Truthout has posted an interview with retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns. Kearns is a “‘master’ SERE [Survival Evasion Resistance Escape] instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).”

He said he decided to come forward because he is outraged that [Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA,] used their work to help design the Bush administration’s torture program.

“I think it’s about time for SERE to come out from behind the veil of secrecy if we are to progress as a moral nation of laws,” Kearns said during a wide-ranging interview with Truthout. “To take this survival training program and turn it into some form of nationally sanctioned, purposeful program for the extraction of information, or to apply exploitation, is in total contradiction to human morality, and defies basic logic. When I first learned about interrogation, at basic intelligence training school, I read about Hans Scharff, a Nazi interrogator who later wrote an article for Argosy Magazine titled ‘Without Torture.’ That’s what I was taught – torture doesn’t work.”

What stands out in Jessen’s notes is that he believed torture was often used to produce false confessions.