War Crimes Are The Policy Of Bush Admin-Not Only Do We Torture-But We Teach-HOW TO TORTURE

[kpete]

NOT ONLY DO WE TORTURE, BUT WE TEACH -HOW TO- TORTURE

"It is now indisputable that psychologists and psychology were directly and officially responsible for the development and migration of abusive interrogation techniques, techniques which the International Committee of the Red Cross has labeled 'tantamount to torture.'"

http://www.salon.com/news/primary_sources/2007/06/21/open_letter/

The CIA's torture teachers
Psychologists helped the CIA exploit a secret military program to develop brutal interrogation tactics -- likely with the approval of the Bush White House.

By Mark Benjamin

June 21, 2007 | WASHINGTON

There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to "reverse-engineer" techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military's use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA's use of such tactics -- working in close coordination with the military -- until now has remained largely unknown.

According to congressional sources and mental healthcare professionals knowledgeable about the secret program who spoke with Salon, two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. The two are currently under investigation: Salon has learned that Daniel Dell'Orto, the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Defense, sent a "document preservation" order on May 15 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon officials forbidding the destruction of any document mentioning Mitchell and Jessen or their psychological consulting firm, Mitchell, Jessen and Associates, based in Spokane, Wash. Dell'Orto's order was in response to a May 1 request from Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is investigating the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody.

.................

"The irony -- and ultimately the tragedy -- in the migration of SERE techniques is that the program was specifically designed to protect our soldiers from countries that violated the Geneva Conventions," says Brad Olson, president of the Divisions for Social Justice within the American Psychological Association. "The result of the reverse-engineering, however, was that by making foreign detainees the target, it made us the country that violated the Geneva Conventions," he says.


more at:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/21/cia_sere/?source=whitelist

[pocoloco]

1. The Nazis psychologists had no morals either.

Have we been missing something?
Is torture that much fun?

Do they know something we don't, for example, that there is no Hell?

[Ezlivin]

3. The process proceeds at a steady pace that few see

I've started a discussion of how we let these steps progress to the point that protesting en masse will accomplish nothing: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1152287&mesg_id=1152287

[redqueen]

2. This is news?

SOA has been doing it for decades.

[Mend]

4. a timely moment to remind people that we psychiatrists are different from

psychologists. We went to medical school, are MDs, and are strictly forbidden to torture, not that we would anyway.