Psychiatrists and psychologists have long history of work with the CIA

A new report reveals that the American Psychological Association(APA) collaborated in secret with the G.W. Bush administration to help support the legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners in the war on terror after the 9/11 attacks.

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The report discussed in a New York Times article shows the APA secretly supported and cooperated with the G.W. Bush administration to provide both legal and ethical justification for torture of prisoners captured in the war on terror initiated after the 9/11 attacks.

The report uses newly disclosed emails that it argues show that the group acted to keep psychologists involved in the interrogation program just when the Bush administration was trying to salvage the program after the release back in 2004 of photos showing extensive abuse of prisoners by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The use of psychologists and psychiatrists by the military has a long history often involving association with universities as well.

A military staff study in May of 1951 recommended that “a major contract be awarded to a recognized educational institution to provide for the formation of an Army Human Resources Research Office, which would have primary responsibility for conducting research in the areas of training methods, motivation and morale, and psychological warfare” (Department of the Army, 1951). A contract was signed with George Washington University on July 31, 1951 with Dr. Meredith Crawford assuming the directorship of HumRRO or the Army's Human Resources Research Organization. As the Wikipedia entry on the APA notes: A year after the establishment of Human Resource Research Organization by the U.S. military, CIA began funding numerous psychologists (and other scientists) in the development of psychological warfare methods under the supervision of APA treasurer Meredith Crawford. Donald O. Hebb, the APA president in 1960 who was awarded the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1961, defended the torture of research subjects, arguing that what was being studied was other nations' methods of brainwashing.

Not only psychologists were recruited by the CIA but eminent psychiatrists as well. The Project MKUltra was the code name of what is often described as the CIA mind control program. The program consisted of experiments on human subjects sometimes without their knowledge or consent. It was developed by the CIA and was intended to develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations in order to obtain confessions through mind control. The program was quite extensive:The scope of Project MKUltra was broad, with research undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies.[10] The CIA operated through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA's involvement.

One participant in the program was Dr. Ewen Cameron: Donald Ewen Cameron (24 December 1901 – 8 September 1967) ...was a Scottish-born psychiatrist who served as President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, American (1952–1953) and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry during the 1950s. Notwithstanding his high professional reputation, he has been criticized for his administration, without informed consent, of disproportionately-intense electroshock therapy and experimental drugs, including LSD, which rendered some patients permanently comatose. Some of this work took place in the context of the MKUltra mind control program.

Note the high positions Cameron held. Cameron's work was in part based upon the ideas of Donald Hebb, the former head of the APA who defended torture of prisoners. Alfred McCoy writes:"Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron's experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method," which refers to first creating a state of disorientation in the subject, and then second creating a situation of "self-inflicted" discomfort in which the disoriented subject can alleviate their pain by capitulating.[48]

The authors of the new report conclude that the APA secretly worked with the CIA, the White House, and the Department of Defense to create an APA ethics policy on national security organizations which fit in with the legal guidance, then classified, that authorized the CIA torture program. The APA has since changed its policy after many of its own members and others were critical of what was going on.

Joe Darby's Ordeal: Whistleblower of Abu Ghraib

It seems hard to believe that Rumsfeld was unaware of the consequences of blowing Darby's cover. Of course nothing at all happened to Rumsfeld on that account. What is heartening about this story is that many of hiw own unit actually shook his hand after learning of what he did. There will always be those whose attitude is: My country right or wrong. They will consider any attempt to reveal wrongdoing my soldiers as unpatriotic.


Abu Ghraib whistleblower's ordeal
By Dawn Bryan
Producer, BBC Radio 4's The Choice


The US soldier who exposed the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison found himself a marked man after his anonymity was blown in the most astonishing way by Donald Rumsfeld.

Joe Darby was commended by the military for his actions

When Joe Darby saw the horrific photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison he was stunned.

So stunned that he walked out into the hot Baghdad night and smoked half a dozen cigarettes and agonised over what he should do.

Joe Darby was a reserve soldier with US forces at Abu Ghraib prison when he stumbled across those images which would eventually shock the world in 2004.

They were photographs of his colleagues, some of them men and women he had known since high school - torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners.

His decision to hand them over rather than keep quiet changed his life forever.

The military policeman has only been allowed to talk about that struggle very recently, and in his first UK interview, for BBC Radio 4's The Choice, he told Michael Buerk how he made that decision and how he fears for the safety of his family.

Photos of abuse

He had been in Iraq for seven months when he was first handed the photographs on a CD. It was lent to him by a colleague, Charles Graner.


I knew that some people wouldn't agree with what I did... They view it as - I put American soldiers in prison over Iraqis

Joe Darby

Most of the disc contained general shots around Hilla and Baghdad, but also those infamous photos of abuse.

At first he did not quite believe what he was looking at.

"The first picture I saw, I laughed - because one, it's just a pyramid of naked people - I didn't know it was Iraqi prisoners," he says.

"Because I have seen soldiers do some really stupid things. As I got into the photos more I realised what they were.

"There were photos of Graner beating three prisoners in a group. There was a picture of a naked male Iraqi standing with a bag over his head, holding the head, the sandbagged head of a male Iraqi kneeling between his legs.

"The most pronounced woman in the photographs was Lynndie England, and she was leading prisoners around on a leash. She was giving a thumbs-up and standing behind the pyramid, you know with the thumbs-up, standing next to Graner. Posing with one of the Iraqi prisoners who had died."

Promised anonymity

Joe Darby knew what he saw was wrong, but it took him three weeks to decide to hand those photographs in. When he finally did, he was promised anonymity and hoped he would hear no more about it.


Mr Darby feared repercussions from the soldiers in the photos

But he was scared of the repercussions from the accused soldiers in the photos.

"I was afraid for retribution not only from them, but from other soldiers," he says.

"At night when I would sleep, they were less than 100 yards from me, and I didn't even have a door on the room I slept in.

"I had a raincoat hanging up for a door. Like I said to my room mate, they could reach their hand in the door - because I slept right by the door - and cut my throat without making a noise, or anybody knowing what was going on, and I was scared of that."

When the accused soldiers were finally removed from the base, he thought his troubles were over.

And then he was sitting in a crowded Iraqi canteen with hundreds of soldiers and Donald Rumsfeld came on the television to thank Joe Darby by name for handing in the photographs.

"I don't think it was an accident because those things are pretty much scripted," Mr Darby says.

"But I did receive a letter from him which said he had no malicious intent, he was only doing it to praise me and he had no idea about my anonymity.

"I really find it hard to believe that the secretary of defence of the United States has no idea about the star witness for a criminal case being anonymous."

Rather than turn on him for betraying colleagues, most of the soldiers in his unit shook his hand. It was at home where the real trouble started.

Labelled a traitor

His wife had no idea that Mr Darby had handed in those photos, but when he was named, she had to flee to her sister's house which was then vandalised with graffiti. Many in his home town called him a traitor.

"I knew that some people wouldn't agree with what I did," he says.

"You have some people who don't view it as right and wrong. They view it as: I put American soldiers in prison over Iraqis."

That animosity in his home town has meant that he still cannot return there.

After Donald Rumsfeld blew his cover, he was bundled out of Iraq very quickly and lived under armed protection for the first six months.

He has since left the army but did testify at the trials of some of those accused of abuse and torture. It is Charles Graner he is most afraid of.

"Seeing Graner across the courtroom was the only one that was difficult during the trial," he says.

"He had a stone-cold stare of hatred the entire time - he wouldn't take his eyes off me the whole time he sat there. I think this is a grudge he will hold till the day he gets out of prison."

Mr Darby and his family have moved to a new town. They have new jobs. They have done everything but change their identities.

But he does not see himself as a hero, or a traitor. Just "a soldier who did his job - no more, no less".

"I've never regretted for one second what I did when I was in Iraq, to turn those pictures in," he says.