Democracy Now! on psychologists and US torture, again
Democracy Now! on Monday covered the recent Vanity Fair article on the two psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, who designed the CIA’s torture techniques that framed the US’s Standard Operating Procedure for interrogations. My friend and colleague Brad Olson was also on the show.
An excerpt:
AMY GOODMAN: Last year, Democracy Now! hosted a debate on the role of psychologists in military interrogations. We included Dr. Gerald Koocher, then the president of the American Psychological Association, still a powerhouse behind the scenes. This is some of what he had to say about the issue of psychologists involved in interrogations at Guantanamo.
GERALD KOOCHER: We don’t, as a professional association, tell our members that they can’t work for a given employer. Obviously there are some people who don’t think that psychologists should assist in the military at all. That’s a political preference and a social statement, but there are many very beneficial things that psychologists have done in the military. One example is that the lead officer sent in to help clean up Guantanamo Bay was a psychologist, a US Army colonel, who was sent in to help to clean up the abuses as soon as they were reported. There’s another APA member, a civilian employee of the Navy, who was sent to Guantanamo and was one of the first people to file complaints with his superiors about things that he observed down there, and he reportedly brought about some changes.I wish I had the assurance that Jane Mayer and that Dr. Reisner apparently have that there are APA members doing bad things at Guantanamo or elsewhere, because any time I have asked these journalists or other people who are making these assertions for names so that APA could investigate its members who might be allegedly involved in them, no names have ever been forthcoming.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Dr. Gerald Koocher, former president of the American Psychological Association, still very active in the APA. Katherine Eban?
KATHERINE EBAN: Well, you don’t make an ethics policy by citing a few positive examples. There has been an army or military line and an APA line that are surprisingly similar, which is that psychologists make interrogations safer and more effective. But what my reporting found is that the interrogations they make safer are the interrogations that had been made more dangerous. In other words, you take some very dangerous methods, like reverse-engineered SERE tactics — it’s basically like letting a tiger loose in the interrogation booth, and then you get in an animal trainer to make sure that the animal doesn’t go crazy, but why did you put the tiger in the booth in the first place? In other words, psychologists were initially used in the SERE program in order to prevent against behavioral drift. So what the military is saying and what the APA is saying is, psychologists can play that role in interrogations, but those are the interrogations in which these reverse-engineered SERE tactics are being used. Now, presumably, if you didn’t use those tactics, you wouldn’t need psychologists to safeguard them.
And:
KATHERINE EBAN: It is a memo drafted by JTF-GTMO, the task force I just talked about, and it is a SERE SOP, standard operating procedure, how to standardize the use of these coercive tactics in interrogation, and it basically — and it came about a week on the heels of Rumsfeld approving the most coercive tactics, and it lists a category of approaches to interrogations, and they include degradation, manhandling, omnipotence tactics, insults, slaps, walling, hooding, and how to use those dangerous tactics safely.
AMY GOODMAN: You write, “In a bizarre mixture of solicitude and sadism, the memo details how to calibrate the infliction of harm. It dictates that the ‘[insult] slap will be initiated no more than 12–14 inches (or one shoulder width) from the detainee’s face … to preclude any tendency to wind up or uppercut.’ And interrogators are advised that, when stripping off a prisoner’s clothes, ‘tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.’ In short, the sere-inspired interrogations would be violent. And therefore, psychologists were needed to help make these more dangerous interrogations safer.”
KATHERINE EBAN: Right. To me, this is — it really exposes the military’s argument that psychologists are needed to make interrogations safer and more effective. What they were needed for is to oversee the use of these tactics so that they did not get out of hand and result in the death of detainees.
AMY GOODMAN: What if psychologists didn’t participate? The doctors won’t participate. Psychiatrists won’t participate. What if psychologists said no?
KATHERINE EBAN: It would be very interesting to see what happens. Perhaps the military would need to shift tactics. But the problem is — and to go back to some of the questions you asked Brad Olson — the military has long been the largest employer of psychologists. We’re talking about a jobs program. I mean, the relationship is long and deep. So there are certainly psychologists who feel that they are serving their country by being in the interrogation booth.
Unfortunately, in addition to her excellent reporting, reporter Eban also missed the significance of much of what she investigated. She was so taken up by”the most coercive techniques,” such as waterboarding, that she seems to believe that the slightly”less coercive” tactics, such as prolonged isolation, and sensory deprivation, are not so abusive. Only thusly could she make the startling claim that the PENS members were critical of “coercive interrogations.” She also didn’t understand the Office of Inspector General report that made clear that military SERE psychologists, beyond Mitchell and Jessen, were integral to US interrogations at Guantanam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Like all to many reporters, she apparently believes that what she discovered is the key to the whole, rather than one small piece of a large puzzle. Mitchell and Jessen were the extreme of a continuum, not an alternative to otherwise humane behavior. Just ask any of these supposedly “humane” psychologist interrogators what they think of the tactics approved by Secretary Rumsfeld in April, 2003, which included isolation, “environmental manipulation,” “sleep manipulation,” and “Fear Up Harsh”. So far, those supposed “rapport-building” psychologists have declined to answer this question. Until they answer in detail, their claims of being against abuse are simply not credible.
As for Brad Olson, in the brief time he had, he presented a brief overview of the current state of our struggle, which will continue at the APA Convention this August.
Add comment July 31st, 2007