Home
Refresh   Tag(s): ; ; ; ; ; ;
Add to My Group
August 17, 2009 at 16:25:25     

Further details on SERE-JPRA role in development of CIA torture

Diary Entry by Stephen Soldz (about the author)

 

submit to twitter
submit to reddit
submit to digg


Tell A Friend

View Ratings | Rate It

In a 3-part series at Firedoglake, Jeff Kaye adds to our picture of the development of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program by taking a closer look at the other shareholders of Mitchell Jessen, and Associates. As has been previously noted by Kaye, all of them had long connections with the SERE program and with JPRA [Joint Personnel Recovery Agency], the SERE parent agency.

::::::::

Kaye cites a JPRA sources as stating that Mitchell and Jesses were not the prime actors in the initiator of the program. Rather, this source suggests, stakeholders Roger Aldrich, one of the pioneers of the SERE program, played a critical role.

Kaye also extends backwards the involvement of former American Psychological Association President Joseph Matarazzo:

David Ayers, head of Tate, Inc., was the other MJA shareholder, along with Joseph Matarazzo, yet another former president [in addition to Martin Seligman: SS] of the American Psychological Association who crossed Mitchell and Jessen's path. Matarazzo, who Jane Mayer recently reported worked for the CIA, had been hired by Mitchell and Jessen years earlier, in 1996, along with other prominent U.S. psychologists -- Charles Speilberger, Richard Lazarus, and Albert Bandura -- for an internal review of SERE training procedures, according to a SERE internal document.

It is amazing how many senior psychologists seem to have been at least tangentially connected with the developers of the CIA's torture program. And, of course, we should remember that the APA itself had Mitchell and Jessen as participants in a joint CIA-APA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception at which, accordingly to the conference description, several enhanced interrogation techniques were discussed. Someday we will understand why these and, no doubt, other prominent psychologists were so close to the SERE program and to Mitchell, Jessesn, and the other creators of the CIA torture program.

Read the series: part 1, part 2, part 3.

 

Stephen Soldz is psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology (more...)
 

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Contact Author Contact Editor View Authors' Articles
Book Recommendations for "American Psychological Assoc"
ETHICAL PRINCIPLES IN THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH WITH HUMAN PARTICIPANTS
by AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC

$22.35

Number of pages:
Publisher: Washington APA

Issues in Community Psychology And Preventive Mental Health, Division 27 of the American Psychological Assoc.
by Gershen (Editor) Rosenblum


Number of pages:
Publisher: Behavioral Publications, Inc.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AS SEEN BY ANALYZED PSYCHOLOGISTS
by AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC


Number of pages:
Publisher: Washington American Psychological Assoc

View All Book Recommendations

 

Share this page: (what's this?)

Facebook      Add This Diary to Mr Wong!      DIGG THIS           NEWSVINE      DEl.ICIO.US      Looksmart Furl      NETSCAPE      My Web      Tag!RawSugar      Blink List     (More...)
Comments: Expand   Shrink   Hide  
No comments

 
Want to post your own comment on this Diary? Post Comment


 

 

 

 

Tell a Friend: Tell A Friend

Copyright © 2002-2009, OpEdNews

Powered by Populum