Chronicle of Higher Ed: Psychology and Torture
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a News Analysis of the APA controversy:
Psychology and Torture
Mock executions, waterboarding, and religious humiliation: Participation in those interrogation practices and more than a dozen others was banned in a resolution enacted at last August’s convention of the American Psychological Association. At the time, the association’s spokespeople said they hoped they had put to rest a lengthy debate about psychologists’ responsibility for torture at the Guantánamo Bay detention center and other sites where suspected terrorists have been held.
But as the association prepares to meet this week in Boston, feelings are running hotter than ever. For the second consecutive year, activists are planning a large street demonstration outside the convention. One of the activists scheduled to speak there — Steven Reisner, a psychoanalyst and a senior adviser in New York University’s international trauma-studies program — is running for the association’s presidency.
The lingering ill will stems in part from new revelations about how the CIA, FBI, and the Department of Defense drew on psychological research when they designed their post-September 11 interrogation systems.
The Dark Side, a new book by Jane Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, describes a 2002 incident in which Martin E.P. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a former president of the psychology association, accepted a CIA invitation to lecture at a naval training center about his theories of “learned helplessness.”
Mr. Seligman’s widely respected research suggests that when people and animals are traumatized at random intervals, they tend to give up: They stop seeking to rationally help themselves, and they stop responding to ordinary incentives. Mr. Seligman insists that his 2002 lecture was intended only to help train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if they are captured. But in his 50-person audience that day were Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell, psychologists who operate a consulting firm that helped the CIA develop interrogation techniques that some critics have called abusive. According to Ms. Mayer’s book, Mr. Mitchell has long been fascinated by learned-helplessness theory. (Through a lawyer, Mr. Mitchell denied to Ms. Mayer that his CIA interrogation techniques were inspired by Mr. Seligman’s work.)
Few people in the psychology association believe that Mr. Seligman consciously assisted in the development of detainee abuses. But many say that the association needs to make a more thorough public accounting of how the work of Mr. Seligman and other prominent members may have been misused by government agencies.
The association has so far rejected calls for formal inquiries. In a public statement last summer, Olivia Moorehead-Slaughter, a clinical psychologist in Massachusetts who chaired an association task force on psychological ethics and national security, argued that the association is not equipped to sift through the military’s decision making in 2002 and 2003. The association “has neither subpoena power nor the necessary security clearances,” she wrote, “so an ‘investigation’ would be pointless.”
Beyond disputes about the past, calls to toughen the association’s interrogation policies still persist. Last year’s anti-torture resolution permits psychologists to work as advisers and therapists at Guantánamo-style detention centers, as long as they do not assist in or tolerate coercive interrogations. But some activists say that the general conditions at Guantánamo and similar sites are intrinsically abusive, and that psychologists should have nothing to do with them.
Those activists have forced a mail ballot on a resolution that would forbid the association’s members from working in any capacity “in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either international law … or the U.S. Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.” Ballots were distributed on August 1, and results are expected in late September.
The referendum’s authors say that if psychologists want to provide mental-health services to detainees, they should do so through outside agencies such as the Red Cross, not as direct employees of military or intelligence agencies.
But it is not clear that the government would welcome independent therapists into the detention centers. Many leaders of the association insist that if military psychologists leave Guantánamo, the detainees’ situation will only get worse. Even Michael Gelles, a former Navy psychologist who famously left Guantánamo after protesting abuses, has said that it would be a serious mistake for his colleagues to withdraw entirely. This debate seems likely to tear at the association well after the Guantánamo Bay facility itself is closed.
1 comment August 11th, 2008