Many conservatives, including Liz Cheney, who is the daughter of Vice President Cheney, have been defending the Bush administration’s torture regime arguing that many of the techniques authorized were derived from U.S. special forces training called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) and were used on American troops.

While the situations are clearly not analogous (mainly because the circumstances in which techniques are applied are “very different“), former master instructor and chief of training at Navy’s SERE school Malcolm Nance said last night on MSNBC that that argument is “ridiculous on its face” and he called those making it “torture apologists”:

Host Rachel Maddow then asked Nance if he would use SERE techniques in the “faulty” premise of a “ticking time bomb scenario.”

MADDOW: In the case of an actual ticking time bomb scenario, which is a faulty premise because things don’t work out this way in the real world, would you do SERE, these techniques on a prisoner in that scenario? [...]

NANCE: No of course not, because one, it defeats the ticking time bomb scenario, in that all the prisoner has to do is not answer the question or, better yet, the prisoner will lie. And once the prisoner lies, especially with al Qaeda members. Let me tell you something, their ideology — they have a concept within their ideology called “al-warrah el barrah” (sp) and that is absolute devotion to their god, but absolute disavowal and hatred of anything that’s not their god.

Nance added that when these techniques were used, detainees knew they were were giving “gibberish,” thus seeing “that as a victory.” “[W]hat we’ve done is we created al Qaeda SERE school for them,” Nance said. Watch it:

Incidently, “torture apologist” Liz Cheney also made this ticking time bomb argument earlier this week: “We are talking about a situation in which there are imminent threats to the United States so if you say to me, this guy’s got information that’s gonna save my kids’ lives and your kids lives that’s going to keep this country safe but we gotta waterboard them to get it, I got no problem with that.”

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Ralph Peters’ latest cry for help supports a suspicion that I’ve long had about conservatives and counterinsurgency. For all of their praise of General Petraeus for having “turned Iraq around” using population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) methods, (what COIN guru David Kilcullen has called “armed social work“) conservatives remain generally committed to the proposition that the best way to protect Americans from terrorism is to just go out into other countries and kill lots and lots of people.

Praising the promotion of former joint special operations chief Lt. Gen. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Peters writes that “Petraeus’ deservedly lauded performance in Iraq appears to have inhibited his ability to think clearly about Afghanistan”:

[Petraeus] doesn’t seem to grasp that, while al Qaeda was a foreign and ultimately unwanted presence in Iraq, the Taliban’s the home team in Afghanistan. Afghan tribesmen just don’t share our interests. And Iraq’s a state. Afghanistan’s an accident. [...]

Will McChrystal, our special operator without peer, be allowed to do what’s necessary — and to jettison huggy-bear programs that sound good but don’t work? Can he focus on the destruction of our enemies?

While recognizing that violent kinetic operations such as those that McChrystal oversaw in Iraq are often an underplayed aspect of counterinsurgency — and McChrystal’s promotion strongly indicates that such operations will play a major role in Afghanistan — it’s important to note here that we spent a number of years doing “what’s necessary” in Iraq, (as Peters wrote so charmingly at the time, “if we can’t leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies… Give therapeutic violence a chance.”) and only managed to incite a violent insurgency and midwife a sectarian civil war that killed tens of thousands and utterly changed the face of the country. Of course, Peters’ view was that we weren’t doing enough of “what’s necessary” — we just needed to do more of it, and harder.

He was, of course, proved wrong on that, just as were many on the other side like myself who were skeptical that any strategy conducted under the auspices of a U.S. occupation could actually succeed in bringing violence down. (It still remains to be seen, however, whether that strategy will result in a stable and unified Iraqi state.) While I think it’s correct to note the difference between Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, it seems to me that the fact that the Taliban (or the various insurgent factions that are often carelessly referred to together as “the Taliban”) are more deeply embedded in Afghan society argues even more for a careful population- and governance-centric approach to isolate the irreconcilable hardcore from the reconcilable opportunists.

Peters’ basic argument, though, is that protecting the population was all fine and nice in Iraq, but in Afghanistan it’s time to get back to the KILLIN’. Add this to the tendency of people like Bill Kristol to diminish or dismiss the role that public relations and symbolism play in counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency and you really have to question whether they really understand or believe in the strategic approach that they’ve been hailing so vociferously for the past couple years. I have my own concerns about the Cult of COIN that’s been developing here in Washington, but I think it’s becoming clear that, for many pro-war conservatives, what Petraeus and the COINdinistas really deserve praise for is helping them save face.

In yesterday’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee torture hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) lashed out at witnesses and questioned whether the hearing was “a political stunt,” contending that “it’s not really fair” to the Bush administration. He repeatedly emphasized that the “other side of the story” is that torture produced “good information.”

Later, however, Graham broke with the conservative line and candidly admitted that torture has not make the U.S. “safer.” Talking to reporter Spencer Ackerman after the hearing, Graham claimed that the interrogation program “saved lives,” but at the same time, he stated that torture didn’t “as a whole” result in greater U.S. security:

GRAHAM: Well, I’m just saying there’s information that was devised, was received from enhanced interrogation techniques that did tell us about what the enemy was up to and probably save lives. That’s the other side of the story. I don’t think that these techniques as a whole have made us safer, because of the problems we’ve had. We’ve got a new way of going forward.

“Let’s have interrogation techniques within our values, but let’s don’t tell the enemies exactly what they are,” Graham concluded. Watch it:

Graham did not specify what “problems” the U.S. has had because of torture, but the evidence is clear. Torture has led to the deaths of coalition troops, inflamed anti-American sentiment, and shattered the reputation of the U.S. Graham’s statement is a significant break from Vice President Cheney, who insisted on Sunday that torture “kept the nation safe for nearly eight years.”

Graham, a former JAG lawyer, has tried to walk a fine line in the torture debate. To his credit, he has been a frequent critic of the Bush administration’s interrogation program, saying that waterboarding is torture and forcefully criticizing Bush officials who have hedged on the topic. Yet he has also voted against banning waterboarding, tried to argue just yesterday that waterboarding was effective, and opposes efforts to investigate the Bush administration.

In the Wall Street Journal this morning, Karl Rove declared that House Speaker Nancy Pelsoi (D-CA) was “an accomplice to ‘torture,’” repeating the right wing’s latest talking point that Pelosi is responsible for Bush’s torture program and should be demonized — even as Rove insists it wasn’t really “torture” and actually was a really great program.

This morning, Pelosi held a press conference to address these allegations. Reading a statement, she said that the CIA had told her in September 2002 — falsely — that waterboarding was not being used:

PELOSI: The CIA briefed me only once on enhanced interrogation techniques in September 2002, in my capacity as ranking member of the intelligence committee. I was informed then that the Department of Justice opinions had concluded that the use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques were legal. The only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed. [...]

We also now know that techniques including waterboarding had already been employed and that those briefing me had given me inaccurate and incomplete information. At the same time the Bush administration…was misleading the American people about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Indeed, we now know that the CIA had waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times in August, 2002, after receiving approval from Condoleezza Rice in July.

Pelosi also accused the CIA and the Bush administration of repeatedly misleading Congress and the American people, and repeated her call for a truth commission to examine the issue:

PELOSI: So on the subject of what’s happening in Iraq, when it’s talking about the techniques used by the intelligence community on those they’re interrogating, at every step of the way, the administration was misleading the Congress. And that is the issue. And that is why we need a truth commission to look into the issue.

REPORTER: So Madame Speaker, just to be clear, you’re accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?

PELOSI: Yes. Misleading the Congress of the United States.

Watch it: