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"The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as important as ends."
- Final Report of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, also known as the Church Committee, 1976
RECENTLY, I CAME ACROSS A PHOTO on the web of prisoners in Guantánamo. You know the one: shot at close range through a chain-link fence, we see a line of detainees in orange jumpsuits - hooded, hands tied, bent over and broken. They are the first crop of prisoners from the new Global War on Terror. An American guard hovers nearby, apparently berating one of them. You can feel the menace even through the pixels. The funny thing is, despite being an American and a former Marine, I instinctively identify with the guy in the orange. I can't help myself.
You see, back in the nineties, I was the guy in the orange jumpsuit. As a young lieutenant, I was sent to a secretive school whose regimen of torture and abuse later became the basis for Guantánamo. The school, known simply by its initials SERE - Survival Evasion Resistance Escape - is ostensibly designed to train military personnel to withstand interrogation. While I was in the school I lived like an animal. I was hooded, beaten, starved, stripped naked, and hosed down in the December air until I went hypothermic. At one point I was unable to speak because I was shivering so hard. Thrown into a three-by-three-foot cage with only a rusted coffee can to piss in, I was told that the worst was yet to come. I was interrogated three times. When I forgot my prisoner number, I was strapped to a gurney and made to watch as a fellow prisoner was waterboarded a foot away from me. When my turn came, the guard just dropped the hose on my chest, the water soaking my uniform. His point was made: this is all your fault.
I was only incarcerated for a few days, but my mind quickly disintegrated. At some point in the training I became convinced that I was being held in an actual prisoner-of-war camp. Training had stopped. My captors, who wore foreign uniforms and spoke with thick...