Psyche, Science, and Society

Valtin: Fact Sheet: Psychologist Participation in Torture

July 7th, 2007

Blogger Valtin, on Daily Kos, Never In Our Names, and his own Invictus, details the evidence that psychologists are involved in US torture. Here is the introduction:

Fact Sheet: Psychologist Participation in Torture

Psychologists organized into “Psychologists for an Ethical APA” plan to meet at the August convention of the American Psychological Association with education, protests, and political pressure. The protest will be at noon, August 18 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, and will feature a number of prominent speakers from the psychology community. The aim of the protest is to support the proposed moratorium within APA to stop psychologist participation in national security and military interrogations associated with torture and abuse.

Opposition to stopping such collaboration often centers around claims that there is no documented evidence of psychologist participation in torture or abusive methods. The following brief fact sheet addresses such claims. I will follow with a more comprehensive essay on the subject in the near future.

This fact sheet documents the activities of a number of military psychologists in planning and participation in actions that can only be called torture. Names are not usually available, due to redaction in classified records. In such cases, we can only say that a psychologist is specifically named as a party to a particular activity.

He goes on to discuss the following “cases”:

Case No. 1 – Major John Leso and the Interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani

Case No. 2 – Psychologist at the Secret Prison Interrogation of Marwan Jabour

Case No. 3 – Psychologist Participation in the Interrogation of a German Citizen Kidnapped by the CIA

Case No. 4 – Psychologist Present During Abusive Use of Military Dogs

Case No. 5 – Sharing of Confidential Psychologist Evaluations of Prisoners

Case No. 6 – Military Psychologists Transfer SERE-POW Training for Use in Abusive Interrogations

Case No. 7 – SERE Psychologist Pushes “Harsher Methods” in Interrogation

Learn about these cases by reading the entire Fact Sheet.

Entry Filed under: APA, Interrogation, Psychological Torture, Psychology, SERE, Torture, War Crimes