Mental health professionals 'may have committed war crimes', report says

As reported in the Guardian

Much more at the link

Health professionals who assisted in the CIA’s torture programme of terror suspects “betrayed the most fundamental duty of the healing professions” and may have committed war crimes, according to a hard-hitting report released on Tuesday.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) called for a federal commission to investigate the full extent of health professionals’ participation in CIA torture following last week’s release of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on the agency’s detention and interrogation programme.

“Under the auspices of the Bush administration, the CIA systematically tortured suspected terrorist detainees, in at least one instance to the point of death. This torture program heavily relied on the participation and active engagement of health professionals to commit, conceal, and attempt to justify these crimes,” PHR concludes.

The report comes days after Dick Cheney, the former US vice president, defended the practices disclosed in the report including “rectal feeding” – arguing the practice was done for medical reasons. Former CIA director Michael Hayden has also claimed that the practice was carried out on medical grounds.

According to PHR, rectal hydration is almost never practiced in medicine because there are more effective methods, and it is never considered as a first option for rehydration or nutritional support. PHR notes that the report indicates that rectal hydration was used to “control and/or punish the detainees ... Insertion of any object into the rectum of an individual without his consent constitutes a form of sexual assault.”

“Rather than reject such brutal practices, medical officers appear to have modified them to increase pain: ‘we used the largest Ewal [sic] tube we had,’ stated one officer in a February 2004 email,” writes PHR.

Dr Vincent Iacopino, PHR’s senior medical advisor and an author of the analysis, said Cheney was “either terribly misinformed or propagating a lie. Any reasonable person knows feeding does not take place rectally.”

The report sets out eight areas where doctors, psychologists and physician assistants may have violated “medical and psychological ethics, domestic and international law, and federal research guidelines”:

• Designing, directing and profiting from the torture program;
• Intentionally inflicting harm on detainees;
• Enabling US department of justice lawyers to create a fiction of “safe, legal and effective” interrogation practices;
• Engaging in torture research that could potentially violate the Nuremberg Code, brought in after World War II to ban “experiments” like those practiced by the Nazis, and could constitute a crime against humanity;
• Monitoring torture and calibrating the level of pain;
• Evaluating and treating detainees for the purposes of torture;
• Conditioning medical care on cooperation with interrogators;
• Failing to document physical and/or psychological evidence of torture.

The report is especially damning of the work of psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. The SSCI described how the pair – given the pseudonyms “Grayson Swigert” (Mitchell) and “Hammond Dunbar” (Jessen) in the report– designed the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) used to interrogate suspects.

Much more at the link

Meet the Psychologists Who Helped the CIA Torture People

As Seen in New York Magazine

Read Much More at the Link

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 500-page executive summary of its report on the CIA’s torture program offers some horrifying details about U.S. treatment of detainees captured in the post-9/11 years. It also highlights and adds some details about the important role two psychologists had in both developing the “enhanced interrogation” program and carrying it out.

Within the report, the duo in question are referred to with the pseudonyms "Grayson Swigert" and "Hammond Dunbar." But both the New York Times and NBC News have identified them as Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two psychologists who have been previously singled out for their roles in developing and legitimizing the torture program.

Both men came from an Air Force background, where they worked on the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program in which military personnel are trained to resist enemy questioning by enduring oftentimes brutal mock interrogations. Beyond that, though, they seemed otherwise poorly suited for the task of interrogating al-Qaeda detainees. “Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator,” the report notes, “nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa'ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.” Despite their lack of experience in these key areas, Mitchell and Jessen “carried out inherently governmental functions, such as acting as liaison between the CIA and foreign intelligence services, assessing the effectiveness of the interrogation program, and participating in the interrogation of detainees in held in foreign government custody.”

So how did these two men come to play such an outsized role in developing and enacting the CIA’s torture program? Much of the story is captured in a 2009 Times article by Scott Shane. Shane writes that Mitchell, who after retirement “had started a training company called Knowledge Works” to supplement his income, realized that the post-9/11 military would provide business opportunities for those with his kind of experience and started networking with his contacts to seek them out.

[...]

“In 2005,” the Senate report states, “the psychologists formed a company specifically for the purpose of conducting their work with the CIA. Shortly thereafter, the CIA outsourced virtually all aspects of the program.” And while the company’s contract was terminated in 2009 amid a growing national outcry over government-sanctioned torture, by then Mitchell and Jessen’s years-long relationship with the CIA had already proven extremely profitable.

The CIA paid two ex-military psychologists $81 million to help design and run torture the program

Of course, the Psychologist who made so much money from the program has been speaking out, defending the torture program.

Is This Guy Crazy?

Top 10 Evil Human Experiments

As seen on the List Universe.

Human experimentation and research ethics evolved over time. On occasion, the subjects of human experimentation have been prisoners, slaves, or even family members. In some notable cases, doctors have performed experiments on themselves when they have been unwilling to risk the lives of others. This is known as self-experimentation. This is a list of the 10 most evil and unethical experiments carried out on humans.

[WARNING] This list contains descriptions and images of human experimentation which may cause offense to some readers.]

We are only posting the link above; the full list is too long to copy here.

Karadzic’s alter ego

More on the prospects for mad psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic.

The July 30 extradition of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to the Netherlands, following his July 21 arrest, put an end to many years of efforts to bring one of the world’s most wanted fugitives to justice. After 12 years on the loose, Karadzic will face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, committed during the 1992/95 war in Bosnia, before the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Many people remain shocked that the one time president of Republika Srpska, allegedly responsible for carrying out massive ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war, was living a normal life in Belgrade, just like any ordinary citizen. Those more familiar with his numerous transformations, however, were not as surprised.

A graduate psychiatrist, poet and politician, Karadzic was captured spending his days practising alternative medicine, giving lectures, contributing to a health magazine and even running his very own website. Pretty bold, many would say, but, on second thought, these proved to be quite successful tactics because media reported a number of people who have known and been in touch with “Dr Dragan Dabic” are utterly stupefied after finding out who he really was.

[...]

In spite of being officially married to psychiatrist Ljiljana Zelen-Karadzic, with whom he has two children, Sasa and Sonja, Karadzic was reported to have a girlfriend, Mila, during the time he spent as Dr Dabic. She often accompanied him to his lectures and was introduced, by Karadzic, as his associate, media reports claim.

Zoran Pavlovic, the software engineer who worked on Dabic’s website, told the AP Karadzic had a framed photograph of four boys in his two-room apartment in the suburb of New Belgrade, who he claimed to be his grandsons living in the US. Karadzic said he had lived in New York, where he had earned his diploma. “He told me he travelled often to America and I had no reason to disbelieve him,” the software expert told the AP.

Karadzic did not miss out on social life either, as reports say he frequently visited the Madhouse bar in his neighbourhood. There, he enjoyed drinking red wine and listening to the traditional gusle, which he occasionally got to play himself. On its walls, the small pub had pictures of him and his one time close associate Ratko Mladic, the chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb army during the Bosnian war and the next top wanted fugitive on the list of The Hague tribunal.

As the days of healer Dabic are now over, Karadzic has removed the long beard and hair hiding his face. He has also announced he would defend himself at the tribunal. However, how could any defense rebut the charges, as the war in Bosnia saw the worst atrocities in Europe since the end of World War Two?

Karadzic: Psychiatrist-turned 'Butcher of Bosnia'

From the profile on Radovan Karadzic seen on CNN

Radovan Karadzic, whose Interpol charges listed "flamboyant behavior" as a distinguishing characteristic, was a practicing psychiatrist who came to be nicknamed the "Butcher of Bosnia."

Twice indicted in 1995 by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Karadzic faces charges of genocide, complicity in genocide, extermination, murder, willful killing, persecutions, deportation, inhumane acts, terror against civilians and hostage-taking.

While president of the so-called Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Karadzic's troops were reported to have massacred over hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats during a campaign of "ethnic cleansing." Early estimates of the death toll from the 3-year war ranged up to 300,000, but recent research reduced that to about 100,000.

The U.S. State Department had a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture. His arrest brings an end to more than 10 years as a fugitive.

The Facts be Damned! Psychologists' President Defends Psychologist Participation in Detainee Interrogations

As seen on OpEdNews, and on Stephen Soldz' own blog, where he points out the dramatic need for the head of a professional organization like to APA to be far more knowledgeable and responsible about the ethical standards vs the conduct his memberships indulges in. This is only a portion of the full article. Fait to say that it l;ooks like he is merely making excuses, and is likely engaged in a PR coverup.

Last Friday American Psychological Association President, and Indiana University professor, Sharon Brehm discussed the APA's policies supporting psychologist participation in national security interrogations with faculty and students at her university. The Indiana Daily Student has an account of the meeting.

While the entire article is well worth reading, a few of Dr. Brehm's comments as cited there are especially worth commenting upon. Either they reflect an unacceptable level of ignorance of the basic facts about psychologists' roles in American torture or they are simply willful falsehoods. For example, Dr. Brehm stated:

"Brehm said psychologists only acted in an advisory role during questionings, working with interrogators to develop effective strategies that will elicit “accurate information.”"

There is now overwhelming evidence from reporters and government documents that this statement is not simply false, but almost the exact opposite of the truth. Thus, three major journalists (Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair, and Mark Benjamin at Salon) have reported that the basic torture techniques used by the CIA in its black sites were initially developed and implemented by psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. This role is far from Brehm's "…psychologists only acted in an advisory role during questionings, working with interrogators to develop effective strategies that will elicit 'accurate information.' " On the contrary, as Eban reported In Vanity Fair:

"psychologists weren't merely complicit in America''s aggressive new interrogation regime. Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A..”

Thus, Dr. Brehm's "effective strategies" include months of total isolation, freezing, being chained up in painful positions for hours and days on end, and it seems, waterboarding.

The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (OIG), in a report declassified last May, documented the central role of psychologists, including those from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program in the development of what the OIG itself saw as abusive. [See our summary of the OIG report and in pdf format.] The OIG report documents how SERE psychologists trained Guantanamopsychologists in the use of SERE-based torture techniques. The OIG report also documents how SERE and Guantanamostaff went to Iraq to train US soldiers there in abusive SERE-based "counter-resistance" techniques. The OIG report made clear that these techniques were, in the OIG's opinion, abusive.

Frankenstein's Children: Modern Torture's Scientific Bible

Of course our interest is in the criminality and lack of morality displayed by these experts on the mind when working for a government (not just the US government)

A frightening and detailed review of a book that is best described by this quote:

What if there was a book that dispassionately looked at the history and methodology of torture? What if this book looked at human physiology and psychology and tried to scientifically establish how to best break another human being and bend him or her to your will? What if this book were written by top behavioral scientists and published in the United States? And, finally, what if the studies published in this book were financed by the U.S. government?

Look no farther, there is, or rather was, such a book. Published in 1961 by John Wiley & Sons, The Manipulation of Human Behavior was edited by psychologists Albert D. Biderman and Herbert Zimmer. This book, unfortunately, cannot be found online, nor was a second edition or printing ever made (not surprisingly). But I will provide a review here, and an introduction into the nightmare world of science, torture, and politics that helped shape our modern world and today's news.

In recent months, it went on-line and and can be viewed at Internet Archive:

The Manipulation of Human Behavior - The text is copyright 1961, but not renewed (and therefore expired in the US). HTML formatting from unknown source.

We include this summary of the text:

The titles of the book's essays are bone-chilling in their scientific bland exactitude. Here they are, with authors, for the record:

1. The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject as it Affects Brain Function, by Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr., Assoc. Professor of Clinical Medicine in Psychiatry, New York Hospital

[I have come to see over the past months of research that this essay by Hinkle is often referenced, and is key in understanding later methods of psychological and modern torture.]

2. The Effects of Reduced Environmental Stimulation on Human Behavior: A Review, by Phillip E. Kubazansky, Chief Psychologist, Boston City Hospital

3. The Use of Drugs in Interrogation, by Louis A. Gottschalk, Assoc. Professor of Psychiatry and Research Coordinator, Cincinnati General Hospital

And because you probably can't wait, and to juice up this account, I'll admit, yes, this is the chapter that goes into LSD, mescaline use and all that. Gottschalk found enough data in the research literature to find that LSD-25 might have "possible applications... to interrogation techniques".

The conclusions reached on mescaline hold equally for the possible applications of this drug to interrogation. As a tool in the advancement of knowledge of psychopharmacology, LSD-25 is a drug on which clinical and experimental research is likely to continue. (pp. 123-124)

Likely to continue..." An ironic understatement?

4. Physiological Responses as a Means of Evaluating Information, by R. C. Davis, Professor of Psychology, Indiana University

5. The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation, by Martin T. Orne, Teaching Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard University Medical School

An aside: Some of you may recognize Martin Orne as the psychiatrist of the famous poet Anne Sexton, who in the early 1990s released the tapes of her psychotherapy sessions with him to a biographer, precipitating a storm of controversy.

6. The Experimental Investigation of Interpersonal Influence, by Robert R. Blake and Jane S. Mouton, Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, and Social Science Research Associate, University of Texas, respectively

7. Countermanipulation Through Malingering, by Malcolm L. Meltzer, Staff Psychologist, District of Columbia General Hospital

Six of the essay contributors were psychologists; two were psychiatrists.

The Psychopathology of Shrinks

By Alexander Cockburn in CounterPunch. While we do not agree about Paris Hilton (the use of a bogus psychiatric diagnosis to avoid personal responsibility is reprehensible) the ironies of the impact of Tony Soprano and the misuse of psychoanalytic procedures should not be passed up

Summer’s hot breath draws closer and the psychoanalysts of New York and Boston prepare their patients for the difficult two or three weeks of holiday separation. Traditionally, many Boston shrinks take their seaside weeks on Cape Cod, around Truro, sunning and gossiping while their patients muster on their beach towels a few hundred yards away. The touching scene is duplicated further south around the Hamptons on Long Island.

Undoubtedly beach chat among both analysts and analysands will ripple over the June excitements of the psychoanalytic trade, starting with the gallant efforts of Paris Hilton’s psychiatrist, Dr Charles Sophy, to engineer what her costly but incompetent lawyers failed to do, namely spring her from L.A. County Jail where – given the triviality of her offenses - she is grotesquely pent. But of course the prime topic will surely be the end of the Soprano series which, across the past eight years, courtesy of Lorraine Bracco's Jennifer Melfi – Tony Soprano’s analyst -- has been the biggest boost to the shrink business since Lee J. Cobb starred in The Three Faces of Eve.

Truly comical has been the solemnity with which psychoanalysts across the United States have been deploring the “breach of professional ethics” at a shrinks’ dinner party in one of the concluding Soprano episodes in which the identity of Dr Melfi’s patient as Mobster Tony was disclosed. The rare moments when shrinks aren’t seducing their female patients (70 per cent, in an informal New York survey some years ago) are usually consumed by such indiscretions, a tradition stretching all the way back to the notoriety of the patients trotting up the stairs of Bergasse 19, Freud’s chambers in Vienna.

It’s true that some psychoanalysts were indignant at the way Melfi, chided by her colleagues for enabling a sociopath, promptly dumped the Mafia boss as a patient, the climax of a process identified back in 1999 in the British Medical Journal by Dr Tony David as the collision of “the superego of Melfi’s civilised values and the intellect… with the murky id that is Soprano’s stock in trade.” “The strict ethical principles established by the American Psychological Association”, wrote one APA member furiously, “do not allow for the arbitrary dismissal of a client even if they are sociopathic in nature (unless there is danger to the therapist).”

It so happens that these same “strict ethical principles” of the APA have been the topic of unsparing rebuke which probably won’t be cited much on those holiday beaches. A recent report by the Pentagon’s Inspector General confirms what has been detailed in a number of news stories since 2005 concerning the starring role played by American psychologists and psychoanalysts in devising and supervising torture techniques as administered by the U.S. military in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other secret interrogation centers run by the CIA.

These techniques -- as has been recently described here by Stephen Soldz have been “reverse-engineered” from the Pentagon’s SERE (“Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape”) program in which US military and intelligence personnel are taught how to withstand harsh interrogation. Psychologists have always been central to this enterprise and are now similarly central to the use of sleep deprivation, sexual and cultural humiliation and waterboarding in grilling America’s enemies. “Reverse-engineered” simply means the Pentagon is using the techniques to torture suspected terrorists.

In 2002 the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that “interrogation methods used were no longer effective in obtaining useful information from some detainees” and, as the Inspector General’s report details, “recommended that the Federal Bureau of Investigation Behavioral Science Unit, the Army's Behavioral Science Consultation Team, the Southern Command Psychological Operations Support Element, and the JTF-170 clinical psychologist develop a plan to exploit detainee vulnerabilities.” The use of dogs, sexual humiliation, and kindred tortures were only a couple of months away.

Amid furious protests from such APA members as Soldz and others the APA leadership has piously maintained that "psychologists have a critical role in keeping interrogations safe, legal, ethical and effective." The Pentagon Inspector General’s Report make clear this claim is ludicrous. So here we have shrinks refining Tony Soprano’s brutish violence, draping his id with the national flag. The August meeting of the APA’s “Council of Representatives” will be stormy as the members vote on a motion introduced by Neil Altman urging "A moratorium on psychologist involvement in interrogations at US detention centers for foreign detainees.”

Antidepressant lawsuit to test Texas Law

As seen on KHOU , the report includes a video

By the time Kayla Beltran turned 18, family members say she was dealing with emotions not uncommon among those in her age group.

“The hormones begin raging. You just fascinate between highs and lows. Typical for most teenagers,” says Kayla’s father, Ray.

But when the highs became higher and the lows lower, a doctor placed Kayla on Lexapro.

The number one prescribed anti depressant of it’s kind.

Six weeks later…six months after he 18th birthday Kayla hung herself.

Documenting her final act on earth, with her cell phone camera.

Kayla’s father contends that what was supposed to give his daughter the power to enjoy life led her to end it.

He plans to sue. “I knew my daughter. She wouldn’t have done this. The medication has everything to do with it.”

For some time now, the makers of Lexapro have warned that children and adolescents taking the drug may have increased thoughts of suicide.

Although the FDA recently came out and said that warning should be extended to include 18 to 24-year-olds, this is not an open and shut case, thanks in large part to a Texas law from 2003.

Tort reform, essentially limiting your ability to sue a drug maker because of inadequate warnings.

Although it was sold as a way of weeding out frivolous lawsuits.

“It’s not about kicking out lawsuits that don’t belong in the system. It’s about protecting the pocketbooks of corporations as is evidenced by this case. You can’t get more serious than death,” said attorney Denman Heard.

Experts say this is a potentially landmark case, that could not only have implications for the thousands of Texas who take anti-depressants but for those who take any kind of prescription medication at all.

The maker of Lexapro is Forest Pharmaceuticals.

NATO raids Karadzic family homes

From UPI reports

NATO troops raided the homes of two children of suspected Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic on Tuesday.

NATO spokesman Derek Chappell said around 3 a.m., troops acted on a tip that Sonja and Sasha Karadzic were allegedly involved in an organized network to help their father avoid capture.

The houses are in the town of Pale, 10 miles east of Sarajevo, from where Karadzic, a psychiatrist, was the political leader of Bosnian Serbs who laid siege to Sarajevo and slaughtered thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Yugoslav war.

Chappell said no arrests were made but Karadzic's children were being questioned.

"We have been (to the houses) before and we'll come back again and again as the evidence suggests they are involved in this network," he said.

Karadzic and his military counterpart, Gen. Ratko Mladic, are wanted on war crimes and genocide charges by the U.N. Yugoslav tribunal in The Hague.

CIA thought Cameron's techniques could be useful in the Cold War

From the Montreal Gazette

Ewen Cameron, the man behind the brainwashing experiments, was a Scottish-born psychiatrist who worked at the Royal Victoria Hospital and McGill's Allan Memorial Institute.

From 1950 to 1965 he subjected hundreds of patients at the Allan Memorial to unorthodox treatment involving LSD, huge doses of electroshock, drug-induced comas and tapes that they sometimes listened to for weeks at time. One woman received the treatment through most of her pregnancy.

Funding came from the Canadian government and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as part of a project called MK-ULTRA. In that Cold War era, the spy agency thought these techniques might be useful against the Soviet Union - perhaps LSD could be used as a truth serum, brainwashing drug or incapacitating agent, given to prisoners or foreign leaders like Cuba's Fidel Castro.

In the late 1980s, the CIA made an out-of-court settlement with a handful of victims. In 1994, 77 of the patients who received the most severe treatment were given $100,000 each in compensation from the federal government but 254 had their claims rejected.

An appeal court gave one of them $100,000 in 2004.

Cameron died in 1967.

Pharmaceutical corporations accused of Genocide before ICC in The Hague

This is not directly to psychiatry, but ties into the related businesses. As seen in this report:

June 14, 2003 - The Hague

Pharmaceutical corporations and individual executives have been accused of genocide and crimes of war before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The charges, which also involve accusations of war crimes against US President George W. Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and other top political figures, are contained in a detailed complaint filed with the ICC by Dr. Mathias Rath.

Pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Amgen and Astra Zeneca are accused of deliberately preventing life-saving natural alternatives to drug based treatments from being applied in prevention and cure. A worldwide disinformation campaign undertaken by these companies is said to have caused the death of millions of people. Their role in getting both Bush and Blair into power and in determining the policies of their respective administrations with respect to the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is cited as evidence for a case made for violation of Human Rights.

Financial interests behind misdirected health policies world wide and behind the drive for war are also named in the complaint, filed by Rath and others during a two-day Conference in The Hague on 14 and 15 June.

....

This ties in well with this report from a couple months back, as well as this report from earlier this year on diseases invented for profit. Note that these are all big players in the medical drug market.