Terrorism and Torture, Oh My!
The United States government paid two military psychologists $80 million to develop torture tactics that were used against suspected terrorists in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
In 2002, two former Air Force psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, became the masterminds of the CIA’s torture program, according to a new report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The two men, identified in the report under the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar, devised and performed torture tactics–including waterboarding and mock burial on some of the CIA’s most significant detainees.
Aside from any human rights considerations about torture, notice the word “psychologists” in the above statement. There were also psychiatrists involved in these affairs, as well as the use of anti-psychotic drugs on detainees. Oh my, but haven’t we been saying all along that psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotropic drugs are all a matter of human rights violations?
Psychiatry is a coercive practice. One can see this intuitively, as no one would voluntarily subject themselves to psychiatric treatment knowing its devastating consequences.
Numerous studies have verified that psychotropic drugs can take over the human mind against the will of the individual. Except in this case, they were possibly being used to manipulate potential terrorists into confessions rather than to create suicide bombers for terrorist organizations.
In 1955, a Soviet manual entitled Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics was translated and distributed as a public warning by a New York professor. The manual was based on the methods of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian psychiatrist who developed “conditioned response” theories through experiments on dogs in the early 1900s. Pavlov’s work laid the groundwork for a fundamental psychiatric misconception that remains to this day: that, like dogs, men are basically programmable animals, influenced only by fear and reward. Pavlov’s experiments established the foundation for much of the inhuman brainwashing techniques used by the Soviet Union and China in the mid-twentieth century; and now used by the United States Central Intelligence Agency in their Detention and Interrogation Program.
The manual revealed, “The early Russian psychiatrists, pioneering this science of psychiatry, understood thoroughly that hypnosis is induced by acute fear. They discovered it could also be induced by shock of an emotional nature, and also by extreme privation, as well as by blows and drugs.”
In 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared psychologists and psychiatrists “capable of doing an immense amount of harm” and that they should be restricted from involvement with armed forces. Apparently no one paid attention.
Now, opportunistic psychologists and psychiatrists push “post-traumatic stress disorder” on victims of war and other devastating events, making money at the expense of their vulnerability.
Citizens, human rights groups, and government officials should work together to ensure governments expose and abolish psychiatry’s hidden manipulation of society.
Click here for more information about Psychiatry and Terrorism.
Click here to download and read the Russian manual of Psychopolitics.
