Quotes from the torture report

Malcolm Nance, Navy SERE 1997 - 2001
Malcolm Nance is a former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape
school, who has himself been waterboarded as part of the training.
A long-time intelligence specialist who speaks five languages, including Arabic, Nance has been deployed on counterterrorism operations in the Balkans, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.
I have no idea who the idiot is that took the entire history of the brutality and inhumanity and -- of all of the American captives in the history of this nation and would flip that on its head and take the techniques from the torturers and murders who had held our service people and civilians and hostages in captivity, and could somehow take that template which we called SERE school resistance training, and say, hey, this would be a great template for Guantanamo Bay.

Whoever did it, did it consciously, knowing that they were choosing totalitarian tactics, which we were defending against, and applied them as an American technique to handle detainees. Now, was it pain, was it revenge, was it just mindless attempt to get deeper into the war? I don't know. But all I know is that it will hurt us for decades to come. Decades. Our people will all be subjected to these tactics, because we have authorized them for the world now. How it got to Guantanamo is a crime and somebody needs to figure out who did it, how they did it, who authorized them to do it, and shut it down because our servicemen will suffer for years.

I was watching al-Jazeera, and I was listening to the Arabic, and it was a captive who had been released from Guantanamo Bay. And he got up on television, and he started showing a stress position against a wall. And I said, hey. That's a stress position. You know. Stress positions are what we do at SERE, you know, in an effort to show how pain can be inflicted upon a person with no marks. And this guy was saying, I was held up for hours and hours. And I thought hours? Hours? In that position? I said I couldn't go five minutes. Most of our students can't go a minute. But they were forced up and they were held up. And I thought, oh, my God.

I e-mailed a buddy of mine. I said, "Hey, I just saw something on al-Jazeera. Why is this guy describing SERE tactics?" And he goes, "I don't want to be the one to tell you, but they came and they got our manuals," you know. JPRA, Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, asked for all of our manuals to be sent to them. Each of the SERE schools. Our manuals on how we carry out our "simulated totalitarian evil nation, which has a complete disregard for human rights and Geneva Convention."
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People who are, you know, pro waterboarding. Let's be frank here. If you believe in this, and you think it's a technique we need to have on the book, you're pro torture. Period. There is no black -- there is no grey area here. You are either for torture, all right, which means that you are against what it is that this country stands for, for the last 200 years. Or you are anti torture, and it means that you are standing up for the honor of this nation. That's the only way that I'll describe this discussion.
Someone needs to go to jail. That's all there is to it. This is disgusting. Thousands of service members, thousands, went through that process and were tortured around the world. People died to -- so that we could have those techniques brought out and shown our service member how to resist it. It's disgusting. How could they dare take this? How could they so -- how could they dishonor us like that? Every ex-captive in this nation should be standing up against this. They literally went and took the techniques of the North Vietnamese and said we could use it to break them? I didn't know that, by the way. I'm pretty pissed. I mean this is ridiculous.