Steven Reisner in Slate:
Thanks to revelations in the newly released report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, it is now widely known that the CIA’s torture program was created, supervised, and implemented by two licensed clinical psychologists—James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen—who were paid millions of dollars for their efforts. Less widely known is that the Bush administration’s torture operation, at both the CIA and the Pentagon—at “black sites” and at Guantanamo—was devised and supervised largely by clinical psychologists. These psychologists used their knowledge of the workings of the human mind and psychological “mind-control” research to induce “learned helplessness” and “debility, dependency, and dread,” aiming to destroy the minds of detainees in the hope that “actionable intelligence” and “critical threat information” could be sifted from the wreckage.
The psychologists were vital to the torture program for one additional reason: The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had determined that the presence of psychologists and physicians, monitoring the state and condition of the prisoner being tortured, afforded protection for the CIA leadership and the Bush administration from liability and potential prosecution for the torture. Later, the OLC applied the same rules to the Defense Department’s “enhanced interrogation program,” which, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, was created and overseen by a team led by a clinical psychologist, and eventually overseen exclusively by clinical psychologists.
More here.
