World Bulletin / News Desk

In a report to the Nation, Lisa Hajjar, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara has said that human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA's torture program and that no one has been eld accountable for the grisly tortures that were detailed in the Senate report on the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program.

Hajjar said in the her report : “[T]he experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques” used by the CIA “is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of the perpetrators.”

The report revealed that the CIA hired two psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen who designed interrogation and detention procedures that they and others would use on people imprisoned in the agency’s secret “black sites” across the globe. Neither of the had the qualifications that are standard for military interrogators, nor did they have specialized knowledge about al-Qaida or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. Hajjar writes that what did have “Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of ‘learned helplessness’ derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies,” Hajjar writes.

At least 38 people were tested in the manner described between April of 2002 and 2008, when the program was officially ended. “[T]he results were methodically documented and analyzed,” Hajjar writes. “That is the textbook definition of human experimentation".