If you torture a dog with random electric shocks, will the dog become sad?

Such was the question millions of Americans were once frantically asking, until Penn professor and psychologist Martin Seligman decided to find out once and for all. (The answer: Yes.) However, Seligman's results, after they were first published 40 years ago, had a perhaps unintended effect. As it happened some time later, CIA torture aficionados became very interested in Seligman's work and wanted to examine the implications of this revelation for human torture. Seligman's dog studies, it turns out, were instrumental in developing techniques used at Guantanamo Bay. So say the muckraking journalists, at least. The Daily Pennsylvanian reports:

[Writer Jane} Mayer's book [The Dark Side] alleges that Seligman's research heavily influenced the psychologists that developped [sic] CIA interrogation techniques at the Guantanamo Bay military prison. But in a pre-publication review of the book's content, Harper's Magazine writer Scott Horton writes that Seligman "assisted" in the development of their interrogation techniques. This statement has since circulated on several psychology-related blogs and is a claim that Seligman unequivocally denies.

At last, the truth comes out: everything is the Ivy League's fault.

According to the Atlantic,

The setup involved restraining dogs and subjecting them to "50 seconds of severe, pulsating shock" -- trauma that lingered as fear, torpor, and depression after the experiments ended. Animal advocates questioned his ethics, rightly, and Seligman defended his work by pointing out, also rightly, that it had illuminated mental illnesses that afflict the lives of millions of humans, at a price of nonpermanent damage to a few dozen dogs.

Seligman tells the DP his dog torture experiment was for purely dog-torturing purposes and had nothing to do with the CIA's application of his breakthrough concept, called "learned helplessness," to torturing terrorism suspects.

"The allegation that I 'provided assistance in the process' of torture is completely false," Seligman said in a written statement. "I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process."

Hey, at least now we're prepared for the next wave of canine terrorism.