Heal the Body Politic, Harm the Body

From the Dossier of an Ex-Patriot.

In "The Experiment" (The New Yorker, July 4), Jane Meyer chronicles how medical and scientific personnel have not only developed Guantanamo Bay interrogation techniques, but tailored them to individual detainees. In an exemplary piece of investigative reporting, she expands on what Neal Lewis revealed in his June 24 New York Times, article "Interrogators Cite Doctors' Aid at Guantánamo Prison Camp."

It seems that a Pentagon-funded program known as SERE -- Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape -- teaches pilots and other personnel, if captured, how to withstand and resist abuse and torture. One exercise subjects trainees to days of hardship inside a mock prisoner-of-war camp.

Meyers reports that ". . . after September 11th, several psychologists versed in SERE techniques began advising interrogators at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. Some of these psychologists essentially 'tried to reverse-engineer' the SERE program. . ."

One imagines the thoughts of the type of SERE graduate who might read Meyers's article. Would his experience, "intended to help Americans resist abuse [but] spread to Americans who used [it] to perpetuate abuse," make him feel like he'd been a guinea pig for Nazi doctors?

I spent the winter reading Nazi Doctors (Basic Books, 2000) by Robert Jay Lifton. Amazing how when duty calls, the Hippocratic Oath goes out the window. In fact, it didn't. Instead of the individual, it was employed by the state, which, however, turned it on its head.

Lifton's premise is that to heal itself from Germany's post-World War I malaise, the Nazis enlisted doctors to cut out Jews and Gypsies as if they were a cancer killing the country. Segueing from Hippocratic to hypocritical, the Defense Department, with a level of stealth the Nazis abandoned at a certain point, operate from the same principle with terrorists. Or, in this case, as Meyers calls many of them, "Afghan dirt farmers."

However, as she quotes a former interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, "If you don't have a terrorist now, you will by the time he leaves."

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