An Interrogation Center at Yale? Proposed Pentagon Special Ops Training Facility Sparks Protests (Democracy Now!)

Students and alumni at Yale University are organizing against a proposed campus center to train Special Operations Forces in interview techniques. The center would be funded by a $1.8 million grant from the Pentagon and could open as early as April. Dubbed an "interrogation center" by critics, the facility would be housed at the Yale School of Medicine and led by Charles Morgan, a professor of psychiatry who previously conducted research on how to tell whether Arab and Muslim men are lying.

Democracy Now! speaks to two students at Yale, Alex Lew and Nathalie Batraville, who co-authored an editorial titled, "DoD Plans are Shortsighted, Unethical." Batraville is a graduate student in the French Department at Yale University who helped start a petition against the proposed interview training center for Special Operations forces.

Also interviewed is Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, and a 1990 graduate of the Yale School of Medicine.

"Yale has now crossed a line," Siegel says. "Using the practice of medicine and medical research to help design advanced interrogation techniques, or even just regular civilian intelligence gathering and interviewing techniques, is not an appropriate use of medicine. The practice of medicine was designed to improve people's health. And the school of medicine should not be taken part in either training or research that is primarily designed to enhance military objectives."

Click here to read the complete transcript.

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