Over at Physicians for Human Rights (where I work), we have issued a statement concerning the disturbing evidence disclosed today in Katherine Eban's Vanity Fair article, "Rorschach and Awe."
In today's statement, PHR Executive Director Len Rubenstein compares the current CIA torture program to the infamous US Public Health Service use of 400 Black men as human guinea pigs for experiments with syphilis and to the CIA's original human experiments, when it first began to develop psychological torture techniques in the 1950s.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) urgently reiterated its call today for the White House and Congress to prohibit the use of all SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) techniques in interrogations by US agencies, especially those conducted by the CIA at the agency's "Black Sites" and other secret facilities. SERE techniques include water-boarding, the use of stress positions, isolation, exploitation of phobias, and cultural and sexual humiliation, among other tactics. The group's statement follows Vanity Fair's shocking revelations about the alleged involvement of CIA and US military psychologists in torturing detainees in US custody, as well as its disclosure of a standard operating procedure for use of the SERE tactics that appears to have been employed at Guantanamo. PHR has been calling for the Administration to prohibit tactics used in these and other interrogations for nearly three years.
The report in Vanity Fair details the key role in detainee abuse played by psychologists, particularly CIA contractors Drs. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, from US military SERE schools-training programs designed to instruct service personnel in physical and psychological torture resistance. These psychologists were contracted by the CIA to use these SERE techniques on high value detainees-a practice that is unethical, ineffective and illegal. This new information about the alleged involvement of psychologists in the development and implementation of psychological torture techniques for the CIA was preceded on May 18th by similar revelations about Department of Defense (DoD) psychologists using these tactics at DoD sites, according to a recently declassified DoD Inspector General's report.
"The indisputable evidence disclosed today that the US government, with the assistance of psychologists, was engaged in psychological torture tactics for the CIA is as morally reprehensible as Tuskegee and the MK-Ultra program of the 1950's and 60's," stated Leonard S. Rubenstein, Executive Director of PHR. "It is imperative that both White House and Congress explicitly prohibit the use of these specific tactics once and for all. They have no place in lawful and honorable military and intelligence communities."
Senator Carl Levin, Chair of Senate Armed Services Committee, has announced publicly that he intends to call hearings on the use of the SERE tactics by the US. PHR called today for immediate Congressional investigative hearings to learn how these methods came to be used and who was responsible for approving them. "Extensive and exhaustive hearings are required to conclusively and fully understand whether the regime of psychological torture documented at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, CIA Black Sites and elsewhere was authorized at the highest levels of the government, as it appears, and if so, to hold those civilian officials accountable for these gross violations of human rights," stated Rubenstein.
Read Katherine Eban's article.
Take action: Ask Congress to Fully Investigate CIA and DoD Interrogation Methods.
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