Tortures

Bodies of evidence: psychologists and the CIA torture scandal

In the summer of 1975, in the weeks before President Gerald Ford dodged the first of two assassination attempts, the Rockefeller Commission issued a report into the Central Intelligence Agency’s illegal surveillance of home-grown subversives. Prompted by The New York Times’ reporting of the agency’s involvement in opening the mail and tapping the phones of anti-Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists, the 300-page report uncovered little new information. However, it did find something equally worrying: a paper trail cataloguing the large number of American psychologists whose research had been secretly funded by the CIA.