Alfred McCoy, Hebb, the CIA and torture.

The publication of Alfred McCoy’s (2006) book A Question of Torture implicated Hebb in CIA-funded research on brainwashing. Chapter 2 of McCoy’s book, “Mind Control,” examines how Hebb’s research was drawn into the web of the CIA. Although McCoy did a prodigious amount of research for his book—15 years in the writing—he, like many others, seems to have confused the work of Hebb with that of Ewen Cameron and others who were involved in the CIA’s mind-control research. McCoy points out that the CIA funded research in experimental psychology through the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Bureau of Social Science Research, and the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, “one of the agency’s main fronts for mind control research” (McCoy, 2006, p. 43). Thus, many prominent psychologists in the 1950s who received research funds from these and other agencies were, directly or indirectly, and mostly unknowingly, funded by the CIA. At some date, the CIA “identified three key behavioral components integral to its emerging techniques for psychological torture” according to McCoy (2006, p. 32). The work of Albert Biederman at the Bureau of Social Science Research in Washington, D.C., Irving Janis (Yale University), Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle (at Cornell Medical College in New York) on “the role of self-inflicted pain in Communist interrogation”; the work of Stanley Milgram at Yale University showing that “almost any individual is capable of torture,” and the work of Donald O. Hebb at McGill showing “the devastating impact of sensory deprivation.” The problem is that we do not know what date the CIA identified this research and how much the CIA was involved in the research of these psychologists. McCoy (2006) then makes the following statement: “In silent, sadly eloquent testimony to the corrupting influence of this research, it is ironic that Hebb, an ethical and erudite scholar, should be best remembered today for work that made him, in effect, the progenitor of psychological torture” (p. 33). How could McCoy come to this conclusion? In order to answer this, I have examined the statements made by McCoy and many of the archives, memoirs, records, and books relevant to Hebb’s research that were available to McCoy. Based on my (incomplete) research, I found the following problems with McCoy’s treatment of Hebb’s research.