Psyche, Science, and Society

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero on psychologists and torture

September 8th, 2007

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero was on Democracy Now! on Wednesday. Part of his interview was devoted to the issues of psychologists and US interrogations, including APA policy and the pre-Convention letter from the ACLU to the APA. Here is the relevant portion of the interview. [Note, if watch this interview, you can see footage from the Convention debate at the APA's Council of Representatives, including portions of the talk by Colonel Larry James supporting APA policy and a response by delegate Laurie Wagner.]:

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about this big debate in the American Psychological Association. Democracy Now! went to San Francisco for the four-day convention, their annual convention, and broadcast from there. And in the midst of that, you wrote that letter to Sharon Brehm, the president of the APA.

ANTHONY ROMERO: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what your letter said.

ANTHONY ROMERO: Well, we wanted to be very clear. We want to exhort them to encourage their membership in the American Psychological Association to take a stand that would say that their members are not to participate in any of the interrogations that may use torture or abusive techniques, what are these advanced coercive techniques. And we wanted to be very clear on two fronts, frankly, Amy.

One was we were calling to the morality, that the healers shouldn’t be part of the tormenters, as we talk about at the end of the letter, that the American Psychological Association has always thought of itself as helping people grapple with difficulty, mental illness or mental issues or psychological problems, and that they should not be a part of the tormenting forces of government. And so, we wanted to appeal to their ethical side.

We also wanted to be clear that they have a legal liability. And frankly, as a legal organization and as an organization that takes very seriously the need to hold people accountable, that if there are individuals, psychologists, doctors, who are involved in such techniques, they face potential civil, criminal liability.

AMY GOODMAN: We invited a spokesperson from the American Psychological Association on the program, but they did not respond to our repeated requests. At the center of the firestorm is Dr. Stephen Behnke, who is Director of Ethics at the APA. At the end of the group’s annual conference, Dr. Behnke addressed a few hundred APA members gathered at a town hall meeting. The meeting was held after the APA’s policymaking council voted to approve a resolution that prohibited involvement in interrogations that use at least fourteen specified methods, including sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and mock executions. Dr. Behnke got on the stage to defend the resolution.

DR. STEPHEN BEHNKE: The passage I’d like to read says that, “Be it resolved the American Psychological Association affirms that there are no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether induced by a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency that may be invoked as a justification for torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including the invocation of laws, regulations and orders.”But I also want to be very clear that if you look at the language of the resolution — and again, I hope that everyone reads it — what it says is that, that this unequivocal condemnation includes all techniques defined as — and then is says, “This unequivocal condemnation includes, but is by no means limited to,” so that there are specific techniques identified, but that is not a closed set — very explicitly not a closed set.

One final point about the resolution. Again, I just encourage people to read it. But the Ethics Committee has been directed by counsel. It says: “Be it resolved that the APA Ethics Committee shall proceed forthwith in writing its casebook and commentary that shall set forth guidelines for psychology that are consistent with international human rights instruments.” And then it actually specifies what those instruments are. The first is Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Stephen Behnke. Stephen Behnke, ethics spokesperson for the American Psychological Association. Your response, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero?

ANTHONY ROMERO: Well, you know, I think one of the things that’s quite disconcerting about the debate — and I’d want to understand the study better, the resolution that he just read — is that part of what’s going on both within the government and it seems also within the American Psychological Association is this effort to redefine what is torture and to provide some wiggle room at the grey areas. To be very clear, there are certain techniques that were completely off the books before 9/11, that there were techniques that were not ever to be authorized. Rumsfeld and others within the military expanded the list of interrogation techniques, ultimately had to retract some of them because they had gone too far. And yet, you find an effort right now to redefine what does in fact constitute torture, what constitutes abuse, what is cruel and humiliating treatment. And I think part of what we’ve got to be very clear about and I think the American Psychological Association needs to grapple with is what is its role.

AMY GOODMAN: The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association have said that their members cannot participate at all.

ANTHONY ROMERO: Categorically, yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: They rejected that possibility of a moratorium on psychologist involvement.

ANTHONY ROMERO: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: And earlier in the day, before that town hall meeting, which was mainly just many angry psychologists from around the country decrying the decision of the APA policymaking council –

ANTHONY ROMERO: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: – but during the debate of the policymaking council, some of the top military brass was in attendance, perhaps none more so than Colonel Larry James. He was flown in from Cuba, from Guantanamo, where he served as the chief psychologist for the joint intelligence group at Guantanamo Bay. He was also the first psychologist at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. An APA council representative himself, Colonel James addressed the council members on Sunday as they were preparing to vote on a proposed resolution that would have prohibited psychologists from participating in interrogations at Guantanamo and other US detention centers.

COL. LARRY JAMES: This is I my second tour at Gitmo, Cuba. I was also the first psychologist at Abu Ghraib. I’m going to repeat what I said earlier. If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die. If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to get hurt.One other thing I want to add. We’ve got young twenty-seven-, twenty-eight-, twenty-nine-year-old psychologists on the battlefield right now. If you support this amendment, those young psychologists are going to feel as though we’ve abandoned them. And they need our support right now. Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: Soon after Colonel Larry James spoke, he was confronted by an APA member in the audience. Laurie Wagner is a psychologist and a member of the APA’s Psychoanalysis Division. She took Colonel James to task.

LAURIE WAGNER: I heard Colonel James say that if psychologists are not present in Guantanamo and other settings similar to it, that innocent lives will be lost, and I asked him what he meant by that, and he said, “The lives of detainees.” And I would submit that if psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, that those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest it by leaving it.

AMY GOODMAN: Anthony Romero?

ANTHONY ROMERO: We have to go back to a categorical rejection of the torture and abuse and the use of techniques that humiliate detainees. There is no need to argue about the niceties of these definitions. There is no need to talk about whether waterboarding is or is not torture, whether mock executions are or are not torture. We need to go back to a point, Amy, where we as a nation ascribe to some core values, that we do not allow people to be poorly treated in our custody.

And I think the questions about — if individuals are dying in Guantanamo, for the gentleman who spoke from the Guantanamo base, it’s because many of them are trying to commit suicide, because they have no hope, because we’ve eliminated the right of habeas corpus. They have no access to the judicial system, no access to their family members, where they’re kind of detained — I’ve been to Guantanamo, and I’ve been for the first round of military commission proceedings. It is not what the government describes it to be. No matter how good a face they try to put on the detention center at Guantanamo in the military commission proceedings, it is a travesty. It does not uphold to the best of American values.

And we have to go back to a point where we look at ourselves in the mirror as Americans and say, “Who are we as a people? What do we stand for?” We stand for some core values, the right to habeas corpus, the right to be treated well, the right to be treated humanely, to equal protection under the law, to right to due process. And that’s often what our government officials forget to remind themselves of in their jobs.

We might add that psychologists need to decide who we are as a profession. Are we a profession in which “psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm” as Principle A of our Ethic Code states? Or are we a profession in which doing harm is fine as long as one can argue that the harm doesn’t cause “significant pain or suffering” or is done in such a manner “that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm” as the APA Council voted almost unanimously, with no debate of this fundamental change in the nature of the profession. Psychology has now defined itself as the harming, but not too much, profession.

Entry Filed under: Civil Liberties, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Interrogation, Law, Psychological Torture, Rights and Liberties, Torture, War Crimes