They joined the Navy, where they were assigned to develop a survival-training program.
He and his colleague Beth Fischer at the University of Pittsburgh are the duo behind the "Survival Skills and Ethics Training" program, a train-the-trainer marathon held each year in Aspen, Colorado.
The methods came from the military's SERE training program, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, which many of the C.I.A.'s paramilitary officers had themselves completed.
Many of the interrogation techniques in the C.I.A.'s list were adopted from the Air Force's Survival, Evasion, Rescue, and Escape training program.
The report documents how the military training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, became a crucial source for interrogations as the Bush administration looked for tougher methods after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
In 2002, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon became concerned that standard questioning was inadequate for suspected terrorists and turned to a military training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE.
Re "Telling the Brutal Truth" (April 26): When I went through the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training program in 1966, before shipping out to Vietnam where I flew many combat missions, everyone — those who ran the program and those who underwent the training — referred to what was done to us as "torture".
In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military.
