US Army psychiatrists may be participating in the interrogation of detainees in the war-on-terror, ignoring recommendations to the contrary from professional medical associations, according to a Penn State bioethicist and a Georgetown University law professor.

"The American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted positions in 2006 that basically said physicians should not be directly involved in any interrogation of any individual," says bioethicist Jonathan Marks. "According to them this is not what physicians should be doing, whether the interrogation is aggressive or not, or legal or not."

Yet documents provided under the US Freedom of Information Act reveal that the Department of Defense still wants physicians to be involved in interrogations and continues to resist the positions taken by the professional medical associations. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine points out that an October 2006 Army document, known as the Behavioral Science Consultation Memo, seeks to undermine the positions of the two associations and tries to carve out a role for psychiatrists advising interrogators on individual interrogations.

The authors contend that the Army is trying to provide rationales to justify the participation of physicians in interrogation. As of October 2007, at least five psychiatrists had undergone training as behavioral science consultants even after the AMA and APA adopted their restrictive policies. One of the techniques they studied was "learned helplessness". This is suspected of being "the paradigm for some of the most aggressive interrogations in the war on terror", say the authors. ~ NEJM, Sept 11