Members of the American Psychological Association, including the person in charge of ethics, have been exposed colluding with the CIA to develop new methods of torture. What does it mean for us as a society when doctors put serving the state above healing patients?
Members of the American Psychological Association, including the person in charge of ethics, have been exposed colluding with the CIA to develop new methods of torture. What does it mean for us as a society when doctors put serving the state above healing patients?
Members of the American Psychological Association, including the person in charge of ethics, have been exposed colluding with the CIA to develop new methods of torture. What does it mean for us as a society when doctors put serving the state above healing patients?
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams and it's good to see you Daniel.
Good morning Dr. Paul.
Good.
I'd like to visit with you a little bit about a subject which is a very important subject but sometimes people forget about it and that has to do with the corrupt ethical standards that occurred under the Bush administration and the condoning of a torture program.
And getting to the bottom of this has been difficult.
There was one Senate report that came out and they redacted a lot but the one conclusion they came to there didn't do any good.
But then James Risen wrote a book at any price, pay any price, and he talks about this subject and he's kept this subject alive.
And because of that, the American Psychological Association, which he indicated were probably co-partners with the CIA in carrying out these torture programs, of course, originally it was told, well, that's to protect and make sure they don't go too far and they don't hurt the prisoners.
And it had nothing to do with that.
It was to give them more information on how to torture.
Such evil that we see going on.
So they asked for this special report.
They hired somebody to do it.
It's the American Psychological Association report, which is the group under the gun.
But now this report came out 542 pages.
And I haven't found a lot of good things other than the fact that we are getting some information, but we don't have all the answers yet on this.
But it raises the question, how could this ever become a part of our policy?
And the American people be way too complacent about it.
And not only does it indict members of the American Psychological Association for colluding with the CIA to design particularly horrific torture devices, but it also indicts the head of the APA's ethics office, Stefan Benke, who colluded with the CIA to change the ethics rules within the APA to more accommodate the CIA's torture program.
What a tragedy.
And the two prior presidents of that organization also were involved in being employed by both groups or getting money for contracting with the CIA, and they're running the show.
So to indict everybody in the American Psychological Association would be wrong, but it does raise questions because there was one individual who kept losing the election and he was running on this fact that he was trying to expose what was happening.
But you know, the big question is, how do they rally the troops?
How did these dictators do it?
How did the German people go along with Hitler's rise to power and all?
And it's the same thing.
It's propaganda and fear.
And for 60 years, the issue of torture was held under relatively good wraps.
It was international laws and understanding, probably still went on, but it was nothing like this.
9-11 changed everything.
That means civil liberties no longer mattered.
And it was very easy for the president to use this.
And he said that we have to do this for national security reasons.
We're about to be attacked, and we have to find out this.
And then they put pressure on the medical profession to go along, and the CIA will do this, and they get involved in these torture programs.
This to me is a real tragedy that this has happened, and yet I'm just concerned that it may still be going on.
Well, Dr. Paul, in a previous life, you spent a lot of years as a doctor, and you take an ethics oath, you know, to heal and to do no harm.
This must strike kind of personally at you.
It does, and fortunately, this does not represent most of the doctors and most of the ones I've dealt with, but it's still a serious crime on what is going on.
But, you know, there's a lack of understanding about ethics in medicine from the time of Hippocrates.
The Hippocratic Oath, you know, for instance, said that doctors shouldn't do abortions.
So we quit saying the Hippocratic Oath.
Matter of fact, when I graduated, they weren't saying the Hippocratic Oath.
But they restored the Hippocratic oath about not doing certain things.
They changed the words.
And they said, well, just don't do anything illegal.
So unfortunately, ethics are relative.
And I think this is what's happened.
And if you're doing it for national security purpose, in the money on the side, that's just incidental.
I'm not doing it for the money.
But it's very, very corrupting.
But, you know, when the president decided this and the people were prone to accept the fear and the concern about national security, this period of time of 60 years that we were following these rules, guess what?
It was canceled out by an executive order.
So that's a principle, too, that I think that we should be concerned about, that the president has this much power.
I remember back in the campaigns, one of the things that I think shocked a lot of people that you said is we need to shut down the CIA.
But this doesn't this give an example of how the, it doesn't exonerate, of course, these people who willingly participated, but how the CIA infiltrates our life, infiltrates our values, corrupts people and corrupts their values.
You know, like I mentioned, one individual was running against these presidents that were abusing these ethical principles in the American Psychological Association.
But there were some people on occasion in the CIA.
Some of them we have gotten to be friendly with.
I mean, they're not all of the same pattern.
They don't believe all the same thing.
So there were some people who were starting to speak out.
Matter of fact, there's one individual who spoke out and got into a lot of trouble.
John Kiriaku, you know, the person who exposed torture is the only one who went to jail for it.
Yeah, the people who broke law didn't go to jail.
And he's a father of five.
And he was sentenced to 36 months in prison.
I guess it was two and a half years, 30 months.
And he is out of prison right now.
But he's very adamant.
He said that he would do it all over again.
He felt very strongly about it.
But once again, don't we have laws to protect the whistleblowers?
Not when they threaten the state.
Yeah, that's the problem.
I wonder if, I don't need to wonder.
I imagine that you would agree that Edward Snowden will not be protected by the whistleblower's laws.
He should especially be careful of any offers to come home and we'll work out a deal later.
Yeah, and then you have to guess which side would be the worst, the Republican side or the Democrat side.
So it's too often, if people can be taught to be fearful, they go along with too much and they accept it and they don't see what's going on as people.
But this thing that the Senate, the Senate report, which someday maybe we'll get the full report, said it didn't do any good.
You know, they didn't get any useful information.
And a lot of them were totally innocent.
A lot of them are teenagers and they did not have due process.
And if you say something like that, it's not a very popular thing to say.
It's also very sad as society, as patriotic people like we both are, to see that the doctors, psychologists would put the duty to the state above the duty to their patients.
Doctors Above Patients00:02:39
Yeah, and you know, maybe you could expand that too.
What about the responsibility of an industrialist to not be a lobbyist to build weapons and spend all that time?
And you have to be a fairly efficient, smart person to run a large factory and a manufacturing plant to build fancy, very complicated weapons.
But they spend all their time and their energy doing this.
But they must put blinders on and convince themselves I'm doing the Lord's work.
You know, because if we didn't do this, we'd be attacked tomorrow, which is just not true.
You know, when we've talked about how much more money we spend than everybody else put together.
So that is hardly the case.
And that'll continue to be the same thing.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in.
And this issue of why wasn't this stopped a lot sooner?
Why was it permitted that these doctors and the Psychological Association got together with the CIA and they were responsible for the ethics of those organizations and they colluded with the government and they got money under the table and got contracts.
It's really pretty bad.
But you know, I have spoken on a couple occasions to medical graduates and the important point I made with the graduates, I didn't get into the politics of abortion and euthanasia because they are very inflammatory.
But I did make some explicit statements about what I thought the ethics of doctors should be.
One is that we should be physicians for the protection of life.
And it shouldn't be any more complicated than that.
And certainly it should be for the privacy of the patient.
And today life is looked down upon and the privacy of the patient to practice medicine you're almost forced to turn over all the information to the government.
But I don't think the doctors should participate in doing abortions.
I don't believe they should participate in doing euthanasia.
It's not necessary.
I don't think a doctor should ever participate in experimentation, which they do under some of these torture circumstances.
And even when the purpose is not to torture, in wartime, sometimes these aggressive experiments are performed on prisoners.
And certainly never, never participate in torture.
Never, never participate in carrying out the death penalty.
Why should a physician be trained and say, I'm an expert, I'm going to say, how's the quickest way to kill somebody?
And I'll tell you when he's dead.
Never Participate In Torture00:00:37
They should stay away from that.
And we should also think about why should the medical profession be so entwined with the drug companies.
Too many of them make money on the side because they promote certain things and certain instruments.
I think that's wrong and unethical.
And also, if you truly want to be ethical and have a goal, the preservation in life, they should certainly be against anti-war in particular, very much opposed to preventive war, which is a scam and something that we should never endorse.