Turning murderers into victims

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (-/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Debra Burlingame’s brother was the captain of the plane hijacked on 9-11 which crashed into the Pentagon. She wrote three years ago in the New York Daily News about the so-called torture of the murderers who killed her brother and so many others.

Tortured? What does that actually mean?

In the Washington bubble, the debate on the so-called torture report has come and gone with disturbingly familiar speed. It was the big story for one week, and then seems forgotten.
Not for those who live daily, hourly, moment-by-moment with the emotional scars of having lost loved ones on 9/11.

The Senate Intelligence Committee members who prepared this report — which essentially labels as criminals those who scrambled to defend us in the immediate wake of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil in our history — have done the unimaginable. They have turned our loved ones’ murderers into victims.

…Once the legal memos were published, we learned that enhanced interrogation methods were drawn from the SERE program; Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Our brother called it “POW school.” As a Navy fighter pilot, he was one of the tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel put through SERE since the end of the Vietnam War.

The purpose was to teach pilots, special-force operators and intelligence personnel — those most likely to be captured behind enemy lines — how to mentally prepare for the ordeal. As Chic explained it, the military believed that the command to provide only “name, rank and serial number” was insufficient.

The aim was to expose SERE participants to terrifying conditions to increase their ability to cope in captivity, to give them the means to survive.

Chic was among the tens of thousands of pilots who had attended SERE and had been waterboarded. He didn’t call it that. He called it “the water treatment,” and would only say that it was “very effective.” SERE was a brutal experience, approved by Congress, which members of our own military submitted to in preparation to serve their country. But applied to Al Qaeda terrorists, Sen. Feinstein now says it amounts to “torture.”

Read more here.