Scientists Claim CIA Misused Work on Sleep Deprivation

[sabra]

Source: Yahoo News/TIME

German and French researchers whose work has been cited by the CIA and the Justice Department to help justify the legality of harsh interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, condemned the Bush Administration on Tuesday for misusing their scientific findings.

"It is total nonsense to cite our study in this context," said Dr. Bernd Kundermann, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Marburg.

"I'm disappointed, upset, consternated and even hurt at seeing this," said Dr. S. Hakki Onen, a sleep specialist and geriatrician with the HÔpital GÉriatrique A. Charial, part of the Hospices Civils de Lyon in France. "To see (the research) used in this manner is upsetting because (the CIA's) goals run counter to the therapeutic intent of our effort ... In publishing clinical findings like this, you're aware you lose control of them, because they can be read and even abused by people who may have other objectives in mind."

Kundermann and Onen are the second and third European sleep scientists to speak out this week against the CIA's use of published academic literature on sleep deprivation. On Monday, James Horne, a British researcher who was also cited by CIA medical experts in recently declassified memos, called the agency's medical reasoning "nonsense."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599189289700

[rcrush]

1. I would think the CIA already learned all about sleep deprivation

From their MKULTRA experiments in the 50's.

[NC_Nurse]

2. Among other things. They twisted and edited every scientific study to justify

their goals. The Bush Admin motto was "the end justifies the means" on every thing they touched.

[wroberts189]

3. k anna r

[Mnemosyne]

4. KnR. n/t

[merh]

5. When will the AMA call for investigations into those physicians

that took part in the torture and abuse?

K&R

[Igel]

6. It's a question.

Because if they do, they're admitting that they believe in the absence of the physicians' assistance the "enhanced interrogation techniques" wouldn't have been used, that non-participation would have been a hindrance. This means the interrogators weren't simply into abuse for the sake of abuse, i.e., they weren't heartless bastards. This means that the doctors actually bear some moral or ethical culpability in a meaningful sense.

This is at odds with the deep desire to believe the worst about the enemy. Most of the things the physicians did were to mitigate the trauma or declare when the parameters for application of the techniques were exceeded.

To say that they are responsible and therefore can be investigated when it didn't matter one way of the other would be to say that the physicians' presence there was meaningless. They were guilty of being there--possibly being forced to be there, possibly voluntarily--but their absence would have been meaningless. Most people don't have the heart to punish those who are merely weak and who committed no crimes themselves, but simply abetted others' doing it. Esp. when the others aren't sitting behind the defendants' table, and won't be.

Moreover, this raises the question of why they were there. People who would voluntarily watch absue tend not to become physicians--that would describe some doctors I know, but their main gig is research and teachers. Nobody's claimed research of any kind was involved in this, so we can rule that out. If they were there because they had no choice, the investigation goes nowhere, and serves to blacken the name of doctors whose "crime" was weakness.

This leaves the possibility that the doctors involved were simply sadistic bastards, and I don't know of anybody who's claimed this. Were it to be the case, it would be a black eye to the AMA--who wants to admit that they licensed doctors who enjoy torturing for its own sake?