MADDOW: Can you give us a sense of what the SERE program is and what it‘s for?
KLEINMAN: Yes. The SERE program is a very, very noble program. It‘s run—designed and run by some of the most incredible patriots you‘d ever want to encounter. But it‘s designed for one purpose, and that is to help our personnel, our military personnel who should find themselves in harm‘s way—allow them to return with honor, by preparing them, introducing them to the worst possible scenarios, including what was once known as the communist interrogation model—something that we learned from the Chinese in the Korean War, from the Soviets-backed show trials.
MADDOW: How did you learn that SERE school techniques were being reverse-engineered to be used as interrogation methods by American personnel?
KLEINMAN: My first exposure to that was actually during my deployment to Iraq in 2003. The organization that sent me to Iraq, apparently there was a misconnect between us, but I thought I was going out there as interrogator because I had a lot of experience prior that, that I was representing an organization that did this sort of training, and the idea was that we were going to introduce SERE strategies and methodologies into the repertoire of the interrogators.
MADDOW: Why would SERE methods be used in an interrogation if they were known to have been designed to elicit false confessions?
KLEINMAN: See, that‘s where the misunderstanding lies. At the very senior levels of government—surprisingly—the understandings of the complexities of interrogation is rare. It really is. It‘s probably shaped more by the television, “24,” than practitioners of the art.
There‘s a lot of people who don‘t see—don‘t understand the difference between a model that would train people to resist harsh interrogation and the purpose of that was to compel people to produce propaganda, and intelligence interrogation, which is designed to elicit cooperation intelligence—therefore, timely, accurate and comprehensive intelligence. They‘re very similar. They appear almost similar at the surface, but there‘s very, very profound differences and those two cannot be crossed.
MADDOW: I know that defenders of the Bush administration‘s interrogation program—and we now have a lot of evidence that it was a program—they say that these harsh techniques, these extreme techniques were only used in extremely controlled circumstances, on a very small number of people by only very highly-trained, skilled personnel, that it was an elite practice in essence. Does that accord with what you saw in Iraq and how you know these techniques were used?
KLEINMAN: Not at all. First of all, it is not an elite practice. You know, enhanced interrogation technique - that term - would connote an elite program, an advanced program, one conducted by sophisticated practitioners. And nothing can be further from the truth. The best interrogators in this country understand how to interrogate and that‘s largely a relationship-based, culturally-elite finesse approach.
It‘s systematic and it‘s patient. And that‘s what produces information,** to use, you know, SERE methods or to think that one can use physicality or heavy stress to obtain useful, reliable information is just a misnomer. It‘s not backed up by operational experience, and it is not backed up by one shred of scientific evidence.
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MADDOW: Col. Steven Kleinman, former military intelligence officer, thank you for your service, sir. And thanks for taking time to talk to us about this tonight.
KLEIN: Thank you. Thank you for your service as well.