In a stunning confirmation of George Santayana’s adage that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it*, the New York Times reports that none of the Bush cabinet members, including then-CIA director George Tenet, knew that the “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape” (SERE) methods they used while interrogating inmates at Guantanamo and other “off-shore” prisons, had been developed decades before by the US military, “to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.”

According to the Times article,

The top officials [Tenet] briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition…. They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation…

(Thanks to my York colleague, Fred Weizmann for bringing this articleto my attention.)

* Life of Reason, 1905, p. 284