CIA Empowered Its Director to Override Rules on Human Experimentation

    George Tenet, former CIA director, in 2007. (Bebeto Matthews / AP)

A secret document published by The Guardian on Monday reveals that, despite having explicit guidelines against “human experimentation,” the Central Intelligence Agency empowered its director to rule on questions of medical ethics in its post-9/11 torture program.

Spencer Ackerman reports at The Guardian:

Sections of a previously classified CIA document, made public by the Guardian on Monday, empower the agency’s director to “approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research”. The leeway provides the director, who has never in the agency’s history been a medical doctor, with significant influence over limitations the US government sets to preserve safe, humane and ethical procedures on people.

CIA director George Tenet approved abusive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, designed by CIA contractor psychologists. He further instructed the agency’s health personnel to oversee the brutal interrogations – the beginning of years of controversy, still ongoing, about US torture as a violation of medical ethics.

But the revelation of the guidelines has prompted critics of CIA torture to question how the agency could have ever implemented what it calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” – despite apparently having rules against “research on human subjects” without their informed consent.

Read more here, and read the previously classified CIA document below:

‘Human experimentation’ and the CIA

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.