Evidence that the US used psychologists in torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees emerged yesterday in a declassified Department of Defence (DoD) report entitled Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse. The report was published by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). "In this report is conclusive evidence from the oversight division of the DoD confirming that psychologists played a central role in the development of the regime of psychological torture used at the US detention facilities at Guantánamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan".
The OIG report confirms previous media reports "that the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program had been "reverse-engineered" to develop the harsh interrogation techniques used in our country's detention facilities housing terrorist suspects".
When these media reports claimed that psychologists had a hand in formulating the torture techniques used, the "leadership of the American Psychological Association (APA) ignored or disparaged them; in each case reiterating the APA policy statement, that "psychologists have a critical role in keeping interrogations safe, legal, ethical and effective".
The same methods used by the US to torture detainees in the war against terror have previously been "described as torture by the United States government in State Department human rights reports for decades".
UPDATE: Dizzy Thinks that torture is amusing and is upset that I do not appreciate his sense of humour.
This horror is what Dizzy Thinks finds amusing.
