A Year After Torture Report, CIA and Its Accomplices Still Free

A year ago the United States Senate published the product of a five-year investigation into the torture tactics employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. One year later, nothing has happened—no one who designed, managed or implemented the torture program has been tried for the crimes they committed. Victims of torture have received no justice, nor have they received any compensation.

But the CIA and other U.S. agencies, including the Department of Defense, did not torture on on their own; they had professional medical advice at their disposal thanks to members of the American Psychological Association. According to a new report from the group Physicians for Human Rights, two U.S. military psychologists were paid nearly US$100 million to compromise their research into the harms of torture to help carry out torture instead. By maintaining that torture was safe and effective, the psychologists helped indemnify the CIA’s methods and provided plausible deniability to those who ordered it.

ANALYSIS: Top 10 Torture Graduates

​“Such a posture is unacceptable in the United States, just as it was unacceptable in Chile under Augusto Pinochet’s rule, Uganda under Idi Amin’s rule, or South Africa under its apartheid governments,” says the report.

One Year After the Senate #Torture Report, No One’s Read It and It Might Be Burried forever. https://t.co/fO2XKDX9yg by @MazMHussain

— Rik Delhaas (@RikDelhaas) December 9, 2015

In October, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, but the case is still pending. Two other Harvard-affiliated psychologists and former directors of the APA were also implicated in a July study that revealed they adjusted the association’s policies to be Pentagon-friendly. The APA-commissioned report also revealed millions of dollars in contracts and grants from the Department of Defense, one of their biggest employers.

IN DEPTH: U.S. Senate Report on CIA Torture

Though the APA updated its policy in 2013 to prohibit participation—in most cases—in interrogation methods that violate the Geneva Convention, the ethics director responsible for drafting the previous torture-friendly guidelines was still employed by the group at the time. Both of the APA’s previous directors have done well for themselves since: one, Gerald Koocher, is still a dean at DePaul University, and the other, Ronald Levant, teaches and directs a clinic at the University of Akron.

While some thought last year’s findings by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence might help bring about prosecutions of intelligence officials, the report was also said to be flawed and incomplete.

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"It was not bipartisan, took too long to write, made little effort to generate public support along the way and produced a declassified version that constituted a tiny portion of the full study," Stanford political scientist Amy Zegart told the Sierra Sun Times. Just 10 percent of the committee’s findings were released to the public.

The Senate “faced extraordinary resistance from the CIA that included spying on the investigation; stonewalling and whittling away what parts of the report would be declassified; and a publicity campaign to discredit the study as soon as it was released," added Zegart.