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Yale University to Train U.S. Special Forces in Interrogation Techniques by Practicing on Immigrants
The Department of Defense and Yale University have partnered up to train U.S. soldiers in the art of interrogation techniques with the local immigrant community acting as test subjects, reports the Yale Daily News.
As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.
The centers primary goal would be to coach U.S. Special Forces on interviewing tactics designed to detect lies. Charles Morgan III, a professor of psychiatry who will head the project, calls these tactics people skills. These techniques would be honed using New Havens immigrant community as subjects. Morgan hopes that by having soldiers practice their newly acquired techniques on someone they cant necessarily identify with (read: someone who is not white), theyll be better prepared to do the real thing abroad.
The authors of the article, Nathalie Batraville and Alex Law, provide many reasons for why this training center is a terrible idea, one of which includes a lack of transparency. Apparently, students didnt learn about the new program until now, just two months before the center opens. As Batraville and Law point out:
There was no conversation with the city about how this might impact its immigrant community. There was no conversation with students and faculty about how it might impact campus culture. And there was no conversation at all about the ethics of a project like this. Its hard to understand where this project came from; the universitys motivations are wholly opaque.
They also argue that Yale could be indirectly involving itself in immoral practices by training soldiers whose skills could be used to, for example, determine whose name is added to President Obamas kill list.
Most importantly, the authors offer some insight into the racist aspect of this program:
Morgans research and, by extension, this proposed center target people of color brown people exclusively. According to a Yale Herald article, Morgan listed Moroccans, Columbians, Nepalese, Ecuadorians and others. Is there an assumption in Morgans desire to use more authentic, brown interviewees as test subjects, that brown people lie differently from whites and even more insidiously, that all brown people must belong to the same category of liar?
How might training on lie detection be perceived if it targeted blacks, or if it aimed to answer the question, How do Jews lie? That Morgans test subjects are compensated does not resolve the ethical questions his project raises. In fact, their participation highlights the structural inequality that this research capitalizes on and that the center would ultimately exploit.
Yale University to Train U.S. Special Forces in Interrogation Techniques by Practicing on Immigrants | Dispatches from the Underclass
The Department of Defense and Yale University have partnered up to train U.S. soldiers in the art of interrogation techniques with the local immigrant community acting as test subjects, reports the Yale Daily News.
As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.
The centers primary goal would be to coach U.S. Special Forces on interviewing tactics designed to detect lies. Charles Morgan III, a professor of psychiatry who will head the project, calls these tactics people skills. These techniques would be honed using New Havens immigrant community as subjects. Morgan hopes that by having soldiers practice their newly acquired techniques on someone they cant necessarily identify with (read: someone who is not white), theyll be better prepared to do the real thing abroad.
The authors of the article, Nathalie Batraville and Alex Law, provide many reasons for why this training center is a terrible idea, one of which includes a lack of transparency. Apparently, students didnt learn about the new program until now, just two months before the center opens. As Batraville and Law point out:
There was no conversation with the city about how this might impact its immigrant community. There was no conversation with students and faculty about how it might impact campus culture. And there was no conversation at all about the ethics of a project like this. Its hard to understand where this project came from; the universitys motivations are wholly opaque.
They also argue that Yale could be indirectly involving itself in immoral practices by training soldiers whose skills could be used to, for example, determine whose name is added to President Obamas kill list.
Most importantly, the authors offer some insight into the racist aspect of this program:
Morgans research and, by extension, this proposed center target people of color brown people exclusively. According to a Yale Herald article, Morgan listed Moroccans, Columbians, Nepalese, Ecuadorians and others. Is there an assumption in Morgans desire to use more authentic, brown interviewees as test subjects, that brown people lie differently from whites and even more insidiously, that all brown people must belong to the same category of liar?
How might training on lie detection be perceived if it targeted blacks, or if it aimed to answer the question, How do Jews lie? That Morgans test subjects are compensated does not resolve the ethical questions his project raises. In fact, their participation highlights the structural inequality that this research capitalizes on and that the center would ultimately exploit.
Yale University to Train U.S. Special Forces in Interrogation Techniques by Practicing on Immigrants | Dispatches from the Underclass
