Science in Dachau's shadow: HEBB, Beecher, and the development of CIA psychological torture and modern medical ethics

In August 2006, the U.S. Army’s surgeon general, General Kevin Kiley, appeared before the national convention of the American Psychological Association (APA) dressed in full combat uniform to defend the participation of psychologists in interrogation. “Psychology,” he declared, invoking a military maxim that many present may have found unsettling, “is an important weapons system” (Levine, 2007; Lewis, 2004). For over half a century, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, psychology has served the U.S. intelligence community as a secret weapon in wars against its ideological enemies, first communism and now Islamic fundamentalism. From the start of the Cold War, the U.S. intelligence community has lavished rewards on the psychology profession, both generous funding for experimental researchers and employment for clinical specialists, producing a variant of what psychiatrist Robert Lifton has called a “Faustian bargain.” In this case, the price paid has been the APA’s collective silence, ethical “numbing,” and over time, historical amnesia (Lifton, 1986, pp. 418–419). Illustrative of this latter phenomenon, only months after General Kiley’s extraordinary address to the APA, the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences published a discussion by two psychologists that, instead of debating these ethical issues or probing this troubled past, engaged in a collective attack on a study that tried to break this silence over the CIA’s patronage of cognitive science—my recent book, A Question of Torture. In a disjointed 15-page critique, the psychologist Richard Brown accused me, incorrectly, of fabricating text to lend credibility to his catalogue of my supposed scholarly derelictions.1 Moreover, in defending Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 43(4), 401–417 Fall 2007 Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20271 © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.