SocraticGadfly: Profile: The psychologist authors of U.S. torture

August 12, 2009

Profile: The psychologist authors of U.S. torture

The New York Times has an excellent article on career military psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the pair who reverse-engineered Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, eventually leading to waterboarding and other torture.

At the peak of their work, the pair was getting $2K/day, each from the CIA. And, doing things like chatting up and down Martin Seligman, the psychologist who discovered and researched the concept of “learned helplessness,” without telling him WHY they wanted to pick his brain.

And, given how Seligman was ripping off the Army little over a year after the NYT piece was written, with positive psychology "spirituality" being hustled as the solution to PTSD, I doubt he was as upset about learning the truth about Mitchell and Jessen as portrayed in the piece. That's if he didn't know more of the truth in the first place.

No comments: