Let's Just Move On......

Collective Unconscionable

How psychologists, the most liberal of professionals,
abetted Bush’s torture policy.

By Arthur Levine

The Washington Monthly, January/February 2007

www.washingtonmonthly.com

Psychology has long had ties to the military and the government. Indeed, the armed forces may have played a larger role than any other institution in establishing psychology as a technical and scientific profession. During World War I, psychologists were placed in charge of aptitude tests given to soldiers—a task they again carried out in World War II, by which time they had been thoroughly integrated into the military structure. By the 1950s, they were helping to conduct Cold War studies on interrogation that included experiments with sensory deprivation and hallucinogens meant to serve as “truth serum” (LSD, for example)—and developed techniques used by the CIA to torture prisoners in Latin America in the 1980s.