Psyche, Science, and Society

Carl Levin on the export of SERE techniques to Iraq

Below I reported on yesterday’s important Senate Armed Services Committee [SASC], hearing on the export of SERE techniques to Iraq. Here I’ll post Senator Carl Levin’s Opening Statement, which summarize some of the key findings from the two rounds of SASC hearings. We eagerly look forward to the completed committee report, some time before the end of the Congressional session.

Here in Senator Levin’s Statement:

In June 2008, this Committee held a hearing on the origins of aggressive interrogation techniques used against detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. At that hearing, the Committee heard how techniques such as stress positions, forced nudity, and sleep deprivation – used in military Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape or “SERE” training to teach U.S. personnel to resist abusive interrogations, and based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions – were turned on their head and authorized at senior levels of our government for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody. Today’s hearing will cover one way that those techniques made their way to Iraq.

While some have claimed that detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were simply the result of a few bad apples acting on their own, at our June hearing we heard that as far back as December 2001, senior Department of Defense officials, including from General Counsel William J. “Jim” Haynes’s office, sought out information from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), the DoD agency responsible for overseeing SERE training. We heard how, when he later reviewed a request from Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) to use techniques similar to those used in SERE training, Mr. Haynes ignored strong concerns from the military services that some of the techniques were illegal, cut short an effort by the Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to conduct a legal and policy review of the techniques, and recommended that the Secretary of Defense approve most of them for use against detainees. In December 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld approved Mr. Haynes’s recommendation, sending the message that stripping detainees, placing them in stress positions, and using dogs to intimidate them was acceptable. Policies authorizing some of those same abusive techniques in Afghanistan and Iraq followed the Secretary’s decision. We’ll hear this morning how one military commander in Iraq sought and obtained interrogation support from JPRA, an agency whose expertise, again, is in teaching soldiers to resist abusive interrogations conducted by our enemies.

We’ll hear from Colonel Steven Kleinman, the former Director of Intelligence at the JPRA’s Personnel Recovery Academy and retired Colonel John R. Moulton II, former Commander, JPRA. Both witnesses have been cooperative with the Committee’s inquiry and I thank them for their appearance here today.

Some new information and recently declassified documents [PDF] provide further insight into the extent to which SERE resistance training techniques influenced detainee interrogations conducted by U.S. personnel and the role of senior officials in approving policies authorizing the use of those techniques against detainees.

At our June 17th hearing, we heard that the Department of Defense General Counsel’s office, led by Jim Haynes, sought advice from JPRA as far back as December 2001. Specifically, in mid-December 2001, Deputy General Counsel for Intelligence Richard Shiffrin solicited information from JPRA on detainee “exploitation.” JPRA Chief of Staff Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Baumgartner responded to Mr. Shiffrin’s call with a six page fax. An unclassified fax cover sheet addressed to Mr. Shiffrin and dated December 17, 2001 [TAB 1] states that the document provided JPRA’s “spin on exploitation” and that if the General Counsel’s office needed “experts to facilitate this process” that JPRA stood “ready to assist.” That December 2001 call from Mr. Shiffrin appears to have been JPRA’s first foray into “offensive” interrogation operations, but other efforts soon followed.

On April 16, 2002, Dr. Bruce Jessen, who was then the senior SERE psychologist at JPRA, circulated a draft “exploitation plan” to JPRA Commander Colonel Randy Moulton and other senior officials at the agency. Emails exchanged between Dr. Jessen and Colonel Moulton [TAB 2] suggest that JPRA intended to seek approval of the exploitation plan.

Also in the spring of 2002, the CIA sought approval from the National Security Council (NSC) to begin an interrogation program for high-level al-Qaida detainees. In a written response to questions I sent her in July 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was then the National Security Advisor to the President, responded on September 12th that, in 2002 and 2003 there were meetings at the White House where specific CIA interrogation techniques were discussed. [TAB 3] I also asked Secretary Rice whether she attended meetings where SERE training was discussed. Secretary Rice responded that that she recalled being told that U.S. military personnel were subjected in training to “physical and psychological interrogation techniques.” Her legal advisor at the time, John Bellinger, said in his September 12th written answers to my questions that he was present in meetings at the White House or the Eisenhower Executive Office Building “at which SERE training was discussed.” [TAB 4]

Secretary Rice also wrote in her September 12th response that John Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), provided legal advice at “several” meetings that she attended and that the Department of Justice’s advice on the program “was being coordinated by Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales.” She wrote that CIA’s interrogation program was reviewed by NSC Principals and that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld participated in that review. Secretary Rice said that when CIA sought approval of the interrogation program she asked Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet to brief the Principals and asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to “personally advise NSC Principals whether the program was lawful.” Mr. Bellinger, her Legal Advisor, wrote that he asked CIA lawyers to seek legal advice not only from the OLC, but also from the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, headed at the time by Michael Chertoff.

The meetings referred to by Secretary Rice and Mr. Bellinger were not meetings between low-level bureaucrats. These were the most senior officials in the United States government, advisors to the President, meeting in the White House.

Mr. Bellinger said that some of the legal analyses of proposed interrogation techniques that were prepared by the Department of Justice referred to “the psychological effects of military resistance training” and that during the 2002-2003 timeframe, he “expressed concern that the proposed CIA interrogation techniques comply with applicable U.S. law, including our international obligations.”

At our June 17th hearing, the Committee heard that in July 2002, prompted by a request from DoD General Counsel Jim Haynes, Deputy General Counsel for Intelligence Richard Shiffrin called JPRA and asked for a list of physical and psychological pressures used in SERE training. In response to that request, on July 26, 2002, JPRA provided a list of techniques that included stress positions, waterboarding, slapping, sleep disruption, and sensory deprivation. The JPRA list also made reference to a section of the JPRA manual that talks about “coercive pressures,” like treating a person like an animal. Mr. Shiffrin testified that part of the reason the General Counsel’s office sought the information was its interest in reverse-engineering the techniques for use offensively in detainee interrogations.

At that hearing we also heard that in October 2002, Major General Michael Dunlavey, the Commander at Guantanamo, requested authority to use some of the same SERE resistance training techniques that had been on the list JPRA provided to Mr. Haynes’s office in July.

The military services registered serious concerns about the legality of some of the techniques in Major General Dunlavey’s request and Rear Admiral Jane Dalton, who was the Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that she initiated a broad based legal and policy review of the request. But, at Mr. Haynes’s request, her review was cut short by General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff. Mr. Haynes subsequently recommended that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approve most of the techniques in Major General Dunlavey’s request. Again, on December 2, 2002 Secretary Rumsfeld approved Mr. Haynes’s recommendation, authorizing the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at GTMO, including stress positions, instilling fear through the use of dogs, and removal of clothing.

At the June 17th hearing, we heard from then-Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora about concerns he raised in December 2002 and January 2003 with Mr. Haynes about interrogations at GTMO. We learned from John Bellinger, the NSC legal advisor, in his September 12th response to my questions, that on several occasions, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz raised concerns with him about allegations of detainee abuse at GTMO. Mr. Bellinger wrote to me that he, in turn, raised these concerns “on several occasions with DoD officials.” In her September 12th response, Secretary Rice wrote that Mr. Bellinger also advised her “on a regular basis regarding concerns and issues relating to DoD detention policies and practices at Guantanamo.” She wrote that as a result she convened a “series of meetings of NSC Principals in 2002 and 2003 to discuss various issues and concerns relating to detainees in the custody of the Department of Defense.”

At our last hearing, I described how aggressive techniques authorized by the Secretary of Defense for use at GTMO made their way to Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of those same techniques were authorized by senior military commanders. For instance, on September 14, 2003 Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Commander of Combined Joint Task Force 7 in Iraq, authorized the use of dogs, stress positions, and other aggressive techniques in interrogations.

In the summer of 2003 the Commander of a special mission unit Task Force in Iraq went further. He contacted JPRA for help with interrogations. Again, JPRA’s expertise is in training soldiers to resist abusive interrogations by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions. In response to the Commander’s request, and with explicit approval from the U.S. Joint Forces Command, JPRA’s higher headquarters, JPRA sent an interrogation support team to Iraq. Colonel Kleinman was the team leader during that visit.

Here’s some of what we know about the Iraq trip from unclassified or declassified sources. The Task Force’s request for JPRA “interrogator support” was submitted through official channels and was approved by JFCOM on August 27, 2003. JPRA put together a three person team to support the request. On September 4, 2003, just as the JPRA team was arriving in Iraq, Lieutenant General Robert Wagner, the Deputy Commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, JPRA’s senior command, sent an email to Colonel Moulton, the JPRA Commander, about the trip asking, what in JPRA’s “charter places JPRA in the business of intelligence collection?” [TAB 5] Again, just a week earlier, JFCOM had approved the trip. Colonel Moulton replied to Lieutenant General Wagner’s email that “there is nothing in our charter or elsewhere that points us toward the offensive side of captivity conduct” and that JPRA was “well aware of the problems associated with crossing the Rubicon into intel collection (or anything close).”

A second email from Colonel Moulton, however, sent on September 9, 2003 to the JFCOM Director of Operations, stated that “recent history (to include discussions and training with [DIA], USSOCOM, CIA) shows that no DoD entity has a firm grasp on any comprehensive approach to strategic debriefing/interrogation. Our subject matter experts (and certain SERE psychologist) currently have the most knowledge and depth within DoD on the captivity environment and exploitation.” While Colonel Moulton’s email said that JPRA was “NOT looking to expand our involvement to active participation” he noted that JPRA’s “potential participation is predicated solely on the request of the Combatant Commander.”

A recently declassified summary of a 2005 interview with Colonel Moulton [TAB 6] and Colonel Moulton’s prepared statement for today’s hearing both describe conversations he had with Colonel Kleinman while the JPRA team was in Iraq. Colonel Moulton acknowledges telling Colonel Kleinman that the JPRA team was authorized to participate in interrogations using SERE training techniques. Colonel Moulton said he granted that authority only after seeking approval from JFCOM. Colonel Kleinman has said that he objected to the use of SERE training techniques during the trip and that he told Colonel Moulton both that those techniques were inconsistent with the Geneva Conventions and that granting authority for the team to use them was an illegal order. This morning we will hear both Colonel Moulton’s and Colonel Kleinman’s account of those conversations and events that occurred during that trip.

Towards the end of their trip, members of the JPRA team produced a draft Concept of Operations or “CONOP” for the interrogation of detainees. Emails from Captain Daniel Donovan, U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Staff Judge Advocate, reveal some of what the CONOP proposed and what JPRA thought was acceptable.

Captain Donovan, in a September 26, 2003 email to Colonel Moulton and others at JPRA [TAB 7], raised a concern that techniques proposed in the CONOP would “not be legal under the Geneva Conventions.” A few days later in an email to JFCOM leadership [TAB 8] Captain Donovan reiterated his concern stating that “a number of the ‘interrogation techniques’ suggested by JPRA in their draft CONOP are highly aggressive (such as the ‘water board’), and it probably goes without saying that if JPRA is to include such techniques in a CONOP they prepare for an operational unit in another [area of responsibility], they need to be damn sure they’re appropriate in both a legal and policy sense.” Captain Donovan added “JPRA got its list of techniques from a DOD General Counsel Working Group Report dated 6 Mar 03, so I’m sure they felt that their list might have already been ‘blessed’ by Pentagon lawyers.”

The Working Group referred to by Captain Donovan’s email had been established at Secretary Rumsfeld’s direction in January 2003. As the Committee heard at our June 17th hearing, over the strong objections of senior military lawyers, the Working Group relied on a March 14, 2003 legal opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) written by John Yoo. The Working Group’s final report, issued on April 4, 2003, recommended several aggressive techniques including removal of clothing, prolonged standing, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, hooding, increasing anxiety through the use of a detainee’s aversions like dogs, and face and stomach slaps. While the final Working Group report did not mention SERE, many of the techniques it recommended were strikingly similar to techniques used in JPRA SERE training.

Captain Donovan’s email said that that the techniques approved by Secretary Rumsfeld for use at GTMO in April 2003 were not the same as those in the Working Group report and said that what the Secretary had approved was more restrictive. As we heard at our June 17th hearing, Secretary Rumsfeld’s April 2003 memo to U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), GTMO’s higher headquarters, was silent on most of the techniques in the Working Group’s report. The Secretary’s memo said that if techniques, beyond 24 that he specifically authorized, were required, SOUTHCOM should “provide a written request describing the proposed technique, recommended safeguards, and the rationale for applying it with an identified detainee.” We heard at our last hearing that one such request arrived at the Pentagon just a few months later and was approved by the Secretary.

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s original December 2, 2002, authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques including stress positions, use of dogs and removing detainees clothing and his Working Group’s April 2003 recommendation of many other aggressive techniques, conveyed the message that senior officials felt that physical pressures and degrading tactics were appropriate for use during interrogations of detainees in U.S. military custody. Many of the aggressive techniques the Secretary approved in December 2002, including the three I just mentioned – stripping detainees, putting them in stress positions and using dogs to intimidate them – were used against detainees at Abu Ghraib.

But even the public disclosure of abuses at Abu Ghraib apparently did not eliminate interest in using SERE specialists to provide advice on interrogations. The Department of Defense Inspector General said in its 2006 report that it was only after a request to send a JPRA team to Afghanistan in 2004 that JFCOM finally issued guidance that the use of SERE for “‘offensive’ purposes lies outside the roles and responsibilities of JPRA.” [TAB 10]

September 26th, 2008

Senate Armed Services Committee on importing SERE techniques to Iraq

Yesterday the Senate Armed Services Committee [SASC], or rather, its Chair, Senator Carl Levin [no other members deigned to come to the hearing on US war crimes] held a hearing on the export of SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape] tactics to Iraq, leading, eventually, to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib.

At the hearing they heard from Col. Steven Kleinman, an interrogator and former JPRA official [Joint Personnel Recovery Administration, the SERE parent agency] and Col. John Moulton, former JPRA Commander. They testified about Col. Kleinman’s mission to Iraq, in which he was asked to demonstrate SERE techniques. He witnessed abusive interrogations and stopped them. He was then sent back home. Col. Kleinman is one of the heros of this sordid episode.

Documents released at the hearing also contained a questionaire ansered by Secretary of State, and foemer National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice in which she admitted being briefed on SERE methods in the White House. She claims to have been  “that these techniques had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm.” In fact, as was clarified by th hief SERE psychologists at the June 17 SASC hearing, these techniques were deemed safe for use in training US troops, because of the combination of psychological screening, careful monitoring, ability of troops to stop at any time, and extensive multi-session debriefings afterwards. This psychologist did not claim or provide any evidence that these techniques were safe when used as interrogation techniques of captured detainees.

There are many other goodies revealed in these hearings that I am only beginning to understand.

The AP and Washington Post covered the hearings. I will here post the AP account. Then I will post Senator Levin’s Opening Statement separately. Here is the AP:

Interrogator details pre-Abu Ghraib abuses

By Pamela Hess

WASHINGTON — A military interrogation expert, Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, told Congress on Thursday that prior to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, he witnessed interrogations of Iraqi detainees that he considers violations of the Geneva Conventions.

One interrogation was conducted by an Air Force civilian and a contractor employed by his own organization, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. It had sent a small team to Iraq in September 2003 to help a special forces task force improve its interrogations of stubborn prisoners. The team was asked to demonstrate an interrogation on an Iraqi prisoner. It was an unusual role for the organization, which trains soldiers how to resist interrogations, not conduct them.

Kleinman said his two colleagues forcibly stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, shackled him and left him standing in a dank, six-foot cement cell with orders to the guards that the prisoner was not to move for 12 hours. Had the prisoner passed out, he would have hit his head on a wall, Kleinman said.

Kleinman stopped the interrogation, which had veered from his careful plan into abuse.

“Until their time in Iraq they had never seen a real world interrogation,” he said.

The men, Terrence Russell and Lenny Miller, had learned the harsh techniques working with the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program for U.S. forces, which conducts stressful mock interrogations to prepare soldiers to withstand and resist abusive questioning in the event they are taken prisoner. The program uses methods derived from the real-life experiences of American prisoners of war. The techniques include forced nudity, stress positions, exposure to extremes in weather and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.

Russell is a civilian JPRA employee involved in research and program development. Miller was a contractor who no longer works for JPRA, according to the military.

Joint Forces Command, which oversees JPRA, did not investigate Kleinman’s allegations because they were made directly to the task force in Iraq, said spokesman Capt. Dennis Moynihan.

Attempts to locate Russell and Miller independently were unsuccessful.

At the time, Kleinman called his now retired commander, Col. John Moulton II, to express concern about the harsh methods he saw being used in several interrogations. He said Moulton checked with his superiors and called him back to say the techniques had been specifically approved. Moulton later told investigators that he understood that the Pentagon’s general counsel or higher had approved the measures, and that the prisoners were considered terrorists and were not protected by the Geneva Conventions.

The Geneva Conventions, however, did apply in Iraq.

The Senate Armed Services Committee also released responses from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and legal counsel John Bellinger regarding their knowledge of the CIA interrogation program when Rice was the national security adviser and Bellinger was the National Security Council’s top lawyer.

She and Bellinger were also briefed on SERE interrogation methods at the White House in 2002 or 2003.

“I recall being told … that these techniques had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm,” Rice wrote.

Rice told the committee the CIA had sought NSC approval before embarking on its own harsh interrogation program in the spring of 2002. Rice said she asked then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to review its legality. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the White House on legal matters, later determined the CIA’s program to be legal.

Rice also said Bellinger advised her regularly about “concerns and issues” relating to the Pentagon’s interrogation and detention program at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. She said the Justice Department never discussed with her the FBI’s now documented concerns with interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay and CIA detention facilities.

Bellinger said he knew the FBI refused to participate in some CIA interrogations, which included waterboarding for at least three detainees. He was also aware of allegations of abuse at Guantanamo in 2003.

Also Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee took a step closer to forcing the Justice Department to hand over secret legal memos authorizing the Bush administration to use harsh and potentially illegal interrogation techniques on detainees.

By a 10-9 vote, the committee agreed to give the chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., authority to subpoena the memos from the Office of Legal Counsel. It is now up to Leahy to decide whether to issue the subpoena, which the Justice Department likely will fight because much of the information in the memos is highly classified.

Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse did not answer a question about whether the department would comply with such a subpoena.

“We regret that the committee authorized the subpoena,” Roehrkasse said in a statement. “We will continue to work with them to ensure that their legitimate oversight needs are met.”

September 26th, 2008

Rachel Maddow on US torture

Rachel Maddow on US torture, as directed out of the White House. She interviews Alex Gibney, Director of Taxi to the Dark Side, now on HBO.

[H/t to Mike in comments.]

September 26th, 2008

NPR: Psychiatrists protest Pentagon interrogations

NPR’s Morning Edition this morning had a story by Richard Knox on protests by the American Psychiatric Association [yes, the psychiatrists this time, not psychologists] protesting continued use by the Defense Department of psychiatrists for Behavioral Science Consultation Teams [BSCTs] consulting on detainee interrogations.The take home quote by current American Psychiatric Association President Nada L. Stotland is:

Stotland says the controversy is not “just about a rule.”

“This is about the soul of a psychiatrist, which is to be dedicated to helping people and healing people,” she says. “And in order to do that, we need to get and we need to deserve their trust.”
Gates has not yet replied, but a Pentagon spokesman says a response will be forthcoming.
Military officials say people have misconceptions about the way interrogations are currently done.

If only some leader of the American Psychological Association could speak so clearly and passionately about the soul of psychology. If we elect Steven Reisner APA President this fall, we will at last have such a leader.

The comments by the Pentagon spokesperson have a warning for us psychologists as we struggle over the exact meaning and implementation of the referendum that was approved by 59% of the American Psychological Association membership. If we do not make the referendum an enforceable part of the ethics code, the Pentgon will feel free to ignore it, if they choose:

Ritchie says the Army did not consider the psychiatric association’s 2006 policy statement to be an ethical guideline.

The other important point here is that DoD is listening to what our professional associations are saying:

In fact, military officials are going back to the drawing board. The Army’s 2006 policy memo on the role of “behavioral consultants” expires Oct. 20. Ritchie says work has begun on a new policy. She says it will take the current controversy into account.

You can listen to the report here. Here is the accompanying article on the NPR web site, which is close to, but not identical to a transcript:

Psychiatrists Protest Pentagon Interrogations

by Richard Knox

Morning Edition, National Public Radio, September 26, 2008 ·

The nation’s leading organization of psychiatrists says the Pentagon has reneged on an agreement not to use psychiatrists in interrogations of detainees at Guantanamo and other detention sites.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Dr. Nada L. Stotland, president of the American Psychiatric Association, says, “The use of psychiatrists to aid in interrogations is a serious violation of medical ethics and should be discontinued.”A Pentagon spokeswoman said the Pentagon’s rules on the use of psychiatrists, psychologists and other “behavioral science consultants” does not violate professional ethical guidelines set out by the APA and other organizations.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have been involved in the interrogation of detainees for years. Their participation has generated strong feelings among mental health professionals, lawyers and ethicists.

The controversy is coming to a head. Last week, the American Psychological Association also weighed in on the issue, announcing the results of an unprecedented referendum on the issue: Nearly 60 percent of voting members said psychologists should not serve at detention centers at all. The only exceptions are psychologists who work directly for a detainee or a humanitarian agency.

The issue is whether it’s ethically proper for mental health professionals, who vow to do no harm, to be instruments of interrogation.

Neither professional group can tell the Pentagon what to do. And the only direct power the associations have over psychiatrists and psychologists lies in being able to kick them out if they violate policies. But professionals’ livelihoods could be in jeopardy if state licensure boards were to find they violated ethical rules.

The American Psychiatric Association’s policy stems from a visit Dr. Steven Sharfstein made to Guantanamo in October 2005, when he was president of the group.

Sharfstein says he was disturbed to see what mental health professionals actually did there. He says they were advising interrogators as detainees were being questioned.

“They had headsets and microphones, and would be talking to (interrogators) as the interrogators were talking to the detainees,” Sharfstein says. “I just had lots of problems with the whole process.”

When he got home, Sharfstein resolved to get his association to oppose psychiatrists’ participation in interrogations. After a contentious debate, the association adopted that policy in 2006.

The association’s current president, Stotland, says the group thought it had an understanding with the Pentagon back then that it would stop using psychiatrists in interrogations. Then she read the Sept. 11 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

It contained a report by ethicists Jonathan Marks and Gregg Bloche, who obtained Pentagon documents through the federal Freedom of Information Act. The documents showed that the Army has continued to train some psychiatrists as behavioral science consultants.

The researchers also obtained — and the New England Journal published — a 26-page Army policy memo that states, among other things, that behavioral consultants are expected to do psychological profiles of detainees and identify their vulnerabilities as interrogations proceed.

She complained to Gates in the letter she sent Sept. 12. “Both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association have taken official positions opposing the participation of psychiatrists in interrogation,” she wrote. “We understood that the U.S. military had acknowledged those policies. Has the military’s position changed?”

In an interview with NPR, Stotland says the controversy is not “just about a rule.”

“This is about the soul of a psychiatrist, which is to be dedicated to helping people and healing people,” she says. “And in order to do that, we need to get and we need to deserve their trust.”

Gates has not yet replied, but a Pentagon spokesman says a response will be forthcoming.

Military officials say people have misconceptions about the way interrogations are currently done.

Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a psychiatrist with the Army, says that at the beginning of the war on terror, there was misunderstanding of “what the rules were” for interrogations. “We don’t try to defend (that),” she says.

But abusive interrogations are in the past, military officials say.

“Interrogations are not abusive,” says Dr. Jack Smith, who works in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. “Anyone reading what’s been published in magazines and even some medical journals would begin to feel that, by definition, interrogation is abuse. And I think that is not correct.”

Pentagon officials say the presence of psychologists and psychiatrists prevent what they call “behavioral drift” — the erosion of ethical norms that they say can spiral into a situation like Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq where detainees were abused by some U.S. troops.

Ritchie says the Army did not consider the psychiatric association’s 2006 policy statement to be an ethical guideline.

“We appreciate their position, and we’ve listened to it and discussed it intensively,” she says. “But it is important to remember that information obtained from interrogation has been used, for example, to discover weapons caches in Iraq, and therefore has saved the lives of both Americans and Iraqis.”

The new challenges to the participation of psychologists and psychiatrists in military interrogations may have consequences.

“If they took these position statements seriously, they would have to stop using psychologists and psychiatrists as advisers on individual interrogations,” says Marks, a Pennsylvania State University lawyer-ethicist who co-wrote the New England Journal article.

“They would have to go back to the drawing board and seriously consider how they’re going to conduct interrogations,” Marks adds.

In fact, military officials are going back to the drawing board. The Army’s 2006 policy memo on the role of “behavioral consultants” expires Oct. 20. Ritchie says work has begun on a new policy. She says it will take the current controversy into account.

1 comment September 26th, 2008

Resignation leaves National Institutes of Health leaderless

Revere at Effect Measure explains what’s going on at the National Institutes of Health [NIH] as the Director resigns, and the implications for U.S. science:

Like a lot of other research scientists supported by NIH I got an email yesterday from NIH Director Elias Zerhouni announcing his intention to leave his position “to devote much of my attention to writing.” At least it wasn’t the hackneyed “to spend more time with my family.” While Zerhouni won’t actually leave until the end of next month, the federal health research establishment is essentially leaderless, awaiting the next administration. The main public health institute within the NIH system, the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has been under “Acting” (although quite capable) for many months after its previous Director resigned under fire (see here, here, here, here and here). That scandal reached all the way to Director Zerhouni’s office, although Zerhouni himself left no fingerprints. In any event, his departure is not a surprise. It was widely predicted he would resign over the summer in time to take an academic job. His plans to “devote time to writing” and the timing of the announcement after the start of the academic year suggest he wasn’t able to secure a top level academic position.

Zerhouni presided over tumultuous years at NIH. The doubling of the NIH budget in the five years prior to 2003 created a pig in a python effect when the budget flatlined and all the new post docs, graduate students, laboratories and research projects stimulated by the doubling were left high and dry. Now the budget is at about what it was in real dollars before the doubling but there are many more mouths to feed and lab benches to maintain. Basic health research is facing its own financial meltdown as existing grants aren’t being renewed and the hands that do the work — the post docs and graduate students — are leaving the field and the research programs they were a part of are withering. This is creating a crisis in leadership in academic science in the US, as the post docs leave for other work and the mid level academics coming up for tenure can’t get their grants renewed and have to leave their institutions to look for other positions and start over or leave research altogether.

The result will be continued erosion of US leadership in the basic sciences. The current financial crisis and wasteful and atrocious war in Iraq have squandered enormous quantities of federal resources, a small fraction of which could have strengthened the kind of science that would benefit everyone. Instead we will see the basic science foundation of the country weakened.

Zerhouni is getting out while the getting is good.

September 26th, 2008