Psyche, Science, and Society

Democracy Now! has Mark Benjamin discuss CIA’s Torture Teachers

June 25th, 2007

Democracy Now! today featured Salon reporter Mark Benjamin talking about his article last Friday: The CIA’s Torture Teachers. In addition to discussing psychologists’ role in teaching SERE-based [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] techniques to the CIA, the article also discusses the struggle in the American Psychological Association, including our Open Letter to APA President Brehm. A few excerpts from the interview:

ARK BENJAMIN: The two psychologists are named James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, and these are psychologists who have been affiliated with this training program — again, called the SERE program — for years. What we have learned is that the Senate Armed Services Committee — this is a committee run by Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan — is now looking into the activities of these two psychologists, in particular.

What our sources on Capitol Hill and, in fact, some of Mitchell and Jessen’s own colleagues say is that these guys, these psychologists who are affiliated with the military’s SERE training, were then employed by the CIA as contractors to do the same thing that the military was doing, which was to flip these tactics around and use them on real terrorists. And, in fact, Jane Mayer from the New Yorker, who’s done some wonderful reporting also on this issue, put one of these guys, James Mitchell, in the room with a high-level CIA detainee in early 2002, and, according to Mayer, he was urging some very rough stuff.

And:

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the letter that psychologists have written to the American Psychological Association and the controversy that’s brewing within this organization of close to 150,000 psychologists?

MARK BENJAMIN: There is a major rift in the American Psychological Association, a professional association for psychologists. In 2005, the American Psychological Association came up with ethics guidelines that essentially say that a psychologist can help participate in a military interrogation. This is a big deal, because the American Psychiatric Association for psychiatrists said no, we won’t have any part of it. It turns out that six of the ten individual psychologists who helped draft those ethics guidelines for the American Psychological Association were affiliated with the military. And, in fact, several of them were affiliated with this SERE school.

This issue has been really tearing apart the American Psychological Association for years now, and there is an expanding group of psychologists who are very, very concerned that the American Psychological Association’s own ethical guidelines are allowing psychologists, like these guys Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, to reverse-engineer training tactics into really brutal interrogation techniques. And there’s a bunch of letter-writing back and forth, frankly, to the head of — the president of the American Psychological Association, objecting to these ethic guidelines and perhaps the use of these tactics.

AMY GOODMAN: You write about the dozens of psychologists who made public a joint letter to the American Psychological Association President Sharon Brehm, fingering another CIA-employed psychologist. He was one of the ten on that committee in 2005 that was convened to look at psychologists’ involvement in these interrogations. Explain who he is.

MARK BENJAMIN: That’s a guy whose last name is Shumate. He’s a psychologist for the Counter Terrorism Center at the CIA. This is the center that reported — at the time of 9/11 was a guy named Cofer Black was in charge of that unit. You may recall Cofer Black is very well known for going up to Congress early in the war on terror and saying, you know, “There’s a before-after-9/11 and there’s an after-9/11; after 9/11 the gloves come off.”

What the psychologists are concerned about is that their fellow psychologists who are associated with that center, the Counter Terrorism Center, seem to be also, you know, crucial in reverse-engineering these tactics, these training tactics in the brutal interrogation techniques, or at least that’s the concern among these psychologists. And what they’re doing is alerting their organization that there could be a real problem here.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, Cofer Black now involved with Blackwater, the private security company based in North Carolina, and an offshoot of that around intelligence. Now, R. Scott Shumate was one of the ten people involved in this PENS Task Force, this advisory task force that ultimately advised that the psychologists could continue in these military interrogations, despite the fact that three of the members — we had two of them on on Democracy Now! — have expressed great concern about them, one of these members handing over all of her notes leading up to the meeting and afterwards, the email listservs, over to the Senate Armed Services Committee, as they conduct their investigation.

MARK BENJAMIN: That’s right. And some of the psychologists, as you mentioned, these civilian psychologists, sort of feel like they were railroaded or misled or, you know, in other words, the military folks who were on that panel which came up with these ethics guidelines sort of ran the show. I think that’s sort of what you’re referring to there. And, yes, there’s very serious concern about these psychologists, that their own fellow professionals may have played a vital role in flipping these techniques around, both at the Pentagon and, now we’ve learned, also at the CIA, into some really brutal interrogation techniques….

AMY GOODMAN: When we had the psychologists on, two of the ten people who ran this task force for the American Psychological Association, nine of them voting members, six of them military, Nina Thomas, psychologist based in New York who was a part of that, said, though she knew about the military connection, she didn’t realize how involved some of the members were in this presidential task force, who was making their recommendation to the APA, how involved they were in the SERE program and in the interrogations. Among those she talked about was Colonel Morgan Banks.

MARK BENJAMIN: That’s right. Morgan Banks is a guy who’s affiliated with the Special Operations Command’s Psychological Directorate, so these are the top psychologists associated with the Special Operations units in the military. What we learned last month, the Department of Defense Inspector General declassified a report that showed that that department, the Special Operations Command’s Psychological Applications Directorate, early in the war came up with a plan specifically to do this. In other words, when I say “this,” I mean take these training tactics, these brutal mock interrogations, and flip them around into real interrogation techniques. Because this guy, Morgan Banks, was in charge of that portion of Special Operations, it certainly seems to strongly suggest — it doesn’t say Morgan Banks by name, but it says his organization did this. So if you’ve got a guy who is involved and who is part of the original planning to turn these techniques into real interrogation tactics and then he’s sitting on a task force at the American Psychological Association drawing up ethics guidelines that say that can be done, I think that’s raising some real alarm bells among psychologists.

Entry Filed under: APA, Guantanamo, Interrogation, Psychology, Torture, Uncategorized, War Crimes