SERE is a classified program, but every person informed of it is 'read in' to the details of the program. Even the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which administers SERE, starts its PowerPoint presentation with a slide outlining the agency's origins.

To help students steel themselves for captivity, SERE used a variety of 'stress and duress' techniques. The military's encyclopedic knowledge of these techniques was paid for in American blood because it was gleaned from former POWs tortured by totalitarian regimes. One technique, waterboarding, was a historically well-known torture.

I saw the waterboarding device in Cambodia's notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh and did not see another until I was strapped down on an identical one at SERE. Waterboarding was administered as a 'stress demonstrator' to show that an enemy could make one say anything. And one does.

Malcolm Nance Quotes