Psyche, Science, and Society

Social science debates military funding

The Washington Post reports on the controversy among anthopologists and others about whether to cooperate with Pentagon funded research efforts. Complex issued are raised in this debate. But at least it’s happening. Alas, in psychology there is virtually no debate about the extent to which the profession, including many types of research, are intertwined with the defense establishment. It’s time that debate commence:

Military’s Social Science Grants Raise Alarm

By Maria Glod
Washington Post, Sunday, August 3, 2008

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is calling on “eggheads” to help the military unravel questions about the recruitment of terrorists, the resurgence of the Taliban and messages delivered in militant Muslim religious schools.

Many eggheads are wary.

The Pentagon’s $50 million Minerva Research Initiative, named after the Roman goddess of wisdom and warriors, will fund social science research deemed crucial to national security. Initial proposals were due July 25, and the first grants are expected to be awarded by year’s end.

But the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which includes professors from American and George Mason universities, said dependence on Pentagon funding could make universities an “instrument rather than a critic of war-making.”

In a May 28 letter to federal officials, the American Anthropological Association said that it was of “paramount importance . . . to study the roots of terrorism and other forms of violence” but that its members are “deeply concerned that funding such research through the Pentagon may pose a potential conflict of interest.”

Gates, a former president of Texas A&M University, described the Minerva program in an April speech to the Association of American Universities. The nation should devote more resources to “elements of national power beyond the guns and steel of the military,” he said.

“In Iraq and Afghanistan, the heroic efforts and best intentions of our men and women in uniform have at times been undercut by a lack of knowledge of the culture and people they are dealing with every day,” he said. Gates said the research would not be kept secret.

David Price, an anthropologist at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash., and the author of a book on anthropological intelligence in World War II, agreed that the military and policymakers should know more about world cultures. But, he said, the Pentagon effort is flawed.

“It sets up sort of a Soviet system, or top-down system,” Price said. “If you look at the big picture, this will not make us smarter — this will make us much more narrow. It will only look at problems Defense wants us to in a narrow way.”

Every year, the Defense Department spends billions of dollars on research to improve technology, weapons and medicine, including nearly $13 billion this fiscal year. But its relationship with social science has sometimes been tumultuous. Anthropologists were active during World War II, even designing propaganda to encourage Japanese soldiers to surrender.

In the 1960s, Project Camelot, an Army-sponsored effort to study political change and unrest in Latin America, was canceled abruptly after the program was revealed in the Chilean press.

Recently, the Army’s Human Terrain System has embedded social scientists in military units in Iraq and Afghanistan with the aim of helping commanders understand local culture and customs. The project has drawn criticism from many academics. Two scholars have been killed.

Thomas Mahnken, a deputy assistant defense secretary for policy planning, said Minerva is “not about supporting combat operations.” He said Gates seeks to fill a void in funding for basic social science scholarship that would improve understanding of issues that bear on national security.

“This is the first significant effort in 30 or 40 years to engage social sciences on a large scale by the Department of Defense,” Mahnken said, citing the unsuccessful Project Camelot as a contributor to a rift between the military and many anthropologists.

“There was an effort during [the Vietnam era] that ended up being ill-conceived and burned bridges on both sides, and, unfortunately, these attitudes have persisted,” Mahnken said. “This effort is about rebuilding those bridges.”

In his April speech, Gates recalled U.S. efforts to raise math and science education after the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite, in 1957. He quoted the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as saying that the United States should “return to the acceptance of eggheads and ideas if it is to meet the Russian challenge.”

Minerva will fund research on five topics, including the development of China’s military and technological prowess and how religion, culture, economics and politics in the Islamic world “interact to foster political violence, terrorism or insurgent behavior.”

The Pentagon also wants insights into Saddam Hussein’s rule and into terrorist groups. Citing the development of game theory and Kremlinology in the Cold War, the Pentagon is asking the brightest minds to come up with new ways of thinking about national security. Universities around the world are eligible for Minerva funding. Officials said $50 million will be awarded over five years.

David Vine, an American University anthropologist, criticized the initiative, saying the research would be limited by the Pentagon’s worldview.

“Research about a potential conflict with China, I feel, may be part of a large self-fulfilling prophecy,” Vine said. “That kind of research could lead up to an increasing escalation of military tensions and military preparations for war.”

The Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which describes itself as an advocate for ethical anthropology, said the research topics could “contribute to creating more national and human insecurity by trafficking in the construction of . . . a connection between Islam and violence.”

Vine said he would apply for funding. His topic: how overseas military bases affect relations with other nations, “how they’ve damaged our international reputation and how they’ve damaged the lives of people around the world.”

Other academics embrace the Pentagon project.

“Hopefully, a project like Minerva will provide some historical perspective before, rather than after, it is needed,” said Robert B. Townsend, acting executive director of the American Historical Association.

Graham B. Spanier, president of Penn State University, said researchers there will eagerly seek funding for work to bring insight and nuance to policymaking.

Spanier, noting Gates’s experience as a university president, expressed confidence in the defense secretary’s commitment to academic freedom. In his April speech, Gates said Minerva would solicit diverse views, regardless of whether they are critical of the military.

But Maximilian C. Forte, an anthropologist at Concordia University in Montreal, said he worries that the project could damage an important asset for anthropologists: trust.

Forte, who has been doing research in the Caribbean region, said debate over Minerva has made some of his subjects suspicious of his motives. They want to know who is really backing him “because they are concerned I might be some kind of intelligence agent. We’re all going to be seen as potentially serving the state, as being the eyes and ears of American foreign policy.”

Add comment August 3rd, 2008

Steven Reisner’s Candidate Statement for APA President

As most of my regular readers know, my friend and colleague Steven Reisner is running for President of the American Psychological Association as an attempt to change the association’s policies allowing psychologists to participate in US detainee abuse. Steven has released his candidate statement. For more information on the campaign, go to http://www.reisnerforpresident.org/. And please register to receive further information and to help the campaign.

Dr. Steven J. Reisner’s candidate statement

I am running for President of the American Psychological Association for several reasons, but none more important than the fact that the APA’s support of psychologists’ participation in detainee interrogations and detention operations demonstrates that the association has lost its moral compass. APA interrogation policy is a part of a culture of unreflective support of military and intelligence counterterrorism operations that has led our country and our profession down a dangerous and disingenuous path. This policy and culture have undermined the APA’s independence, its scientific integrity, and its ability to lead us into the twenty-first century. The APA, and the field of psychology it represents, must stand unequivocally for human rights and human welfare. Otherwise, we are merely a guild, promoting only the interests of its well-connected members; otherwise, we are the tools of our government, pandering to programs that violate our own ethical values.

My foremost task as APA President will be to reclaim our first ethical principle of beneficence: “to benefit those with whom [we] work and take care to do no harm… to safeguard the welfare and rights of those with whom [we] interact professionally and other affected persons.”

At this point in our history, our Association stands alone among the health professions in supporting its members’ direct participation in military and CIA interrogations. Psychiatrists, physicians, and nurses, have all rejected such participation and aligned themselves with international standards of medical ethics. Recently, international associations of psychologists, too, have protested our Association’s unique position. The Nordic Psychological Associations stated in their June 25th, 2008 letter to the APA that “military psychologists cannot function in an ethically correct way in sites where basic human rights are systematically violated and where appropriate international bodies of control are denied access.”

New information steadily emerges on psychologists’ operational role in abusive detention conditions—from the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, the Defense Department’s Inspector General Report, and the press—directly implicating psychologists in the design or practice of abusive interrogations at Guantánamo, Bagram and at CIA black sites. When orders came directly from the White House to use waterboarding, sleep and sensory deprivation, and other abusive techniques on detainees, psychologists implemented the program; and when secret Justice Department memos asserted that health professionals’ oversight was required to render such techniques legal, psychologists provided that oversight. These revelations are not only morally damning but scientifically embarrassing, with psychological research and theory distorted for political maneuvers and abusive ends.

Let’s be clear – these abusive interrogation procedures and conditions were not exceptions, perpetrated by unsupervised individuals. These abuses were part of a carefully developed program of psychological pressure, abuse, and torture, supported by protocols from the CIA and the military and with legal justifications from the Justice Department. Psychologists helped to author and implement those protocols and to give legal cover to those involved in abuse. To this day, brutal systems of psychological reward and punishment are implemented and overseen by psychologists at Guantánamo.

While the APA has passed several anti-torture resolutions, APA policy continues to support psychologists’ presence at detention sites whose very conditions violate international law, and where psychologists have been consistently implicated in those violations. Against all evidence, it remains APA policy that psychologists’ presence at such sites is necessary to keep interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.”

As president, I will seek practical measures to prohibit such involvement and to restore APA’s reputation as an unequivocal voice for human welfare. Such measures would protect not only “those with whom we interact professionally,” as mandated by our Ethics Code, but our good name—and future!—as a profession. It would also offer safeguards for our military and CIA psychologists from moral compromise under pressure as well as from potential criminal liability.

Resolving our ethical conflicts will strengthen our profession as we confront healthcare reform and other significant challenges to our profession in the 21st Century. As APA President, I will advocate on behalf of these pressing issues, based upon the same guiding principles of improving human welfare, doing no harm, and upholding scientific integrity:

• to bring about universal health care, accompanied by full mental health parity.
• to raise awareness of the psychological dimension of environmental and ecological responsibility through research, practice and policy.
• to address the crisis in mental health care and private practice through public education and through combating managed care’s ever narrowing definition of mental illness and treatment.
• to advance the role of psychology in our transition into a diverse and global society.
• to work to resolve the crisis in psychology education and training, address the problems of student funding and debt, and help develop diverse internship opportunities relevant to our changing world.
• to build bridges between our research and practice communities by fostering a variety of research-practice partnerships.
• to restore and increase behavioral research funding, particularly in areas that further psychology’s time-honored commitment to human welfare and social justice.

Currently, the APA puts an extraordinary effort into supporting government funding for psychologists’ contributions to homeland security and counterterrorism. Such advocacy may have its place, in that it supports psychologists seeking government-funded contracts and academic grants. But, in a manner analogous to psychiatry’s dependence on pharmaceutical funding, our dependence on military-related contracts and appropriations can undermine our necessary independence. We must undertake a transparent, internal review of the allocation of APA resources and lobbying efforts so that APA members may decide together how to best advocate for the good of our members, our scientific discipline, and our society. But we cannot bring the best of our field to bear on these pressing issues unless we put our ethical house in order. With your vote for my presidency and with your assistance, we can transform the APA at this turning point in our history.

Add comment August 2nd, 2008

Translated into Spanish — Torture After Dark: Torture and the Strategic Helplessness of the American Psychological Association

Our recent article, Torture After Dark: Torture and the Strategic Helplessness of the American Psychological Association, has been translated into Spanish as Torturando en la oscuridad: La tortura y la estrategia de la indefensión de la Asociación Psicológica Americana. Please help distribute to Latin American ad other Spanish speaking colleagues.

1 comment August 2nd, 2008

Protest at the American Psychological Association, Saturday, August 16

Please join us. This is an issue for all concerned citizens, not just psychologists. All are welcome.

Come join Boston Psychologists for an Ethical APA

Rally at the American Psychological Association Annual Convention

Protest Psychologists’ Involvement in Abusive Interrogations and Illegal Detention

Where: Plaza at front entrance of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, 415 Summer St., Boston

When: Saturday, August 16^th,  12:00-2:00

Voice your outrage at the APA’s continued acceptance of psychologists’ participation in Bush administration interrogations and detention centers where  human rights and international law are continually violated. “There is no right way to do something wrong.”

This issue is of increasing concern to all citizens but of particular importance to us as psychologists because it violates our primary ethical obligation to “Do No Harm.”  Our complicity in the current administration’s “privileged” war on terror is now well-documented.

Co-Sponsors:
Psychoanalysts for Social Responsibility (Div. 39 S9)
Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Withholdapadues.com
Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR)
Psychologists for an Ethical APA
Monterey Bay Psychological Association
Physicians for Human Rights
[More being added]

Speakers include:
Steven  Reisner
Ghislaine Boulanger
Dan Aalbers
Brad Olson
Anthony Marsella
Nathaniel Raymond
Stephen Soldz
Bryant Welch

Entertainment by two Jazz-Blues performers:

Kathleen Kolman
Marlene del Rosario

We look forward to seeing you there on Saturday, the 16^th.

OUR CALL:

Psychologists for an Ethical APA Calls for Protest Outside APA Convention

“A government is not the expression of the will of the people, but rather the expression of what the people will tolerate.”

Kurt Tucholsky

We as psychologists and American citizens have become aware that our government has adopted torture and the denial of human rights for detainees as official policy. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, rendition and CIA “black sites” have irrevocably entered our language and consciousness. Waterboarding, sexual and religious humiliation, and denial of habeas corpus have become symbolic of a climate of disdain for human rights and human decency that has infected our government and been absorbed into our social fabric.

During the last several years, we have also become aware that psychologists have played central roles in the Bush regime of torture and detainee abuse. As has been documented by numerous journalists and official government reports, psychologists helped develop, implement, standardize, and disseminate abusive interrogation techniques that have led to torture.  Other psychologists responsible for treating detainees, along with other health professionals, failed to act against abuses being committed upon those they were ethically obliged to heal and protect. Given the central role of our profession in perpetrating and abetting these abuses, the rest of us who represent the field bear a special responsibility to do all we can to stop the abuses and voice our objection.

Our professional association, the American Psychological Association, has failed us. While we expectantly listened for a clear moral voice opposing complicity with our government’s abuses, the APA engaged in a pattern of denial, deceit and distraction in support of its policy keeping psychologists engaged in interrogations at detention centers where human rights and international laws have been grossly and systematically violated. When we needed an ethics policy that underscored the importance of ethical behavior, the APA created a revised code which allowed the following of unethical laws and regulations, and which removed protections for research participants when permitted by law or government regulation. When we needed deep ethical discussion, the APA appointed an ethics task force dominated by military-intelligence psychologists, most of whom served in precisely those interrogation settings under debate. When we needed clear statements condemning ongoing U.S, government abuses, the APA passed resolution after resolution condemning “torture” and “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” while failing ever to condemn, or even acknowledge, the ongoing abuses. When we needed action against those psychologists participating in abuses, we received denial after denial and delay after delay, making a continual mockery of ethics enforcement. And when we needed to indicate to the world that psychology was a profession with the highest ethical standards, the APA alone, of all the major health professions’ organizations, not only allowed continued participation in interrogations, violating the centuries-old “do no harm” ethical standards for health professions, but kept silent on known harms.

Last February, over six years after the first reports of US torture and abuse in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and later, Iraq, surfaced, the APA finally unambiguously condemned participation in 19 specific interrogation techniques. While this is a laudable, if long-delayed, first step, it is not enough.

Ø         We must forever remove psychologists from detention centers where human rights and international law are violated; to do otherwise is to collude in those abuses.

Ø         We must change our ethics code to no longer allow members to follow unethical laws or orders and to restore protections for all research participants.

Ø         We must reevaluate the nature of the ties between the APA and the military-intelligence establishment to avoid participation in future unethical government activities.

Ø         We must, in collaboration with other health professions, set up a Truth process to create a public record of the roles of psychologists and other health professionals in torture and other detainee abuse, and to recommend ethical, policy, and structural changes to reduce the likelihood that psychologists and other health professionals will collaborate with future abuses.

We call upon all APA members, psychologists, other health professionals, and citizens concerned with fundamental threats to human rights to let the Association know the time is long past due for real change. Please join us on the 16^th of August to speak with a common voice against torture and for a return to an ethical psychology and an ethical American Psychological Association.

“A profession  is not the expression of the will of its members, but rather the expression of what these members will tolerate.”

Psychologists for an Ethical APA

Let the APA leadership know that we will not tolerate collaboration with detainee abuse. Psychology must once again become a profession based upon fundamental ethical principles.

3 comments July 30th, 2008

American Psychological Association referendum ballots go to membership

Last summer an attempt by APA dissidents at a Moratorium on psychologist participation in interrogations at US Detention facilities was defeated at the Convention through a combination of parliamentary maneuvering and Council vote. Proponents of change have since regrouped and adopted a variety of new tactics. One was to utilize a never-before-used provision in the APA rules allowing for a referendum to be adopted by vote of the membership.

A referendum to remove psychologists from sites in violation of international law was proposed and was signed by the requisite 1one percent of the membership. Ballots will go out to the membership this week, due back in mid-September. Here is the referendum text, followed by the Pro and Con statements that will accompany the ballots:

Referendum

We the undersigned APA members in good standing, pursuant to article IV.5 of the APA bylaws, do hereby petition that the following motion be submitted to APA members for their approval or disapproval, by referendum, with all urgency:

Whereas torture is an abhorrent practice in every way contrary to the APA’s stated mission of advancing psychology as a science, as a profession, and as a means of promoting human welfare.

Whereas the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Mental Health and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture have determined that treatment equivalent to torture has been taking place at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. [1]

Whereas this torture took place in the context of interrogations under the direction and supervision of Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs) that included psychologists. [2, 3]

Whereas the Council of Europe has determined that persons held in CIA black sites are subject to interrogation techniques that are also equivalent to torture [4], and because psychologists helped develop abusive interrogation techniques used at these sites. [3, 5]

Whereas the International Committee of the Red Cross determined in 2003 that the conditions in the US detention facility in Guantánamo Bay are themselves tantamount to torture [6], and therefore by their presence psychologists are playing a role in maintaining these conditions.

Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights[7].

Footnotes

[1] United Nations Commission on Human Rights. (2006). Situation of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Retrieved March 4, 2008, from here. The full title of the ‘Special Rapporteur on Mental Health’ is the ‘Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health’.

[2] Miles, S. (2007). Medical ethics and the interrogation of Guantanamo 063. The American Journal of Bioethics, 7(4), 5. Retrieved March 4, 2008, from here.

[3] Office of the Inspector General, Department of Defense: Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse. Retrieved March 4, 2008, from here.

[4] Council of Europe Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights (2007). Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report. Retrieved March 4, 2008, from here.

[5] Eban, K. (2007). Rorschach and Awe. Vanity Fair. Retrieved March 4, 2008, from here.

[6] Lewis, N. A. (2004, November 30). Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo. New York Times, Retrieved March 4, 2008, from here.

[7] It is understood that military clinical psychologists would still be available to provide treatment for military personnel.

Pro Statement

As psychologists, our first ethical principle is to do no harm; yet substantial documentation reveals that American psychologists have systematically designed and participated in interrogations that amount to torture. In addition, they have helped to legitimize cruel and abusive treatment in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA blacksites.

Responding to these revelations, the APA has passed several resolutions barring psychologists from participating in torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. These resolutions, however, are insufficient as they do not address the critical role that psychologists play in perpetuating harmful interrogation strategies and in maintaining conditions that the International Committee of the Red Cross has labeled “tantamount to torture.”

These concerns, which have propelled over a thousand APA psychologists to bring this referendum to the membership, are not hypothetical. Psychologists, as “consultants”, have been active in interrogations that have brought about extreme forms of torture. In at least one of these cases, the psychologist advocated for an escalation to even more extreme ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’

Psychologists have also played a critical role in this administration’s legal defense of torture. Justice Department lawyers have argued that torture can only take place if the perpetrator intends to cause ‘prolonged mental harm’ which, in turn, is measured by a subsequent diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder. Psychologists instead routinely provide diagnoses other than posttraumatic stress disorder, thus giving the illusion of safety and legal cover in otherwise objective instances of “torture”. Moreover, psychologists play a role in maintaining the conditions of detention, for instance, by removing “comfort items” such as toilet paper, toothpaste, and soap.

In settings that fail to meet basic standards of international law, it is unrealistic to rely on psychologists to challenge their superiors, report on violations, and protect abused detainees. We know, from decades of psychological research, that good people do bad things in bad situations. Psychologists are no less vulnerable to “behavioral drift” than others, particularly when subject to the chain of command in the closed environment of a geographically isolated detention center.

We do believe that psychologists working independently, and outside of the institution’s chain of command, can and should be available to detainees, through NGOs such as the International Committee of the Red Cross. In abusive settings, clinicians working in the chain of command cannot know whether they are helping detainees recover only to return them to more abusive interrogations; and detainees cannot gauge whether the information being gathered by the clinician will be used against them-as has been documented on several occasions. Instead, the proposed referendum policy places psychology and psychologists squarely on the side of the most vulnerable.

Some APA psychologists have argued that the presence of psychologists in these settings protects the detainee from abuse. Yet, in the six years since captives began arriving at Guantanamo, there have been few documented cases of psychologists speaking up on the behalf of detainees. There is significant evidence of many more cases of silence. While we commend anyone who has acted heroically, a reliance on individual heroism is an unsound basis for policy.

We stress that the referendum does not exclude any psychologist from working in any settings where international law and human rights are fundamentally upheld. Imperfect as our U.S. domestic justice system may be, people held within the present system have basic legal protections, including the right to know the charges against them, meet with an attorney, receive family visits and, most importantly, to be free of torture. This is in sharp contrast to the individuals gathered up and illegally taken to CIA blacksites. For the past 60 years, international law has held professionals responsible for upholding basic human rights. This referendum would thus protect psychologists from risk of future prosecutions.

Your vote in favor of the referendum will increase the independence of psychologists and protect the reputation of our discipline. The policy puts psychology and psychologists on the side of those who are the most vulnerable to mental harm. On behalf of Psychologists for an Ethical APA and all the APA members who have petitioned for this referendum, we strongly encourage you to research this topic through books, websites and articles, and to vote “yes” — to support human rights and to restore the integrity of American psychology.

Brad Olson, PhD

Con Statement
This Overbroad Petition Will Harm Vulnerable Populations and Put Ethical Psychologists at Risk

1. This petition seeks to prohibit APA member psychologists from working in settings that are inconsistent with international law and/or the US Constitution.  The petition’s “Be It Resolved” clause sets forth this prohibition even though a psychologist may adhere to all APA ethical standards, and despite the difficulty in determining whether a particular site meets the petition’s ambiguous criteria.
2. The petition thus threatens to restrict the scope of practice for psychologists whose work in psychiatric hospitals, US correctional facilities, and countless other settings serves the public good each day.
3. The petition is unnecessary given APA’s strongly worded Council resolutions against torture and concerted federal advocacy directed at the Bush administration and Congress.
4. The unintended consequences arising from a resolution prohibiting locations of employment rather than unethical behavior make this petition impossible for us to support. Many psychologists are employed in settings where constitutional challenges arise.  Such settings include jails, prisons, psychiatric hospitals and emergency rooms, and forensic units.  Likewise, many psychologists work in settings that could be considered inconsistent with international standards, for example, settings where the death penalty may be administered.  The “Be It Resolved” clause potentially affects thousands of APA members.
5. While APA is clear that the petition, if adopted, is not enforceable, allegations that a psychologist was violating APA policy could arise in multiple venues (civil court; a licensing board; state psychological association, hospital, and other professional organizations’ ethics committees).  Especially given the petition’s ambiguity regarding whether international standards and/or the US Constitution apply in a given instance, the petition places APA members doing good and ethical work in an untenable position of uncertainty regarding whether their practice is consistent with APA policy.
6. The clause “unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights” would prevent psychologists in a prohibited setting from providing services to a person in psychological distress, since in most all settings psychologists work for the institution and not for the individual being held.  Unlike the Ethics Code, the petition does not provide a way to resolve this ethical dilemma, i.e., between a prohibition from providing services and the need for services.  (See e.g., Ethical Standard 2.02, Providing Services in Emergencies, allowing psychologists without the necessary training to provide services in emergent situations when other services are not available.)  A psychologist who, in all good faith, assisted an individual in distress could nonetheless be in violation of APA policy.
7. The sponsors’ good and noble intentions notwithstanding, for over two decades APA has held that torture is unethical and always prohibited.  Five APA resolutions provide clear, explicit condemnations of torture.  The last sentence of the 2008 resolution states: Psychologists are absolutely prohibited from knowingly planning, designing, participating or assisting in the use of all condemned techniques [Note: nearly two dozen techniques are enumerated] at any time and may not enlist others to employ these techniques in order to circumvent this resolution’s prohibition. APA has stated emphatically:  Following orders is never a defense to torture.
8. In August, 2007, the APA Council passed one of several resolutions condemning torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and punishment.  Council expressed “grave concern over settings in which detainees are deprived of adequate protection of their human rights” and “affirmed the prerogative of psychologists to refuse to work in such settings.”  Council noted that “APA will explore ways to support psychologists who refuse to work in such settings or who refuse to obey orders that constitute torture.”  APA has called upon US courts to reject testimony resulting from torture or abuse.
9. APA has strongly and unequivocally condemned the abuse of detainees in letters to President Bush, Attorney General Mukasey, CIA Director Hayden, and members of Congress, and in articles in the media, and has urged the establishment of policies and procedures that fully protect the human rights of detainees, including judicial review of their detentions.
10. The petition seeks to prevent psychologists from working where the federal, state, or local government is acting wrongly.  The precedent-setting nature of this petition, which restricts the settings in which psychologists may work, raises insurmountable concerns.  A highly unfortunate side effect of the petition will be to place at risk APA members who serve vulnerable populations and behave in legal, ethical, and entirely moral ways.  This petition harms the very groups it seeks to protect:  Vulnerable populations and ethical psychologists.

Robert J. Resnick, PhD

Now that you’ve seen the debate, please don’t throw those ballots away! And please vote in favor. This is our chance to change a disasterous policy which is casting shame upon the psychology profession while aiding the abuse of those in custody.

1 comment July 30th, 2008

Torture and the American Psyche: 33 minute video

Earlier we posted the video and audio from our May 3 forum: torture and th American Psyche. The film crew has now edited the three hour discussion down to 33 minutes. A fabulous job!

After watching the digest, go watch the entire show. I guarantee there are many more nuggets there.

Add comment July 28th, 2008

Two Jane Mayer interviews: Letterman and Moyers

Jane Mayer interviewed on Letterman:

Mayer was also interviewed by Bill Moyers. You can read the transcript here or watch here.

Add comment July 26th, 2008

Democracy Now! Jane Mayer on psychologists and torture

Amy Goodman interviewed Jane Mayer about her new book, The Dark Side, today on Democracy Now! today. About a third of the interview was devoted to the role of psychologists in designing and implementing the Bush administration torture program. I post that portion her. [You can read/listen/watch/download the entire interview here.]”

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Jane Mayer. She is author of the book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. Talk about the title, The Dark Side.

JANE MAYER: Well, as we all know, September 11th was a sea change. Everybody says everything changed after that. And it did, but I think one of the most important changes that the country hasn’t really thought about is America became a country that, for the first time in its history, endorsed what is torture in all but name. And since then, it changed, I think, from a war for the country’s security, the war on terror, to a battle for the country’s soul. And we have to really think about whether or not this is what kind of country we want to be.

AMY GOODMAN: You were talking about Abu Zubaydah. Let’s talk about the psychologists involved in his interrogation.

JANE MAYER: Well, they were the ones who showed up there, right by Abu Zubaydah’s side.

AMY GOODMAN: Where?

JANE MAYER: In—well, it’s in an undisclosed location, where Abu Zubaydah was being held by the CIA. Suddenly, a psychologist showed up. And the FBI’s reaction was, “Who is this person?” His name is James Mitchell. He is a contractor to the CIA, a contract interrogator or adviser to the interrogation program. And he started talking about how there were these psychological theories that would help break down the detainees.

And the theories he talked about were experiments with dogs, in which dogs were put in cages and electrocuted and in a random way that completely broke their will to resist. It’s a theory called “learned helplessness,” and it springs from experiments done in the 1970s by a very famous psychologist in America named Martin Seligman, who actually went to lecture at the—a bunch of SERE—people who were involved with the CIA’s program, including this psychologist, James Mitchell. So, James Mitchell and a partner, Bruce Jessen, became advisers to the CIA’s interrogation program.

I think, to step back, what you need to know is that the CIA had no experience really in interrogating prisoners. They had never really held prisoners before. And so, they really had no idea how to go about getting information out of people. So they turned to an incredibly strange place, which is a secret program inside the military that had studied torture, and it had studied torture in order to teach our own soldiers how to survive it if they were ever taken captive by some kind of completely immoral regime. Because they understood torture, the CIA turned to them and said, “Well, so how do you do it?” And basically they reverse-engineered this program in the most ironic way, and what became a program that was defensive became instead a—it was like a blueprint for torture. It was, you know, a rulebook.

And I actually got into this story, because in researching this subject, I started with a question, wondering why is it that all around the world we’re seeing the same really strange kind of mistreatment of prisoners. Is this the work just of freelancing American soldiers? Why do they all have hoods? Why are they shackled in the same stress positions? Why are they being bombarded with these sounds so that their ear drums are, you know, splitting? And why are they being kept up day after day and, you know, exposed to heat and cold and all these things that were particularly odd-seeming? And they were cropping up in Iraq. They were cropping up in Guantanamo and in Afghanistan.

And so, I just went into it without knowing any of the answers and just asking, you know, is there a rulebook to this thing? Is there a curriculum? And, in fact, it turned out there was a curriculum, and the curriculum is from this secret program in the military. It’s known as the SERE program, and the CIA consulted with the SERE program to figure out how to get its methods. And these psychologists that you’re talking about were the ones who basically became the experts in it.

AMY GOODMAN: What was, for example, James Mitchell’s background?

JANE MAYER: He was an instructor. He’s now—he’s a psychologist who oversaw this training program. He had never been an interrogator. He had no background in Islamic fundamentalism. I mean, one of the FBI officers, as they were struggling over what to do with Abu Zubaydah, said, you know, “Do you know anything about Islamic radicals? Do you speak Arabic? Have you got any background in this area?” And he didn’t.

But he felt that because—and I’ve actually talked to Mitchell. He’s a great believer in “Science is science,” as he says, and so he used what he thought was good science, which were experiments that had been done on dogs, to apply them to ways to break down human detainees.

AMY GOODMAN: Alright, let’s go to the—

JANE MAYER: Can I just—wait, Amy. I’ve got to just say one thing, so we don’t wander into some kind of legal problem. A lawyer for Mitchell says that these were not his theories at all and that he never meant to apply them this way. That is absolutely not what colleagues of his have said, and I cite them by name in the book.

AMY GOODMAN: Who?

JANE MAYER: Steve Kleinman, who is a colonel in the Army, and he worked at the SERE program, and he said that James Mitchell would speak continually about using this “learned helplessness” model.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to this “learned helplessness” model.

JANE MAYER: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the former president of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman.

JANE MAYER: OK. Again, and here we have to be careful, but Martin Seligman is one of the most eminent psychologists in America. He teaches at Penn, and—

AMY GOODMAN: University of Pennsylvania.

JANE MAYER: University of Pennsylvania, sorry. And he was the former head of the American Psychological Association, the organization of professional psychologists. And so, very, very prominent man.

He was called in shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured and handed over to the CIA. He was called in to give a lecture, mysterious still exactly what kind of lecture it was. But he spoke for three hours. I talked to him about it by email.

AMY GOODMAN: To whom?

JANE MAYER: I talked to Martin—who the lecture was to? The lecture was to CIA officers, including these psychologists. Both Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell were in the audience. And it took place at the SERE school in San Diego, which is where, again, this unusual program existed.

AMY GOODMAN: Survival, Evasion—

JANE MAYER: Evasion, Resistance, Escape. It’s a program that has sort of kept—that has studied torture in order, supposedly, to inoculate the US soldiers against it. But after 9/11, the same techniques started cropping up around the world, being used by US soldiers.

AMY GOODMAN: You talked to Martin Seligman about this?

JANE MAYER: Yes, I did, and—by email. And he acknowledged he gave a lecture for three hours in April to the—at the SERE school. He has added to that recently, mentioning that these two psychologists were in the audience. He has said he never assisted torture, he is against torture, that his experiments were meant to safeguard US soldiers. It may be that he was just innocently misinterpreted by the CIA.

It’s really hard to tell exactly what happened. But what we do know is that his theories began to be cited by these psychologists, who then oversaw the CIA program and started putting Abu Zubaydah, for instance, in a dog cage and also put a dog collar on another detainee and thrust him into the wall with it headfirst. And these were just the beginning of some of the things these people went through.

AMY GOODMAN: We invited Dr. Martin Seligman to join us on the program. His answer was simple: “I am not available.” But he did respond to what you have written, and I want to read what his statement is—

JANE MAYER: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: —that you have also responded to. This is what he has said, not to us specifically, but his statement to Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side. He said, quote, “The allegation that I ‘provided assistance in the process’ of torture is completely false.

“I gave a three hour lecture sponsored by SERE (the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape branch of the American armed forces) at the San Diego Naval Base in May 2002. My topic was how American troops and American personnel could use what is known about learned helplessness and related findings to resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors. I was told then that since I was (and am) a civilian with no security clearance that they could not discuss American methods of interrogation with me. I have not had contact with SERE since that meeting.

“I have not worked under government contract (or any other contract) on any aspect of interrogation or any aspect of torture. Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen were present in the audience of about 50 others at my speech, and that was, to the best of my knowledge, the sum total of my ‘assisting them in the process.’

“I have had no contact at all with the American Psychological Association about their relevant policies. Most importantly, I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.”

Your response, Jane Mayer.

JANE MAYER: Well, I have to say, first, that he—it’s not a contradiction of The Dark Side, because the allegation that he, quote-unquote, “assisted torture” comes from a blogger who was reading my book. It’s not actually what I say in the book. The book is—he confirms all of the facts in the book, which are very accurate. It describes the lecture he gave. It describes his relationship with the SERE program exactly as it was. And so, I actually—you know, the one thing I have to say is, he’s not and has not contradicted any of the facts in the book itself. He’s reacting to accounts by bloggers there. I think he’s just basically confirming it, reconfirming it. I have to say, every—

AMY GOODMAN: What did you learn from that response?

JANE MAYER: Well, I mean, what I learned is there are a lot of unanswered questions that I would really like to put to him, but when I did try to question him further, he said he had no further comment. He’s a very—obviously a very erudite and savvy man. What did he think he was doing when he went to talk to the CIA at their confab at the SERE school? How did he know Mitchell and Jessen were in the audience, unless—did he speak to them? Did he know what their role was, in terms of interrogations? You know, there are a lot of things that would be great to know. It’s hard to tell, because he keeps shutting down the conversation when it gets interesting.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to go further with the American Psychological Association and a former president. Last year, it was revealed former APA president Joseph Matarazzo is a partner of Mitchell & Jessen, and the New York Times reported the CIA interrogator of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, Deuce Martinez, now works for Mitchell and Jessen’s firm in Spokane, Washington.

JANE MAYER: Right. And it’s—this one firm keeps cropping up again and again. You know, Jessen and Mitchell, I guess, are not members of the APA, from what I understand, but the connections to the APA and this program keep popping up again and again. It may—it’s really interesting. It may say something about why the APA has been so reluctant to take a categorical stance, as psychiatrists have, saying there’s no role for this profession in torture or in coercive interrogations.

Let’s put aside the word “torture”, because it’s a semantic game. But the medical profession takes, you know, an oath. The Hippocratic Oath is “do no harm.” And I think it’s the role of medics, nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, who keep cropping up in reports that you get from detainees about—they’ll be in a moment of extremis, and suddenly a doctor will appear and certify that it’s OK to keep interrogating them. I think it’s an area that is really ripe for investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: On Democracy Now!, we’ve been covering the issue of psychologists, examining the role of psychologists in developing the Bush administration’s interrogation programs for the past two years. During a debate in 2006, the APA president—the then-APA president, Gerald Koocher, mentioned you by name, Jane Mayer. We talked to him on the telephone. This is what he had to say.

DR. GERALD KOOCHER: I wish I had the assurance that Jane Mayer and that Dr. Reisner apparently have that there are APA members doing bad things at Guantanamo or elsewhere, because any time I have asked these journalists or other people who are making these assertions for names so that APA could investigate its members who might be allegedly involved in them, no names have ever been forthcoming.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the former APA president, Gerald Koocher. Your response, Jane Mayer?JANE MAYER: Well, I mean, again, obviously, Martin Seligman was the president of the APA, and he had some role here in lecturing those psychologists who went on and designed this program for the CIA. So, I mean, there are all kinds of things that, if they wanted to be vigilant, they could look into at the APA. They seem to have a reluctance to dig beneath the surface.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, last year, Democracy Now! went to the APA annual convention in San Francisco to cover the debate that they were having around the issue of passing a moratorium on involvement in coercive interrogations. I wanted to play one of the statements. It was by Army Colonel Larry James. He was flown up from Guantanamo, the chief psychologist at Guantanamo and member of the APA governing body, to oppose the proposed moratorium on psychologists’ involvement in coercive interrogations.

COL. LARRY JAMES: Thank God this is a democracy. I actually welcome and support all of the discussion and the debate. That’s why I wear this uniform, because I’m very, very proud of this democracy. So I want to thank Dr. Altman and his colleagues for having the courage to speak out, although I may disagree with many of the things they say. God bless America.

Number two, torture is wrong. How could anyone disagree with that? So, under no conditions, with myself or any of these psychologists you see here today in the uniforms that they wear representing our country, would ever support anything that allows torture or inhumane treatment.

Thirdly and lastly, if we remove psychologists from the front, in any capacity whatsoever, innocent people are going to die. Innocent people are going to get hurt. Phil Zombardo told us this was going to happen thirty years ago. And so, in going back through the chronicles of histories, any detention facilities we’ve set up anywhere in the world, when you don’t have psychologists involved in the policy decision makings, when you don’t have psychologists involved in the day-to-day activity, bad things are going to happen, innocent people are going to die.

UNIDENTIFIED: Dr. James?

COL. LARRY JAMES: Sorry. Thank you, Madame President.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Colonel Larry James. He was head psychologist at Guantanamo, recently hired as dean at Wright State University in Ohio. Interestingly, right after that, another psychologist got up. Her name was Dr. Laurie Wagner, a Dallas psychologist. And she shot back, “If psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, then those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest by leaving.”JANE MAYER: Well, obviously there are a lot of psychologists who are very defensive about this role, and there’s a reason why. Starting in the summer of 2002, there were psychologists from the SERE program going down to Guantanamo and supervising and advising on the interrogations there, which included the interrogation of Mohammed Qahtani, the so-called twentieth hijacker, who was put through the most unbelievable program of psychological abuse. I don’t really know how anybody could defend it. Some of the transcripts have come out.

He was subjected to fifty-four days of only four hours of sleep a night. He had bags of fluid put into his veins, so that he had to urgently go to the bathroom; they wouldn’t let him get up and go, so he had to urinate on himself. They put, you know, the bra on his head. They made him do dog tricks. They put a birthday hat on his head and sang “God Bless America” to him. I mean, looking at the—they told him to bark like a dog. They told him that he was lower than a dog. I mean, it goes on and on and on. People have to see these transcripts to believe it.

And the fact that there were psychologists who were advising on this program is—if the APA doesn’t think that’s worthy of taking a look at, then I don’t know much about the—I don’t know much about the APA, but it makes me really wonder about it.

AMY GOODMAN: The APA is the largest association of psychologists in the world, almost 150,000 psychologists. How does the APA’s stance on involvement compare to the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association?

JANE MAYER: I mean, ever since World War II, during which the Nazis subverted the medical profession in the most horrendous ways, there have been ethical codes passed about what role doctors should play in this. There’s—doctors are supposed to, first, do no harm, and all scientists are supposed to, first, do no harm. And, you know, I’ve interviewed a number of scientists in this book who say that, you know, in particular, there’s a responsibility for psychologists to use their knowledge in good ways, because they have such skills in understanding people’s psyches, they really understand how to break people down, as well as they do how to fix them up. And, you know, used in the wrong way, it’s a powerful tool to really hurt someone.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, then come back to our guest, Jane Mayer. Her new book is out, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. And if you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Stay with us.

[Read the rest of the interview here.]

1 comment July 18th, 2008

Whom, and what, to believe?

Jeff Stein puzzles over the dilemma of self-styled victims of the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Such claims seem hard to believe. Yet MKULTRA was real, and current abuses are real:

Self-Described CIA ‘Manchurian Candidates’ Gather to Share Fractured Memories

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

A few years ago, I was talking with a Washington psychiatrist, a Harvard Medical School graduate whom I’ve known and respected for more than 20 years. When, for some reason, our past military service came up, I remembered he’d been in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, but couldn’t recall where he’d been stationed.

“At Andrews,” he said, meaning the air base just outside Washington. “Treating PTSD,” he added — post-traumatic stress disorder.

Vietnam combat veterans, I assumed.

“No,” he said. “Russia.”

No way.

But in the late 1960s, my friend insisted, he’d treated men who said they had been dispatched to Siberia on clandestine reconnaissance operations.

Their mission: to hunker down deep in the forests for weeks at a time with telemetry equipment to monitor Soviet ballistic missile tests.

This was sometime in the very early ’60s, supposedly, a brief period between the end of U-2 overflights and the deployment of spy-in-the-sky satellites.

My friend said his patients described training with drugs and other mind-control techniques to perform the mission — then forget them, like the Manchurian Candidate.

But now they were remembering fragments, they told him, giving them terrifying nightmares about things they could not quite believe they had done.

They thought they were losing their minds. So did any loved ones who they dared tell their looney-sounding tunes to.

But this being America, of course, they — and other self-described victims of CIA mind control experiments — formed self-help groups. And for several years, it turns out, they have been holding yearly conferences, like one just outside Hartford, Conn., next month.

“About a hundred” people usually show up, says Neil Brick , coordinator of “The Eleventh Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference.”

Brick, 49, told me that he, too, has “recovered memories of being part of experimental situations — being given to people to go on missions” under the CIA’s mind control experiments program, code-named MKULTRA.

MKULTRA did, in fact, exist. It is described in the CIA’s own internal documents, 16,000 pages worth obtained by John Marks for his ground-breaking 1979 book, “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.”

One was an “eyes-only” report on MKULTRA by the CIA’s inspector general, in 1963, which said “there have been major accomplishments both in research and operational employment.”

“Operational employment” would seem to say the zombies were created and dispatched, with great results.
The Truth Is Out There

The late Sidney Gottlieb, who ran MKULTRA , also described the program, which began in the early 1950s and continued at least into the late 1960s, in congressional testimony in 1977.

On the other hand, much remains unknown. CIA Director Richard M. Helms ordered the destruction of boxes upon boxes of documents, including the treatment records of unknown numbers of “patients” agency “doctors” experimented on in psychiatric hospitals (including a wing of Georgetown University Medical Center), and secret locations, including military bases.

So its alledged victims have no records to back up their stories. Books by self-described MKULTRA survivors tend to get thrown into the UFO bin.

Neil Brick grants there’s a stigma that comes from going public with such X-Files-type stories, asking, for example, that I not print his location or occupation.

It’s a conundrum of the first order, isn’t it?

We have extensive documentation of the CIA’s Manchurian Candidate experiments, but when the Manchurian Candidate himself walks up to tell his story, most people shake their heads or laugh.

Brick admits that “some people” attending his past conferences “have psychiatric issues,” but he says he believes “the majority are survivors of MKULTRA.”

For years, of course, the CIA laughed off rumors of drug experiments.

Today, the agency and the Pentagon stoutly deny they have used hallucinogenic and other mind-altering drugs on prisoners at Guantanamo and secret sites elsewhere.

Just as in the 1970s, however, as I wrote in April, evidence to the contrary is mounting.

The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick also tracked down former prisoners at Guantanamo who said their minds were destabilized by repeated drug injections.

Such stories have been told for 40 years now.

Who are you going to believe?

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Add comment July 18th, 2008

Mayer on Seligman

At Andrew Sullivan’s blog Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side,  responds to Martin Seligman’s denial of involvement in the development of CIA interrogation tactics:

Mayer on Seligman

Professor Seligman’s disavowal actually adds a rather interesting new fact to the story of how the psychology profession played a role in the CIA’s “special” interrogation program. In “The Dark Side,” I established by interviewing him, that he had personally spoken for three hours at the Navy’s SERE School in San Diego, in April of 2002, at a somewhat mysterious confab organized in part by the head of Behavioral Science at the CIA.

This was a pretty crucial moment in the development of America’s secret interrogation and detention program. Abu Zubayda had been captured just weeks before, and the CIA was trying to come up with ways to make him talk. They had no patience for the slow, rapport-building methods used by the FBI, whose role in the case they had just superceded. But what to do?     At this very moment, Professor Seligman, it seems, agreed to participate in what he says was an unexplained private high-level CIA meeting, held on the campus of the part of the Navy that runs a secret program emulating torture – the SERE School in San Diego.

Professor Seligman says he has no idea why he was called in from his academic position in Pennsylvania, to suddenly appear at this CIA event. He just showed up and talked for three hours about how dogs, when exposed to horrible treatment, give up all hope, and become compliant. Why the CIA wanted to know about this at this point, he says he never asked.    But somehow- and this is what is news as far as I know – Professor Seligman does know that in his audience were the two psychologists who soon after became the key advisers to the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.    So, Professor Seligman, must have had some contact with them, since he knew they were in his audience. Did he speak with them? What did they talk about?
According to sources close to the FBI, around the same time, one of those psychologists, James Mitchell, showed up where Abu Zubayda was being held, and started talking about Dr. Seligman’s theories of “Learned Helplessness” as shedding useful light on how to coerce Zubayda into talking. Specifically, he spoke of Seligman’s dog experiments, in which random electric shocks broke the dogs’ will to resist. An FBI agent was appalled – pointing out they were dealing with humans, not dogs. But Mitchell said it was “good science” for both.

(Mitchell declined to elaborate on the treatment of Abu Zubayda, when I interviewed him, but admitted he admired Seligman’s work on Learned Helplessness. A lawyer for Mitchell later claimed that he had not tried to apply the theory to detainees. But a colleague, Col. Steve Kleinman, who worked in the SERE program, said Mitchell talked all the time about how Learned Helplessness provided the blueprint for interrogating detainees).

So- did Seligman assist the U.S. Torture program? I am careful not to say so in “The Dark Side,”- I just recount the facts of his odd visit to the SERE school. So- he is not denying anything in my book.

But now that he brings all of this up again, it would be nice if he’d answer a few more questions. What exactly did he think he was doing that day in April of 2002 with the CIA? How did he know who Mitchell and Jessen were, and, what role did he think they were playing at that time? Maybe he was as clueless as he says he was. But, why doesn’t he then tell us know what he thinks of his theories being used in this way? Does he renounce Mitchell and Jessen? Does he think they used psychology immorally? He was the head of the APA- has he ever spoken out about this? Has he ever complained to the CIA about what they did with his science? Time for some more information here…instead of non-denial denials…

1 comment July 18th, 2008