Article: It Wasn't Just Torture, It Was Experimentation on Human Beings

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The American people have become blase about the idea of torture. But how do they feel about the fact that the CIA did human experimentation on the helpless prisoners held in their dungeons?

Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA's torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee's executive summary of its investigative report...
At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen....

Mitchell and Jessen's qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of 'learned helplessness" derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies.

To implement those theories, Mitchell and Jessen oversaw or personally engaged in techniques intended to produce "debility, disorientation and dread." Their "theory" had a particular means-ends relationship that is not well understood, as Mitchell testily explained in an interview on Vice News: "The point of the bad cop is to get the bad guy to talk to the good cop." In other words, "enhanced interrogation techniques"...do not themselves produce useful information; rather, they produce the condition of total submission that will facilitate extraction of actionable intelligence.

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</blockquote>There's actually a long history of human experimentation shading into torture in the practices of the CIA. When the CIA's "Human Resource Exploitation Manual" (for use by the right-wing regimes they were propping up in Latin America and Southeast Asia) became public in the 1980s, such practices were subjected to congressional investigation and were supposedly made off-limits in future. <blockquote>The "war on terror" is not the CIA's first venture into human experimentation. At the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American POWs' breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models, including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation....During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual titled "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation" to guide agents in the art of extracting information from "resistant" sources by combining techniques to produce "debility, disorientation and dread." Like the communists, the CIA largely eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired state of compliance.... </blockquote>Forbidden, yet there it was again, rearing its monstrous head in the dark days of the Bush-Cheney administration panic after 9/11: <blockquote>From [April 15, 2002] until the program was dry-docked in 2008, at least thirty-eight people were subjected to psychological and physical torments, and the results were methodically documented and analyzed. That is the textbook definition of human experimentation.</blockquote>There's going to be no accountability for torture, because apparently it's a patriotic thing to do in this new world of global terror and endless war, and patriots should feel no compunction about doing it. Anything for The Homeland! But perhaps there can be some for the human experimenters -- those who chose to experiment on their fellow human beings in some of the most damaging ways imaginable, and unimaginable.