Psyche, Science, and Society

ACLU launches Close Guantanamo campaign

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is launching a new campaign to close Guantanamo immediately. As part of this campaign they, along with Brave New Foundation are launching a new series of videos:

Go to www.closegitmo.com/ and sign this letter to President-Elect Obama:

Dear President-elect Obama,

Nothing would make me prouder than to see you act on your first day in office to restore America’s moral leadership in the world.

With one stroke of your pen, you can close Guantánamo Bay prison, shut down military commissions, and ban torture.

The Bush administration created a prison camp at Guantánamo – a place where they claimed the law didn’t apply. They detained hundreds of men without charge or trial, authorized torture, and prosecuted some prisoners in military commissions that violate our Constitution and international law.

We can’t let the system of injustice George W. Bush put in place stand – not for a single day.

I want you to know that I will support your leadership on this vitally important issue in every possible way. Please act on Day One to make clear that the government you lead will be faithful to the Constitution.

The restoration of American freedom is in your hands. Give us back the America we believe in.

Signed,

Here is a blog posting by ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero describing the campaign:

Obama: Close Gitmo On Day One. You Can Do It. We’ve Got Your Back

By Anthony D. Romero

It’s already a time-worn cliché when we say that the election of Barack Obama is historic. I still like saying it. Let me share some of my personal reflections on why this election seems historic and hopeful for a sometimes jaded Executive Director.

Like many of you on Tuesday night, I was celebrating the end of the Bush era and the beginning of a historic one. My partner and I went to four festive and fun election parties that night. And then while lying in bed that night, excitedly talking about the world, we reflected on what that night’s election meant for us.

My partner remarked that he was born in 1954, and that the year he was born, African-American little boys like him were still legally put in “separate but equal” schools. Then Brown vs. Board of Education changed all that. And today, an African-American ascends to the highest office of the greatest nation. I remarked that when I was a little boy in the Bronx public housing projects, I never thought I could be president of ANYTHING when I grew up. I only believed I could go to college when I was a high school sophomore after receiving a letter telling me I was offered early admission at a community college. That was the first day I realized I would not have to be a waiter like my father who came from Puerto Rico and worked at the Warwick Hotel for 39 years. I told my partner that my Mom still proudly tells me that I was always smart, ambitious, and focused on school. But I never aspired for anything more than a job like my dad’s because I never thought it was possible. My dad was the only great role model I knew and I wanted to be just like him.

On Tuesday, all the African-American, Latino, poor of all races, and disenfranchised of all countries got the best of role models. Everyone knows who the U.S. president is, and now literally billions of little boys and girls who may have otherwise set their sights too low will invariably set them higher. If nothing more happens (and our collective job is to make sure a lot more happens), change will indeed happen by having a President Barack Obama inspire new generations of little boys and girls to write, “I want to be President when I grow up.” No one will dare ridicule them because of the color of their skin, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, or convince them that the odds are insurmountable. Tuesday inspired many, but the best of those we inspired we won’t know for generations to come.

For our generation, however, we have to help realize the greatness that President Obama represents. It’s not all on him. He needs us. He has two raging wars, a failing economy where good folks are losing their homes and can’t drive their cars because they don’t have the cash to go the pump, and where they avoid going to the doctor because they can’t afford the bills that will come in the mail. Those are not ACLU priorities, but they are American priorities that President Obama confronts. Solutions to these problems won’t be easy, as he will have to contend with well-moneyed lobbyists from pharmaceuticals, oil companies and military contractors opposing him at every turn. Solutions to those issues will require partisan horse trading with Republicans and Democrats alike — and I worry that he will have to water down what he wants and ultimately give up the Progressive Caucus to get the Blue Dogs and Conservative/Moderate Wing of Republican party, as well as the “Independent” likes of Joe Lieberman (smile).

But our issues and our top agenda are easy by comparison. He doesn’t have to contend with lobbyists in client-bought Ferragamos. Our issues won’t require partisan horse-trading, congressional action, faux hearings and bipartisan committees that deliberate but never deliver.

Our top issue — closing down Gitmo and shutting down the military commissions — can be done as soon as he lifts his left hand, picks up the new presidential pen and signs an executive order closing Gitmo and ending the military commissions once and for all. Call me naive, but I honestly believe he wants to do it. He promised us that on the campaign trail, and I believe it was more than an empty promise. I believe he knows what he needs to do to restore the America we believe in, to get us on back on track, to give us back our America, an America we never stopped believing in but have sorely missed for the past eight years.

With a stroke of his pen on Day One, a good, courageous president can do that — as long as he listens to himself and to our pleas. As long as he doesn’t listen to the centrist and DLC types who tell him, “It’s too complicated.” “It’s tougher than it looks.” “Take your time.” “We need message discipline — you don’t want to do what Clinton did with gays in the military. The nation wasn’t ready.”

But what these so-called experts might forget is that America IS ready. The world is ready. And we need a courageous, optimistic president ready to say back to them, “I don’t want America to live with the stain of President Bush’s Guantánamo prison camp and his flawed commissions for one day longer. I’m closing them today. You tell me how we are going to accomplish that and begin cleaning up the mess we inherited.”

They’re not likely to give him a solution — just their view of the realpolitik. They may play for time, and “get back to him” as he turns his attention elsewhere. But the solution to the stain on America’s pride is in fact really easy: criminally charge all the Guantánamo detainees for whom the government has good evidence. Those we can’t charge, you have to release. For those being tried in kangaroo military commissions, transfer them to federal criminal courts or to courts governed by the U.S. Code of Military Justice. Those are the best systems of justice in the world where the Constitution still stands for something. Let’s use them.

President Obama needs us. Even for the most extraordinary of men like him, his head must be spinning from the “expert” advice he’s getting on a range of issues. Other pressing issues will take time, compromise and horse-trading. Our top issue — closing Gitmo and shutting down the military commissions — just requires us to remind him that that’s what we want; that we have his back when the critics come after him for doing so. We can tell him that we understand that the best of presidents who want to do the right thing are better able to do so when the public, fans and supporters respectfully demand action. Like Dr. King forcing the hand of JFK. Both their legacies benefited from that pressure. And the nation remembers them fondly, even if there were tensions between them. We understand that. I have to believe President Obama understands that.

So let’s get to work to help Mr. Obama be the best president ever. A courageous commander-in-chief, who tells West Wing advisors sipping lattes in Italian calfskin loafers what they have to do, rather than ask the George Bush question, “What should we do?”

In today’s New York Times, we’re running a full-page ad urging President-Elect Obama to close Guantánamo Bay and shut down the military commissions on his first day in the White House. Take a look at the ad.

Today, we’re also launching the first in a powerful series of short videos produced by filmmaker Robert Greenwald, the award-winning director and producer of documentaries including “Outfoxed” and “Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties.” Check out the first video now. You can find Robert’s video on closegitmo.com.

We’re hosting an open Town Hall Meeting on Thursday, November 13, when concerned citizens from all across the nation will gather via teleconference to brainstorm how we help Barack Obama take the steps we all want towards freedom on Day One. We can help him do the right thing, we can give him cover and we can respond to his advisors that it not as hard to close Gitmo and shut down Bush’s military commissions as we’re being told. We can’t wait. The world can’t wait. Our America can’t wait. We want it back and need him to get us back on track.

You are invited to this strategy session to help the president do the right thing that’s in his gut. Go to www.aclu.org/townhall for more information and to sign up.

For eight years, patriotic Americans have led the battle against the most un-American policies in recent history. The Bush administration created a prison camp at Guantánamo — a place where they claimed the law didn’t apply. They have detained hundreds of men without charge or trial, prosecuted others in unconstitutional military commissions and authorized torture.

Now, you can help us and our new president seize a dramatic opportunity for progress. You can help this historic president make history on Day One — not a day too soon. Before the weeds and vines of politics-as-usual creep over our hope and smother its light, let’s come together and demand a new beginning and a new day — on the first day. We can and will close Gitmo, and we can shut down the un-American military commissions. It takes a president, but he needs his people. Not his advisors.

Help us reach him. Help President-elect Obama. Help America.

Get involved: Watch our first “Close Gitmo” video, check out our New York Times ad and sign up for our Town Hall Meeting.

If not for us, do it for those legions of little boys and girls who now have a role model they believe in. Let’s not lose their hope in him, in us, and let’s not let their incipient hope in themselves dissipate. Hope is too hard won. And too easily lost.

November 10th, 2008

General admits he beneffitted from therapy

A brave General speaks out about his own need for therapy. If the military attitude toward those suffering from PTSD and related conditions is to change, we will need many others as brave as him. :

General bucks culture of silence on mental health

Brave twice over: General defies culture of silence about postwar mental health treatment

By Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press

It takes a brave soldier to do what Army Maj. Gen. David Blackledge did in Iraq. It takes as much bravery to do what he did when he got home.

Blackledge got psychiatric counseling to deal with wartime trauma, and now he is defying the military’s culture of silence on the subject of mental health problems and treatment.

“It’s part of our profession … nobody wants to admit that they’ve got a weakness in this area,” Blackledge said of mental health problems among troops returning from America’s two wars.

“I have dealt with it. I’m dealing with it now,” said Blackledge, who came home with post-traumatic stress. “We need to be able to talk about it.”

As the nation marks another Veterans Day, thousands of troops are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with anxiety, depression and other emotional problems.

Up to 20 percent of the more than 1.7 million who’ve served in the wars are estimated to have symptoms. In a sign of how tough it may be to change attitudes, roughly half of those who need help aren’t seeking it, studies have found.

Despite efforts to reduce the stigma of getting treatment, officials say they fear generals and other senior leaders remain unwilling to go for help, much less talk about it, partly because they fear it will hurt chances for promotion.

That reluctance is also worrisome because it sends the wrong signal to younger officers and perpetuates the problem leaders are working to reverse.

“Stigma is a challenge,” Army Secretary Pete Geren said Friday at a Pentagon news conference on troop health care. “It’s a challenge in society in general. It’s certainly a challenge in the culture of the Army, where we have a premium on strength, physically, mentally, emotionally.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked leaders earlier this year to set an example for all soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines: “You can’t expect a private or a specialist to be willing to seek counseling when his or her captain or colonel or general won’t do it.”

Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, an Army psychiatrist heading the defense center for psychological health and traumatic brain injury, is developing a campaign in which people will tell their personal stories. Troops, their families and others also will share concerns and ideas through Web links and other programs. Blackledge volunteered to help, and next week he and his wife, Iwona, an Air Force nurse, will speak on the subject at a medical conference.

A two-star Army Reserve general, 54-year-old Blackledge commanded a civil affairs unit on two tours to Iraq, and now works in the Pentagon as Army assistant deputy chief of staff for mobilization and reserve issues.

His convoy was ambushed in February 2004, during his first deployment. In the event that he’s since relived in flashbacks and recurring nightmares, Blackledge’s interpreter was shot through the head, his vehicle rolled over several times and Blackledge crawled out of it with a crushed vertebrae and broken ribs. He found himself in the middle of a firefight, and he and other survivors took cover in a ditch.

He said he was visited by a psychiatrist within days after arriving at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He had several sessions with the doctor over his 11 months of recovery and physical therapy for his injuries.

“He really helped me,” Blackledge said. And that’s his message to troops.

“I tell them that I’ve learned to deal with it,” he said. “It’s become part of who I am.”

He still has bad dreams about once a week but no longer wakes from them in a sweat, and they are no longer as unsettling.

On his second tour to Iraq, Blackledge traveled to neighboring Jordan to work with local officials on Iraq border issues, and he was in an Amman hotel in November 2005 when suicide bombers attacked, killing some 60 and wounding hundreds.

Blackledge got a whiplash injury that took months to heal. The experience, including a harrowing escape from the chaotic scene, rekindled his post-traumatic stress symptoms, though they weren’t as strong as those he’d suffered after the 2004 ambush.

Officials across the service branches have taken steps over the last year to make getting help easier and more discreet, such as embedding mental health teams into units.

They see signs that stigma has been slowly easing. But it’s likely a change that will take generations.

Last year, 29 percent of troops with symptoms said they feared seeking help would hurt their careers, down from 34 percent the previous year, according to an Army survey. Nearly half feared they’d be seen as weak, down from 53 percent.

The majority of troops who get help are able to get better and to remain on the job.

November 10th, 2008

Stanley Fish: Torture and the moral ambiguity of “applied psychology”

In today’s New York Times Stanley Fish discusses the American Psychological Association’s policies toward torture and interrogations. Fish raises critical points as he emphasizes that the APA policy is a natural outgrowth of the concept of “applied psychology” as manipulation of behavior. The point is made most clearly in the concluding paragraph:

The American Psychological Association flirts with the same reasoning when it regards the transformation of psychological insights into devices of torture as an instance of crossing a line. But that line is crossed whenever the knowledge psychology yields as a science of the mind is made into the technology of persuasion. Applied psychology can never be clean.

I agree with Fish. The interrogations/torture controversy is but the cutting edge of the crisis of psychology. As we learn more about how the human brain/mind work, the possibilities for behavior manipulation are ever increasing. Marketing psychology is one of the clearest examples of this ability.

Psychology claims an ethics code which proclaims the loftiest aspirations:

Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.

Yet, as the interrogations debate has demonstrated, “doing no harm” is far from universally accepted in practice. In its official statements defending its interrogations policy, the APA replaced this goal with the one of not doing more harm than is necessary to acomplish the mission. For that, after all, is what the APA’s repeated mantra that psychologists aiding interrogation of detainees helps keep those interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.” Interrogations, no matter how humane, remain the art of “exploiting” detainees for intelligence. Psychology may be able to aid the effectiveness of that “exploitation,” but should it?

Psychology as a profession has an enormous way to go in order to adequately grapple with these ethical conundrums. Now that progress is being made, we must expand our focus to explore the proper uses of knowledge in a world largely dominated by power and money. To fail to do so is to turn the profession into a tool available to aid the high bidder. That possibility is what has been at stake in the interrogations/torture controversy, as in so many other developments, e.g. managed care, of the last decades. What better time to begin that discussion than in the month when the entire country, indeed, the entire world, is experiencing hope that a new path may be within our grasp.

Here is the Fish article:

Psychology and Torture

By Stanley Fish

In late September, the American Psychological Association reversed a longstanding policy by voting to ban its members from participating in interrogations at United States detention centers, including Guantanamo Bay. Just a year earlier, the association had declined to take this action, but did pass a resolution listing a number of methods of interrogation -– sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, exploitation of phobias, loud music, harsh lights and mock executions were examples –- with which psychologists should not be involved.

What the association did this September brought it into line with the positions of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, which declared in a May 2006 statement that “No psychiatrist should participate directly in the interrogation of person held by military or civilian investigative or law enforcement authorities.”

Why did psychology, generally considered to be one of the most liberal of disciplines, lag behind its sister professions? One answer can be found in the A.M.A.’s explanation of its prohibition: “Physicians must not conduct, directly participate in, or monitor an interrogation with an intent to intervene, because this undermines the physician’s role as healer.” The American Psychiatric Association is even more explicit: “Psychiatrists . . . owe their primary obligation to the well being of their patients.”

Psychology, on the other hand, is not exclusively a healing profession. To be sure, there are psychologists who provide counseling, therapy and other services to patients; but there are many psychologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists. It is their task to figure out how the mind processes and responds to stimuli, or how the emotions color and even create reality, or how reasoning and other cognitive activities are affected by changes in the environment. Their product is not mental health, but knowledge; their skills are not diagnostic, but analytic -– what makes someone do something -– and it is an open question as to whether there are limits, aside from the limits of legality, to the uses to which these skills might be put.

Are psychologists experts for hire, or is it understood, as a matter of professional self-definition, that their expertise is to be deployed only for benign purposes?

As a matter of fact, psychological skills are purchased and deployed as commodities all the time. Law firms employ jury consultants to assess the psychological make-up of prospective jurists and give advice about the appeals and emotional triggers that might sway (i.e., manipulate) them. Every viewer of “Law and Order” knows the good-cop-bad-cop routine, a strategy of interrogation designed to put suspects off balance and gain their confidence by creating a false sense of comradeship. Cable TV’s most popular heroine, Brenda Lee Johnson of “The Closer,” plays both roles herself. Large corporations employ psychological profilers to help make them make personnel decisions. Sports teams hire “coaches” whose job it is to motivate players and make them more aggressive. Hospitals use the results of psychological examinations to decide whether or not a patient should be released. And of course the military employs psychologists in an effort to identify techniques that lead prisoners to spill what they know.

Once could try to draw a line between those techniques that are coercive and those that are merely facilitative, but the line would always be arbitrary, as we can see from a directive put out by Donald Rumsfeld when he was Secretary of Defense: “Interrogations must always be planned deliberate actions that take into account a detainee’s emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses” and “manipulate the detainee’s emotions and weaknesses to gain his willing cooperation” (“Memorandum for the Commander, U.S. Southern Command,” 2003).

What could the word “willing” possibly mean here? It can’t mean “of his free will” because it is precisely the point of the “planned deliberate actions” Rumsfeld speaks of to bend, if not break, the will of detainees. “Willing cooperation,” if it is achieved, is a theatrically produced state and the opposite of the real thing. (If there is a real thing; there has always been an argument that human agents cannot freely will anything, but that is not an argument I want to take up today.)

In fact, the moment psychological knowledge of causes and effects is put into strategic action is the moment when psychology ceases to be a science and becomes an extension of someone’s agenda. Employing psychological skills in the course of any verbal interaction -– be it a domestic conversation, classroom teaching, a performance in a law court, or an interrogation -– will always have the effect of subordinating the facts and the truth of the matter to the desire for an outcome.

This is precisely the accusation traditionally made against the ancient discipline of which psychology is the heir -– rhetoric, or the art of persuasion. The earliest rhetorical manuals were handbooks for lawyers; they taught the tricks of the trade: how to make an argument, how to disguise the weakness of an argument; what to do when the facts are not on your side; how to turn a negative into a positive; how to modulate your voice; how to position your body; how to flatter, pander, intimidate and obfuscate; in short, how to play the jurors and the judge so that they will dance to your tune.

The emphasis is not on what is true, but on what works, what gets results even if the results are obtained by torture. If the testimony you are citing has been elicited by torture, just say that “it was in order to discover the truth that our ancestors wished to make use of torture” (”Rhetorica ad Herennium“). That is, first torture and then defend the practice with any argument that can give it “an appearance of plausibility.” Physical manipulation and verbal manipulation bleed into one another; they are only slightly different ways of clouding minds.

In his “Rhetoric,” Aristotle acknowledges that it would be better if we could make our case without either browbeating or flattering the audience; nothing should matter except “the bare facts.” Yet he laments, “other things affect the result considerably, owing to the defects of our hearers.” And since our hearers are defective it is incumbent upon us to suit our methods to those defects. The ancient art of rhetoric comes into being because men and women are susceptible to base appeals; that susceptibility has been mapped and scientifically described by the modern art of psychology.

Can those arts be defended? The classic defense of rhetoric is that the techniques it catalogs are themselves morally neutral; the enterprise should not be condemned because some people misuse it. In other words, we just supply the knowledge; what is done with it is someone else’s responsibility.

The American Psychological Association flirts with the same reasoning when it regards the transformation of psychological insights into devices of torture as an instance of crossing a line. But that line is crossed whenever the knowledge psychology yields as a science of the mind is made into the technology of persuasion. Applied psychology can never be clean.

November 10th, 2008

Whither Guantanamo trials?

The Obama administration is moving quickly to close Guantanamo, AP reports:

Obama planning US trials for Guantanamo detainees

The Associated Press
Monday, November 10, 2008

WASHINGTON: President-elect Barack Obama’s advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.

During his campaign, Obama described Guantanamo as a “sad chapter in American history” and has said generally that the U.S. legal system is equipped to handle the detainees. But he has offered few details on what he planned to do once the facility is closed.

Under plans being put together in Obama’s camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.

A third group of detainees –the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information — might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not final.

The move would be a sharp deviation from the Bush administration, which established military tribunals to prosecute detainees at the Navy base in Cuba and strongly opposes bringing prisoners to the United States. Obama’s Republican challenger, John McCain, had also pledged to close Guantanamo. But McCain opposed criminal trials, saying the Bush administration’s tribunals should continue on U.S. soil.

The plan being developed by Obama’s team has been championed by legal scholars from both political parties. But it is almost certain to face opposition from Republicans who oppose bringing terrorism suspects to the U.S. and from Democrats who oppose creating a new court system with fewer rights for detainees.

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and Obama legal adviser, said discussions about plans for Guantanamo had been “theoretical” before the election but would quickly become very focused because closing the prison is a top priority. Bringing the detainees to the United States will be controversial, he said, but could be accomplished.

“I think the answer is going to be, they can be as securely guarded on U.S. soil as anywhere else,” Tribe said. “We can’t put people in a dungeon forever without processing whether they deserve to be there.”

The tougher challenge will be allaying fears by Democrats who believe the Bush administration’s military commissions were a farce and dislike the idea of giving detainees anything less than the full constitutional rights normally enjoyed by everyone on U.S. soil.

“There would be concern about establishing a completely new system,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a member of the House Judiciary Committee and former federal prosecutor who is aware of the discussions in the Obama camp. “And in the sense that establishing a regimen of detention that includes American citizens and foreign nationals that takes place on U.S. soil and departs from the criminal justice system — trying to establish that would be very difficult.”

Obama has said the civilian and military court-martial systems provide “a framework for dealing with the terrorists,” and Tribe said the administration would look to those venues before creating a new legal system. But discussions of what a new system would look like have already started.

“It would have to be some sort of hybrid that involves military commissions that actually administer justice rather than just serve as kangaroo courts,” Tribe said. “It will have to both be and appear to be fundamentally fair in light of the circumstances. I think people are going to give an Obama administration the benefit of the doubt in that regard.”

Though a hybrid court may be unpopular, other advisers and Democrats involved in the Guantanamo Bay discussions say Obama has few other options.

Prosecuting all detainees in federal courts raises a host of problems. Evidence gathered through military interrogation or from intelligence sources might be thrown out. Defendants would have the right to confront witnesses, meaning undercover CIA officers or terrorist turncoats might have to take the stand, jeopardizing their cover and revealing classified intelligence tactics.

In theory, Obama could try to transplant the Bush administration’s military commission system from Guantanamo Bay to a U.S. prison. But Tribe said, and other advisers agreed, that was “a nonstarter.” With lax evidence rules and intense secrecy, the military commissions have been criticized by human rights groups, defense attorneys and even some military prosecutors who quit the process in protest.

“I don’t think we need to completely reinvent the wheel, but we need a better tribunal process that is more transparent,” Schiff said.

That means something different would need to be done if detainees couldn’t be released or prosecuted in traditional courts. Exactly what that something would look like remains unclear.

According to three advisers participating in the process, Obama is expected to propose a new court system, appointing a committee to decide how such a court would operate. Some detainees likely would be returned to the countries where they were first captured for further detention or rehabilitation. The rest could probably be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts, one adviser said. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing talks, which have been private.

Whatever form it takes, Tribe said he expects Obama to move quickly.

“In reality and symbolically, the idea that we have people in legal black holes is an extremely serious black mark,” Tribe said. “It has to be dealt with.”

November 10th, 2008