Vanity Fair Exposes How Two Psychologists Shaped the CIA's Torture Methods

[unhappycamper]

In case you missed it yesterday, Democracy Now! had an excellent story on psychiatry & psychology in terms of military interrogations at our gulags. You can watch it on the link to the left.


Rorschach and Awe: As Opposition Grows Over the APA's Policy Allowing Psychologists to Take Part in Military Interrogations, Vanity Fair Exposes How Two Psychologists Shaped the CIA's Torture Methods


Vanity Fair reporter Katherine Eban unravels the central role of two CIA-contracted psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in designing torture tactics for use on detainees held in secret CIA prisons around the world. Both worked in a classified military training program known as sere—for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—which trains soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands. Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on sere trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror. The C.I.A. put them in charge of training interrogators in the brutal techniques, including "waterboarding," at its network of "black sites." President Bush, in his July 20th executive order, gave the Central Intelligence Agency the green light to resume some severe interrogation methods to question detainees in secret prisons overseas. While the order explicitly bans murder, sexual abuse, and religious denigration it remains silent on the use of psychological torture and specific techniques such as waterboarding, sleep and sensory deprivation, death threats, stress positions, isolation, and use of dogs.

The story behind these interrogation techniques is the subject of an expose titled "Rorschach and Awe" by investigative journalist Katherine Eban that was published on vanityfair.com. Eban unravels the central role of two CIA-contracted psychologists in designing these tactics for use on detainees held in secret CIA prisons around the world. Her article is the latest in a series of revelations linking psychologists to US military and CIA interrogations of prisoners of the so-called "war on terror."

Although the two psychologists contracted by the CIA are not members of the American Psychological Association, many psychologists continue to voice grave concern over the APA's equivocation. In an open letter last month, leading psychologists urged the president of the APA to reverse its "years-long policy of condoning and encouraging psychologist participation in interrogations."

Today we spend the hour on the explosive issue of psychologists and their role in America's continuing use of so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques that the International Committee of the Red Cross calls "tantamount to torture." The pressure for a moratorium is mounting, with a vote expected in several weeks at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco.



Transcript & links to watch or listen

[bobthedrummer]

1. Harry Frederick Harlow was up for President of the APA at one time-he didn't get it

a lot of the Special Access Program's came from original research done in various Departments of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Here's a post from an interesting parent thread

"Wisconsin and some black operations"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=186x21683#21699

[bobthedrummer]

2. The rape rack, the pit of despair, Maslow's personality theories reversed

the Health Alteration Committee of the Technical Services Division...

[bobthedrummer]

3. Let's talk about the "influences" that overcome moral, ethical and other objections

kick

[Batgirl]

4. just one more reason why VF is a must-read n't

[bobthedrummer]

5. .