Two Senate Reports on Torture: Why the Armed Services Committee Findings Matter More
In December 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its long-anticipated report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. The document generated enormous media attention and public debate. However, a separate investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, completed years earlier, contained what many analysts consider the more consequential revelation about the true purpose behind the U.S. government’s adoption of torture techniques.
The Armed Services Committee report, released in 2009 under the leadership of Senator Carl Levin, traced the origins of the interrogation methods used on detainees to a surprising source: the SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape), which was originally designed to train American military personnel to resist coercive interrogation by foreign adversaries. The techniques in the SERE curriculum were themselves modeled on methods used by Chinese Communists during the Korean War, methods whose documented purpose was not to extract truthful intelligence but to produce false confessions for propaganda.
The Demand for an Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection
According to reporting by McClatchy and corroborated by multiple former officials, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld applied sustained pressure on intelligence personnel to find evidence of operational ties between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This pressure intensified throughout 2002 and into 2003, despite repeated assessments from the CIA and other intelligence agencies that no credible evidence of such ties existed.
Army Major Charles Burney, a psychiatrist stationed at Guantanamo Bay, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators were under significant pressure to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. When conventional interrogation methods failed to produce the desired connections, pressure mounted to employ harsher techniques that might yield “more immediate results.”
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, wrote in 2009 that the administration’s principal priority for intelligence was not focused on preventing another terrorist attack on American soil but rather on discovering evidence that would link Iraq to al-Qaeda.
SERE Reverse-Engineering: Exploitation, Not Intelligence
Retired Air Force Captain Michael Kearns, a senior SERE instructor and decorated veteran who held positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense, provided critical context about what was actually reverse-engineered from the SERE program. According to Kearns, the program notes of psychologist Bruce Jessen, one of the architects of the interrogation program, focused not on interrogation techniques but on the broader concept of prisoner exploitation.
This distinction carries significant implications. As Kearns explained, reverse-engineering a resistance-to-exploitation course does not produce an interrogation program but rather a plan for the full exploitation of prisoners, encompassing intelligence extraction, propaganda generation, and the recruitment of informants. Air Force Colonel Steven Kleinman, recognized as one of the Department of Defense’s most effective interrogators, described the SERE-derived approach as a “guidebook to getting false confessions” drawn specifically from a communist interrogation model designed to generate propaganda rather than reliable intelligence.
The Case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi
The story of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi illustrates how the torture program functioned in practice. Al-Libi, a Libyan national who ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan during the late 1990s, was captured in Pakistan in November 2001. The CIA successfully asserted jurisdiction over his interrogation, overriding the FBI’s objections.
Through a combination of physical abuse and threats of rendition to Egyptian intelligence services, interrogators extracted claims from al-Libi that Iraq had provided chemical and biological weapons training to al-Qaeda operatives. The Defense Intelligence Agency expressed skepticism, noting that al-Libi lacked specific details and was likely fabricating stories to maintain his interrogators’ interest.
Despite these warnings, al-Libi’s claims were incorporated into high-profile government statements. President Bush cited them in an October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, days before Congress voted on the Iraq War resolution, declaring that the United States had learned Iraq had trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and the use of poisons and deadly gases. Secretary Powell relied on the same claims during his February 2003 address to the United Nations Security Council.
Al-Libi later recanted his statements entirely. According to a declassified CIA cable from early 2004, al-Libi told debriefers that Egyptian interrogators had confined him in a small box for approximately 17 hours and subjected him to physical beatings when his answers about al-Qaeda’s connections to Iraq proved unsatisfying. He said he fabricated his claims because he “knew nothing” about any such connections and had difficulty “even coming up with a story.” The CIA subsequently recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements, though by that point the invasion of Iraq was well underway.
Al-Libi was eventually transferred to a prison in Libya, where he reportedly died shortly after being located by a human rights organization. His full account of the torture he experienced and the false confessions he provided was never publicly recorded.
A Pattern of False Confessions
Al-Libi’s case was not isolated. Multiple detainees subjected to the program later stated that they provided fabricated information to stop the abuse:
A humanitarian aid worker reported that torture ceased only after he falsely claimed membership in al-Qaeda. Abu Zubaydah, initially described by the Bush administration as a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader, made claims under interrogation about al-Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein and a plot to attack Washington with a radiological weapon. Both claims were later acknowledged to be false, and the CIA itself eventually admitted Zubaydah was never a member of al-Qaeda. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the September 11 attacks who was waterboarded 183 times, stated that during his interrogation he “gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear.”
The 9/11 Commission Report itself relied substantially on third-hand accounts of statements made by tortured detainees. According to NBC News, at least four individuals whose interrogation informed the Commission’s findings claimed they had provided false information to end their mistreatment. The Commission internally doubted the accuracy of the torture-derived confessions but did not publicly disclose those reservations.
Pre-9/11 Planning and the Push for War
The evidence that senior officials sought to connect Iraq to the September 11 attacks extends beyond the torture program itself. Within five hours of the 9/11 attacks, Secretary Rumsfeld reportedly expressed interest in striking Saddam Hussein, stating “Go massive… Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” Internal memoranda from that same afternoon discussed whether the case against Hussein was strong enough to justify military action.
Ten days after the attacks, President Bush received a classified briefing confirming that the intelligence community had no evidence linking Iraq to 9/11 and only minimal credible evidence of collaborative ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. A Defense Intelligence Agency terrorism summary from February 2002 reached similar conclusions.
Despite this intelligence, administration officials continued to assert connections between Iraq and the September 11 attacks. Bush’s March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force explicitly referenced “nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001” as justification for military action against Iraq.
The Broader Pattern
Former CIA Director George Tenet later acknowledged that the White House had wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11 and had inserted what he called “crap” into its justifications. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who served on the National Security Council, confirmed that Iraq war planning preceded the September 11 attacks. Senior British officials corroborated that discussions about regime change in Iraq began before Bush took office.
Journalist Ron Suskind reported that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq to Muslim terrorists and the 9/11 attacks, and that the agency complied. Suskind also revealed that the administration possessed intelligence from a senior Iraqi official confirming that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, information received in time to halt the invasion.
The torture program, viewed in this broader context, was not primarily an intelligence-gathering operation that went too far. It was a component of a larger effort to manufacture justification for a predetermined military objective. The SERE-derived techniques were adopted not despite their tendency to produce false confessions but precisely because of it. When the goal is not truth but a predetermined narrative, methods designed to elicit false confessions become not a bug but a feature.