And now, designing torture tactics?

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Eric Mink: U.S. torture tactics harm our security



By Eric Mink -

Friday, June 27, 2008
Story appeared in section,
More pieces of the U.S. torture puzzle fell into place last week.The picture got clearer — and uglier: —On Wednesday, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Physicians for Human Rights released a 121-page report detailing the results of medical tests performed on nearly a dozen former prisoners of the U.S.military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. All had been released after having been held in U.S. custody for periods ranging from six months to three years. None had been charged with any offense--------------


Friday, June 27, 2008


And now, designing torture tactics.

Vanity Fair reporter Katherine Eban unravels the central role of two CIA-contracted psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in designing torture tactics for use on detainees held in secret CIA prisons around the world. In her article,Rorschach and Awe,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. As opposition grows over the APA's policy allowing psychologists to take part in military interrogations,there is a further point, a more serious charge.
Psychology and other social sciences might be doing actual harm to our society. You needn't be a scholar to sense this. In fact, scholarship is often a hindrance to understanding what is really happening. Despite the creation of a virtual army of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychometrists, counselors, and social workers, there has been no letup in the rate of mental illness, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, child abuse, divorce, murder, and general mayhem.And now, designing torture tactics.
Ted Rudow III,MA