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SERE was not torture. Torture is not consensual. The tortured are not given a safe word or signal they can use to stop things whenever they want. And the fact that waterboarding was included is a pretty solid indicator that the military considers it torture. The point, after all, was to expose soldiers to a flavor of what it would be like to be tortured. It wasn't "here are perfectly legal and reasonable -- though tough minded -- extreme interrogation techniques you might experience if captured training" it was "here're are some of the things you might experience if you're captured and tortured" training.
SERE gave a taste of what it might be like to be tortured but psychicly it is fundamentally different from toture. On another board someone who has been through SERE said it well, I think. It was torturous, not torture.
And to pre-empt the eventual question that comes up. If torture was the only thing standing between us avoiding another 9/11, it would still be wrong to torture and that would be, in my view, and acceptable price to pay for standing by some very important principles.
That said, I certainly understand the pressure that leads to torture and after the fact society may decide to forgive or only lightly punish a transgession if the evidence is strong that it did do just such a thing (currently there is little such evidence for the torturing we did do). But still, you don't pre-emptively exonerate people for immoral acts that they might commit under the pressure to succeed.
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