Thursday, December 12, 2013

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: KIPP Guru Seligman helped develop GITMO interrogation techniques

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: KIPP Guru Seligman helped develop GITMO interrogation techniques:

KIPP Guru Seligman helped develop GITMO interrogation techniques

Thanks to reader Dienne (see comment below) for pointing out the role played by KIPP guru Seligman in developing interrogation techniques used on the prisoners at Guantanamo. While Seligman denies working for the SERE Program or directly for the CIA (he was granted a $31-million no-bid Army contract to provide “resilience training” to US soldiers), his own experiments, using electric shocks on caged dogs, heavily influenced the Bush Administration's use of torture techniques.

First read this from the Times story on KIPP:
Toll and Levin are influenced by the writings of a psychology professor from the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman, the author of a series of books about positive psychology. Seligman, one of the first modern psychologists to study happiness, promotes a technique he calls learned optimism, and Toll and Levin consider it an essential part of the attitude they are trying to instill in their students. Last year, a graduate student of Seligman’s named Angela Duckworth published with Seligman a research paper that