We are extraordinarily fortunate to converse today with psychiatrist and psychohistorical researcher Robert Jay Lifton. His new memoir, written after 60 years of professional life, is an amazingly fascinating and entertaining book. Dr. Lifton speaks in his persona of a gifted, intelligent, and rational observer and thinker, a self-described disciple of the Enlightenment and a humanist approach to understanding.

Jason Leopold has posted an incredible interview with David Hicks, formerly Detainee 002 at Guantanamo. In April 2007, Hicks, an Australian, was released from Guantanamo and sent back to serve nine months in jail in Australia, having been forced to plead guilty to “providing material support to terrorism.” This is his first interview, and Truthout has posted it along with an article by Leopold with more background on Hicks, which includes interviews with some of the guards who watched him.

Headlines were made last week concerning revelations that a key researcher who was part of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis experiment had also headed a 1940s project in Guatemala that deliberately inoculated prisoners and insane asylum inmates with various venereal diseases. But there have been many more examples of U.S. government experimentation on unwitting subjects, including CIA experiments on detainees held in the “war on terror.”

The New York Times’ editorial board has called for the White House and Congress to investigate charges of illegal human experimentation by the CIA and possibly other agencies. Such illegal research is a war crime, and insofar as undertaken by medical professionals, represent a grave breach of medical ethics.

Maxwell-Gunther Dispatch.com, the web news site for personnel and interested partisans of Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, reported on September 17 that Col. (Dr.) James W. Walter has been awarded the Air Medal “for his meritorious service on delicate assignments providing medical care to enemy detainees.”

From January 2007 to 2009 as the senior detainee movement flight surgeon, he provided 106 combat hours of support to the 14 Joint Task

Some stories are more revelatory than others. They expose the truth hidden behind rhetoric and spin.

Such is the nature of a story I stumbled upon some weeks ago, and which I have written up in an investigatory piece at The Public Record. It concerns the incarceration of a U.S. citizen by the military, held without charges for approximately 18 months, and forced after almost a month of 12-19 hour a