Comments on torture and psychology
Gerald Gray of the Center for Redress & Recovery at Santa Clara University and author (with Alessandra Zielinski) of Psychology and U.S. psychologists in torture and war in the Middle East, has sent a few comments of my article yesterday, Protecting the Torturers: Bad Faith and Distortions From the American Psychological Association. He has given me permission to post them:
Herewith some quick random comments that are intended to be supportive and helpful.
1. One of your most significant points is that the APA is asserting psychological damage only counts as torture if mind-altering drugs are administered. Those of us in the torture-treatment movement (there are 30 U.S. centers alone) know that psychological damage from such effects as being made to hear torture can result in lifelong PTSD and depression. Does the VA say its soldiers are not tortured when a firing squad deliberately shoots the soldiers on both sides of a survivor?
2. PTSD and depression are the most common (but not necessarily the only) symptoms following torture and may count as evidence it has occurred. The literature and testimony of clinicians in the torture treatment movement might be useful.
We provide testimony in U.S. immigration courts for lawyers asserting that torture has occurred to an applicant—and for years, all the acts now being excluded as torture have been accepted as torture by these U.S. courts.3. The psychiatrists and doctors are right to exclude participation during interrogation sessions at all. Milgram and Zimbardo show what can happen to guards and psychologists in such situations. In fact, Zimbardo participated in training Naval intelligence and his training was misused, in fact reversed (he was warning that mock torturers teaching torture resistance (?) could result in the torturer continually raising the level of torture). It does not seem to have taken military intelligence much to realize that if it constructed prison situations like Abu Ghraib, this would predictably, but without orders, result in torture.
4. It is important to point out to psychologists that the aggressive acts they support are not only, or perhaps even primarily, for interrogation. I note the example you cite of the Guantanamo prisoner tortured by a female soldier. That seems to have been experimental torture to see what will destroy cultural resistance—which could be as much for controlling a country, as for getting individual information (which did not seem to be asked—a forced confession was wanted, not useful information).
There are differences between torture for experiment, torture for control of a society, and torture for information. Psychologists should see that all are going on, that they may not be able to distinguish them in the moment, and that the use of torture earns the government our distrust.
Good luck.
Gerald Gray, LCSW
1 comment September 7th, 2006