Doctors of the Dark Side

A must see for all psychologists
Martha Davis' film is called _Doctors of the Dark Side_ but _Psychologists of the Dark Side_ (if it were not so much less catchy) would be a title more representative of where the film's outrage is most passionately directed. The film indicts the role of all health professionals who participated in the "interrogations" at Guantanamo, CIA blacksites, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, but it has a special place in its heart for psychologists, who were (and still are) the most professionally complicit with the post 9/11 U.S. torture regime.

The film also upsets the current gradient of what is called the "torture debate" where human rights activists decry torture as being wrong first, ineffective second, while torture-supporters play up the hypothetical ticking bomb scenario as an obvious justifier of torture under some circumstances, thus making absolute prohibitions against torture seem authoritarian, closed-minded and potentially disastrous to innocent life and limb. Torture...

A must-see for who value basic human rights
Through a combination of original footage and filmed re-enactments of key practices, Doctors of the Dark Side, graphically exposes the collusion and participation of US health care professionals in the torture of prisoners held without trial and who have not been charged with any crime. One leaves the theatre after watching this documentary with an understanding of how devastating this has been to the victims, to the perpetrators, and to any claims that the U.S. might make now, or in the future, that it pays more than lip service to the protection of human rights.

I'm not aware of any more egregious institutionalized violation of the Hippocratic oath ("Do no harm") by any organization representing health care professionals since the Nazi-era German medical association turned a blind eye to physician participation in the torture and experimentation of Jews and Roma in the 1930s and 1940s and the (mis-)use of psychiatry in the Soviet Union to stifle political dissent...

A TOUR-DE-FORCE...
During the course of the past year, DOCTORS OF THE DARK SIDE has been screening at medical and law schools, community centers and colleges, and featured at professional conventions including the International Congress of Psychology. It was also an Official Selection at the United Nations Association Film Festival in late 2012. I was lucky enough to have attended one of university screenings, the result of which is a heightened awareness and understanding of the dynamics of our society and how we decide protect it.

Doctors of the Dark Side is at the heart of the roaring ZERO DARK THIRTY debate about how torture is portrayed in film, and how we as a society perceive it. The torture of detainees in US custody has been in the news for many years, but there is little media attention to the doctors and psychologists who made/make the torture program possible. The CIA and Department of Defense continue to use health professionals in ways that violate centuries of good health care...

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