Last year the Senate Armed Services Committee held two hearings on the detention and interrogation of suspected enemy combatants held by U.S. forces, probing into the origins of military interrogation policy and documenting some of the key decisions that were made.
“Today’s hearing,” said Committee Chair Sen. Carl Levin, “will explore how it came about that the techniques called survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE) training, which are used to teach American soldiers to resist abusive interrogations by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were turned on their head and sanctioned by Department of Defense (DOD) officials for use offensively against detainees. Those techniques included use of stress positions, … use of dogs, and hooding during interrogation.”
The record of those hearings has recently been published, supplemented by detailed questions and answers for the record and documents obtained by the Committee (in the PDF version).
See “The Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” hearings before the Senated Armed Services Committee, June 17 and September 25, 2008.
As the United States continues nuclear modernization on all legs of its nuclear triad through the creation of new variants of warheads, missiles, and delivery platforms, examining the effects of nuclear weapons production on the public is ever more pressing.
“The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”
To better understand what might drive the way we live, learn, and work in 2050, we’re asking the community to share their expertise and thoughts about how key factors like research and development infrastructure and automation will shape the trajectory of the ecosystem.
Recognizing the power of the national transportation infrastructure expert community and its distributed expertise, ARPA-I took a different route that would instead bring the full collective brainpower to bear around appropriately ambitious ideas.