Scotland's Mengele

The National on a film about CIA torturer Ewen Cameron -

Indeed, the film takes its title - Eminent Monsters - from that chilling nickname given to Cameron and those like him.  All were psychiatrists and psychologists engaged in experiments on patients that helped devise systems of torture employed by military and security services across the globe, from Northern Ireland and Guantanamo Bay, to the CIA's dark sites like that at Bagram. 

In the course of developing his own barbaric practices, Cameron would sometimes destroy the lives of his unsuspecting patients while changing the course of psychological torture forever. 

As has now been proven, Cameron's techniques were to have no therapeutic validity whatsoever, and often, following his "treatments", patients were unable to function, having been reduced to a state of infancy even years after the experiments were finalised. 

Given this horrendous impact on people, would it be accurate then to compare what the Scottish-born doctor did to that of Nazi medical atrocities during the Second World War, I asked Bennett? 

"Absolutely, Cameron was in effect a Scottish Mengele," he unstintingly replies, referring to the Nazi SS physician Josef Mengele, himself nicknamed the Angel of Death, who conducted inhumane medical experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz concentration camp.