In one of her excellent annotations to Chapter 3, Marcy Wheeler called my attention to this document, which is simply a list that the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) prepared of "physical pressures" commonly used in the services' various "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape" (SERE) training programs. Like the JPRA memo quoted in the chapter that explicitly warned of the dangers and ineffectiveness of torture, the list was attached to a JPRA memorandum Office of Legal Counsel lawyers used to support the infamous August 1, 2002 torture memo.

As Marcy notes, one of the "pressures" on the list is blowing smoke in a detainee's face—a technique that we saw used in Chapter 2, in a January 2002 incident reported by a military interpreter in Afghanistan in 2002, and in Chapter 3, during the interrogation of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in Thailand. Another is "Immersion in Water/Wetting Down," which we also saw in Chapter 3 and which obviously led to the death of the anonymous detainee at the Salt Pit site in October 2002.

And then there's this item:

I now have this document pinned to the wall beside my desk -- as an easy reference to the many SERE techniques "reverse-engineered" for use in real interrogations, and as a reminder of their truly sinister origins.