After a two year tug of war between Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Chair of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the CIA, the “redaction—studded version” of the Executive Summary (500 pages of the 6,000 page report) was released on December 9, 2014. The Committee staff had reviewed more…
Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terroris a report by The Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism, an independent panel of 20 high ranking professionals with expertise in medicine, ethics, psychiatry, public health, military medicine, and law charged that the military and the CIA, “required…
Former CIA analyst, John Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. He was officially convicted for leaking the name of a covert officer, but Kiriakou said he was really being targeted for being a whistleblower and revealing the details about post-9/11 torture tactics in the US. Kiriakou was…
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author James Risen, whom Newsweek called “the finest national security reporter of this generation,” infuriated government intelligence officials with his article about massive, surveillance without a warrant by the National Security Agency (NSA) which The New York Times shelved in 2004 for more than a year, having succumbed to…
In Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches, (Oxford University Press, 2014), Rebecca Gordon argues that the 9/11 attacks reopened a question that many Americans had assumed was a settled ethical question, which is: Is torture ever morally permissible? She notes that defenders of torture often defend a practice of purely vicious evil…
In a penetrating, comprehensively referenced article on the Washington Blog, David Swanson removes the blinders that have misled most media commentators from seeing clearly that the torture, extraordinary renditions and assassination policies have not only not disappeared; they have actually accelerated under the Obama administration: “Fifteen years ago, it was…
Ostensibly, the stated purpose for the resort to brutal interrogations was to obtain “actionable intelligence” and “critical threat information” to prevent a ticking bomb from detonating. That was the justification given when in 2004 the Administration was confronted with the leaked confidential report by the International Red Cross Committee that…
Psychologists involved in “interrogation science” and “deception detection” – otherwise recognized as experiments in torture – appear to be thriving under the Obama administration. Most prominent among them is psychologist Susan Brandon, PhD who after 9/11 served as “Senior Scientist” at the American Psychological Association (APA) where she steered much…
A powerful essay by Alessandra Hirsch, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors in The Hastings Center, Bioethics Forum (2015): “The CIA’s actions share four main qualities with those of the Nazi doctors: 1) they experimented on their detainees, 2) they perverted medical procedures, turning them into rape and torture, 3) they…
Below is the Gestapo directive for use of “Verschärfte Vernehmung:” the phrase is German for “enhanced interrogation”. Other translations include “intensified interrogation” or “sharpened interrogation”. It’s a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks. In 1948, a Norwegian…
When President Obama assured the American people that “my team” vetted the surveillance system in 2009 and “scrubbed” the faulty parts…he was not telling the truth. He did not fire the heads of intelligence who took us far on an abominable path and lied about it. In his essay, Working…
In July 2015, a devastating 542-page report, Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Investigations, and Torture, by David Hoffman, a former federal prosecutor who is an attorney with a Chicago law firm, revealed the magnitude of what has been called, “the greatest ethical breaches in the history of…
