Psyche, Science, and Society

Annul the PENS Report

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November 21st, 2011

New York psychology licensing board doesn’t have to investigate torture, court rules

For years we activist psychologists have been trying to get the APA and state licensing boards to act against psychologists allegedly involved in detainee abuse. So far, every venue has refused to act. Lawsuits in several states have tried to compel the state boards to investigate the allegations. With one exception, all boards have failed to conduct any sort of investigation. Today word comes that a New York juge has decided in favor of the board’s right to do do nothing in the case of psychologist John Leso, implicated in the torture of Mohamed al-Qhatani at Guantanamo:

A New York judge has declined to force an investigation into whether an Army psychologist developed abusive interrogation techniques for Guantanamo Bay detainees and should be stripped of his license.

The ruling was made public Thursday. It says another psychologist who brought the case cannot force a state agency to investigate complaints of professional misconduct.

….

The case sought to compel a state licensing office to look into psychologist John Leso. The agency says his Army work fell outside its scope.

The board’s reasoning is that psychology involves helping people. If skills are used intentionally to harm, then that does not involve the practice of psychology and is immune to board action, despite the fact that Army regulations require that their “Behavioral Science Consultants” have state licenses and uses the existence of these licenses as the basis for not investigating the professional ethics of these psychologists. Thus, torture and abuse by licensed psychologists is nobody’s business, constructing a perfect web of protection for torturers.

BTW, the American Psychological Association (APA) has had multiple complaints against Leso since August 2006 and has so far done nothing in the five years since the first complaint was filed. Their last excuse was that they were waiting to see what New York state would do. Now that New York has decided they don’t have jurisdiction, what new excuse will the APA come up with?

August 11th, 2011

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness critique in Washington Post

The article that I wrote with Roy Eidelson and Marc Pilisuk critiquing the military’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program is discussed in a Washington Post article on CSF. Also discussed is a critique by by Penn psychologists James Coyne. Here are the sections of the article focussing on CSF critique:

“There’s little reason to believe that these techniques would have any efficacy at all,” said James C. Coyne, a psychology professor in the psychiatry department at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “It’s very difficult to do anything preventively before the fact.”

In cases of combat stress, he said, he fears that preventive techniques could disrupt a soldier’s natural coping process.

“Getting upset, saying, ‘I don’t like feeling this way, this is a horrible way to feel,’ can often be the first step in a very healthy, adaptive response,” he said.

“Targeted, secondary prevention is much wiser and has much more of an evidence base than primary prevention,” he said.

Another critic, Roy Eidelson, a board member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, added: “This is the largest experiment ever undertaken — it involves a million soldiers.”

“The stakes are very high,” he said, “because we’re talking about war. We’re talking about life and death. And there’s a lot that wasn’t done to prepare for this experiment.”

And:

In January, at the suggestion of Seligman, a special issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, devoted 13 articles — by Cornum, Casey and others — to the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program.

Norman B. Anderson, head of the association and the journal’s editor, said Seligman’s work is a hot topic, and so is the mental health of American military personnel.

But in March, a trio of psychologists — Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz — wrote a blistering online essay accusing the journal of “cheerleading” and attacking the Army program as research, not training.

And as research, the program should involve the consent of its subjects, the soldiers, the authors stated. “Such research violates the Nuremberg Code developed during post-World War II trials of Nazi doctors,” the authors said.

In addition, Seligman’s resilience work in schools has been “only modestly and inconsistently effective,” the authors contended, producing only small reductions in mild depression.

The critics also charged that the resilience work done in schools is probably not applicable to soldiers who face combat.

Finally, the authors worried that the program might actually harm soldiers: “Might soldiers who have been trained to resiliently view combat as a growth opportunity be more likely to ignore or underestimate real dangers, thereby placing themselves, their comrades, or civilians at heightened risk of harm?”

“Given those ethical questions,” Eidelson said, “psychology . . . should be thinking really hard about whether this is a good idea.”

Seligman countered that “it’s not remotely” a research project. “It’s an Army-wide course. . . . It’s no more subject to consent than . . . when you’re told to run in sneakers rather than boots.”

BTW, it is interesting that resilience guru Martin Seligman here, after our critique,  denies that CSF is at all a research study. In contrast, in 2009, in the APA’s Monitor on Psychology Seligman bragged:

“This is the largest study—1.1 million soldiers—psychology has ever been involved in, and it will yield definitive data about whether or not [resiliency and psychological fitness training] works,” Seligman says.

Furthermore, Seligman admitted that CSF was being “tested” by the military in an article promoting resilience training for businesses:

It is now being tested in an organization of 1.1 million people where trauma is more common and more severe than in any corporate setting: the U.S. Army

Evidently it’s a research “study” when that brings Seligman bragging rights or potential business but not when questions about research ethics are raised. Perhaps the ability to utilize situational ethics like that is what Seligman means by “resilience.”

Here’s the complete Post article:

Army program works to make soldiers fit in body and mind

By Michael E. Ruane

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — The soldiers crowd around a large conference table, their maroon berets scattered on top. A digital clock on the wall shows the time in Afghanistan and Iraq. The unit’s flag, hung with battle streamers, rests at one end of the room.

Outside, not far away, stands the 16-foot bronze statue of World War II paratrooper “Iron Mike,” grim-faced with submachine gun in hand — the epitome of the rugged American soldier.

But the training here this morning has little to do with war.

A young soldier from Rhode Island is telling how his wife walked out on him when she was two months pregnant and he fell into depression and alcoholism.

A burly soldier with red hair admits that he has a bad temper, which leads to disputes with his spouse. There are murmurs of assent around the room, and other problems galore.

It feels like an intense group-therapy session.

In a way, it is.

It’s also a radical shift in the Army’s approach to mental health, a switch from the just-suck-it-up tradition of the past and a change that was expected to get a grumpy reception from rank-and-file “Joes.”

But the new program, designed largely by outside psychologists, appears to have been embraced by soldiers.

The critics, it turns out, are other psychologists.

The Army, burdened by almost a decade of war and beset by increases in suicides, substance abuse and combat stress, embarked on the controversial $125 million project to instill psychological strength in soldiers the same way it teaches physical fitness.

The program, called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, is designed to make soldiers more psychologically “resilient” amid the pressures of combat, repeated deployments, and family and financial crises.

The effort runs counter to many military traditions.

“It’s a big culture change,” said Col. Jeffery Short, a physician and the program’s medical director.

“For decades,” he said, the Army attitude was “everybody’s just going to be tough. . . . You’re going to sweat this out, and when you come out the other end, you’re going to be better for it.

“Now, to concentrate on how people are thinking, and how they’re feeling . . . that is an Army culture change,” he said.

Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum, who oversees the program, said: “The Army recognized that its historical way of dealing with psychological fitness was to wait until somebody showed evidence of not having psychological fitness and then trying to fix it.”

This is an effort to help soldiers before that happens.

The program includes a mandatory confidential online assessment tool so soldiers can gauge their emotional status around issues such as relationships, job satisfaction and life in general. They can take further optional online training to get help in areas where they would like to improve.

The Army also wants resilience to be taught face to face, classroom-style and is in the process of teaching “master resilience trainers,” who go back to their bases and conduct sessions in person.

There, the MRTs use slides, excerpts from TV shows and round-the-table discussions to talk about ways to stay optimistic, avoid prejudging others and forestall “catastrophic thinking,” or dwelling on worst-case scenarios.

During one recent session touching on prejudgment, MRTs here played the now-famous segment of the “Britain’s Got Talent” TV show in which the drab-looking phone salesman Paul Potts turns out to have a world-class opera voice.

So far, according to recent interviews here and at training sessions at the University of Pennsylvania, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness seems to be a hit.

“It’s a revolution for us younger-generation soldiers,” said Spec. Matthew Gregg, 27, a Fort Bragg truck driver from Leesville, La., who has twice been deployed to Iraq.

“It shows that the military does care,” he said during a break in a recent Fort Bragg session. “When you fill out surveys, they’re not just going in the trash. People are actually . . . listening to what soldiers are saying.”

The program’s most vocal critics have been outside the Army — other psychologists who contend that it won’t work and that it is not training at all but rather a vast, quasi-ethical research project.

“There’s little reason to believe that these techniques would have any efficacy at all,” said James C. Coyne, a psychology professor in the psychiatry department at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “It’s very difficult to do anything preventively before the fact.”

In cases of combat stress, he said, he fears that preventive techniques could disrupt a soldier’s natural coping process.

“Getting upset, saying, ‘I don’t like feeling this way, this is a horrible way to feel,’ can often be the first step in a very healthy, adaptive response,” he said.

“Targeted, secondary prevention is much wiser and has much more of an evidence base than primary prevention,” he said.

Another critic, Roy Eidelson, a board member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, added: “This is the largest experiment ever undertaken — it involves a million soldiers.”

“The stakes are very high,” he said, “because we’re talking about war. We’re talking about life and death. And there’s a lot that wasn’t done to prepare for this experiment.”

Search for a strategy

The program was launched after the Army said it recognized some alarming trends.

Suicides among active-duty soldiers jumped from 138 in 2008 to 162 in 2009, according to the most recently available Army statistics.

Cases of spousal abuse and child abuse or neglect almost doubled between 2004 and 2009, from 913 to 1,625, the Army said. And referrals for alcohol and drug abuse rose from 15,000 in 1999 to 22,500 in 2009.

“It used to be that you just kind of joined the Army and lived your life . . . and there wasn’t anything very dangerous about it,” Cornum said.

“When I came in the Army, which was 1978, nobody was going anywhere and doing anything. Vietnam was over.”

Now, she said, almost everybody who joins is quickly deployed to a hot zone and faces redeployment over and over. “It’s a different Army, and nobody sees peace breaking out.”

The idea for the program was that of Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the recently retired Army chief of staff, who Cornum said was dismayed by the cases of suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder and family violence.

“We’ve got to have something besides the Whac-a-Mole theory,” Cornum quoted Casey as saying. “We need a strategy to teach people to do better and not just wait till they do badly.”

The Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, said day-to-day pressures on the modern soldier are enormous.

“We are putting as much stress on a soldier in the first six years in the United States Army” as many 80-year-old civilians have experienced in an entire lifetime, he said.

In 2008, Cornum said, the Army asked the University of Pennsylvania to help design something to combat negative behaviors.

The Army had a similar program, called Battlemind, but it was aimed at soldiers being deployed and coming off deployments and had not been implemented effectively, said Lt. Col. Sharon McBride, a senior research psychologist with the soldier fitness program.

Penn’s Positive Psychology Center and its director, Martin E.P. Seligman, are proponents of the idea of positive psychology, where attention is focused on positive aspects of life.

Seligman and his colleagues had already designed resilience programs for middle schools, high schools and college to prevent anxiety and depression, and they found that it was not that hard to adjust the training for soldiers.

“A lot of the material was directly relevant,” Seligman said. “The struggles of a soldier are relational — families, getting along with others. A very small part of life is going into battle.”

“I was worried that people would say [it was] ‘girlie psychobabble,’ ” he said. Instead, about half the soldiers who rated the program “said it was the best course they ever had in the Army.”

In 2009, the university began teaching resilience to the first 150 of the more than 4,500 noncommissioned officers who have thus far become trainers.

“We teach a set of skills around building mental toughness,” said Karen Reivich, co-director of the Penn Resiliency Project, who helps lead training sessions at a hotel near the university’s campus in Philadelphia.

The teaching is “designed to enhance a person’s ability to handle stress, to perform well, to stay optimistic,” she said during a break in a recent session.

“It’s about making sure that the soldiers have the skill sets to be able to do what our army is asking of them,” she said.

Sgt. 1st Class Brian Diggs, 35, a drill sergeant who has twice been deployed to Iraq and took the Penn trainers course in March, said he found it “excellent.”

He said he believed it would be useful in dealing with recruits.

“The younger generation . . . coming in the military, some of them have, already, issues that they bring with them,” he said. “I think this is just a better tool for leaders to help these new recruits get past those individual barriers that they bring with them.”

Psychologists criticize

In January, at the suggestion of Seligman, a special issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, devoted 13 articles — by Cornum, Casey and others — to the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program.

Norman B. Anderson, head of the association and the journal’s editor, said Seligman’s work is a hot topic, and so is the mental health of American military personnel.

But in March, a trio of psychologists — Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz — wrote a blistering online essay accusing the journal of “cheerleading” and attacking the Army program as research, not training.

And as research, the program should involve the consent of its subjects, the soldiers, the authors stated. “Such research violates the Nuremberg Code developed during post-World War II trials of Nazi doctors,” the authors said.

In addition, Seligman’s resilience work in schools has been “only modestly and inconsistently effective,” the authors contended, producing only small reductions in mild depression.

The critics also charged that the resilience work done in schools is probably not applicable to soldiers who face combat.

Finally, the authors worried that the program might actually harm soldiers: “Might soldiers who have been trained to resiliently view combat as a growth opportunity be more likely to ignore or underestimate real dangers, thereby placing themselves, their comrades, or civilians at heightened risk of harm?”

“Given those ethical questions,” Eidelson said, “psychology . . . should be thinking really hard about whether this is a good idea.”

Seligman countered that “it’s not remotely” a research project. “It’s an Army-wide course. . . . It’s no more subject to consent than . . . when you’re told to run in sneakers rather than boots.”

Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff, said: “We do all kinds of mandatory things. . . . We make people pee in a bottle every month, too. We take mandatory physical fitness tests.”

At the same time, “they’re probably right in saying it’s an experiment,” he said. “Take an organization of 1.1 million people and try to institute a program like this, it probably is a little bit of an experiment. But that’s okay.”

Chiarelli said the debate is understandable.

“There are always going to be naysayers out there,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we should wait until all the publishers publish all the articles.

“I think we have enough evidence on Comprehensive Soldier Fitness,” he said. “We know resiliency is key. And we know we can train people to be more resilient. To me, that’s all I need to know right now.”

Working through crises

At Fort Bragg one recent morning, sun streamed through an open door to a meeting room of the 264th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion.

Inside, the soldiers were among the first “lower enlisted” to be exposed to the notions of resilience by the newly minted teachers.

They had broken into small groups to analyze a personal crisis detailed by one person in each group.

The Rhode Island soldier’s group offered the story of his reaction to his pregnant wife’s departure for general discussion in the room.

“What was the activating event?” asked the moderator, Staff Sgt. Nathan Hayes, 27.

“Uh, finding out your wife was two months pregnant, and she leaves you,” a spokesman for the group replied.

“Sorry to hear that,” Hayes said.

He asked for the soldier’s reaction to his wife’s departure.

“He went into a drunken rage,” the spokesman related, “went into a downward spiral, got put into AA . . . got put on medicine, went through depression, didn’t want to work, didn’t want to do anything.”

Why did he turn to alcohol? Hayes asked.

“Just to forget everything,” the 24-year-old Rhode Island soldier, who had been sitting quietly, replied. “Just block it out.”

“So, ‘I can’t handle this on my own? I need alcohol?’ ” Hayes asked.

“Yeah, basically” the soldier said.

“So what’s the thinking trap there?” Hayes asked.

A “thinking trap,” a decades-old psychological concept, is one of the things the program wants soldiers to identify and avoid.

Reivich, of Penn, identified eight thinking traps in “The Resilience Factor,” a 2002 book she co-authored with Andrew Shatte. They include jumping to conclusions, overgeneralizing and “personalizing,” or always blaming oneself for setbacks.

“ ‘Alcohol’s the solution’ was the conclusion you jumped to,” Hayes told the young specialist.

After the session ended, the Rhode Island soldier, who has since reached an understanding with his wife, said he found the program valuable.

“If I had this kind of training before, I probably would have still been with my wife,” he said. “It definitely does help.”

 

July 5th, 2011

Kaye: Guantanamo Psychologist Led Rendition and Imprisonment of Afghan Boys

Psychologist Jeff Kaye has elaborated in Truthout on our understanding of the actions of psychologist Col. Larry James during the time that James was head of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team [BSCT] at Guantanamo in 2003. Kaye discusses the actions of James in regards to the numerous juvenile detainees at the facility during James’ tenure:

Guantanamo Psychologist Led Rendition and Imprisonment of Afghan Boys, Complaint Charges

By Jeffrey Kaye

Four Ohio residents filed court papers last week seeking to compel the Ohio State Psychology Board to investigate Dr. Larry James, a retired Army colonel and former chief psychologist for the intelligence command at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, who oversaw the brutal torture of detainees, including children.

The motion was filed by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas on behalf of the four residents, which includes a psychologist, a veteran, a minister and a long-time mental health advocate.

Earlier this year, the psychology board had dismissed a complaint first filed by the same Ohio residents last July, stating, “It has been determined that we are unable to proceed to formal action in this matter.”

The original complaint, filed with the Ohio Board of Psychology, was supported by over a thousand pages of documentation, including reports from the US military, the Department of Justice, the Central Intelligence Agency and statements from survivors and witnesses. But the board did not provide a rationale as to why it was unable to probe the allegations leveled against James.

James was head of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), which was made up of psychologists and other mental health professionals who assisted interrogators at the prison facility during the first half of 2003. From 2004 to 2006, he served as chief of psychology at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, and in 2007 he returned to Guantanamo. He retired in 2008.

James is currently dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He was licensed to practice psychology in Ohio in 2008.

According to the complaint, during James’ tenure at Guantanamo, “boys and men were systematically abused” and were subjected to “rape and death threats” and torture techniques such as “forced nudity; sleep deprivation; extreme isolation; short-shackling into stress positions; and physical assault.”

Moreover, the complaint states that James supervised the forceful and arbitrary detention of three Afghan boys, “transported thousands of miles away from their families and denied them access to counsel.”

James did not return an email request for comment.

In their verified complaint filed with the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, seeking a writ to compel the Ohio Board of Psychology “to proceed to ‘formal action’ against Dr. Larry C. James,” the complainants quote an affidavit by former American Psychological Association (APA) Practice Directorate Chief, Dr. Bryant Welch, that the allegations in the complaint, “if true, represent the most serious ethical breaches I have seen in my thirty-five years as a psychologist. They also have the most far reaching implications for the profession of psychology of any ethical or licensing issue I have yet encountered.”

IHRC’s earlier complaint (PDF link) was damning.

He was accused of numerous instances of professional misconduct and violations of the law, including failure to protect his clients from harm, exploitation of those with whom he worked, failure to protect detainees’ confidentiality and failure “to represent honestly his own conduct, experience and the results of his services.”

Indeed, in “Fixing Hell,” a book James published in 2008 about his experiences at Guantanamo and at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, he claimed that he was “righting the wrongs” at both prisons and that there “have been no incidents of abuse at Guantanamo Bay by either an interrogator or psychologist reported since my arrival in Cuba in January 2003.”

Ironically, in his book, James wrote of at least two incidents of such abuse during his 2003 tenure, which as the IHRC complaint explains, he failed to report to proper authorities.

A fair amount of James’ narrative about his time at Guantanamo concerns his actions after his commander, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, put him in charge of three young teenage prisoners, all younger than age 16 and one perhaps as young as 12 years old, in February 2003. James was in charge of rendering the boys from Bagram, Afghanistan, where they were then held, arranging their Guantanamo housing and attending and supervising their interrogations. James wrote that the boys were “very traumatized” upon arrival at Guantanamo. While he presents his treatment of these children as a “case study” for his “softer” style of interrogation – “exactly the kind of prisoners I needed to test my philosophy on interrogation” – a closer, more nuanced look presents a very different picture.

“Teenage Terrorists”

The story of these young detainees had previously been documented in news reports and is also retold in the IHRC complaint, which redacts the boys’ personal information, something James failed to do in his book.

While James doesn’t mention the fact in his book, there were at least a dozen underage, minor children or teenagers held at Guantanamo. US authorities in Iraq and Afghanistan have allegedly held thousands of other juveniles. The IHRC complaint refers to torture and abuse suffered by two of the Guantanamo minors, Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, during the period James was chief psychologist. These teens, as well as all the others but the three held at Camp Iguana, the special camp built to hold them at the Guantanamo base, were kept with the adult prisoners at Camp Delta and other sites at the prison.

According to James, when he arrived at Bagram to pick up his new prisoners, he found them looking “not only terrified but also disheveled and lost.” Nevertheless, he believed them to be “far from innocent,” “teenage terrorists.” “These juveniles were not sweet kids,” James wrote.

Yet, he also found that the trauma they endured was very real. James wrote that the boys were “victims of rape, illiterate, one certainly had PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]“; they were, according to James, “the most fragile – psychologically, medically and academically – children I had ever met.”

James glosses over in his book the circumstances of the 20-hour flight from Bagram that brought the children to Guantanamo. But news reports published after the children were released in January 2004 provides more detail about their time held by US forces in Afghanistan and their subsequent transport to Guantanamo.

In his book, James states that all three children “had been captured while fighting in a combatant role against US forces in Afghanistan.” But James failed to provide any evidence to support such an assertion, which is contrary to reports the boys made themselves. According to a report published a Guardian UK article, two of the boys were caught while US forces were “looking for a local commander, Mansoor Rahman Saiful, who had fought against the Taliban for years, but joined the radical Islamists when America attacked Afghanistan.”

Naqibullah, age 13, “a local imam’s son, said he stumbled into the raid while cycling from a friend’s house,” and was interrogated daily about his knowledge of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

“I told them, ‘I don’t know these people and I am too young to give anything to anyone without my father’s authority.’” After two weeks, Naqibullah said, he was asked whether he had any objection to being taken to “another place.”

“I said, ‘What can I do? You will take me wherever you want to.’ That night, bound, blindfolded and fitted into orange overalls, he was loaded on to a cargo plane and flown non-stop to Cuba. Naqibullah’s first 10 days in Guantanamo were the worst of his life, he said.”

According to a March 2004 story by The New York Times, another child prisoner, Asadullah, age 12 or 13, believed to be the youngest of the prisoners, said he was interrogated daily for several months while held in Afghanistan. The beatings he endured in the first five days of his captivity still bothered him when he arrived in Guantanamo.

As with Naqibullah, the third child prisoner, Mohammed Ismail Agha, age 13, told a foreign journalist, as reported in The Washington Post in February 2004, that he had been arrested because a friend with whom he was looking for work was supposedly identified as a Taliban. He spent a month and a half at Bagram before being “warned that if he did not confess he would be sent to a terrible and distant place called Guantanamo.”

Agha was subjected to sleep deprivation and stress positions during his time at Bagram in an effort to get him to make a confession.

“It was a very bad place. Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick on my door and yell at me to wake up,” he said. “When they were trying to get me to confess, they made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours. Sometimes I couldn’t bear it any more and I fell down, but they made me stand that way some more.”

Agha’s story of his rendition is similar to that of Naqibullah. He was “put on a plane with other prisoners, chained by the wrists and ankles, with a hood placed over his head.”

“It was hard to breathe,” he said.

Supervising the transport back to Guantanamo on the large C-17 transport plane, complete with medical team, military police and Air Force Special Forces shooters, was Col. Larry James. The former chief psychologist never states whether he reported the treatment received by these child prisoners at Bagram to any authority.

“I Prayed to God, I Asked, ‘Where Is My Son?’”

While James and the Guantanamo authorities apparently did try to make the boys’ treatment much improved over that of prisoners in the rest of the camp, including at least eight or nine other teens held at roughly the same time, the young prisoners were not entirely grateful.

According to the Guardian report, “The boys played football every day and sometimes basketball and volleyball with their guards.” But Asadullah told his interviewer, “I was very sad because I missed my family so much…. I was always asking, ‘When can I go home? What day? What month?’ They said, ‘You’ll go home soon,’ but they never said when.”

According to a February 2004 story in the UK Telegraph, Ismail Agha (who is reported as 15 in this article) said, “At first I was unhappy … For two or three days [after I arrived in Cuba] I was confused but later the Americans were so nice to me. They gave me good food with fruit and water for ablutions and prayer.”

The boys lived in shared bedrooms and appear to have been treated humanely by their guards. According to James’ account, they were assigned a Navy child psychologist, Dr. Tim Dugan. They attended school classes. A pediatrician provided “thorough medical care.”

James states that he attended the interrogations of the boys every day from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM, which he said provided “useful intelligence.”

Meanwhile, the children had not seen or heard from their families for many months. They complained of homesickness. Though one paper quoted Agha as praising the soldiers who watched over him, he was critical of US authorities for not notifying his parents for ten months of his incarceration, even though he says he gave the Red Cross letters from the first months of his incarceration. “They stole 14 months of my life and my family’s life. I was entirely innocent: just a poor boy looking for work,” Agha said.

The families by most accounts were desperate to find out what happened to their children. No US authority or the Red Cross informed them about the fate of their sons for many months. James never raises the issue of the boys’ parents in his book.

According to the Post article, Nayatullah, “an illiterate farmer of about 60,” traveled to work sites throughout his area, asking if anyone had seen his son. No one had. “Finally I thought he must be dead,” Agha’s father said.

Asadullah’s mother spoke through a translator to a Guardian UK correspondent about how she suffered not knowing her son’s fate. She cried “every night thinking about my son.”

“I prayed to God, I asked, ‘Where is my son?’” she continued. “He was just a boy, much too young to disappear on his own.”

The family and other villagers looked high and low for the boy. Family members and friends went to Bagram, Logar and Gardez to inquire from the Americans regarding their son’s whereabouts, but “no one knew about him.” Asadullah’s father sold his land to fund the several thousands dollars it took to fund the search for his son. It took the family seven months before they found out where their son was held.

At last, with no explanation or apology, the boys were released in January 2004. James had left Guantanamo after May 2003, but in his book, he wrote proudly of his work with the inmates of Camp Iguana. “This is how my country handles prisoners,” he said. “It’s not all about abuse. We can take juveniles like that and send them home better than we found them.”

An Exploitation Program

News of the incarceration of minors at Guantanamo, including the capture of the three boys held at Camp Iguana, leaked out in early 2003, the same time James was supposedly “fixing” the prison facility. An April 2003 Guardian UK report quoted Angela Wright, an Amnesty International official, as saying that “holding the children was ‘wholly repugnant and contrary to basic principles of human rights’ … and contravened UN rules with ‘near-universal acceptance’ regarding the treatment of juveniles.” Moreover, Wright said, the incarceration of the children at Guantanamo, with no access to counsel and under conditions of indefinite detention, was contrary to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and “is clearly totally at odds with the purpose of the treaty.”

The Center for Human Rights in the Americas at UC Davis has noted that the youngest children held at Guantanamo were Naqibullah, Assadullah and Abdul Qudus, all of whom were born in 1988. Naquibullah and Assadullah were sent to Camp Iguana, but Qudus, who was imprisoned at Guantanamo as early as February 7, 2002, was held along with the adult population and presumably treated the same as other adult prisoners. He is reported to have been released in 2005 or 2006.

Other Guantanamo teens under age 16 included Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, both of whom made claims of extensive torture and use of solitary confinement.

When the Camp Iguana children were released in January 2004, the Anglo-American press made a great deal about their supposed humane treatment.

Carlotta Gall at The New York Times stated, “Aside from homesickness, the boys did not suffer at Guantanamo.” James Astill at The Guardian UK noted the “gentle treatment” of the boys, while the headline to the article stated, “Cuba? It was great, say boys freed from US prison camp.”

Such was the general propaganda theme surrounding the release of the boys. “I had a good time at Guantanamo, says inmate,” was the headline in the February 7, 2004 UK Telegraph.

A February 11, 2004, Washington Post story by Pamela Constable concludes with Agha’s father smiling and saying, “My son got an education in America.” Agha is said to be proud of his education, too. This mirrors James’ own assertion that he took boys who “were flat-out dumber than a bag of rocks” and returned them home “all functioning at the sixth to eighth grade academic level.” How James took illiterate children and lifted them to this grade level in approximately a year isn’t explained.

Despite claims of humane treatment of the Camp Iguana minors, given the fragile psychological condition of these youth, as reported by James himself, their incarceration was certainly at odds with standards of mental health even within the military itself. In the 2006 book “The Military Family,” part three of the “Military Life” series, published by Praeger Security International, an entire chapter is devoted to the “pain and loss” of family separation. The stress of unexpected combat deployment on military families, that is, sudden separation with unknown outcome for one family member, is compared with “catastrophic stress” and “immobilizing crisis” (p. 19).

Whatever the nature of the treatment of the boys at Camp Iguana, other children or teens held at Guantanamo during James’ tenure (and afterward) was significantly abusive, amounting in many cases to torture. Omar Khadr’s affadavit regarding his torture has been posted as a PDF online. He alleges beatings, isolation, exposure to cold, short-shackling, threats, and other abuse.

In August 2008, another Guantanamo BSCT psychologist, US Army Lt. Col. Diane M. Zierhoffer, refused to testify in Mohammed Jawad’s military tribunal hearing, pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. According to a Newsweek article, Zierhoffer (who was identified separately in an article at Daily Kos), working with interrogators, “encouraged them to continue to dial up the emotional pressure on Jawad: ‘He appears to be rather frightened and it looks as if he could break easily if he were isolated from his support network and made to rely solely on the interrogator,’ according to an excerpt of the report read to Newsweek. The psychologist recommended that Jawad be moved to a section of the prison where he would be the only Pashto speaker and be moved again if he somehow began to socialize in his new block. The psychologist also suggested that interrogators emphasize to Jawad that his family appeared to have forgotten him: ‘Make him as uncomfortable as possible. Work him as hard as possible.’”

Other reports of abuse or torture by underage children held at Guantanamo also exist. Most recently, the youngest prisoner at Guantanamo Bay at the time of his release in June 2009, Chadian citizen Mohammed el Gharani, who was 14 years old when grabbed by the Americans, told a Miami Herald reporter that beatings and tear gassing occurred as late as 2009. Prior to that time, according to the British charity organization Reprieve, he had been subjected to sleep deprivation, freezing cold, strobe lights, blasting music, being burned by a cigarette and more beatings. As a result, the boy who entered Guantanamo at age 14 or 15 attempted suicide more than once, “including slashing his wrists, trying to hang himself and running head-first into the wall as hard as he could.”

When putting the treatment of the Camp Iguana boys next to that of other children and teens held at Guantanamo and other US sites, it can only be inferred that the Camp Iguana children were primarily a demonstration project for public propaganda purposes. While little or no attention was spent on the impact of separation from family on these three children, or on the effect upon other family members, and while the abuse and difficulties of their initial stay at Camp Iguana, as reported by the children themselves, was never pursued by those who interviewed them, the emphasis on the supposed good treatment of these children appears to be aimed at promoting a picture of basic treatment of the children that is at odds with the treatment that most minors incarcerated by the United States received.

The construction of a “model” camp for children at Camp Iguana, never used again for other minors after the three Afghan boys left in January 2004, is consistent with a program of exploitation of prisoners for propaganda purposes that was revealed in a recent set of notes by former CIA psychologist contractor, Bruce Jessen, in an article at Truthout last month.

Recently, James emailed members of the Wright State University School of Professional Psychology community to announce that he was “appointed” by First Lady Michelle Obama to a White House Task Force entitled “Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family.”

According to a story at Truthout, the White House subsequently denied any such appointment, or even the existence of such a task force. The APA would not directly deny a report that they or another group may have “indirectly” invited James to a White House meeting on military families, but a spokesperson said the APA is “happy to work with the White House to recommend psychologists who have experience in helping military families.”

James has served on other matters for APA in the past. In 2005, James served on the APA’s president’s task force on Psychological Ethics and National Security. The task force controversially recommended in a report, “Psychologists may serve in various national security-related roles, such as a consultant to an interrogation, in a manner that is consistent with the Ethics Code and when doing so psychologists are mindful of factors unique to these roles and contexts that require special ethical consideration.”

In the press release by IHRC, Dr. Trudy Bond, a Toledo-based psychologist and one of the four complainants against James, commented on the dismissal of the complaint against the former Guantanamo psychologist. “The Board disregarded ample and credible evidence that an Ohio psychology dean had overseen torture,” Bond said. “When the ethics watchdog apparently finds it appropriate to dismiss a complaint like this without conducting a proper investigation, or even justifying the decision, it shows that our system is broken.”

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This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California, writes regularly on torture and other subjects for  Truthout, The Public Record and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

April 21st, 2011

Compressive Soldier Fitness critique in TIME and Scientific American

The recent article by Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk, and myself critiquing the military’s Compressive Soldier Fitness program has received considerable positive attention, including blog posts on the Time and Scientific American web sites. Here are those posts.

Time:

Does the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program Violate the Nuremberg Code?

By Mark Benjamin

There is new criticism of the Army’s high-profile effort to train mental toughness into soldiers so they can better handle the stress of repeated combat tours. This time, the critique comes from a group of psychologists who say the program appears to be scientific research without consent.

The Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program is a $125 million effort to teach mental resiliency to troops. The program is a pet project of Army Chief of Staff George Casey, who retired this week, and is run largely by famed psychologist Martin Seligman through the University of Pennsylvania.

“This is a mandatory program for a million soldiers with no pilot testing,” says psychologist Roy Eidelson. “We don’t know if it is no use, harmful, or potentially helpful.”

Rather than simply screening soldiers for potential problems after combat, the Army says it is trying to provide troops with mental tools to help them handle the rigors of battlefield stress when they deploy and the impact it can have on a soldier and his family when troops return home. The program combines individual assessments, virtual training and classroom instruction.

Critics say the program’s aims are valiant, but its efficacy is far from clear. Eidelson and two colleagues, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz, wrote a critical essay about Seligman’s program in Counterpunch late last month.

The psychologists note that there is little scientific evidence to show that this kind of training works. “It is highly unusual for the effectiveness of such a huge and consequential intervention program not be convincingly demonstrated first in carefully conducted randomized trials,” they wrote. They argue that other well-meaning intervention programs to prevent delinquency, for example, have only been “modestly and inconsistently effective.”

Rather than a program based on experiments that prove it works for soldiers, the psychologists argue that the training itself may be the experiment. Seligman has referred to the program as “the largest study – 1.1 million soldiers – psychology has ever been involved in.” If that is the case, the Nuremberg Code, developed in response to Nazi doctors’ experiments during World War II, requires that soldiers give their consent to any kind of research for which they are subjects. “The soldiers apparently have no informed consent protections – they are required to participate,” the psychologists wrote.

The Army is dismissing this latest controversy as an academic tiff. “The Army is aware of this ongoing discussion and views it as an academic discussion and debate between the psychologist and behavioral health communities,” Army spokesman Gary Tallman says. “The Army’s CSF program continues to move forward to help soldiers and families.”

It is not the first scrutiny the program has attracted. Writing in Salon late last year, I explained how Seligman received a $31 million no-competition contract to begin the work, despite similar programs and research going on at other institutions around the country. Seligman is known for his close ties to the military and intelligence communities, and my article explored how his early work appears to have informed psychological interrogation tactics during the Bush era.

The Army has promoted the program hard, unveiling a website complete with flashy videos. Seligman scored a nice rollout article in the New York Times and the January 2011 issue of American Psychologist, the magazine of the American Psychological Association, published some glowing reviews of Seligman’s work. Seligman is a former president of the APA.

Scientific American:

Beware the military-psychological complex: A $125-million program to boost soldiers’ “fitness” raises ethical questions

By John Horgan

Fifty years ago, in the same farewell speech in which he warned about the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” on American politics, President Dwight Eisenhower also deplored the growing dependence of scientists on federal funding. “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded.”

Eisenhower’s speech comes to mind as I gravely regard the latest example of the militarization of science, a $125 million collaboration between psychologists and the U.S. Army called “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness,” or CSF. The program calls for giving “resilience training” to more than one million Army soldiers and civilian employees to help them cope with the stress of military life. A U.S. Army Web sitecalls the CSF “a long term strategy that better prepares the Army community—including all soldiers, family members, and the Department of the Army civilian workforce—to not only survive, but also thrive at a cognitive and behavioral level in the face of protracted warfare and everyday challenges of Army life that are common in the 21st century.”

The program is the brainchild of one of the most powerful figures in American psychology, Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania. A former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), Seligman is best-known for founding the enormously popular positive psychology, or “happiness,” movement, which emphasizes positive rather than negative personality traits and emotions.

The APA’s main journal, American Psychologist, devoted its January 2011 issue, co-edited by Seligman, to explaining and extolling the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program. No articles in the issue questioned the program’s scientific or ethical soundness, but the psychologists Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz did just that in “The Dark Side of  ‘Comprehensive Soldier Fitness,’” a hard-hitting article published in the newsletter Counterpunch. (Scientific American‘s Gary Stix also critiqued the methods underpinning the CSF in this incisive recent article.)

Is it ethical for psychologists to help soldiers to participate in what may be unethical behavior? This is the toughest question raised by Eidelson et al. “Helping people who have already been harmed by trauma is essential,” they wrote. “But should we be involved in helping an institution prepare to place more people in harm’s way without careful and ongoing questioning and review of the rationale for doing so?”

The trio also charged that the CSF is based on “resiliency techniques,” developed by Seligman and others, that have been shown to be “only modestly and inconsistently effective” in studies of civilians. Indeed, according to Eidelson et al., the techniques are still so experimental that the CSF may violate the Nuremberg Code of ethics, which prohibits research on people without their consent. Eidelson et al. noted that soldiers “apparently have no informed consent protections—they are required to participate.” According to TIME blogger Mark Benjamin, the Army dismisses the issue of informed consent as an “academic tiff”—or, as an Army spokesman put it, “an academic discussion and debate between the psychologist and behavioral health communities.” The spokesman said the CSF “continues to move forward” despite these concerns.

The Army’s own description of the CSF sounds like psychobabble: “Conceptually, while CSF is largely focused on training skill sets, it also delves into root causes of emotion, thought and action—what psychologists refer to as ‘meta-cognition’. With this in mind, CSF serves as a programmatic first step towards training members of the Army community to understand how and why they think a certain way. Once people begin to understand this, they are best postured to change their thoughts and actions to strategies that are positive, adaptive and desirable for both the person and the Army.”

Even in the face of declines in non-military funding, some scientific fields have resisted militarization. In 2009 the American Anthropological Association declared that a program to embed anthropologists with troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and other war zones violated the profession’s code of ethics, which one article described as “a sort of Hippocratic oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm.”

But as I pointed out in a column last year, neuroscience is chasing after defense dollars. In 2009 the National Academy of Sciences published a 136-page report, “Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications,” that advised brain scientists on how to get on board the military gravy train. The authors included two leading brain scientists: Floyd Bloom of the Scripps Research Institute and Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, both former members of The President’s Council on Bioethics. Potential applications of neuroscience include drugs and electromagnetic devices that can boost or degrade soldiers’ capacities.

The APA is capable of taking a stand. In 2007, after reports that psychologists were helping the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency refine their interrogation techniques, the APA condemned the involvement of its members in “planning, designing, assisting in or participating in any activities including interrogations which involve the use of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” But the APA leadership should be ashamed by its uncritical promotion of the CSF program. The association should encourage a debate among its members over whether the CSF represents a genuinely beneficial, ethical program or just another sordid example of what Eisenhower called the “the power of money.”

Alas, Horgan in the last paragraph get’s taken in by APA’s putative “anti-torture” resolution that led Mark Benjamin at the time to wonder Will psychologists still abet torture?

April 19th, 2011

Update on Larry James trial

Courthouse News provides an update on latest developments in the attempt to force the Ohio psychology licensing board to take seriously complaints against former Guantanamo BSCT psychologist Larry James:

Doctors Demand State Board Take Action Against Gitmo Psychologist

By Kyle Anne Uniss

COLUMBUS, Ohio (CN) – Two doctors, a minister and a disabled veteran sued the Ohio Board of Psychology, claiming it failed to act on their detailed complaint against a psychologist, an Army colonel who “was responsible for the abuse and exploitation of detainees as a senior psychologist at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, in violation of Ohio law and Board ethics rules.”

The plaintiffs seek writ of mandamus to compel the State Board to take “formal action” against Dr. Larry C. James, a board-licensed psychologist and Dean of Wright State University’s School of Professional Psychology.

James is not listed as a defendant.

The plaintiffs say he worked at the Guantanamo prison in 2003 and in 2007-2008. At Guantanamo, James was an Army colonel who led the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, which included psychiatrists and psychologists who “played a role in the exploitation, abuse, and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, subsequently misrepresented that experience, and improperly disclosed confidential patient information,” according to the complaint.

James led the team from January to May 2003, and against from June 2007 through May or June 2008, according to the complaint in Franklin County Court.

The plaintiffs are Dr. Trudy Bond, a practicing psychologist from Toledo; Michael Reese, an Army veteran, member of Disable American Veterans, and a former counselor for people with disabilities; the Rev. Colin Bossen, a Unitarian minister from Cleveland Heights; and Dr. Josephine Setzler, director of an Ohio chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

The plaintiffs say they filed a 50-page complaint against James with the Board on July 7, 2010. They ask that if the board does not take “formal action” against james, that it be compelled “to provide clearly articulated reasons grounded in fact or law for any decision, and to show that it investigated meaningfully and/or carried out a formal proceeding in good faith.”

The plaintiffs say the July 7, 2010 “Board Complaint” alleges violations of 18 Ohio laws and Board ethics rules.

They accuse James of “publishing confidential patient history in his 2008 memoir and … misleading the public and the Board about his role.”

They claim that after James left Guantanamo, he continued to commit “grave breeches of confidentiality through statements he made in his book,” “Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib.” They say that James published this book in 2008, “while his application for an Ohio license was pending before the Board.”

According to the lawsuit: “The Board Complaint documents that while Dr. James was chief psychologist and alleged commanding officer of the BSCT [Behavioral Science Consultation Team], men and boys detained in the prison were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted.

“The Board Complaint alleges that Dr. James participated in, ordered, supervised, ratified, facilitated, acquiesced in, and/or failed to prevent, stop, report or punish this and other types of abuse at the prison.

The Board Complaint provides specific exampled of this misconduct, including an incident drawn from Dr. James’s own admission in which he watched behind a one-way mirror and drank coffee as an interrogator and three guards wrestled a man to the floor forcing him to wear lipstick, a wig, and women’s underwear. The Board Complaint alleges that Dr. James did not report the incident and documents Dr. James’s admission that he did not reprimand or disciplines the interrogator and guards.”

The plaintiffs say that their Board Complaint alleged, inter alia, that James and members “under his command and control … advised and trained interrogators, meeting with them to review interrogation plans designed to isolate detainees and foster dependence on their interrogators so as to enhance and exploit their disorientation, shock and fear;

“observed, monitored and retained at least de facto authority to end many, if not all, interrogations, many of which involved treatment rising to the level of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;

“assessed and evaluated detainee behavior and suggested abusive interrogation techniques …

“The U.S. government had previously recognized such techniques as illegal, and U.S. government officials have since reaffirmed that some of these techniques constitute torture.” (Citations omitted.)

“The Board Complaint is further supported by a report submitted by psychologist and attorney Dr. Bryant Welch, an expert in psychological ethics,” the legal complaint adds. “Dr. Welch concludes that if the allegations contained in the Board Complaint are factually true, the conduct described constitutes the most serious and far-reaching ethical breaches he has ever encountered in his career as a psychologist.”

The plaintiffs say the Ohio Board of Psychology responded to their complaint with a “cursory letter” of Jan. 31, stating that “It has been determined that we are unable to proceed to formal action on this matter.”

The plaintiff’s say that’s an abuse of the Board’s discretion of “a 50-page complaint with over 1,000 pages of credible documentation, including government reports and Dr. James’s own admissions,” and that the Board “must proceed pursuant to its duty to protect the public from psychologists who abuse their professional knowledge and skills to cause harm.” The plaintiffs are represented by Terry Lodge of Toledo and Deborah Popowski and Tyler Giannini of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic.

April 19th, 2011

Reisner on Demoracy Now! on Leso torture complaint

Democracy Now! today interviewed psychologist, and American Psychological Association Presidential candidate Steven Reisner regarding Dr. Reisner’s ethics complaint against Maj. John Leso for his activities as part of the Guantanamo Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), including his participation in the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani. [Amy Goodman also wrote about the case in the weekly column.]:

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Monday that key suspects in the 9/11 attacks would be tried by military commissions in Guantánamo, not in U.S. civil court. Holder blamed members of Congress for the decision.

ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: Had this case proceeded in Manhattan or in an alternative venue in the United States, as I seriously explored in the last year, I am confident that our justice system could have performed with the same distinction that has been its hallmark for over 200 years. Now, unfortunately, since I made that decision, members of Congress have intervened and imposed restrictions blocking the administration from bringing any Guantánamo detainees to trial in the United States, regardless of the venue.

AMY GOODMAN: But there will be one Guantánamo case tried in New York. This week, the New York State Supreme Court will hear the case against Dr. John Leso, a psychologist accused of participating in torture of prisoners at Guantánamo.

The case was brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Justice and Accountability on behalf of Dr. Steven Reisner. He’s a New York psychologist and adviser to Physicians for Human Rights. He’s at the center of a growing group of psychologists campaigning against the participation of psychologists in the U.S. government’s interrogation programs. He’s on the faculty at New York University Medical School and at the International Trauma Studies Program affiliated with Columbia University and a founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and the New York Campaign Against Torture. Dr. Reisner is currently running for president of the American Psychological Association, the largest association of psychologists in the world.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dr. Reisner.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: You are just about to go over to the New York State Supreme Court today to hear this case that is being brought against, really, a colleague, against Dr. John Leso. Explain who he is and what he did.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, John Leso was the first psychologist—the first person—named to a Department of Defense BSCT team. BSCTs were the Behavioral Science Consultation Team that oversaw and advised on the enhanced interrogations of detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere. And John Leso found himself in Guantánamo, was put in charge of this BSCT team—he was BSCT number one—and was given the responsibility of creating a program, which we would now call a program of torture, for the high-value detainees at Guantánamo.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was that program?

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, he went to Fort Bragg to be trained in SERE techniques. SERE is the program in our—for our armed forces to be given experiences of torture in case they’re captured, as a kind of inoculation.

AMY GOODMAN: S-E-R-E.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Yes, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. And the “resistance” part is the part that has to do with dealing with torture techniques. And he was taught a series of techniques while at Fort Bragg, and his colleagues and the interrogators at Guantánamo were all part of a training program. And they went back to Guantánamo, and Dr. Leso and his partner, Dr. Burney, a psychiatrist, created a progressively harsh list of techniques to be used, at that point, on Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was a detainee who was thought to be the 20th hijacker. All those charges have been dropped since. But the increasingly harsh techniques included isolation, sleep deprivation, extreme cold, sexual and religious humiliation—the whole gamut of techniques used individually and together. And the interrogation lasted for about a month and a half.

AMY GOODMAN: Major Leso recommended three categories of interrogation severity at Guantánamo, depending on the prisoner’s ability to resist.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what “Category III” was.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, Category III were the harshest techniques. They included some physical abuse. They included nonstop interrogations for 20 hours, absolute isolation. I can’t remember all of—

AMY GOODMAN: Including from the ICRC.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Oh, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: That they were not to be seen by the International Committee of the Red Cross?

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, that was not only the case for those detainees undergoing severe interrogation techniques; the Guantánamo protocols prohibited any contact with the ICRC for all detainees in their first 30 days of isolation.

AMY GOODMAN: What are the rules? You actually brought a case to the Office of Professional Conduct against John Leso, but they would not investigate him.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Right. They made the claim that since what he was doing was aimed to harm—in other words, aimed to break down prisoners—he wasn’t functioning as a professional psychologist, and therefore the State of New York’s Office of Professional Discipline didn’t have jurisdiction to question the ethics of a psychologist who was not acting according to the New York definition of a professional psychologist. So they just refused to hear the case. They refused to investigate.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you break the rules, you’re not acting according to the professional rules of conduct, so you’re not investigated?

DR. STEVEN REISNER: To some extent—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, isn’t he hired because he is a psychologist?

DR. STEVEN REISNER: He was hired because he was a psychologist. It was required that he be licensed. He was asked to use his psychological expertise. The state board said that he didn’t have a therapist-patient relationship with al-Qahtani, but it left out a whole area of professional psychology where the client is the organization. This holds, for example, in prisons. Prison psychologists are clinical psychologists, licensed in the State of New York, who oversee the practice and care of prisoners. And if they act unethically, they are held accountable. It’s quite analogous at Guantánamo. But for some reason, the New York board decided that it was unique and different, and they refused to investigate.

AMY GOODMAN: So your case today is trying to force the Office of Professional Discipline to investigate Dr. John Leso?

DR. STEVEN REISNER: That’s exactly right.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, he was at Walter Reed.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Yes, John Leso was at Walter Reed under Colonel Larry James. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Who’s head of Wright State now, right?

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Yes, Larry James is now a dean at Wright State School of Professional Psychology. And cases have been brought against Colonel Larry James, as well, because Larry—

AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Larry James followed John Leso as BSCT number one at Guantánamo.

AMY GOODMAN: Put this in the context of the battle within the largest association of psychologists in the world, your association, the APA, the American Psychological Association.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, because the legal justification for torture required the presence of psychologists and psychiatrists or—and physicians, in order to allow the torture to go forward according to the Justice Department’s rules at the time, there were—it was necessary for health professionals to be part of the Bush administration torture program. A growing number of psychologists, in particular, felt that we could find a wedge to stop that torture program by forcing the American Psychological Association to declare such practices unethical. And that would take away the legal justification for torture. So, more and more psychologists were made aware of the role of psychologists in the torture. And I don’t know if the public is aware, but the protocols for torture in both the CIA and the Department of Defense were crafted by psychologists. So we’ve been trying now for about five or six years to have the American Psychological Association state unequivocally that these psychologists who followed the Department of Defense protocols should be held accountable.

AMY GOODMAN: And it’s interesting that the American Psychological Association has not enforced resolutions like the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association around issues of interrogation and torture.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, that’s right, and they’ve refused to implement those.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, what hasn’t become clear is, a few weeks ago, there was some news that Larry James, also who complaints have been brought against, was being selected to serve on the White House task force called Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of the Military Family. What is this about? Because the Obama administration is denying this.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, it’s hard to know exactly what it’s about. Dr. James sent a letter to faculty and students stating that he was proud to have been selected to serve on this task force. But when the White House was asked about it, they stated that Dr. James was not invited to the task force. In fact, the task force—there was no such task force. So, those of us who have followed Larry James’s career and have read his book, we’re not so surprised, because the exaggerations and distortions in that book are pretty widely known. And so this—we had to take this one with a grain of salt, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will continue to follow both of these cases, and we will link at our website to all of our coverage of the controversy in the American Psychological Association. Dr. Steven Reisner, thanks so much for being with us, adviser on psychology and ethics for Physicians for Human Rights, running for president of the American Psychological Association.

3 comments April 6th, 2011

The Dark Side of “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness”

By Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk, and Stephen Soldz

Why is the world’s largest organization of psychologists so aggressively promoting a new, massive, and untested military program? The APA’s enthusiasm for mandatory “resilience training” for all U.S. soldiers is troubling on many counts.

The January 2011 issue of the American Psychologist, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) flagship journal, is devoted entirely to 13 articles that detail and celebrate the virtues of a new U.S. Army-APA collaboration. Built around positive psychology and with key contributions from former APA president Martin Seligman and his colleagues, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is a $125 million resilience training initiative designed to reduce and prevent the adverse psychological consequences of combat for our soldiers and veterans. While these are undoubtedly worthy aspirations, the special issue is nevertheless troubling in several important respects: the authors of the articles, all of whom are involved in the CSF program, offer very little discussion of conceptual and ethical considerations; the special issue does not provide a forum for any independent critical or cautionary voices whatsoever; and through this format, the APA itself has adopted a jingoistic cheerleading stance toward a research project about which many crucial questions should be posed. We discuss these and related concerns below.

At the outset, we want to be clear that we are not questioning the valuable role that talented and dedicated psychologists play in the military, nor certainly the importance of providing our soldiers and veterans with the best care possible. As long as our country has a military, our soldiers should be prepared to face the hazards and horrors they may experience. Military service is highly stressful, and psychological challenges and difficulties understandably arise frequently. These issues are created or exacerbated by a wide range of features characteristic of military life, such as separation from family, frequent relocations, and especially deployment to combat zones with ongoing threats of injury and death and exposure to acts of unspeakable violence. The stress of repeated tours of duty, including witnessing the loss of lives of comrades and civilians, can produce extensive emotional and behavioral consequences that persist long after soldiers return home. They include heightened risk of suicide, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse, and family violence.

Conceptual and Empirical Concerns

Although its advocates prefer to describe Comprehensive Soldier Fitness as a training program, it is indisputably a research project of enormous size and scope, one in which a million soldiers are required to participate. Reivich, Seligman, and McBride write in one of the special issue articles, “We hypothesize that these skills will enhance soldiers’ ability to handle adversity, prevent depression and anxiety, prevent PTSD, and enhance overall well-being and performance” (p. 26, emphasis added). This is the very core of the entire CSF program, yet it is merely a hypothesis — a tentative explanation or prediction that can only be confirmed through further research.

There seems to be reluctance and inconsistency among the CSF promoters in acknowledging that CSF is “research” and therefore should entail certain protections routinely granted to those who participate in research studies. Seligman explained to the APA’s Monitor on Psychology, “This is the largest study — 1.1 million soldiers — psychology has ever been involved in” (a “study” is a common synonym for “research project”). Butwhen asked during an NPR interview whether CSF would be “the largest-ever experiment,” Brig. Gen. Cornum, who oversees the program, responded, “Well, we’re not describing it as an experiment. We’re describing it as training.” Despite the fact that CSF is incontrovertibly a research study, standard and important questions about experimental interventions like CSF are neither asked nor answered in the special issue. This neglect is all the more troubling given that the program is so massive and expensive, and the stakes are so high.

It is highly unusual for the effectiveness of such a huge and consequential intervention program not to be convincingly demonstrated first in carefully conducted randomized controlled trials — before being rolled out under less controlled conditions. Such preliminary studies are far from a mere formality. The literature on prevention interventions is full of well-intentioned efforts that either failed to have positive effects or, even worse, had harmful consequences for those receiving them. For instance, in the 1990s the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) substance abuse prevention program was administered in thousands of elementary schools across the U.S., at a cost of many hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet evaluations of DARE rarely found the desired effects in regard to reducing young people’s later substance use (e.g., see this and this summary). In response, DARE was modified in the last decade; however, subsequent evaluation found that the revised program actually increased later alcohol and cigarette use in those who received it compared to controls.

Similarly, criminal justice researcher Joan McCord has demonstrated how well-meaning programs have caused actual harm. She conducted a 30-year follow-up of a classic delinquency prevention program. Those participants randomly selected for intervention, but not matched controls, were provided with extensive enrichment, including mentoring, counseling, and summer camp. Among the matched pairs who differed in outcomes decades later, those who received the intensive assistance were more likely to have been convicted of serious street crimes; were more frequently given a diagnosis of alcoholism, schizophrenia, or manic depression; and on average died five years younger. Other studies of criminal justice interventions have also uncovered unanticipated, deleterious effects. Given this well known record, it is especially concerning when a major intervention is rolled out for thousands — or hundreds of thousands — without careful prior examination, including an investigation of potential negative effects. The special issue of the American Psychologist gives no indication that preliminary studies of CSF were conducted.

Also problematic, the CSF program is adapted primarily from the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) where interventions were focused on dramatically different, non-military populations. Even with these groups, a 2009 meta-analysis of 17 controlled studies reveals that the PRP program has been only modestly and inconsistently effective. PRP produced small reductions in mild self-reported depressive symptoms, but it did so only in children already identified as at high risk for depression and not for those from the general population. Nor did PRP interventions reduce symptoms more than comparison prevention programs based on other principles, raising questions as to whether PRP’s effects are related to the “resilience” theory undergirding the program. Further, like many experimental programs, PRP had better outcomes when administered by highly trained research staff than when given by staff recruited from the community. This raises doubts as to how effectively the CSF program will be administered by non-commissioned officers who are required to serve as “Master Resilience Trainers.”

Regardless of how one evaluates prior PRP research, PRP’s effects when targeting middle-school students, college students, and adult groups can hardly be considered generalizable to the challenges and experiences that routinely face our soldiers in combat, including those that regularly trigger PTSD. In an inadequate attempt to bridge this gap rhetorically, CSF proponents describe PTSD as “a nasty combination of depressive and anxiety symptoms” (Reivich, Seligman, & McBride, p. 26). In fact, PTSD involves a far more complicated cluster of severe symptoms in response to a specific traumatic event, including flashbacks, partial amnesia, difficulty sleeping, personality changes, outbursts of anger, hypervigilance, avoidance, and emotional numbing.

Ethical Concerns

We also believe that other key aspects of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness should have received explicit discussion in this special issue. It is standard practice for an independent and unbiased ethics review committee (an “institutional review board” or “IRB”) to evaluate the ethical issues arising from a research project prior to its implementation. This review and approval process may in fact have occurred for CSF, but the manner in which the principals blur “research” and “training” leads us to wish for much greater clarity here. This process is even more critical given that the soldiers apparently have no informed consent protections — they are all required to participate in the CSF program. Such research violates the Nuremberg Code developed during the post-World War II trials of Nazi doctors. That code begins by stating:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

Disturbingly, however, this mandatory participation in a research study does not violate Section 8.05 of the APA’s own Ethics Code, which allows for the suspension of informed consent “where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations.” Despite the APA’s stance, we should never forget that the velvet glove of authoritarian planning, no matter how well intended, is no substitute for the protected freedoms of individuals to make their own choices, mistakes, and dissenting judgments. Respect for informed consent is more, not less, important in total environments like the military where individual dissent is often severely discouraged and often punished.

More broadly, the 13 articles fail to explore potential ethical concerns related to the uncertain effects of the CSF training itself. In fact, the only question of this sort raised in the special issue — by Tedeschi and McNally in one article and by Lester, McBride, Bliese, and Adler in another — is whether it might be unethical to withholdthe CSF training from soldiers. Certainly, there are other ethical quandaries that require serious discussion if the CSF program’s effectiveness is to be appropriately evaluated. For example, might the training actually cause harm? Might soldiers who have been trained to resiliently view combat as a growth opportunity be more likely to ignore or under-estimate real dangers, thereby placing themselves, their comrades, or civilians at heightened risk of harm?

Similarly, by increasing perseverance in the face of adversity, might the CSF training lead soldiers to engage in actions that may later cause regret (e.g., the shooting of civilians at a roadblock in an ambiguous situation), thereby increasing the potential for PTSD or other post-combat psychological difficulties? Or, might the resilience training lead some to overcome, for the time, the disabling effects of traumatic episodes and thereby increase the likelihood of their redeployment to situations with further risk of serious disability? The likelihood of these eventualities, or other negative effects, is unknown. But certainly they are sufficiently plausible — as plausible as McCord’s unexpected findings, noted earlier, of intensive counseling and summer camp leading to increased crime, mental illness diagnosis, and early death among participating youth — that they cannot legitimately be ruled out a priori. These possibilities increase the ethical responsibility of those promoting CSF to conduct pilot studies, carefully monitor them for possible negative effects upon soldiers or others, submit the program to careful ethical review, and seek informed consent.

It is also important to note here two controversial aspects of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program that have already received attention from investigative journalists. First, Mark Benjamin has raised provocative questions, not yet fully answered, about the circumstances surrounding the huge, $31 million no-bid contract awarded to Seligman (“whose work formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration’s torture program”) by the Department of Defense for his team’s CSF involvement. Benjamin notes that the government allows sole-source contracts only under very limited conditions. The Army contract documents note that “there is only one responsible source due to a unique capability provided, and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements.” But as we have detailed above, public claims about the effectiveness of the Penn Resiliency Program and its superiority to alternative prevention programs are significantly overstated, casting doubt upon the rationale for awarding the sole-source contract.

Second, Jason Leopold and others have raised serious questions about the “spiritual fitness” component of the CSF program, which appears to inappropriately promote a religious worldview as an important path to greater resilience and purpose. The special issue article by Pargament and Sweeney confirms the legitimacy of this concern. It includes a range of theologically oriented terms and references, and it specifically identifies the Army’s chaplain corps as a resource “to assist individuals in their quests to develop their spirits” (p. 61).

The Limits of Positive Psychology

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness draws heavily on “positive psychology” in aiming to reduce the incidence of psychological harm resulting from combat and post-combat stress. The field of positive psychology has grown dramatically over the past decade and has many exuberant supporters and evangelists. Rather than focusing on distress and pathology, they emphasize human strengths and virtues, happiness, and the potential to derive positive meaning from stressful circumstances. Few would dispute the benefits of broadening psychology’s purview in this way. But writers such as Barbara Held, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eugene Taylor and James Coynehave offered compelling critiques of positive psychology, including its failure to sufficiently recognize the valuable functions played by “negative” emotions like anger, sorrow, and fear; its slick marketing and disregard for harsh and unforgiving societal realities like poverty; its failure to examine the depth and richness of human experience; and its growing tendency to promote claims without sufficient scientific support (e.g., the relationship between positive psychological states and health outcomes, or the mechanisms underlying “posttraumatic growth”).

These and related concerns are directly relevant to Comprehensive Soldier Fitness. As described by Cornum, Matthews, and Seligman in the special issue, the CSF program aspires “to increase the number of soldiers who derive meaning and personal growth from their combat experience” (p. 6). But in many ways the technocratic language of military training programs and the positive psychology strategies that characterize the CSF program appear inadequate for the task. Activities such as the “three blessings exercise” in which the individual reflects on what went well that day and why seem ill-suited for encouraging and supporting the deep questioning and open exploration of existential issues that often arise for soldiers facing extreme circumstances. By all indications, the program’s positive psychology orientation also fails to scrutinize those very institutions that subject recruits to potential trauma in order to create people sufficiently hardy to engage in death-defying and death-inflicting experiences.

In this regard, it is worth noting how special issue authors Peterson, Park, and Castro briefly discuss the lowertrust scores of female soldiers on the CSF program’s Global Assessment Tool (GAT), which measures psychological fitness in four domains (social, emotional, spiritual, and family). They interpret these results as suggesting “Female soldiers do not feel as fully at ease in the Army as do male soldiers,” and they recommend further research to “understand the needs and challenges of female soldiers and to help them attain the same morale as male soldiers, which perhaps would reduce attrition among them” (p. 15-16). What goes unmentioned is that the extremely high rates of sexual assault on women soldiers, condoned or covered up by others higher in rank, is clearly a source of distrust and trauma — and it calls less for building a positive, resilient outlook among the victims than for recognition of how the commonplace victimization of women in war should be vociferously prevented.

In important ways, key lessons of humanistic psychology are also regrettably overlooked in the CSF program. For many soldiers, combat awakens questions regarding the meaning of life and of its worth, which can become more persistent after returning home. Too often, our veterans face anomie, lack of community, and the replacement of caring ties with the competitive values of marketability when their military service is over. Humanistic and related perspectives more directly and fully attend to this void, the emptiness of contemporary society that increases the difficulties in recovery from trauma, than does positive psychology. Because of the limitations of quantitative psychology to date, the data for phenomena of this type are more frequently found in stories than in self-report inventories such as the GAT. Limited data encourage a limited view of the phenomenon of PTSD and of any resilience that is based upon denial. In contrast, it is through revelations such as the Winter Soldier testimonies of U.S. veterans and active duty soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq, through studies of the phenomenology of returning soldiers by Daryl Paulson and Stanley Krippner, or accounts of soldier participants in U.S. torture as relayed by journalists Joshua Phillips and Justine Sharrock, that we are able to see how much distress comes from abuses soldiers commit either as a result of commands from superiors or due to the morally disorienting effects of ambiguous combat situations.

Indeed, among the most traumatic psychological scars that soldiers sustain are those resulting from what they have done to others. Some of the particularly intense characteristics of PTSD are found among perpetrators. AsCol. Dave Grossman and others have described, human beings have an inherent resistance to killing other human beings. As a result, waging war almost always relies upon propaganda and training designed to dehumanize the enemy and elevate one’s own cause. Psychology and psychologists have contributed to training programs aimed at increasing soldiers’ willingness to kill. Now this newest positive psychology program for resilience promises to shield soldiers from some of the debilitating consequences of their actions and, as Reivich, Seligman and McBride note, it aims to better enable soldiers to “live the Warrior Ethos — ‘I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade’” (p. 27).

Missing, it would seem, is any meaningful CSF component devoted to helping soldiers grapple with the profound ethical dilemmas involved in their duties, including killing others in furtherance of state policy. Brett Litz and his colleagues have used the term “moral injury” to describe the exceedingly difficult challenges and consequences that soldiers face in response to “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations” (p. 700). These are especially troubling omissions from the CSF program when we also consider the regrettable reality that many recruits, often drawn to the military by economic necessity and deceptive marketing strategies, are never told about the types of injuries to which they will be exposed or the level of slaughter in which some of them will take part.

The U.S. Military and American Psychology

In the closing article of the special issue, Seligman and Fowler (former CEO of the APA) attempt to counter the objections they anticipate from readers who have concerns about how closely the American Psychological Association and the profession of psychology should align themselves with the agenda of the U.S. military. Certainly, such reader concerns are not entirely unfounded, especially given the tragic repercussions of the APA’s decisions post-9/11 to shape its ethics code, policies, and pronouncements to meet the perceived needsof an administration that viewed torture and other detainee abuse as legitimate components of national security practice. Unfortunately, however, Seligman and Fowler’s arguments serve only to instill greater concern about the foundations of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program and the role of institutional psychology in advancing it, as we explain below by responding to three statements from their article.

“It is not the military that sets the nation’s policies on war and peace. The military carries out the policies that emerge from our democratic form of government. Withholding professional and scientific support for the people who provide the nation’s defense is, we believe, simply wrong” (p. 85)

No one recommends withholding services from anyone in need. Indeed, health professionals deserve to be commended for providing such support to our soldiers and veterans.  But when acting ethically, health professionals address the needs of their clients before the wishes of the institutions that hire them. Therefore, if those institutions constrain the options available for the well-being of the practitioners’ clients, these professionals have an obligation to consider remedies beyond the narrow institutionally defined interests. For example, the CSF program does not include a component whereby participants are invited to listen to fellow soldiers and veterans who have enhanced their own safety, well-being, and sense of purpose by refusing to comply with illicit orders, or by deciding, as have so many other American citizens, that the war they are fighting is unjust and immoral.

In addition, whether the U.S. military plays a role in establishing policies is not a matter to be determined by recitation of formal rules. Scholarship involves an obligation to look at the actual evidence. Generals routinely make political statements in which they advocate for the latest war. Major military contractors work closely with military officials to sell both weapons of war and war itself. Retired military officers are then often hired as lobbyists for these same corporations, and some appear as military “experts” in the media without revealing their conflicts of interest. The exorbitant budget for “perception management” services paid to professional propaganda organizations is also used by the military to spin news and promote war to government officials and the public alike. And, as recently reported by Rolling Stone, psychological operations (“psyops”) techniques were used by the military on visiting U.S. Senators to strengthen their support of the increasinglyunpopular Afghan war effort.

“The balance of good done by building the physical and mental fitness of our soldiers far outweighs any harm that might be done” (p. 86).

It is disappointing that researchers who have emphasized the purported empirical underpinnings of the CSF program would here abandon all semblance of scholarly rigor. The authors offer their cost-benefit claim as transparently true (i.e., the good outweighing the harm). But they offer no evidence in support of this crucial claim. For example, in their calculation how much weight do they give to the tragic numbers of civilian casualties in Iraq (minimally estimated in the hundreds of thousands) and Afghanistan — the dead, the injured, and the displaced? Does this harm matter at all to those promoting CSF? Have we reached the point where “do no harm,” the fundamental principle underlying the psychology profession’s ethics, has become “do no harm to Americans, unless it serves the interests of the state”? These issues deserve careful consideration, not evasion.

We should also keep in mind that every effort to support military operations is billed as “support for our troops.” Whether it is the use of drones that kill from a continent away or tapping into a soldier’s capacity to kill without a serious hangover, all are justified as for the brave troops. But the decisions to use military force are not made with the well-being of military personnel in mind, nor are they made by soldiers or even influenced by their desires. Master resilience trainers in the Army will not be urging soldiers to report violations of the rules of engagement by their superiors. They will not encourage soldiers to empathize with the humanity of the adults and children whom they may have killed as collateral damage, nor to use forms of restorative justice for apology and reconciliation that have a potential for deeper healing. And they will not encourage troops to build supportive ties with those critical of the wars they are fighting or the tactics required of them.

“We are proud to aid our military in defending and protecting our nation right now, and we will be proud to help our soldiers and their families into the peace that will follow” (p. 86).

The blind embrace of overly simple notions of “patriotism” is inappropriate for professional psychologists dedicated to the promotion of universal human health and well-being. Ideological convictions based upon mythologies of American exceptionalism are no substitute for an examination of their verity. If it is not true that the U.S. is defending its democratic foundations against ruthless adversaries, then the balance shifts dramatically toward averting the alleged harm of making healthier killers. By tying the CSF program to claims of the rightness of American military goals and actions, Seligman and Fowler are, unrecognized by them, requiring that an ethical evaluation include a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the justification for those policies.

Such an evaluation likely will find that the view of U.S. military history as being primarily “defensive” in nature, rather than one of imperial control, is false. Rather, the U.S. has a long history of intervening in other countries and overthrowing their governments when they act in ways considered to be against U.S. national interests. Where does the “defending and protecting” reality lie in regard to the war in Iraq, or the invasion of Guyana, or the support for the Venezuelan coup, or the bombing of Serbia, or military aid to dictators around the world? Sadly, history (and scholars such as retired U.S. Col. Andrew Bacevich, among many others) has shown how remarkably war-prone the United States has been in the non-defensive pursuit of its foreign policy and “national interest.” The U.S. is, in fact, at best only inconsistently a defender of democracy. Our empire-building behavior has caused great harm to our own safety and well-being — and to the principles our country purports to value. Meanwhile, the promise of peace following military victories has surely not materialized, while the case for the extent of U.S. engagement in wars that were unneeded is extensive and compelling. It is not professionally responsible to ignore these facts.

Conclusion

In addition to our deep concerns about Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, the American Psychological Association’s unrestrained enthusiasm for the program is especially worrisome for what it says about the APA, the largest organization of psychologists in the country, indeed the world. As we have demonstrated, there are many complex issues regarding the CSF program’s empirical foundations, its promotion as a massive research project absent informed consent, and the basis on which its psychologist developers justify the program. We would therefore expect a special issue of the American Psychologist, a journal edited by the APA’s CEO Norman Anderson, to encourage an extended discussion of these matters.

In contrast, guest editors Seligman and Matthews have assembled 13 articles that include no independent evaluation of the empirical claims underlying CSF. They contain no unbiased discussion of ethical issues raised by the program. They do nothing to enlighten psychologists about ethical challenges posed by consulting and research work with the military. And they most certainly offer no encouragement for questioning the foreign policy context in which our soldiers are sent into combat, to face physical and moral hazards for which even the best program can never adequately prepare them. Unfortunately, the APA’s uncritical promotion of the CSF program reveals much about the current moral challenges facing the psychology profession itself.

Psychology should maintain an ethical and critical stance distinct from and resistant to the lure of patriotic calls, which are part of each and every military undertaking — by all nations — regardless of the legitimacy of the cause. As psychologists we should tread carefully when our efforts are solely directed toward sending soldiers back into combat rather than counseling them away from participating in misguided wars. In a similar way, assessing soldiers for their potential to withstand such horrors of war and building their resilience through teaching mental toughness skills are not necessarily healthy alternatives compared to affirming and assisting them in their expressions of doubt and dissent.

Ultimately, there is a paradox that should be foremost in the minds of professional psychologists. Helping people who have already been harmed by trauma is essential. But should we be involved in helping an institution prepare to place more people in harm’s way without careful and ongoing questioning and review of the rationale for doing so? Whatever the needs for a military for national defense, or the benefits of team building, loyalty, camaraderie, and a positive outlook, militaries are, among other things, authoritarian institutions that kill, maim, deceive, and actively reduce an individual’s sense of independent agency.

The enormous toll that armed conflict exacts on soldiers, veterans, families, and communities is a key reason why we should send young men and women to war only as an absolute last resort — and we should bring them home as quickly as possible, rather than sending them back again and again. If the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program is truly about enhancing well-being, then we should also question whether these soldiers might be helped more effectively by finding non-military ways to resolve the conflicts and concerns for which they carry such heavy burdens.

Authors

Roy Eidelson is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com.

Marc Pilisuk is Professor Emeritus, the University of California, and Professor, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. He is the author (with Jennifer Achord Rountree) of Who Benefits from Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System (Greenwood/Praeger, 2008), and the co-editor (with Michael Nagler) ofPeace Movements Worldwide (Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2011). Marc can be reached at mpilisuk@saybrook.edu.

Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. He has conducted extensive research on psychosocial prevention and treatment interventions. He edits the Psyche, Science, and Society blog and is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, one of the organizations working to change American Psychological Association policy on participation in abusive interrogations. Stephen can be reached at ssoldz@bgsp.edu.

March 26th, 2011

Challenge to NY psychology board’s evasion of responsibility

We have been trying for years to get some portion of the system — APA, state licensing boards, the administration, Congress, the courts — to investigate and impose accountability for psychologists’ roles in creating, implementing, studying, monitoring, and justifying torture. So far, ever institution has failed to act.

In New York the state licensing board punted an ethics complaint by claiming that a military psychologist consulting to torture as a Behavioral Science Consultant wasn’t conducting psychology because he wasn’t trying to help the person being tortured. The same logic would apply to prison psychologists who helped guards abuse prisoners. Evidently, if you’re doing harm., you’re immune from ethics discipline in New York State.

Fortunately, attorneys for human rights groups are challenging this bizarre reasoning being used by the board to evade responsibility for some of the greatest abuses ever committed in the name of “psychology.”

Here is a report.

Court asked to order probe of Gitmo psychologist

NEW YORK — A court was asked Wednesday to force an investigation into whether an Army psychologist developed abusive interrogation techniques for detainees at Guantanamo Bay and should be stripped of his license.

The court petition, filed by the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability and the New York Civil Liberties Union, furthers human rights advocates’ efforts to spur probes of some psychologists involved in detainee interrogations. Critics argue that the psychologists’ activities amount to professional misconduct and that state regulators should look into the matter.

Last summer, the California center filed a complaint about John Leso with New York’s Office of Professional Discipline, which oversees psychologists. Leso is licensed in New York; Army spokespeople didn’t immediately respond to inquiries Wednesday about him and where he could be reached.

While leading a behavioral science consultation team at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002 and 2003, Leso developed “psychologically and physically abusive interrogation tactics” based on Army survival strategies, said the complaint, which drew on government documents, academic journal articles and other sources. The complaint said Leso wrote a memo promoting techniques such as exposing detainees to severe cold, depriving them of sleep and forcing liquids into them intravenously.

The agency declined in July to pursue a probe of Leso, saying his Army work fell outside its scope.

“It does not appear that any of the conduct complained of constitutes the practice of psychology as understood in the state of New York,” Director Louis J. Catone wrote in a letter to the California center. As for larger questions about the appropriateness of detainee interrogation methods, he said, “It is not within this office’s purview to express an opinion on that issue.”

A spokesman declined to comment on Wednesday’s court filing. It asks a judge to tell the agency to investigate the allegations that Leso’s conduct warrants revoking his license, or other discipline.

“We think that the professional standards that prohibit abuse or harassment — that prohibit, generally, misconduct — would generally cover abusing detainees and devising ways to hurt people in a professional role,” said Kathy Roberts, a lawyer with the Center for Justice and Accountability. It focuses on deterring torture.

Psychologist licensing boards in California, Louisiana and New York have rejected such complaints. But the American Psychological Association voted in 2008 to ban its members from taking part in interrogations at the Guantanamo prison and other military detention sites where the professional group believes international law is being violated.

The APA took an unprecedented step this year by encouraging Texas officials to revoke the license of James Mitchell, a retired Army psychologist accused of overseeing the torture of a CIA detainee in Thailand in 2002. Mitchell said the complaint against him, filed by a law professor, was full of “fabricated details, lies, distortions and inaccuracies.”

In a complaint filed last summer with Ohio’s psychologist licensing board, Harvard University’s International Human Rights Clinic said retired Army Col. Larry James observed abusive interrogations at Guantanamo in 2003, 2007 and 2008 and didn’t do anything to stop them. James has declined to comment; the Ohio board declined to pursue a similar complaint against him in 2008.

An update on the status of the current complaints against him and Mitchell wasn’t immediately available Wednesday.

1 comment November 24th, 2010

New article on American Psychological Association Practice Organization “mandatory” assessment

Thomas Gaudio has written an article — Fraud Suits Expose Rift in Major Psychology Group — on the controversy regarding the “mandatory” voluntary assessment that  was collecting for the American Psychological Association Practice Organization (APAPO):

Clinical practitioners were misled for nearly a decade about an extra charge called the practice assessment fee they paid when applying for or renewing annual APA memberships, claim the suits, both filed in the United

States District Court for the District of Columbia within the last month. APA, a not-for-profit corporation and trade group based in Washington D.C., failed to disclose that the fee was voluntary and solely for membership in the APA Practice Organization, according to the suits.

Full article.

November 20th, 2010