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…
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…
Cameron was an internationally prominent psychiatrist who was invited as a consultant to the Nuremberg Tribunal. Allen Dulles asked him to evaluate Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s Deputy Führer, and assess his mental capacity to stand trial. Cameron and two other prominent psychiatrists — Drs. Nolan Lewis, Director of NYS Psychiatric Institute…
The secret US Naval Technical Mission Report described the “interrogation” techniques and mescaline experiments at Dachau; they were conducted by Dr. Kurt Ploetner, one of the most prominent Nazi researchers in this area. The report was based on a cache of secret documents captured in Himmler’s cave depository — those…
The committee was headed by Winfred Overholser, MD, superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C. Overholser, a Harvard graduate was Chairman of psychiatry at George Washington University, who presided over St. Elizabeths for 25 years. He was elected President of the American Psychiatric Association in…
