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…
Marc Ambinder. Inside the Secret Interrogation Facility at Bagram, The Atlantic, May, 2010 Mark Benjamin. “War on terror” Psychologist Gets Giant No-Bid Contract,” Salon, Oct. 14, 2010 Mark Benjamin. Psychologists Group Still rocked by Torture Debate, Salon, Aug. 4, 2006 Gregg Bloche, MD and Jonathan Marks. Doctors and Interrogators at…
Safety and Effectiveness Information from CDC and DHHS I’ve been asked to contrast the risk from tIhe disease measles with the risk from the measles vaccine, usually the MMR. MMR stands for Measles, Mumps, Rubella (rubella is german measles) and so the MMR vaccine contains 3 live, attenuated (weakened) viruses…
The covert convergence between CIA and cognitive scientists — psychiatrists and psychologists — who provided the patina of legitimate science to CIA’s outrageous — even depraved — psychological torture experiments. CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” experiments were at first interwoven with chemical and biological weapons tests and radiation experiments; they were conducted…
The phrase “psychological warfare” is reported to have first entered English in 1941 as a translated mutation of the Nazi term Weltanschauungskrieg, (meaning world view warfare). It was first embraced by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a prominent Wall Street lawyer whom President Franklin Roosevelt appointed as Director of the new…
