“What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight . . . is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings.” — General David Petraeus, May 10, 2007
“Two images — Guantanamo on the one hand and Abu Ghraib on the other — are the images for which, unfortunately, the U.S. is probably better known around the world today than for the Statue of Liberty.” — David Cole, Georgetown University Law Center, Feb. 18, 2008
“Medical ethicists say that the Bush era torture program architected and overseen by psychologists will go down as one of the greatest scandals in the history of medical ethics, on a par with the Tuskegee experiments of the mid twentieth century… an incalculable large stain has been left on the profession of psychology.” –Geoff Gray, Weaponizing Psychology, 2014
“Doctors Without Morals” an OpEd in The New York Times authored by Leonard Rubenstein, a lawyer and visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Army Brigadier General, calls for independent investigations into the ethical breaches by doctors and psychologists…
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…
