Psyche, Science, and Society

Chronicle of Higher Ed on psychology department resolutions

The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports on the movement among psychology departments to pass resolutions demanding change in APA’s interrogations policy:

Resolutions Urge Psychology Assn. to Take Tougher Stand on Interrogating Prisoners

Psychology departments at Earlham, Guilford, and Smith Colleges have passed resolutions this month urging the American Psychological Association to ban its members from designing or participating in interrogations of detainees at places such as the Guantánamo Bay naval base.

The departmental resolutions are the latest front in a long-running battle over psychologists’ roles in the interrogation of suspected terrorists.

At its annual meeting, in August, the association approved a statement that significantly toughened its ground rules. But while many of the association’s critics have praised the new policy as a step forward, some believe that it does not go far enough.

One of the critics’ arguments, which lies at the heart of the new Earlham, Guilford, and Smith resolutions, is that the APA’s policy should take into account the context in which interrogations are conducted. Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other overseas detention centers lack internationally recognized due-process rights — and therefore, the critics say, it is unethical for psychologists to work in those settings, even if the interrogations are not coercive and free of torture.

Earlham’s resolution was drafted by Michael R. Jackson, an associate professor of psychology. The resolutions adopted at Guilford and Smith use similar language. In an interview today, Mr. Jackson said he had been in contact with scholars at several other colleges and universities who hope to pass similar resolutions. (He declined to name specific institutions.)

“The APA has basically been forced, step by step, into a stronger stand on coercive interrogations,” Mr. Jackson said. “And they have made some useful changes in their position. But I think there’s still a way for them to go.” —David Glenn

Add comment October 12th, 2007

CIA tries to stop torture investigations by investigating investigators

The Bush administration will leave no stone turned in its attempt to cover up the crimes, including torture, it has committed. The New York Times reports today that the CIA has taken the totally unprecedented step of investigating its own Inspector General! His offense? Investigating the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” aka, torture:

Watchdog of C.I.A. Is Subject of C.I.A. Inquiry

by Mark Maxxetti and Scott Shane

WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 — The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has ordered an unusual internal inquiry into the work of the agency’s inspector general, whose aggressive investigations of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation programs and other matters have created resentment among agency operatives.

A small team working for General Hayden is looking into the conduct of the agency’s watchdog office, which is led by Inspector General John L. Helgerson. Current and former government officials said the review had caused anxiety and anger in Mr. Helgerson’s office and aroused concern on Capitol Hill that it posed a conflict of interest.

The review is particularly focused on complaints that Mr. Helgerson’s office has not acted as a fair and impartial judge of agency operations but instead has begun a crusade against those who have participated in controversial detention programs.

Any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would be unusual, if not unprecedented, and would threaten to undermine the independence of the office, some current and former officials say.

Frederick P. Hitz, who served as C.I.A. inspector general from 1990 to 1998, said he had no first-hand information about current conflicts inside the agency. But Mr. Hitz said any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would “not be proper.”

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Mr. Hitz, who now teaches at the University of Virginia. “Under the statute, the inspector general has the right to investigate the director. How can you do that and have the director turn around and investigate the I.G.?”

A C.I.A. spokesman strongly defended the inquiry on Thursday, saying General Hayden supported the work of the inspector general’s office and had “accepted the vast majority of its findings.”

“His only goal is to help this office, like any office at the agency, do its vital work even better,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.

Current and former intelligence officials said the inquiry had involved formal interviews with at least some of the inspector general’s staff and was perceived by some agency employees as an “investigation,” a label Mr. Gimigliano rejected.

Several current and former officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the inquiry.

The officials said the inquiry was being overseen by Robert L. Deitz, a trusted aide to the C.I.A. director and a lawyer who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency when General Hayden ran it. Michael Morrell, the agency’s associate deputy director, is another member of the group, officials said.

Reached by phone Thursday, both Mr. Helgerson and Mr. Dietz declined to comment.

In his role as the agency’s inspector general since 2002, Mr. Helgerson has investigated some of the most controversial programs the C.I.A. has begun since the Sept. 11 attacks, including its secret program to detain and interrogate high value terrorist suspects.

Under federal procedures, agency heads who are unhappy with the conduct of their inspectors general have at least two places to file complaints. One is the Integrity Committee of the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which oversees all the inspectors general. The aggrieved agency head can also go directly to the White House.

If serious accusations against an inspector general are sustained by evidence, the president can dismiss him.

Both those routes avoid the awkward situation officials describe at the C.I.A. and preserve the independence of the inspector general.

But one intelligence official who supports General Hayden’s decision to begin an internal inquiry said that going outside the agency would “blow things way out of proportion.”

A report by Mr. Helgerson’s office completed in the spring of 2004 warned that some C.I.A.-approved interrogation procedures appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as defined by the international Convention Against Torture.

Some of the inspector general’s work on detention issues was conducted by Mary O. McCarthy, who was fired from the agency last year after being accused of leaking classified information. Officials said Mr. Helgerson’s office was nearing completion on a number of inquiries into C.I.A. detention, interrogation, and “renditions” — the practice of seizing suspects and delivering them to the authorities in other nations.

The inspector general’s office also rankled agency officials when it completed a withering report about the C.I.A’s missteps before the Sept. 11 attack — a report that recommended “accountability boards” to consider disciplinary action against a handful of senior officials.

When the report was made public in August, General Hayden took the rare step of pointing up criticisms of the report by the former intelligence director, George J. Tenet and his senior aides, saying many officials “took strong exception to its focus, methodology and conclusions.”

Some agency officers believe the aggressive investigations by Mr. Helgerson amount to unfair second guessing of intelligence officers who are often risking their lives in the field.

“These are good people who thought they were doing the right thing,” said one former agency official. “And now they are getting beat up pretty bad and they have to go out an hire a lawyer.”

Agency officials have also criticized the length of the inspector general’s investigations, some lasting more than five years, which have derailed careers and generated steep legal bills for officers under scrutiny.

The former agency official called General Hayden’s review of the inspector general “a smart move.”

Since taking over at the C.I.A. in 2006, General Hayden has taken several steps to soothe anger within the agency’s clandestine service, which has been buffeted in recent years by a string of prolonged investigations.

He has brought back two veteran agency operatives, Steven R. Kappes and Michael J. Sulick, both of whom angrily left during the tenure of Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, to assume top posts at the spy agency. He also supported the president’s nomination of John A. Rizzo, a career agency lawyer and someone well-respected by covert operatives, to become the C.I.A’s general counsel.

Mr. Rizzo withdrew his nomination to the post last month in the midst of intense opposition from Senate Democrats.

“Director Hayden has done a lot of things to convince the operators that he’s looking out for them, and putting the I.G. back in its place is part of this,” said John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer from 2002 to 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law.

Mr. Hitz and other former C.I.A. officials said tensions between the inspector general and the rest of the agency were natural. Conflicts most often arise when the inspector general reviews the actions of the agency’s directorate of operations, now known as the National Clandestine Service, which recruits agents and hunts terrorists overseas.

“The perception is like in a police department between street cops and internal affairs,” said A. B. Krongard, the agency’s executive director from 2001 to 2004.

Resentment of the inspector general’s work has also at times extended to the agency’s general counsel’s office, whose legal judgment is sometimes second-guessed by after-the-fact investigations. “In some of our reports, we were quite critical of the advice given by the general counsel,” Mr. Hitz said.

The C.I.A., created in 1947, had an in-house inspector general selected by the director starting in 1952 who investigated failed operations like the Bay of Pigs invasion against Cuba in 1961.

But that position was viewed as lacking clout and independence, and in 1989, partly in response to the Iran-contra affair, Congress created an independent inspector general at the agency, appointed by the president and reporting to both the director and to Congress.

Meanwhile, At Harpers, Ken Silverstein is reporting today that a top CIA attorney resigned over concerns about the agency’s “enhanced interrogations” program. after discussing today’s New York Times revelations [above], Silversetin goes on to report:

Here’s something else that I’ve just learned from several sources: it turns out that a former senior CIA legal official quit in protest over the administration’s use of “enhanced interrogations.” This official, whose name I have promised not to publish, previously worked as a deputy IG for investigations under Frederick Hitz, who served as CIA IG between 1990 and 1998. From there, the official moved on the CIA’s Office of General Counsel.

What’s interesting is that this official was generally known as something of a hardliner. I haven’t been able to pin down the date of his departure, which may have occurred a year ago or more. However, the sources tell me he couldn’t stomach what he deemed to be abuses by the Bush Administration and stepped down from his post.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall points out that Inspector General Helgerso’s fate could rest with the ultimate Bush crony:

Now, let’s say that going directly to the White House isn’t subtle enough for someone as savvy as Hayden. Not to worry! Going to the Council on Integrity and Efficiency is likely to provide the same outcome. The Integrity Committee is chaired by an FBI official named Kenneth Kaiser, who appears to be a perfectly competent individual. But his boss, the chairman of the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, is George W. Bush’s prep school buddy Clay Johnson III, a man whose name is practically synonymous with Bush administration cronyism.

Before becoming deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Johnson was the White House’s personnel director, responsible for vetting such paragons of professionalism as Mike Brown and David Safavian. (Safavian he hired personally.) A month after Hurricane Katrina, Johnson said Brown “served unbelievably well for two years as the head of FEMA.” There was no need to review the White House’s hiring process, he opined, since the “appointments work done by this president is as fine as has ever been done.” That statement might be explained by the fact that Johnson actually keeps a George W. Bush doll on his desk. For reasons that remain apocryphal, he is known to have spanked Bush’s dog, Barney.

Johnson is such a cipher that when his name was floated to become Homeland Security Secretary this summer, even Michelle Malkin called him a crony on the August 27 edition of the “O’Reilly Factor.” (via Nexis)

If Helgerson’s job goes up to the PCIE for review, he’s done for. No wonder that even an intelligence official who applauds Hayden’s anti-Helgerson push thinks that an external review of the agency’s inspector general would “blow things way out of proportion.”

2 comments October 12th, 2007

25,000 US detainees in Iraq

The mass attention to the abuse of those in detention began with the April 2004 Abu Ghraib revelations. Yet both human rights activists and we psychologists have focussed most upon abuses that occurred at Guantanamo, and more recently, at the CIA “black sites.” So we need a reminder that there are huge numbers of detainees held in Iraq, in support of an illegal and brutal occupation, and more held in Afghanistan. AFP provides such a reminder with an article telling us that US forces are holding an astounding almost 25,000 Iraqis in their detention centers in that devastated country:

US detains nearly 25,000 in Iraq

BAGHDAD (AFP) - The US militaryis holding nearly 25,000 people in its prisons in Iraq, 860 of whom are under the age of 16, the general in charge of their detention said on Wednesday.

Eighty-three percent of inmates are Sunnis and 16 percent are Shiite, General Douglas Stone told a press conference in Baghdad.

Egyptians, Iranians, Saudis and Syrians number among 280 foreign nationals imprisoned by the US military in Iraq, he said.

There are two prisons run by the Americans on Iraqi soil: one at their Camp Cropper base outside Baghdad, the other at Camp Bucca near the southern port of Umm Qasr.

These prison receive an average of 60 news inmates each day, according to Stone, while the average length of time for incarceration of a detainee is 300 days.

Since the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in mid-September, the US military has freed around 50 to 60 prisoners every day.

We know very little of what goes on in those detention centers, since Rumsfeld ordered cameras removed as soon as the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. It is reported that there are psychologists in Behavioral Science onsultation Teams [BSTs] there, but we have almost no information about what they are doing.

We should not assume that no news is good news. Last year American contractor and whistle-blower Donald Vance was held for three months in the US prison at Camp Cropper. As was reported in the New York Times, his treatment was extremely brutal:

American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared….

Five times in the first week, guards shackled the prisoners’ hands and feet, covered their eyes, placed towels over their heads and put them in wheelchairs to be pushed to a room with a carpeted ceiling and walls. There they were questioned by an array of officials who, they said they were told, represented the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“It’s like boom, boom, boom,” Mr. Ertel said. “They are drilling you. ‘We know you did this, you are part of this gun smuggling thing.’ And I’m saying you have it absolutely way off.”

The two men slept in their 9-by-9-foot cells on concrete slabs, with worn three-inch foam mats. With the fluorescent lights on and the temperature in the 50s, Mr. Vance said, “I paced myself to sleep, walking until I couldn’t anymore. I broke the straps on two pair of flip-flops.”

As is usual,the military denied Vance’s account:

Asked about the lights, the detainee operations spokeswoman said that the camp’s policy was to turn off cell lights at night “to allow detainees to sleep.”

It was only the fact that Mr Vancewas American, and innocent, that got the press to report on his brutal treatment. What is being done to those 25,000 Iraqis? I don’t know. But I think we, the American public, should know.

Add comment October 12th, 2007

IPCC: Crucial greenhouse gas threshold already passed

The day they win the Nobel Prize, we hear that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] is set to report that the world crossed a crucial threshold, 50 parts per million (ppm), of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere two years ago. This was the level that their report earlier this year said we were in danger of reaching within a decade. If the new IPCC rport is correct, it would imply that massive climate change is now likely inevitable.

A key threshold crossed
An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to be released next month will show that the limit on greenhouse-gases scientists hoped to avert has already been surpassed.
By Gregory M. Lamb

In Ray Bradbury’s science fiction novel “Fahrenheit 451,” that number represented the temperature at which books would burn, a symbol of a disturbing future under a totalitarian government.

For climate scientists, a similar number, 450 parts per million (ppm), holds its own ominous meaning. It represents a dangerous concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; a total that they were not expecting to be passed for at least another decade.

But a new UN-sponsored report, to be released next month, will show that as of 2005 the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had already reached 455 ppm, according to Tim Flannery, a prominent Australian climate scientist who says he’s seen the raw data that go into the document.

In an interview on Australian television this week, Dr. Flannery said that an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will show that carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and other greenhouse gasses are at much higher concentrations than previously thought. Reuters quotes him:

“We thought we’d be at that threshold within about a decade…. We thought we had that much time. But the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold…. What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that could potentially cause dangerous climate change.”About 75 percent of the total ppm represents carbon dioxide, associated with burning fossil fuels. The rest is a combination of the other gasses, he said.

On the Sierra Club website, blogger Pat Joseph explains the meaning of 450 ppm:

“450 ppm has long been held up as the threshold we dare not cross if we hope [to] avert the worst consequences of warming. Well, if Flannery is right, (and there’s no reason to think otherwise) we crossed that line without even breaking stride.”How did it happen? For one thing, countries such as China and India are actually “recarbonizing,” Mr. Joseph says, meaning that their economies are becoming more energy-intensive “as they turn increasingly to [greenhouse-gas emitting] coal to feed their growth.” In May, the IPCC estimated current concentration of greenhouse gases at only 425 ppm, said a BBC report at the time. It noted that many scientists equated 450 ppm with a 2 degree C (3.6 degrees F.) rise in temperatures. Allowing temperatures to rise more than 2 C could lead to major impacts on the environment, scientists said. In the article, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, explained the strategy this way:

“If you want to stabilise around 450 ppm, that means in a decade or two you have to start reducing emissions far below the current level…. So in other words, we have a very short window for turning around the trend we have in rising greenhouse gas emissions. We don’t have the luxury of time.”But, says Flannery, named Australian of the Year for 2007, that window is closed. According to the Australian Associated Press he says that higher figure is due to miscalculating the potency of other greenhouse gasses, which are included in the 450 ppm figure and measured in terms equivalent to that of CO2. But he adds:

“[A]lso we have really seen an unexpected acceleration in the rate of accumulation of CO 2 itself, and that’s been beyond the limits of projection … beyond the worst-case scenario. We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change – that’s what the new figures say…. It’s not next year, or next decade; it’s now.”A major UN climate change meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December aims to set a course toward a new global agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The current Kyoto Protocol, signed by the majority of the world’s nations but not the United States, expires in 2012. Flannery told Reuters that the 450 ppm figure adds to the urgency and importance of that meeting.

Meanwhile, Erwin Jackson, policy director of the Climate Institute, an Australian environmental group, told the Australian Associated Press that reducing greenhouse gas levels would be the only path to avoiding a catastrophe:

“The longer we stay above the kind of levels we’re at at the moment, the more likely it is that we would start to see the loss of the Great Barrier Reef; you would actually start see the collapse of the great ice sheets and places like the Amazon starting to burn down.”This weekly feature appears with links at csmonitor.com

2 comments October 12th, 2007

Inside Higher Ed: Ethics Rebellion in Psychology

Inside Higher Ed discusses the rebellion among psychology departments against the American Psychological Association’s policies supporting participation in abusive interrogations at US detention centers:

Ethics Rebellion in Psychology
by Scott Jaschik
The role of social scientists in helping the U.S. war effort — especially in ways that may violate ethical standards — continues to vex many professors. When anthropologists learned last year that some of their scholarship may have inspired tactics used in the Abu Ghraib prison, the American Anthropological Association voted to condemn “the use of anthropological knowledge as an element of physical and psychological torture” and created a committee to study the ethical issues raised by working with national security agencies. Psychologists have had a more contentious time thus far discussing these issues. While leaders of the American Psychological Association say that they have been unequivocal in their stance against torture, for several years some in the field have argued that policies were not strong enough. The policy was strengthened in August, but it left open the possibility that some psychologists could help interrogation teams with their work, even in situations outside the United States where U.S. authorities detain many prisoners without the due process rights that someone would receive in a prison in the country.

This month, three psychology departments have gone on record saying that the association did not go far enough — and that they consider it a violation of professional ethics to help the U.S. with interrogations in any prison outside the country where due process rights are not enforced. The votes on a resolution — by the psychology faculties at Earlham, Guilford and Smith Colleges — are an unusually public effort by departments to criticize collectively a key decision by their national association. A number of other departments are considering similar moves.

The resolution originated at Earlham, an institution that takes Quaker values of nonviolence and respect seriously. (Guilford is also Quaker, but Smith is not.) The resolution says that — even with the bans on various forms of interrogation in which psychologists can help authorities — there are too many moral problems with helping interrogations in foreign detention centers maintained by the United States. A theme of the resolution is that the APA’s own ethical standards should preclude this kind of involvement by those in the profession, even without a special policy.

The measure adopted by the APA, the Earlham resolution states, acts “to undermine the moral authority and stature of psychology as a profession, and that, moreover, fails to recognize that decades of research in social psychology demonstrates that situational factors, especially in highly ideological and isolated settings, can be predicted, over time, to undermine the resolve of well-intentioned individuals, including psychologists, to resist institutional pressures to misuse authority.”

Michael R. Jackson, chair of Earlham’s psychology department, has sent a letter to department leaders at many other colleges, urging them to back the resolution. He called the APA stance “ethically compromised” and said that he hoped departments could push the association to take “a clear and unambiguous stand on the issue.” The current policy, he said, provides “aid in legitimizing these interrogations and foreign detention centers.”

Richard Zweigenhaft, chair of psychology at Guilford, said professors there agree with their Earlham colleagues that the APA’s position is “insufficient” and acts “to legitimize” both secret military and CIA facilities abroad.

At Smith, where psychology professors voted unanimously Wednesday to adopt the resolution, “our reading of APA’s position most recently is that it is not true to the ethics commitment of the organization, and we conclude that it is improper,” said Fletcher A. Blanchard, the chair. “The profession has ethical guidelines and we believe our organization is violating them.”

Rhea Farberman, a spokeswoman for the APA, said that she thought the colleges’ resolution “badly underreports” the association’s “strict and unequivocal” ban on members of the profession playing any role in torture or a series of activities (not intended to be all inclusive) that constitute cruel and unusual treatment. These activities, specified in the APA resolution adopted in August, include water-boarding, the use of dogs to intimidate, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, the use of psychotropic drugs, hooding and forced nakedness.

While it is true that the APA position permits the involvement of psychologists in some work by interrogation teams, Farberman said that was intended to advance the same goals that the association’s critics embrace. “The question is what’s the best strategy to achieve a goal we are all committed to — the protection of detainee welfare,” she said. “The APA Council of Representatives has devoted considerable time to this issue over the past three years and has chosen a strategy of engagement. That is, rather than absenting all psychologists; allowing psychologists to consult to interrogations teams, within strict ethical guidelines, in order to protect and promote detainee welfare.”

Of course APA’s PR office never acknowledges that the APA Resolution explicitly allowed participation in interrogation tactics as long as they can be said to not cause “significant pain” or “lasting harm.” It also allows psychologists to collude with the massive violations of human rights being perpetrated at US detention facilities, which are illegal, according to the UN, the Council of Europe, and virtually every other international organization.

We challenged the APA to show good faith by using the Resolution to condemn the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” reauthorized by executive order in July. Former President Carter and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have no trouble figuring out that the United States is torturing in these secret CIA facilities. So how does the “anti-torture” APA respond? With total deafening silence. In the two months since the Resolution was passed, APA spokespeople have spoken continuously on the wonders of “engagement,” yet not one word has come out of their mouths criticizing any actual US policy or action. The same was true after the 2005 PENS report and the 2006 resolution against torture. Resolutions that apply to none of the actual abuses that we all know are being perpetrated daily are just pieces of paper, PR stunts designed to distract the APA membership, and the wider public, from the massive abuses being committed by our government, with the collusion of our professional association. It’s exciting to find these academic psychologists see through the farce. Hopefully other psychology constituencies will act similarly.

1 comment October 12th, 2007