MENTAL TORTURE
Aggressive Interrogation Techniques
Medical professionals designed and helped to implement Bush administration interrogation practices
By Ashland Holderman, PhD
BOSTON, MA
One of the key, if underreported, findings in Tuesday’s bombshell Senate committee report on the Bush-era treatment of U.S. military detainees was the role of civilian psychologists in devising, directing and overseeing the torture of prisoners.
While the report highlights the role of senior Bush administration officials in approving “aggressive” interrogation techniques, it also exposes how medical professionals helped to transform the Pentagon’s torture resistance program into tactics used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and CIA “black” sites.
Understanding the role of these professionals should be a “specific focus” of an investigation into the use of these tactics, according to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which has condemned the tactics as illegal and medically unethical.
FULL STORY: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4387/the_psychologists_of_torture
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