Harm SchoolRape, S&M, and the Bush torture program.

(Continued from page 1)

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Fifth and most important, SERE is voluntary. "Students can withdraw from training," Ogrisseg noted. In a report issued four months ago, the Armed Services Committee added that in SERE, "students are even given a special phrase they can use to immediately stop" any ordeal. The report concluded:

The SERE schools employ strict controls to reduce the risk of physical and psychological harm to students during training. Those controls include medical and psychological screening for students, interventions by trained psychologists during training, and code words to ensure that students can stop the application of a technique at any time should the need arise. Those same controls are not present in real world interrogations.

Bush officials purported to replicate many of SERE's protective conditions. But most of these conditions can't be replicated in real interrogation. You can't make the detainees American. And if you want them to talk—which you most certainly do, because the stakes are all too real—then you can't promise them a release date, coach them in resistance, or give them magic words or signals to end a given session, much less the whole ordeal.

Even where the administration objectively limited what could be done to detainees, it concealed these limits from them in order to increase their terror. That's why former CIA Director Michael Hayden opposed the release of the 2002 memo: because, he points out, it discloses to future detainees "the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al-Qaida terrorist." The horror of real torture isn't just the pain or panic. It's that you have no idea where it will end.

The difference between SERE and the Bush interrogation program is the difference between S&M and rape. There is no consent. There are no mutually understood boundaries. There are no magic words. People who can't tell the difference between rape and S&M go to jail. What happens to people who can't tell the difference between torture and training?

(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1. Psychology and torture. 2. War as a video game. 3. Turning your poop into bus fuel.)

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Photograph of blindfolded man on Slate's home page by Barbara Penoyar/Photodisc/Getty Images.

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