Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

After a recent talk in London by Steven and Hillary Rose on Globalisation, biotechnology and democracy, someone from the LSE audience asked would not the democratisation of sicence lead to its politicization. Hillary Rose’s reply was rather brief; something to the effect: ”Implicit in your question is the assumption that science at the moment is not politicized”.

Scientists generally assume themselves to be working in a singularly apolotical context. Rarely does a scientist reflect on the possible uses that his research is being put into. There are others however who have willingly put science at the service of the state for the most nefarious of ends. Vanity Fair, has just published an exclusive report by Katherine Eban, which reveals how psychologists have collaborated with the US state to devise more effective ways of torture.

America’s coercive interrogation methods were reverse-engineered by two C.I.A. psychologists who had spent their careers training U.S. soldiers to endure Communist-style torture techniques. The spread of these tactics was fueled by a myth about a critical “black site” operation.

Democracy Now has covered the issue in depth in three different shows. Here is from the latest:

Vanity Fair reporter Katherine Eban unravels the central role of two CIA-contracted psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in designing torture tactics for use on detainees held in secret CIA prisons around the world. Both worked in a classified military training program known as sere—for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—which trains soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands. Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on sere trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror. The C.I.A. put them in charge of training interrogators in the brutal techniques, including “waterboarding,” at its network of “black sites.”