By Andrew Emett
Caught colluding with the Pentagon and endorsing the CIA’s torture program, the American Psychological Association (APA) sent a letter to the Defense Department last year refusing to continue participation in national security interrogations. Instead of accepting the association’s new policy, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) recently responded with a veiled threat furtively blaming the APA’s non-participation in enhanced interrogations for any future attacks against U.S. citizens.
Following the tragic events of 9/11, the Justice Department constructed a series of legal memos authorizing the Bush administration’s use of torture against enemy combatants. In 2002 and 2003, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo authored the torture memos, which were signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee. The Authorization for Use of Military Force, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and Executive Order 13440 became legal justifications for the utilization of enhanced interrogation techniques and a total disregard for the Geneva Conventions.
Under pseudonyms within the heavily redacted Senate Committee’s Executive Summary on CIA interrogation, two retired Air Force psychologists, Dr. Bruce Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell, received contracts to develop the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. They decided to reverse-engineer the Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) counter-interrogation training by inflicting both physical and psychological torture upon detainees. According to the report, they personally participated in waterboarding and interrogating prisoners.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded at least 183 times at CIA black sites in Poland and Romania while providing no actionable intelligence or useful information to his interrogators. In November 2002, CIA officer Matthew Zirbel left black site detainee Gul Rahman beaten and half-naked from the waist down in an unheated cell overnight. Rahman ended up freezing to death in his cell. In a case of mistaken identity, German citizen Khalid El-Masri was abducted by the Macedonian police and handed over to the CIA. After months of beatings and forced rectal suppositories, El-Masri was released without charges.
Arrested in Pakistan on April 10, 2002, Binyam Mohamed was transported to a CIA black site where he was beaten, burned, and suffered cuts along his torso and penis with a scalpel. The US eventually dropped all charges against Mohamed and released him. Between June 19 and 20, 2003, CIA contractor David Passaro beat an Afghan suspect named Abdul Wali to death with a metal flashlight during an enhanced interrogation. At the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, Manadel al-Jamadi died in a shower room under CIA interrogation with his arms tied behind his back. Former Specialist Charles Graner Jr. notoriously posed over al-Jamadi’s corpse for a photo before being charged with torturing his prisoners. CIA interrogator Mark Swanner was not charged with al-Jamadi’s death.
Kidnapped by CIA agents in Milan on February 17, 2003, an Egyptian cleric named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr lost hearing in one ear after months of beatings and electric shocks. On November 4, 2009, an Italian judge convicted in absentia 22 suspected or known CIA agents, an Air Force colonel, and two Italian secret agents of kidnapping Nasr.
According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, harsh interrogation techniques are not effective means of acquiring intelligence. Under duress, prisoners will say anything they believe the interrogator wants to hear in order to end the torment. Although the CIA claims information acquired through enhanced interrogation has saved lives and led to the death of Osama bin Laden, the Committee discovered these claims are patently false.
Instead of being held accountable for devising and utilizing the CIA’s torture program, Mitchell and Jessen received $81 million prior to their contract’s termination in 2009. Former CIA case officer John Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison after revealing the torture program during an interview with ABC News. Kiriakou was charged with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 by giving Deuce Martinez’s business card to New York Times reporter Scott Shane. Martinez had been a CIA interrogator working for Mitchell Jessen and Associates.
In July 2015, a report found that two former APA presidents had been colluding with the CIA while convincing the board to endorse Mitchell and Jessen’s unorthodox therapy sessions. After concluding that sleep deprivation did not classify as torture, former APA president Joseph Matarazzo later held a small ownership stake in Mitchell Jessen and Associates.
On October 28, 2015, APA President Barry Anton and former APA CEO Norman Anderson wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter informing the Pentagon of its new policy prohibiting supervision, assistance, or presence in any national security interrogations, including CIA torture and interrogations of Guantanamo detainees. Instead of respecting the APA’s decision to avoid further ethical conflicts, Brad Carson, the acting principal deputy secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, responded this month accusing the APA of hindering the recruitment and retention of qualified psychologists required by the U.S. Armed Forces.
“The context of future conflicts — whether a traditional international armed conflict like World War II or the Korean War, a defense of the homeland against international terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or something entirely unpredictable — is today unknown,” Carson warned. “A code governing psychologists’ ethics in future national security roles needs to fit all such contexts. We respectfully suggest that a blanket prohibition on participation by psychologists in national security interrogations does not.”
Due to the fact that Mitchell and Jessen provided no actionable intelligence by devising and conducting enhanced interrogations, the only reason the Pentagon needs the APA to reconsider its policy change is because the DoD can no longer commit torture under current U.S. law. By contracting out to psychologists, the DoD would be able to resume the CIA’s torture program at the behest of a future president without interference from the Justice Department.
Andrew Emett writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com
It is the PENTAGRAM that is the biggest threat to America and her security.
YOUR schools, electric grid, healthcare, national infrastructure, are being blown up in the form of $250,000 bombs dropped on $10 MUD HUTS, so the WAR PROFITEERS can eat lobster and lounge on yachts.
Ever since 9/11 the Military/BANKER/Industrial Complex has done everything it could to provoke and create MORE terrorists —- WAR PROFITEERS have to have a war going for SELF-ENRICHMENT. Iraq quieted down and NEW threats -ISIS- HAD to emerge. So the Pentagon CREATED it.
…..It is interesting to remember that terrorism is not bad for everybody. For the Pentagon, Nine-Eleven was a windfall, providing wars and new drones; for NSA, a massive expansion in its powers; for Israel and AIPAC, the destruction of Israel’s arch-enemy, Iraq; for the arms manufacturers, hundreds of billions; for the federal government in general, near-dictatorship and, for jihadists, the involvement of the US in crippling and endless wars. Which is what they wanted. Everybody profited except the American public.
All world governments are jumping on board, friend. This is truly global. We are all under this BS influence not just the USA. This is why we all need to become one in our fight against this evil system of control…
They PROVE their incompetence and stupidity by even suggesting troture.
We’ve Known Since Ancient Rome that Torture Doesn’t Work
In 72 BC – 2,086 years ago – Cicero (the well-known Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist and consul) pointed out that torture creates conditions of fear and desperate hope in which “there is but little room left for truth”, i.e. that torture is an unreliable method of extracting truth.
Later Roman leaders agreed:
As early as the third century A.D., the great Roman Jurist Ulpian noted that information obtained through torture was not to be trusted because some people are “so susceptible to pain that they will tell any lie rather than suffer it” (Peters, 1996). This warning about the unreliability of information extracted through the use of torture has echoed across the centuries.
The former Attorney General of the United States (Ramsey Clark) notes about the Roman emperor Justinian … who lived in the 6th century:
Justinian condemned torture as untrustworthy, perilous, and deceptive.
And it wasn’t just Romans …
Lawrence Davidson – history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania – points out:
In 1764 Cesare Beccaria [an Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher, and politician who had a profound effect on America’s Founding Fathers] published his groundbreaking work, On Crimes and Punishments. Beccaria had examined all the evidence available at that time and concluded that individuals under torture will tell their interrogators anything they want to hear, true or not, just to get the pain to stop.
The successful and ruthless general Napolean Bonaparte wrote in 1798:
The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.
In 1836, British police magistrate and lawyer David Jardine documented that – for thousands of years – torture has led to false confessions.
This ancient wisdom has been verified by the top American interrogation experts over the last 100 years.
send the torturers to prison for life
The day of the next false flag using the nuke the criminals in
government stole in 2007 and blamed on Iran, America will be annihilated
by Russia, China and the SCO. This is the war of Armageddon and you can
know it is now because of Planet X and the toxic chemtrails sprayed
every day to hide it. All planned by your completely evil treasonous
government and their evil ET masters.
Dont delete my post or you will verify you are an evil treasonous government liar and I will make it known all over the web!
The day of the next false flag using the nuke the criminals in
government stole in 2007 and blamed on Iran, America will be annihilated
by Russia, China and the SCO. This is the war of Armageddon and you can
know it is now because of Planet X and the toxic chemtrails sprayed
every day to hide it. All planned by your completely evil treasonous
government and their evil ET masters.
The American Psychological Association drawing the line on CIA torture but not pharmaceutical torture.
You must be thinking of psychiatrists and the American Psychiatric Association. Psychologists don’t prescribe medications and the American Psychological Association has nothing to do with pharmaceuticals.
They may not prescribe but they proscribe…. supporting medical fraud.
That makes no sense. Proscribe means “to prohibit”. I’m done with this thread. Be well…
The APA proscribes natural alternatives to mental health treatment supporting medical fraud. Better?