — took over the interrogation, but they went overboard, he said.

The men ripped off the detainee’s heavy, long robe — called a dishdasha — and his underwear. He was hooded and shackled at his hands and feet. They screamed directly into his ears and ordered that he be forced to stand for 12 hours before they would begin questioning him.

“I told them this is illegal,” Kleinman said. “I ended up putting a stop to it.”

Kleinman also testified that using SERE methods for interrogations is inappropriate because the communist techniques they are based on were designed to generate propaganda, not intelligence.