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American Psychological Association - Pentagon collusion in Defense of Torture

by Stephen Soldz

The PENS task force membership was kept confidential from both the APA membership, the press and public. Five of these members had aided Bush-era interrogations, with four from chains of command accused of abuses, among other ethical problems.

US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites and

The Red Cross Torture Report: What it Means

by Mark Danner, New York Review of Books,

April 9 and April 30, 2009.

Investigative reporter Mark Danner leaked the 2007 ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody by the International Committee of the Red Cross,” risking that publication of the secret document would jeopardize ICRC access to prisoners in the future, because the report is critical to the national debate on torture. In these two articles Danner discusses the detailed information of the ICRC Report in relation to the development of the Bush/Cheney policy of enhanced interrogations and its implications for the future.

Torturing Democracy

from RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights:

“Meticulous reporting unravels the inside story of how torture was adopted by the U.S. government as official policy in the aftermath of 9/11. With exclusive interviews, explosive documents and rare archival footage, the documentary has been called the definitive broadcast account of a deeply troubling chapter in recent American history.”

WhenHealersHarm.org

A website project from Center for Constitutional Rights:

Despite the health professions’ universally recognized duty to do no harm, doctors and psychologists have played a key role in the U.S. government’s policy of torture in its overseas prisons. When Healers Harm presents the evidence for everyone, including those in institutional power, to examine.

Detainee Interrogations, Physicians, and Psychologists

Ethicist Kenneth S. Pope maintains an up to date list of over 300 links, books, and articles on the torture controversy and doctor involvement in detainee interrogations.

Rorschach and Awe by Katherine Eban

Article from VanityFair.com: America's coercive interrogation methods were reverse-engineered by two C.I.A. psychologists who had spent their careers training U.S. soldiers to endure Communist-style torture techniques. The spread of these tactics was fueled by a myth about a critical "black site" operation.

Psyche, Science and Society

Key articles on the controversy over psychologists’ involvement in detainee interrogations.

University of Minnesota Human Rights Library

Copies of hundreds of original documents and articles on U.S. military medicine in war on terror, prisons, including detainee medical reports and sources used in Oath Betrayed by Steven H. Miles.

Psychologists for an Ethical APA

Information on organized protest against interrogation doctors and torture of prisoners, and how health care professionals can help this movement.

Physicians for Human Rights

PHR was founded in 1986 on the idea that health professionals, with their specialized skills, ethical duties, and credible voices, are uniquely positioned to investigate the health consequences of human rights violations and work to stop them. PHR mobilizes health professionals to advance health, dignity, and justice and promotes the right to health for all.

PrimeTimeTorture.org

“Human Rights First in collaboration with the military educators concerned about the direct influence of TV torture methods (e.g. 24) on young military interrogators are developing a great series of training videos.”

The Psychology and Military Intelligence Casebook

on Interrogation Ethics

The Psychology and Military Intelligence Casebook on Interrogation Ethics (PMIC) responds to the revelations that American psychologists have been instrumental in abusive interrogations of terrorist suspects in the Global War On Terror.

The Experiment by Jane Mayer

Article from TheNewYorker.com:

“The military trains people to withstand interrogation. Are those methods being misused at Guantánamo?”

Report on Detainee Abuse Blames Top Bush Officials

From WashingtonPost.com:

A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere.

ThinkProgress.org articles on Torture

Think Progress is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. The Center for American Progress Action Fund is a nonpartisan organization.

The Progress Report: Top Myths About Closing Guantanamo

“Each day that Guantanamo remains open is another day that U.S. troops are put in further unnecessary danger. One U.S. military officer wrote in the Washington Post that he learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."

We still torture: The new evidence from Guantánamo

By Luke Mitchell (subscription required to view full article)

“Political events move within a continuum, and they are driven by many forces other than democratic action, including the considerable power of their own momentum. Such is the case with the ongoing American experiment with torture.”

ACLU.com

Documents Received from DIA/DOS/FBI

PHR: After Senate Report, Psychologists Who Tortured Must Be Held to Account

Posted by Ben Greenberg

PHR: Restoring the Integrity of Military Medical Ethics: A Human Rights Imperative

by John C. Bradshaw

Invictus:

SERE Psychologist Interviewed on NPR

Exposing Health Professionals’ Complicity in Torture

DailyKos.com Diaries:

Rumsfeld Began Post-9/11 Torture Long Before Abu Ghraib by Meteor Blades

How NYT Distorted My Daily Kos Diary on SERE Torture by Valtin

An Abbreviated History of Exploitation Processes

by smintheus

Army Psychologist Pleads 'Fifth' in Case of Prisoner 900

by Meteor Blades

Vermont State Hospital Implicated in CIA Mind Control Experiments by Valtin

My Thoughts and Perspective as a SERE Graduate

Part I and Part 2 by Jeffersonian Democrat

FireDogLake.com:

Military Interrogations: Torture, Hyprocrisy Pre-Date 9/11

by Jeff Kaye

FDL Exclusive: SERE Psychologists Still Used in Special Ops Interrogations and Detention

by Jeff Kaye

The Role of Heath Professionals in Bush-Era Torture

by Christy Hardin Smith

“Fair and Balanced” in Academia: Twisting Recent Torture History in the Journal “Nature” by Jeff Kaye

How APA Made a Pact with DoD & CIA over Torture Interrogations by Jeff Kaye

Two Generals Who Enabled Torture Skirt Accountability

by Jeff Kaye

Part One: NYT Misses Full Story on Mitchell-Jessen

Part Two: Expanding the Investigation into SERE Torture

Part Three: Roger Aldrich, the Al Qaeda Manual, and the Origins of Mitchell-Jessen

by Jeff Kaye

Huffington Post:

Torture, Psychology, and Daniel Inouye: The True Story Behind Psychology's Role in Torture

by Bryant Welch

The Rachel Maddow Show

From MSNBC

Torture "Black Sites" Exposed - Doctors Assisted Torture according to Red Cross Documents.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

From Comedy Central:

Former interrogator, Matthew Alexander, explains why torture is counterproductive in interrogating terrorists.

Bill Moyers Journal

From PBS:

“On the Web, BILL MOYERS JOURNAL has information on the hearings on interrogations by the House Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on the Constitution, as well as a summary of the national debate about torture and the history of the Geneva Conventions.”

DemocracyNOW

“The firm, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, is named after the two military psychologists who founded the company, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Beginning in 2002, the CIA hired the psychologists to train interrogators in brutal techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and pain. We speak with three journalists who have closely followed the story.”

Contact: info@doctorsanddetainees.com

All trademarks, product names, and company names or logos cited herein are the property of their respective owners.

Oath Betrayed: America's Torture Doctors Second Edition by Steven H. Miles MD, Random House, New York, 2009.
The news that the United States tortured prisoners in the war on terror has brought shame to the nation, yet little has been written about the doctors and psychologists at these prisons. In Oath Betrayed, medical ethics expert and physician Steven H. Miles tells how doctors, psychologists, and medics cleared prisoners for interrogation, advised and monitored abuse, falsified documents—including death certificates—and were largely silent as the scandal unfolded.

A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror
by Alfred W. McCoy, Henry Holt, New York, 2006.
Historian McCoy shows how the CIA developed “enhanced” interrogation techniques that left no physical marks. His expose gives an account of the CIA’s secret efforts to develop new forms of torture spanning fifty years. It reveals how the CIA perfected its methods, distributing them across the world from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals. The book is titled “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror.”

Mindwars: Brain Research and National Defense by Jonathan D. Moreno, Dana Press, Washington, DC; University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill, 2006.
From Nature:
Welcome to the world of Mind Wars and the military application of neuroscience, which is the subject of this fascinating and sometimes unsettling book. As the author Jonathan Moreno reveals, the US military has a long-standing interest in brain research and, as scientific understanding continues to advance, so does its appeal to the national security establishment.

 The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
by Jane Mayer, Doubleday, New York, 2008
From Democracy Now:
Mayer reveals a secret report by the International Red Cross warned the Bush administration last year that the CIA’s treatment of prisoners categorically constituted torture and could make Bush administration officials who approved the torture methods guilty of war crimes. Mayer also reveals that the Bush administration ignored warnings from the CIA that up to a third of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake.

Interrogations, Forced Feedings, and the Role of Health Professionals: New Perspectives on International Human Rights, Humanitarian Law, and Ethics by Ryan Goodman and Mindy Roseman, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009.
The involvement of health professionals in human rights and humanitarian law violations has again become a live issue as a consequence of the U.S. prosecution of armed conflicts with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iraq. Health professionals - including MDs trained in psychiatry and PhDs trained in behavioral psychology - have reportedly advised and assisted in coercive interrogation. MDs have also been involved in forced feedings. The direct involvement of medical professionals in torture and covering up extra-judicial killings is a phenomenon common to many countries. A reexamination of the international norms, as developed in human rights law, humanitarian law, and professional ethics can shed light on these issues.

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People
Turn Evil
by Philip Zimbardo, Random House, New York, 2007.
“I offer a psychological account of how ordinary people sometimes turn evil and commit unspeakable acts. As part of this account, The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days. How and why did this transformation take place, and what does it tell us about recent events such as the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses in Iraq?”

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror
by Mark Danner, NYRB Collections, New York, 2004.
In the spring of 2004, graphic photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison flashed around the world, provoking outraged debate. Did they depict the rogue behavior of "a few bad apples"? Or did they in fact reveal that the US government had decided to use brutal tactics in the "war on terror"? The images are shocking, but they do not tell the whole story. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents but the result of a chain of deliberate decisions and failures of command. To understand how "Hooded Man" and "Leashed Man" could have happened, Mark Danner turns to the documents that are collected for the first time in this book.

Bioethics after the Terror by Jonathan D. Moreno, The American Journal of Bioethics-Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 2002, pp. 60-64.
Bioethics as a field has been fortunate that its values and concerns have mirrored the values and concerns of society. In light of the September 11th attacks, it is possible that we are witnessing the beginning of a transition in American culture, one fraught with implications for bioethics. The emphasis on autonomy and individual rights may come to be tempered by greater concern over the collective good. Increased emphasis on solidarity over autonomy could greatly alter public response to research abuses aimed at defense from bioterrorism, to privacy of genetic information, and to control of private medical resources to protect the public health.

Undue Risk
by Jonathan D. Moreno, Taylor & Francis, Inc., London, UK, 2001 From Nature Magazine:
Undue Risk deals in a balanced, scholarly way with the issues involved, documenting the sources of information with appropriate references. Although the book was written for a general readership, it has a timely and important message, and should be relevant to all those, concerned with military preparedness, defense and the ethics of human experimentation.

American Torture by Michael Otterman, Pluto Press, London, UK, 2007 The Bush Administration called them an "alternative set of procedures" - forced standing for up to forty hours, sleep deprivation for weeks on end, dousing naked prisoners with ice water in rooms chilled to fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and strapping prisoners to inclined boards then flooding their mouths with water. American Torture examines the origins of this interrogation regime and traces how it was refined, spread, and kept legal. Along the way, American Torture uncovers the effects of state-sponsored torture and deconstructs the myths espoused by its proponents.

Bulletin Board Archive

8/14/2009

Screening Liberally invited us to discuss our documentary, Doctors and Detainees, at Netroots Nation the annual convention for Progressive newsmakers, August 14th. We showed a clip of our work-in-progress and got valuable feedback from the audience.

7/15/2009

New Video: Frank Summers’ History of Psychology and the Military, Part I now posted in MORE VIDEOS.. . .. We’ll post Part II soon.

7/09/2009

Dr. Davis and I were invited to discuss our documentary on Virtually Speaking,

a talk show in Second Life, on July 9th. You can listen to the interview on

BlogTalk Radio

6/17/2009

"Doctors and Detainees" has made it into the final round for the Roy W. Dean NYC grant! Thank You to Carole Dean, From the Heart Productions, for considering our project for this prestigious fund.

5/18/2009

Dr. Martha Davis has sent an Open Letter to the American Psychological Association President, CEO, and Ethics Director. View it HERE: OpEdNews.com.