Psyche, Science, and Society

International torture treatment providers support APA referendum

The international organization of torture treatment providers [IRCT] has called upon APA members to support the Referendum:

Copenhagen, 22 August 2008

American Psychological Association
Attn: President Alan E. Kazdin
750 First St, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4242
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Dear President Kazdin and APA members,

The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) would like take the opportunity to address APA members on the role of psychologists in preventing torture and share our ideas of how the APA can move forward to ensure that its members practice their profession under the highest ethical standards.

As an umbrella organisation representing 139 torture rehabilitation centres and programmes in 70 countries, the IRCT understands the devastating impact of torture on survivors. Its consequences include not only physical effects such as long-lasting pain, but psychological sequelae – e.g. PTSD, anxiety and depression. The work of the IRCT and its member centres is to alleviate that suffering and work for the prevention of torture worldwide.

The IRCT is acutely aware that health professionalshave participated, and continue to participate, in interrogations that violate national and international laws. For example, IRCT physicians played a key role in investigating and documenting the torture of 11 ex-detainees held in U.S. custody abroad, the findings of which were published in the Physicians for Human Rights report Broken Laws, Broken Lives. During their clinical interviews with the 11 men, these physicians learned that not only were health professionals present during torture and ill-treatment and failed to report the abuse, they also gave confidential information to interrogators and in some instances even denied medical care for the detainees. And just one week ago, lawyers for Guantanamo detainee Mohammed Jawad charged that a psychologist’s report filed at the detention facility led to the then-teenager being placed in isolation, resulting in a deterioration of his mental health.i Such actions flagrantly violate the fundamental ethical precept of the health professions to “do no harm”.

Last year, the APA passed a resolution condemning and prohibiting psychologists’ participation in interrogation that involves torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. While the resolution represented a step forward in preventing torture and ill-treatment, on 4 September qualifiers in the resolution in respect to the scope of definition of the techniques it mentions.

These concerns still stand. The IRCT thus reiterates that all of the listed techniques are illegal and unethical in all circumstances and not only when “used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm” as stated in the resolution. Moreover, we repeat our concern that the resolution adopts the United States’ reservations to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which weakens the Convention by narrowing its definition of torture with regard to mental pain or suffering.

The IRCT is aware that APA members are currently voting on another resolution that would put a moratorium on members’ participation in military and CIA interrogations altogether. Given the abuses that have taken place in US-run detention centres around the world in later years and the ambiguities that the present US administration has sown with regard to the absolute prohibition against torture and ill-treatment, the IRCT finds such a moratorium appropriate. Therefore we strongly urge APA members to vote “yes” on the proposed resolution.

As several APA members have noted, this resolution is intended to put an end to psychologists’ participation in interrogations that occur in settings that violate international justice and humanitarian standards; it would not prohibit psychologists from working in settings that uphold international and human rights law. The IRCT believes that the APA has the ability to set a precedent for mental health professionals worldwide. The profession of psychology already has suffered ethical damage through its association with the “war on terror” - it will take much time and effort to recover, but the passage of this resolution would be an important step toward healing.

Sincerely,

Brita Sydhoff
IRCT Secretary-General

Jose Quiroga
IRCT Vice President and Representative of North America Region
Medical Director and Founder, Program for Torture Victims (Los Angeles)

—–

i The psychologist in question has invoked Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice so as not to be self-incriminated. For more information see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/washington/16psych.html?ref=health

ii See http://www.irct.org/Default.aspx?ID=159&M=News&PID=5&NewsID=954

Add comment August 22nd, 2008

New York Times on interrogations controversy

The New York Times cover the psychologists-torture issue on the front page today:

Psychologists Clash on Aiding Interrogations

By Benedict Carey

They have closely studied suspects, looking for mental quirks. They have suggested lines of questioning. They have helped decide when a confrontation is too intense, or when to push harder. More than those in the other healing professions, psychologists have played a central role in the military and C.I.A. interrogation of people suspected of being enemy combatants.

But now the profession, long divided over this role, is considering whether to make any involvement in military interrogations a violation of its code of ethics.

At the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting this week in Boston, prominent members are denouncing such work as unethical by definition, while other key figures — civilian and military — insist that restricting psychologists’ roles would only make interrogations more likely to harm detainees.

Like other professional organizations, the association has little direct authority to restrict members’ ability to practice. But state licensing boards can suspend or revoke a psychologist’s license, and experts note that these boards often take violations of the association’s ethics code into consideration.

The election for the association’s president is widely seen as a referendum on the issue. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, plan a protest on Saturday afternoon.

And last week, for the first time, lawyers for a detainee at the United States Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, singled out a psychologist as a critical player in documents alleging abusive treatment.

“It’s really a fight for the soul of the profession,” said Brad Olson, a psychologist at Northwestern University, who has circulated a petition among members to place a moratorium on such consulting.

Others strongly disagree. “The vast majority of military psychologists know the ethics code and know exactly what they can and cannot do,” said William J. Strickland, who represents the Society for Military Psychology before the association’s council. “This is a fight about individual psychologists’ behavior, and we should keep it there.”

At the center of the debate are the military’s behavioral science consultation teams, informally known as biscuits, made up of psychologists and others who assist in interrogations. Little is known about these units, including the number of psychologists who take part. Neither the military nor the team members have disclosed many details.

Defenders of that role insist that the teams are crucial in keeping interrogations safe, effective and legal. Critics say their primary purpose is to help break detainees, using methods that might violate international law.

In court documents filed Thursday, lawyers for the Guantánamo detainee Mohammed Jawad asserted that a psychologist’s report helped land Mr. Jawad, a teenager at the time, in a segregation cell, where he became increasingly desperate.

According to the documents, the psychologist, whose name has not been released, completed an assessment of Mr. Jawad after he was seen talking to a poster on his cell wall. Shortly thereafter, in September 2003, he was isolated from other detainees, and many of his requests to see an interrogator were ignored. He later attempted suicide, according to the filing, which asks that the case be dismissed on the ground of abusive treatment.

The Guantánamo court is reviewing the case. Military lawyers have denied that Mr. Jawad suffered any mental health problems from his interrogation. On Thursday, the psychologist in the case invoked Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military’s equivalent of the Fifth Amendment.

“This is what it’s come to,” said Steven Reisner, an assistant clinical professor at the New York University School of Medicine and a leading candidate for the presidency of the psychological association. “We have psychologists taking the Fifth.”

Dr. Reisner has based his candidacy on “a principled stance against our nation’s policy of using psychologists to oversee abusive and coercive interrogations” at Guantánamo and the so-called black sites operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The psychological association’s most recent ethics amendments strongly condemn coercive techniques adopted in the Bush administration’s antiterrorism campaign. But its current guidelines covering practice conclude that “it is consistent with the A.P.A. ethics code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national-security-related purposes,” as long as they do not participate in any of 19 coercive procedures, including waterboarding, the use of hoods and any physical assault.

How these guidelines shape behavior during interrogations is not well understood. Documents from Guantánamo made public in June suggested that at least some of the coercive methods the military has used were derived from SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, a program based on Chinese techniques used in the 1950s that produced false confessions from American prisoners.

These techniques included “prolonged constraint,” “exposure” and “sleep deprivation,” known informally as the frequent flier program.

In this kind of environment, “health professionals, bound by strong ethical imperatives to do no harm, may become calibrators of harm,” said Nathaniel Raymond of Physicians for Human Rights, which has been strongly critical of the psychological association’s position.

According to the standard operating procedure for Camp Delta, at Guantánamo, the “behavior management plan” for new detainees “concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his interrogator.”

Some psychologists, though appalled by these techniques, emphasize that there is a danger in opting out as well.

“There’s no doubt that the psychologist’s presence can be abused,” said Robert W. Resnick, who is in private practice in Santa Monica, Calif., “but if there’s no presence at all, then there’s no accountability, and you walk away feeling noble and righteous, but you haven’t done a damned thing.”

Stephen Behnke, director of ethics at the psychological association, said in an interview on Friday that Defense Department standards for interrogation appeared to have improved in recent years.

“If you take the position that interrogation cannot be done ethically, then the discussion stops there,” Dr. Behnke said. “But if the answer is yes, then you don’t shut down the whole operation because certain individuals behaved unethically.”

Interrogators, too, are split on the question of whether psychologists provide valuable assistance. Some say that their advice can be helpful; others point out that there is no evidence that it improves the quality of the information obtained.

“I take a hybrid view of this,” said Steven Kleinman, a veteran interrogator and trainer who has worked in Iraq and strongly opposes coercive techniques. “The idea that a psychologist or psychiatrist is going to systematically unlock any prisoner’s resistance and provide some unique strategy is completely false — it’s a fantasy. Their role should be protecting the rights of both the interrogator and the prisoner. That’s far more valuable, and anything they might whisper in the interrogator’s ear, like ‘This person seems to have issues with his mother, play that up.’ ”

However the field addresses the issue, scholars say it may not alter the relationship much between psychologists and the military. Psychologists have helped screen recruits and study morale going back to World War I, and in Iraq, some military psychologists have worked long tours under fire, managing troops’ mental reactions at the front.

“American psychology really grew up with the military,” said Jean Maria Arrigo, a psychologist who has studied the profession’s relationship to military intelligence. “It was barely considered a science before the collaboration began, and the entanglement goes very deep.”

3 comments August 16th, 2008

New York Sun on interrogations controversy

The New York Sun covered the interrogations controversy on their front page Friday.

Psychologists Are Split Over Gitmo

By Joseph Goldstein

A military psychologist’s unprecedented refusal to testify when called to a Guantanamo courtroom yesterday will add to a debate that is expected to rage at this weekend’s annual convention of the American Psychological Association.

The professional organization is riven over whether to prohibit members who are in the military or who work with intelligence agencies from participating in the interrogation of suspected terrorists. That issue has prompted the first referendum in the organization’s history this month, for which voting remains open.

The issue has also spurred a New York psychoanalyst, Steven Reisner, to run for president of the APA on a platform of banning psychologists from involvement in national security interrogations “at sites where the conditions violate international law,” he told The New York Sun yesterday.

The APA has long had a close relationship with the military, which is one of the country’s largest employers of psychologists. In recent years, the APA has generally encouraged “engagement” — or involvement in national security interrogations — for the purpose of stopping “interrogations that cross the bounds of ethical propriety,” as the director of the APA’s ethics office, Stephen Behnke, wrote in a letter earlier this year. APA officials also have encouraged involvement in interrogations by psychologists on the grounds that psychologists should assist in the country’s anti-terrorism efforts.

After the American Psychiatric Association voted in 2006 not to allow psychiatrists to be part of the military’s behavioral science consultation teams, which are called “biscuit teams” and advise interrogators, the military began staffing the teams with psychologists alone.

The event that occurred in a courtroom yesterday at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is expected to add a new dimension to the debate among psychologists this weekend. When a military psychologist was called yesterday to testify about the treatment of a detainee, she pleaded the military law’s equivalent of the Fifth Amendment privilege to not self-incriminate, the detainee’s lawyer, Major David Frakt, said in a press release sent by an intermediary. The psychologist’s name is protected by court order.

It is the first time a military psychologist belonging to a biscuit team is publicly known to have been called to give testimony in a Guantanamo court proceeding. The woman’s response suggests that military psychologists are concerned about either their professional licenses or criminal liability.

Court papers filed on behalf of the detainee, Mohammad Jawad, say the psychologist had, in 2003, advised an interrogator to put Mr. Jawad in isolation in an effort to facilitate interrogation, a person familiar with the detainee’s case and who has seen the unclassified legal papers said. The interrogator had sought out the psychologist’s advice because of a concern that Mr. Jawad’s mental state was deteriorating, the person said, adding that Mr. Jawad had been observed speaking to posters on his wall. The psychologist apparently rejected that layman’s diagnosis and believed Mr. Jawad was faking and recommended isolation, the person said.

Nine weeks after Mr. Jawad was removed from a month of isolation, he tried to commit suicide by hanging or repeatedly banging his head, the source said.

“What is so disturbing about the Jawad case,” the source said, is that the psychologist “is calibrating the level of harm.”

Major Frakt said in the statement that the psychologist’s refusal to testify shows that she “now apparently recognizes that her conduct was criminal in nature.”

Mr. Jawad, now about 24, is accused of throwing an grenade at American forces in Afghanistan while in his late teens.

The effect, if any, of a move by the APA to forbid its members from participating in interrogations is uncertain. While the APA has no control over the licensing of psychologists, which is done by the states, the ABA can censure members on ethics charges. State licensing bodies could consider the APA’s findings in deciding license applications.

Mr. Reisner, the New York candidate for APA president, said he supports extending the APA’s current four- to five-year statute of limitations on ethics complaints in order to investigate the role of psychologists have played in national security interrogations.

Add comment August 16th, 2008

Referendum FAQ

The authors of the APA referendum on participation in Bush detention centers have created an FAQ which they have just revised to address questions being raised about the wording and the intent of the referendum [see also my Vote Against Torture Collusion]:

Q. In regard to the U.S. Constitution, the referendum says, “(where appropriate)”, why was that put in there, and what does “(where appropriate)” mean?

Where appropriate means settings where the U.S. Constitution forms the law of the land and settings in which the Supreme Court has decided it applies.  It therefore applies to the 50 states, embassies, and areas within the U.S.’ maritime and territorial jurisdiction - it also applies to U.S. citizens everywhere.  It does not apply in, say, Canada.  So a Canadian psychologist working in Canada is working ‘outside’ of the U.S. Constitution but ‘inside’ of international law.

Q. I have been told that this language will affect the work of psychologists working in jails, prisons and hospitals.

See our August 6 letter to APA members on the Psychologists for an Ethical APA homepage.  www.ethicalapa.com

Q. This is a complex answer.  Why don’t just answer that question with a simple and definitive ‘no’?

Because this is a complex situation.  If and when Guantanamo and the black sites are closed down the ‘detainees’ could be brought to the U.S. and held under similar conditions.  If Guantanamo, the facility, is ‘closed’, the equivalent of Guantanamo, the policy, could be re-established on U.S. soil. In these, and other possible cases, the referendum policy could and should still apply.

Q. If you didn’t mean to target existing U.S. prisons and jails why did you include the words ‘U.S. Constitution’ in the referendum?

We had two main reasons for doing so:

1. As we have already mentioned, we are concerned that U.S. torture policy will be brought home.

2. To make it clear that we are endorsing both the U.S. Constitution and international law, as outlined in the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, directly and without qualification.

Q.  Why is that important?

Some people strongly support and value international law.  However, the United States has taken an ambivalent stance towards international law by adding “reservations” to some international treaties it has ratified.  For example, when it ratified the Convention against Torture, the U.S. added “reservations” that exclude the law’s ban on most forms of psychological torture:

“In its reservations to the Convention against Torture, the United States claims to be bound by the obligation to prevent “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” only insofar as the term means the cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, U.S. reservations say that mental pain or suffering only refers to prolonged mental harm from: (1) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (2) the use or threat of mind altering substances; (3) the threat of imminent death; or (4) that another person will imminently be subjected to the above mistreatment. (Human Rights Watch, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/05/24/usint8614.htm)

We find it unfortunate that the APA has reproduced the language of the U.S. “reservations” in its official statements. Since we believe these “reservations” deserve no additional legitimacy from our organization, this referendum unequivocally endorses both international and constitutional law.

Q. Why haven’t you provided a definition of torture?

A. Our first citation includes the internationally accepted definition of torture as well as an extensive discussion of the scope and applicability of international law.  It is important to note that this definition - like many legal definitions - is in a state of flux, it changes as courts consider new cases. The jurisprudence surrounding this definition is as important as the definition itself.  Further, the definition may change as new treaties are adopted.  We would ask the question - why would we accept anything other than the internationally accepted definition?

Q. What do you mean by international law? Which treaties? What courts? Which cases?

A. The APA is a UN- recognized nongovernmental organization (NGO) and therefore is subject to the U.N.’s interpretation of international law. We believe that the question is not to which portions of international law should psychologists adhere, but rather why would we be seeking to opt out of some portions of the law?

Q. Isn’t this language vague?

A. That depends on what you mean by “vague.”  If, by “vague,” you mean badly or inadequately defined, the answer is “no.” We do not believe we have offered poor or partial definitions.  If you mean ‘unspecified’, then it is true that we have not specified what portions of international law to which the APA should adhere; nor do we believe that we should do so.

By way of analogy, if we had written a referendum that said: “psychologists shall at all times obey the speed limit,” we could be charged with failing to specify what speed limit psychologists should follow. In this hypothetical and admittedly absurd example it would be appropriate to respond by saying: “that information is easily found and need not be included in the referendum - it is not for us to say”. We would ask why would psychologists attempt to define torture when they could simply refer to internationally accepted definitions?

Q. I understand this referendum, but doesn’t this seem a little simple? Why have you chosen to write this in such ordinary language?

A. Two reasons:

1.           We wanted the referendum be easily read and understandable by everyone.

2.           Because the Bush administration has redefined everyday terms in ways that completely subvert the original meanings of the words. Take, for example, ‘participation’:

“For purposes of this recommendation the term “participating in interrogations” refers to the active participation by medical personnel during an interrogation. For example, asking questions would be active participation. Medical personnel who assist in developing the plan of interrogation are not deemed to be “participating in an interrogation.” Likewise, actual presence in the interrogation room may not constitute “participating in an interrogation.” For example, direct observation by medical personnel to ensure the health and welfare of the detainee is not deemed to be “participation in the interrogation.” (  http://www.defenselink.mil/news/detainee_investigations.html )

Further, we know that many of these definitions - including the current definition of torture - are secret.  We do not know what other terms have been secretly redefined.  Thus, rather than engage in an effort to define each word we were using, we chose language that is easily understood with use of a dictionary or the references we provide.

Add comment August 12th, 2008

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Psychology and Torture

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a News Analysis of the APA controversy:

Psychology and Torture

By David Glenn

Mock executions, waterboarding, and religious humiliation: Participation in those interrogation practices and more than a dozen others was banned in a resolution enacted at last August’s convention of the American Psychological Association. At the time, the association’s spokespeople said they hoped they had put to rest a lengthy debate about psychologists’ responsibility for torture at the Guantánamo Bay detention center and other sites where suspected terrorists have been held.

But as the association prepares to meet this week in Boston, feelings are running hotter than ever. For the second consecutive year, activists are planning a large street demonstration outside the convention. One of the activists scheduled to speak there — Steven Reisner, a psychoanalyst and a senior adviser in New York University’s international trauma-studies program — is running for the association’s presidency.

The lingering ill will stems in part from new revelations about how the CIA, FBI, and the Department of Defense drew on psychological research when they designed their post-September 11 interrogation systems.

The Dark Side, a new book by Jane Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, describes a 2002 incident in which Martin E.P. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a former president of the psychology association, accepted a CIA invitation to lecture at a naval training center about his theories of “learned helplessness.”

Mr. Seligman’s widely respected research suggests that when people and animals are traumatized at random intervals, they tend to give up: They stop seeking to rationally help themselves, and they stop responding to ordinary incentives. Mr. Seligman insists that his 2002 lecture was intended only to help train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if they are captured. But in his 50-person audience that day were Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell, psychologists who operate a consulting firm that helped the CIA develop interrogation techniques that some critics have called abusive. According to Ms. Mayer’s book, Mr. Mitchell has long been fascinated by learned-helplessness theory. (Through a lawyer, Mr. Mitchell denied to Ms. Mayer that his CIA interrogation techniques were inspired by Mr. Seligman’s work.)

Few people in the psychology association believe that Mr. Seligman consciously assisted in the development of detainee abuses. But many say that the association needs to make a more thorough public accounting of how the work of Mr. Seligman and other prominent members may have been misused by government agencies.

The association has so far rejected calls for formal inquiries. In a public statement last summer, Olivia Moorehead-Slaughter, a clinical psychologist in Massachusetts who chaired an association task force on psychological ethics and national security, argued that the association is not equipped to sift through the military’s decision making in 2002 and 2003. The association “has neither subpoena power nor the necessary security clearances,” she wrote, “so an ‘investigation’ would be pointless.”

Beyond disputes about the past, calls to toughen the association’s interrogation policies still persist. Last year’s anti-torture resolution permits psychologists to work as advisers and therapists at Guantánamo-style detention centers, as long as they do not assist in or tolerate coercive interrogations. But some activists say that the general conditions at Guantánamo and similar sites are intrinsically abusive, and that psychologists should have nothing to do with them.

Those activists have forced a mail ballot on a resolution that would forbid the association’s members from working in any capacity “in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either international law … or the U.S. Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.” Ballots were distributed on August 1, and results are expected in late September.

The referendum’s authors say that if psychologists want to provide mental-health services to detainees, they should do so through outside agencies such as the Red Cross, not as direct employees of military or intelligence agencies.

But it is not clear that the government would welcome independent therapists into the detention centers. Many leaders of the association insist that if military psychologists leave Guantánamo, the detainees’ situation will only get worse. Even Michael Gelles, a former Navy psychologist who famously left Guantánamo after protesting abuses, has said that it would be a serious mistake for his colleagues to withdraw entirely. This debate seems likely to tear at the association well after the Guantánamo Bay facility itself is closed.

1 comment August 11th, 2008

Psychologists for Social Responsibility endorses APA referenndum

Psychologists for Social Responsibility has just voted to endorse the American Psychological Association referendum against psychologist participation at US detention sites in violation of international law. It is time for all progressive psychologists to join PsySR and make it a stronger, more active organization. [Truth in advertising: I am Co-Chair of the PsySR End Torture Action Committee and a member of its Steering Committee. Please join me.]

UPDATE: Here is a statement from Anthony Marsella, President of PsySR:

Dear PsySR Members & Friends:

I am writing to announce that the PsySR Steering Committee has voted in favor of endorsing a “yes” vote on the Referendum. The Steering Committee supports the the call for a referendum and encourages its members to vote “Yes” in accord with the PsySR Steering Committee decision.

The Steering Committee is the representative body for PsySR and is the primary source of major PsySR policies and decisions.

Best wishes, Tony

Add comment August 11th, 2008

Valtin on APA referendum

Psychologist blogger Valtin gives his perspective on the APA referendum and the fightback against it. His conclusion:

But the defense of supermax prison jobs, and the concern about U.S. prison conditions rings hollow, being a disingenuous attempt to back institutional concerns in alliance with the Department of Defense and the CIA. In political terms, the coalition between so-called peace psychologists and pro-military types within APA represents a classic rotten bloc.

Add comment August 11th, 2008

Globe Op Ed: Ending the psychological mind games on detainees

I have a Op Ed in the Boston Globe today:

Ending the psychological mind games on detainees

By Stephen Soldz

WHEN MOST people think of psychologists, they think of a professional helping them with life’s emotional difficulties, or of a researcher studying human or animal behavior. Since the Bush administration and the war on terrorism have transformed our country, however, a new, more ominous image of psychologists has slowly seeped into public consciousness.

Psychologists have been identified as key figures in the design and conduct of abuses against detainees in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA’s secret “black sites,” and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Psychologists should not be taking part in such practices.

Yet a steady stream of revelations from government documents, journalistic reports, and congressional hearings has revealed that psychologists designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques, which included locking prisoners in tiny cages in the fetal position, throwing them against the wall head first, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, and waterboarding.

Jane Mayer, in her new book, “The Dark Side,” reports that the central idea was the psychological concept of “learned helplessness.” Individuals are denied all control over their world, lose their will, and become totally dependent upon their captors.

At Guantanamo, the Red Cross described a system of psychological abuse as “tantamount to torture.” Psychologists, and some psychiatrists, helped interrogators “break down” detainees by exploiting information in their medical records. Thus, someone with an intense fear of dogs would be threatened with snarling dogs, while a person with a fear of being buried alive might be threatened with being sealed in a coffin.

When reports of these abuses surfaced, we psychologists looked to our largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association, to take the lead in condemning them and taking measures to ensure that they would not recur. After all, these actions by psychologists violate the central principle of the APA’s ethics code: “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.”

The APA, however, failed to take clear action. While the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association quickly and unequivocally condemned any involvement by its membership in such activities, APA leaders quibbled over whether psychologists had been present at the interrogations and questioned the motives of internal critics.

When the leadership appointed a task force on the ethics of psychologist involvement in interrogations, the report was strangely unsigned, and the members’ names were kept secret from APA members and the media. Finally, it was revealed that a majority of members were from the military-intelligence establishment, with four having served in chains of commands implicated in detainee abuses. Three of the four nonmilitary members have since denounced the task force process and two have called for the report to be rescinded.

The APA has since passed several antitorture resolutions - all of them full of loopholes - but has failed to take ethics enforcement action against a single psychologist for participating in abuses, despite publication two years ago of a detailed interrogation log showing the participation of a military psychologist in the abuse amounting to torture of a Guantanamo detainee.

Not surprisingly, unrest among APA members is growing. Many members, including the founder of the APA’s Practice Directorate and the former head of its Ethics Committee, have resigned in protest.

This month, ballots went out for a first-ever referendum to call a halt to psychologist participation in sites where international law is violated. And dissident New York psychologist Steven Reisner, a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, is running for the APA presidency. His principal campaign platform is for psychologists to be banned from participating in interrogations at US military detention centers, like Guantanamo Bay, that violate human rights and function outside of the Geneva Conventions. In the nomination phase Reisner received the most votes of the five candidates.

At our annual convention in Boston this month, other APA members and I will rally against association policies encouraging participation in detainee interrogations. We will be joined by community activists, human rights groups, and civil libertarians to demand that APA return to its fundamental principle of “Do no harm.” Psychologists owe it to their profession and to the cause of human rights to oppose abuses, not participate in them.

Stephen Soldz, psychologist and psychoanalyst, is professor and director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

1 comment August 10th, 2008

Fisk: On brutality and the death of Margaret Hassan

Robert Fisk manages to convey the horror of the last ten years of Western meddling in Iraq and its horrific effects through telling the story of the death of his friend Margaret hassan. He also makes clear that “freedom,” as in the freedom of Al Jazeera’s brave reporter to tell the truth, was always viewed as an enemy of the American efforts in Iraq:

The Tragic Last Moments of Margaret Hassan

When a renowned British aid worker was kidnapped in Iraq, the world was horrified. Her body was never recovered, but her execution was captured on video and sent to Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel. Robert Fisk watched it and reveals why it has never been broadcast

by Robert Fisk

She stands in the empty room, a deplorable, terrible, pitiful sight. Is it Margaret Hassan? Her family believe so, even though she is blindfolded. I’m not sure if videos like this should ever be seen - or perhaps the word is endured - but they are part of the dark history of Iraq, and staff of the Arab Al Jazeera satellite channel have grown used to watching some truly atrocious acts on their screens.

The “execution” - the cold-blooded, appalling murder of Margaret Hassan, the Care worker who was a friend as well as a contact of mine - is among the least terrible of the scenes that lie in the satellite channel’s archives.

Kidnapped by men in police uniforms, it is now November, 2004, and Margaret has already made her last appeal. Viewers saw her begging Tony Blair to help her, to withdraw British troops from southern Iraq. “I beg of you to help me,” she says in a voice of great distress. But there was then another tape which Al Jazeera refused to show, in which Margaret was coerced into claiming that she gave information to American officers at Baghdad airport. A man’s voice prompts her to keep to a text. “I admit that we worked with the occupation forces …” she says. It is untrue, of course. Margaret was against the whole Anglo-American invasion. She would never have spied on Iraqis.

Then comes the last tape. She is standing in that bare room in a white blouse, a blindfold over her face, her head slightly bowed and a man approaches her from behind holding a pistol. He points it at her head and places what appears to be an apple over the muzzle - a primitive form of silencer? And then squeezes the trigger. There is a click, an apparent misfire, and the man retreats to the right of the screen and then reappears. Margaret Hassan doesn’t move although she must have heard the click. The man is wearing a grubby grey and black checked shirt and ill-fitting, baggy trousers, a scarf concealing his face.

This time the gun fires and the woman utters a tiny sound, a kind of cry, almost a squeal of shock, and falls backwards onto the floor. The camera lingers on her. She has fallen onto a plastic sheet. And she just lies there. There is no visible blood, nor wound. It is over. Should such terrible things be seen? Margaret’s immensely brave Iraqi husband told me I had his permission to watch this, but still I feel guilty. I think it was only here, watching her death on a screen next to Al Jazeera’s studios more than three years later, that I realized Margaret Hassan was dead.

It was Margaret who took leukaemia medicines donated by readers of The Independent to the child cancer victims of Iraq back in 1998 after we discovered that hundreds of infants were dying in those areas where Western forces used depleted uranium munitions in the 1991 Gulf War. She was a proverbial tower of strength, and it was she - and she alone - who managed to persuade Saddam Hussein’s bureaucrats to let us bring the medicine into Iraq. The United Nations sanctions authorities had been our first hurdle, Saddam Hussein our second. It is all history. Like Margaret, all the children died.

“We’ve trained ourselves not to go to the maximum in our feelings when we see terrible things like this,” Ayman Gaballah, Al Jazeera’s deputy chief editor, says bleakly. And I can see why. There are other tapes, other outrages too terrible to show. George Bush wanted to bomb the station’s headquarters in Doha but staff have shown great sensitivity with what they show the world from Iraq. There is no proof that any of Al Jazeera’s reporters was ever tipped off about anti-American attacks before they happened - in Iraq, I investigated these claims in 2003 and 2004 - but plenty of proof that some things are too awful to see.

On one tape, a half-naked man is held to the floor while another produces a small butcher’s knife and slowly carves his way through the victim’s throat, the poor man’s shriek of pain dying in froths of blood until his head is eventually torn from his body.

Another tape shows 18 Iraqi policemen held captive against a demand for the release of Iraqi women prisoners. They are aged between 17 and 40 and stare at the camera hopelessly.

Al Jazeera aired the pictures and the written demands but then cut the next scene. It shows the 18 men trussed up and blindfolded in front of a ditch. A hooded man then fires into the back of one of their heads and - along with other men off-camera - goes from one body to the next, firing again and again. Some of the victims are still alive, their legs kicking and the hooded man goes to each one and fires again into their heads. Then, in the background, a bearded youth approaches the camera, holding an Islamic flag. He is singing.

For some in the Al Jazeera studios these archives are intensely personal. “I trained Ali Khatib - he was a great reporter,” I am told. “The war was almost declared at an end in Iraq and he went out with our cameraman to cover some story and, while he’s approaching an American checkpoint, you can hear an American soldier on the tape say ‘Stop - you have to go back’. And then the soldier just shot at them and killed both of them. Ali had got married two weeks earlier.”

For some, the videotapes will always be too much. When I met Margaret’s husband Tahseen in his Baghdad home after her murder, he was a picture of courage and mourning. There were terrible times. “I would come home and sit here and weep,” he told me then. “I would sit here sometimes and go out of my mind crying and sobbing. I don’t think insurgents did this. I don’t think Iraqi people did this … I couldn’t see the video that was released - not because she’s my wife, but because I can’t bear to see anyone assassinated.”

So who did murder Margaret Hassan? On the video of her apparent execution, there are no Islamic banners, no Muslim chants, no claim of responsibility, just the killer and the fatal shot. After her kidnap, Margaret - who once worked as an English-language newsreader on Saddam’s government television station in Baghdad - even found support among the anti-American insurgents; they issued a joint appeal for her release. Even Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qa’ida leader in Iraq who was later killed by the Americans, joined in the appeal. Margaret had worked in Palestinian camps in the 1960s and fought tirelessly for those thousands of Iraqis under her care in Iraq. If her husband’s suspicions were correct, then whose “foreign” hand took her away?

The tape leaves no clue. In Al Jazeera’s archives, it is difficult to escape this repository of death. The Americans fired a cruise missile at Al Jazeera’s Kabul office in 2001 after it had forwarded Osama bin Laden’s tapes to Doha. Then an American aircraft fired a missile at the station’s Baghdad office in 2003. That time, the Americans killed the bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub. His jacket and his last notes are today on the wall of Al Jazeera’s Doha head office. His staff had - for their own protection - earlier given the map coordinates of their Baghdad office to the US State Department. Reporters asked Tony Blair - on a post-prime-ministerial tour of the Doha offices - if Bush had really planned to bomb them. “Blair said something about ‘the need to move on’” one of them told me. “So we knew it was true.”

If Al Jazeera’s staff have paid a terrible price for their reporting and have been the witnesses to some of the ghastlier acts in Iraq, they appear to have the ferocious support of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who spends his millions funding the loss-making station.

Stories abound of the day that George Tenet - then America’s CIA chief - turned up in Qatar to give the Emir a dressing down for Al Jazeera’s reporting. There was a stiff row between the two men before the Emir walked out.

In Washington, he was invited to meet Vice-President Dick Cheney, only to find that Mr Cheney had a thick file on his desk when he walked in. It was Mr Cheney’s list of complaints against Al Jazeera. The Emir told him he would not discuss it. “Then that is the end of our meeting,” Mr Cheney announced. “It is,” the Emir apparently replied. And walked out. The “meeting” had lasted 30 seconds.

But those are the high points, the drama of Al Jazeera. The dark moments are on those terrible tapes. I asked some of the reporters how humans could commit such atrocities. None of them knew.

One suggested that 11 years of UN-imposed sanctions had somehow changed the mentality of Iraqis. And I do recall, back in 1998 - when Saddam still ruled Baghdad - an NGO official tried to explain to me what was happening to Iraqis. The Americans and British “want us to rebel against Saddam,” the official said. “They think we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything - even give our own lives - to get rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991 so now they are using cruder methods. But they are wrong. These people have been reduced to penury. They live in shit. And when you have no money and no food, you don’t worry about democracy or who your leaders are.”

That official was Margaret Hassan.

–Robert Fisk

Add comment August 9th, 2008

Support for psychologists’ referendum against collusion in detainee abuse

As regular readers know, their is an effort afoot to pass a referendum in the American Psychological Association that would express opposition to psychologists aiding US detention centers operating outside of international law or the Constitution. The ballots are currently arriving in members mailboxes.

The APA has launched a strong effort at spin and disinformation regarding the referendum. Unfortunately, some of our colleagues who should support this efforts have also parsed the text in such a way as to perceive a potential threat. In response to expressed concerns, the referendum authors have issued a clarifying statement:August 6, 2008

Dear APA members:

As sponsors and supporters of the referendum, we are aware that this is a period given to commentary from those who have introduced the referendum, and that–consistent with APA policy–such commentary will be considered in future policy decisions as valid interpretation of the resolution’s intent. We are also aware that there has been some concern voiced on several listservs that the resolution may have ‘unintended consequences’; namely that it may impact the work of psychologists working in existing U.S. jails, prisons, psychiatric facilities, and hospitals.

While we believe a reading of the full referendum in its context resolves these concerns, we would like to be sure that there are no misunderstandings on this point. We are therefore using this commentary period to reiterate the application of the petition, its meaning, and intent:

This referendum is focused on settings such as Guantánamo Bay and the CIA ‘black sites’ set up by the U.S. as part of its ‘global war on terror’; settings where the persons being detained are denied the protections of either constitutional or international law, settings which have been denounced by the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

We are well aware of the harms and legal struggles facing certain prisons and jails inside the domestic U.S. criminal justice system. However, the referendum takes no position on such settings where prisoners have full access to independent counsel and constitutional protections; nor does the referendum take a position on settings that now exist within the domestic mental health system where clients and patients also possess these basic rights.

For Psychologists for an Ethical APA
Dan Aalbers
dan.aalbers@gmail.com

Ruth Fallenbaum
ruthfallenbaum@comcast.net

Brad Olson
b-olson@northwestern.edu

Various illustrious colleagues and organizations are starting to line up in support of the referendum. The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International has issued this statement in support:

The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) is an organization each of whose members is a survivor of torture.  Our  mission is two-fold: to support torture survivors in any way we can and to oppose torture wherever it may be practiced.

We understand the petition submitted by Ethical APA Psychologists to be entirely consistent with this mission. That such a petition is necessary seems, at the very least, distressing but since it is, we express our support for it and thank psychologists for this action.

In solidarity,
Harold Nelson
Advocacy Coordinator
Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC)

www.tassc.org

Additionally — Jean Maria Arrigo, the brave psychologist who served on the APA’s PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] task force in 2005 and revealed it as a cover job for an already decided upon policy — has issued the following explanation for her “Yes” vote on the referendum:

The ballot arrived today from APA, and I just voted Yes on the Referendum. To my mind, the timeliness of the Referendum as social action supersedes the problem of misinterpretation of the text.

My thinking on this matter has been most strongly influenced by military and intelligence personnel I know, including senior interrogators.

At an emotional level, I was much affected by audience responses to my February presentations to anti-torture symposia at two universities in Sao Paulo and the regional psychological association. Audiences were outraged by the APA endorsement of psychologists at military interrogation centers (people standing up and shouting) and truly horrified that I had agreed to the PENS report. (In Brazil, the word “interrogation” is virtually synonymous with “torture.”) If the APA leadership accommodates current government policy on interrogations, well, Brazilian psychologists can understand…, but if the APA membership defeats the Referendum, at this point in our history, that sends a bad message I cannot explain away. They are worried about the passivity of the APA legitimizing torture by our government, which legitimizes torture by their government and delegitimizes their own protests as psychologists.

Respectfully,

Jean Maria Arrigo

1 comment August 8th, 2008