American Psychological Association Participating in Military Interrogations

June 16th, 2006 at 22:17 Björn Hallberg

Another fine example of how academia seems joined at the hip to US tyranny. Members of the American Psychological Association have reportedly been active in the shaping of and participating in the interrogation of the prisoners of America’s “war on terror.”

Last week, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon would try to use only psychologists, and not psychiatrists, to help in interrogations. Why? Because the American Psychiatric Association recently adopted a new policy discouraging its members from participating in military interrogations. As did the American Medical Association. But their counterpart, the American Psychological Association has not.

The assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder, told the Times that the new policy favoring the use of psychologists over psychiatrists was a recognition of the differing positions taken by their respective groups.

It does reek a bit of the 1930s and overly collaborative academia, doesn’t it. Then again, it’s not easy doing the right thing when your university pay check indirectly comes from the DOD. The blending of military interests and academic life is now so far gone that the damage may be irreversable, barring a total reclamation of universities and a dismantling of the military budget. Crap, I almost called it denazification. Oh well. But it may still come to that.

Entry 572 filed under: Social Science. This entry was posted 2 years, 5 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.