The American Pyschotic Association and the Artichoke Hold

So, I'm readin' this rather amazing, disheartening tale from Jeff Kaye, 'bout APA bitch Brandon flouncing around the Obama administration. This woman organized the infamous APA/RAND/CIA/DoD/ head crunch in July ought three, where the melding minds conjured a regime of interrogation in the nu State of National Security, post niner-eleven.

"sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors," including the use of "pharmacological agents. "How might we," the workshop asked, "overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?"

Turns out, these ponderous ponderers pondered, with an unseemly glee, an interrogation regime that is pretty much exactly what Operation Artichoke had goin' on back in the heyday of sis op MK/ULTRA fifty freakin' years ago. So, Artichoke never really went away, as has been long suspected.

Anyway, this Brandon bag, who "helped steer much of the association's scientific outreach relevant to counter-terrorism after 9/11," is knee deep in both the pontifications and their facilitation, doing so while sculling around an amazing variety of administration/congressional subcommittees, engeeohs, and DoD teat-suckling corporations.

• SBES, Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council's Committees on Science and Homeland and National Security
• CIFA, DoD Counterintelligence Field Activity group, [thence to]
• DCHC, DIA's Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center
• Mitre Corporation, Behavioral and Social Science Principal
• US Air Defense, "highly linked" via Mitre
  
• APA, Senior Scientist
• OSTP, Office of Science & Technology Policy, White House
  
• PENS, APA's Psychological Ethics and National Security taskforce
• Also sports or has sported some ties to JSOC and the NSC's Office of Combating Terrorism" (OCT)

Busy woman.

So, we know now that the APA was, and still is, butter side down with the CIA on the whole torture question. Great work.

But some recent APA behaviour ought to give pause and wonder as to who the real inmates should be. After boasting of the gwot smackdown imagineering exercise, the APA has since grown shy of its once bold admission.

Sometime in the past six months, the APA eliminated all references to the webpage described above, even going so far as to eliminate linked references to it on other webpages on its site. While the webpage that described the workshops has been scrubbed, mirrored images of the site remain available at well-known web archive sites, as I described in a recent article on this attempt to rewrite or hide APA's offensive history. In one sense, this attempt to hide its history is not surprising, because the kind of activities discussed in these workshops are exactly like those that involved CIA and military mind control torture programs going back fifty years or more, and evidently still operational today.

Now that's some psychotic behaviour there, and diligently so. These APA dinks clearly have some issues. Seeing that, what a laugh this turns out to be: "Psychology as a profession is at a crossroads."

At a crossroads? Dude, your "psychology" outta be in a fuckin' straight jacket.

By the end, Kaye has laid the whole thing bare, Brandon ought to be expunged. Or so his outrage would suggest. Kaye goes off kilter a bit when he asks (it doesn't appear rhetorical),"Why is the Obama Administration Still Involved in Torture?"

Well, for one, because they said they would be. Seems pretty straight forward. Of course Obama has "manifestly broken his promise to the American people to end torture and close all secret prisons." To borrow, once again, Kunstler's always useful phrase, "psychology of previous investment." It's the same reason we go to war rather than stop driving all over the goddamned place.