[emphasis added]
Seligman's connection to the program received attention when Jane Mayer published her book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. Seligman, once the head of the American Psychologists Association (APA), was mentioned in Mayer's book.
In an interview on Democracy Now! and in the book, Mayer alleged that Seligman had "some role here in lecturing those psychologists who went on and designed the program for the CIA." And, a larger allegation made was that the APA needed to be "vigilant," go "beneath the surface," and look into what had been going on with APA members, who had been present for interrogations where torture or abuse likely took place.
Amy Goodman invited Seligman to come on the show for a discussion with Mayer. He declined the invitation to appear during this segment, which aired in July 2008, but sent a letter to Democracy Now! nearly identical to the one I received. And, Goodman read this letter to Mayer when she was on the show and Mayer responded:
"Well, I mean, what I learned is there are a lot of unanswered questions that I would really like to put to him, but when I did try to question him further, he said he had no further comment. He's a very--obviously a very erudite and savvy man. What did he think he was doing when he went to talk to the CIA at their confab at the SERE school? How did he know Mitchell and Jessen were in the audience, unless--did he speak to them? Did he know what their role was, in terms of interrogations? You know, there are a lot of things that would be great to know. It's hard to tell, because he keeps shutting down the conversation when it gets interesting."
In relation to the contract, Mark Benjamin of Salon.com published a comprehensive post detailing Seligman's history in psychology and his connections to the CIA and the U.S. military. This is an excerpt dealing with Seligman's connection to torture:
"Understanding Seligman's connection to torture requires a bit of background. Bush-era torture was designed by a small group of current and former military psychologists who had been training elite U.S. soldiers to resist torture, an effort that has been in existence in the military for decades in what is called the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program.
In late 2001, both the CIA and the Pentagon first requested interrogation assistance from various SERE psychologists, according to a November 2008 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee and a 2004 CIA inspector general report. A small group of those SERE psychologists agreed to reverse-engineer their torture-resistance training tactics into brutal interrogation methods.
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