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August 17, 2009 at 16:25:25 Permalink Further details on SERE-JPRA role in development of CIA torture Diary Entry by Stephen Soldz (about the author) |
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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.
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...)
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