I am attending the Social, Behavioral, and Educational Research Conference sponsored by PRIM&R in Boston. They keynote session this morning was by Dr. Scott Brown from Physicians for Human Rights who discussed the US's institution of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques after 9/11. EIT is the post-Rumsfeld/Bush name for what everyone else calls torture.
Dr. Brown discussed whether the information collected during sessions at Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib constitutes research and whether the health professionals involved committed legal or ethical violations. According to the US government, especially the CIA and DOD, they did not, but there is a lot of room for discussion and debate. This extreme example brought into focus a number of issues related to things like the purpose of research, the stances of researchers, and the values embedded in methodology. Most telling were the rationalizations used by health professionals to excuse their complicity--"it's for the greater good," ""I was there to keep it safe," or "what was done was legal."
More on this and other interesting issues as the day goes by.
