Mark Benjamin has put together all the chilling details on the CIA’s application of waterboarding from the publicly released documents. The details make clear that CIA waterboarding bore little relationship to that used in the Navy SERE School. BTW, Jeffrey Kaye recently revealed an internal JPRA memo showing that the agency decided that waterboarding was far from safe for its soldier-students:
Waterboarding for dummies
Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney’s “dunk in the water”
By Mark Benjamin
Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.
Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.
The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.
“This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing,” said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. “The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.’ It just sounds like lunacy,” he said. “This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine.”
These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility released late last month.
Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later reviewing the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” haven’t been mined for waterboarding details until now. While Bush-Cheney officials defended the legality and safety of waterboarding by noting the practice has been used to train U.S. service members to resist torture, the documents show that the agency’s methods went far beyond anything ever done to a soldier during training. U.S. soldiers, for example, were generally waterboarded with a cloth over their face one time, never more than twice, for about 20 seconds, the CIA admits in its own documents.
These memos show the CIA went much further than that with terror suspects, using huge and dangerous quantities of liquid over long periods of time. The CIA’s waterboarding was “different” from training for elite soldiers, according to the Justice Department document released last month. “The difference was in the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed,” the document notes. In soldier training, “The interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth (on a soldier’s face) in a controlled manner,” DOJ wrote. “By contrast, the agency interrogator … continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose.”
One of the more interesting revelations in the documents is the use of a saline solution in waterboarding. Why? Because the CIA forced such massive quantities of water into the mouths and noses of detainees, prisoners inevitably swallowed huge amounts of liquid – enough to conceivably kill them from hyponatremia, a rare but deadly condition in which ingesting enormous quantities of water results in a dangerously low concentration of sodium in the blood. Generally a concern only for marathon runners , who on extremely rare occasions drink that much water, hyponatremia could set in during a prolonged waterboarding session. A waterlogged, sodium-deprived prisoner might become confused and lethargic, slip into convulsions, enter a coma and die.
Therefore, “based on advice of medical personnel,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote in a May 10, 2005, memo authorizing continued use of waterboarding, “the CIA requires that saline solution be used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia.”
The agency used so much water there was also another risk: pneumonia resulting from detainees inhaling the fluid forced into their mouths and noses. Saline, the CIA argued, might reduce the risk of pneumonia when this occurred.
“The detainee might aspirate some of the water, and the resulting water in the lungs might lead to pneumonia,” Bradbury noted in the same memo. “To mitigate this risk, a potable saline solution is used in the procedure.”
That particular Bradbury memo laid out a precise and disturbing protocol for what went on in each waterboarding session. The CIA used a “specially designed” gurney for waterboarding, Bradbury wrote. After immobilizing a prisoner by strapping him down, interrogators then tilted the gurney to a 10-15 degree downward angle, with the detainee’s head at the lower end. They put a black cloth over his face and poured water, or saline, from a height of 6 to 18 inches, documents show. The slant of the gurney helped drive the water more directly into the prisoner’s nose and mouth. But the gurney could also be tilted upright quickly, in the event the prisoner stopped breathing.
Detainees would be strapped to the gurney for a two-hour “session.” During that session, the continuous flow of water onto a detainee’s face was not supposed to exceed 40 seconds during each pour. Interrogators could perform six separate 40-second pours during each session, for a total of four minutes of pouring. Detainees could be subjected to two of those two-hour sessions during a 24-hour period, which adds up to eight minutes of pouring. But the CIA’s guidelines say interrogators could pour water over the nose and mouth of a detainee for 12 minutes total during each 24-hour period. The documents do not explain the extra four minutes to get to 12.
Interrogators were instructed to pour the water when a detainee had just exhaled so that he would inhale during the pour. An interrogator was also allowed to force the water down a detainee’s mouth and nose using his hands. “The interrogator may cup his hands around the detainee’s nose and mouth to dam the runoff,” the Bradbury memo notes. “In which case it would not be possible for the detainee to breathe during the application of the water.”
“We understand that water may enter – and accumulate in – the detainee’s mouth and nasal cavity, preventing him from breathing,” the memo admits.
Should a prisoner stop breathing during the procedure, the documents instructed interrogators to rapidly tilt the gurney to an upright position to help expel the saline. “If the detainee is not breathing freely after the cloth is removed from his face, he is immediately moved to a vertical position in order to clear the water from his mouth, nose, and nasopharynx,” Bradbury wrote. “The gurney used for administering this technique is specially designed so that this can be accomplished very quickly if necessary.”
Documents drafted by CIA medical officials in 2003, about a year after the agency started using the waterboard, describe more aggressive procedures to get the water out and the subject breathing. “An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately,” the CIA Office of Medical Services ordered in its Sept. 4, 2003, medical guidelines for interrogations. “The interrogator should then deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water.” (That’s a blow below the sternum, similar to the thrust delivered to a chocking victim in the Heimlich maneuver.)
But even those steps might not force the prisoner to resume breathing. Waterboarding, according to the Bradbury memo, could produce “spasms of the larynx” that might keep a prisoner from breathing “even when the application of water is stopped and the detainee is returned to an upright position.” In such cases, Bradbury wrote, “a qualified physician would immediately intervene to address the problem and, if necessary, the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy.” The agency required that “necessary emergency medical equipment” be kept readily available for that procedure. The documents do not say if doctors ever performed a tracheotomy on a prisoner.
The doctors were also present to monitor the detainee “to ensure that he does not develop respiratory distress.” A leaked 2007 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross says that meant the detainee’s finger was fixed with a pulse oxymeter, a device that measures the oxygen saturation level in the blood during the procedure. Doctors like Allen say this would allow interrogators to push a detainee close to death – but help them from crossing the line. “It is measuring in real time the oxygen content in the blood second by second,” Allen explained about the pulse oxymeter. “It basically allows them to push these prisoners more to the edge. With that, you can keep going. This is calibration of harm by health professionals.”
One of the weirdest details in the documents is the revelation that the agency placed detainees on liquid diets prior to the use of waterboarding. That’s because during waterboarding, “a detainee might vomit and then aspirate the emesis,” Bradbury wrote. In other words, breathe in his own vomit. The CIA recommended the use of Ensure Plus for the liquid diet.
Plowing through hundreds of pages of these documents is an unsettling experience. On one level, the detailed instructions can be seen as helping to carry out kinder, gentler waterboarding, with so much care and attention given to making sure detainees didn’t stop breathing, get pneumonia, breathe in their own vomit or die. But of course dead detainees tell no tales, so the CIA needed to keep many of its prisoners alive. It should be noted, though, that six human rights groups in 2007 released a report showing that 39 people who appeared to have gone into the CIA’s secret prison network haven’t shown up since. The careful attention to detail in the documents was also used to provide legal cover for the harsh and probably illegal interrogation tactics.
As brutal as the waterboarding process was, the memos also reveal that the Bush-era Justice Department authorized the CIA to use it in combination with other forms of torture. Specifically, a detainee could be kept awake for more than seven days straight by shackling his hands in a standing position to a bolt in the ceiling so he could never sit down. The agency diapered and hand-fed its detainees during this period before putting them on the waterboard. Another memo from Bradbury, also from 2005, says that in between waterboarding sessions, a detainee could be physically slammed into a wall, crammed into a small box, placed in “stress positions” to increase discomfort and doused with cold water, among other things.
The CIA’s waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. “In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks,” the CIA’s Office of Medical Services wrote in its 2003 memo. “Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness.”
The agency’s medical guidelines say that after a case of “psychological resignation” by a detainee on the waterboard, an interrogator had to get approval from a CIA doctor before doing it again.
The memo also contains a last, little-noticed paragraph that may be the most disturbing of all. It seems to say that the detainees subjected to waterboarding were also guinea pigs. The language is eerily reminiscent of the very reasons the Nuremberg Code was written in the first place. That paragraph reads as follows:
“NOTE: In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”
March 9th, 2010
In a New York Times Op Ed, Leonard Rubenstein and Brig. Gen. [ret] Stephen Xenakis discuss the contrast between the investigation of the torture lawyers and the lack of any investigation of the torture physicians and psychologists:
Doctors Without Morals
By Leonard S. Rubenstein and Stephen N. Xenakis
After five years of investigation, the Justice Department has released its findings regarding the government lawyers who authorized waterboarding and other forms of torture during the interrogation of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. The report’s conclusion, that the lawyers exercised poor judgment but were not guilty of professional misconduct, is questionable at best. Still, the review reflects a commitment to a transparent investigation of professional behavior.
In contrast, the government doctors and psychologists who participated in and authorized the torture of detainees have escaped discipline, accountability or even internal investigation.
It is hardly news that medical staff at the C.I.A. and the Pentagon played a critical role in developing and carrying out torture procedures. Psychologists and at least one doctor designed or recommended coercive interrogation methods including sleep deprivation, stress positions, isolation and waterboarding. The military’s Behavioral Science Consultation Teams evaluated detainees, consulted their medical records to ascertain vulnerabilities and advised interrogators when to push harder for intelligence information.
Psychologists designed a program for new arrivals at Guantánamo that kept them in isolation to “enhance and exploit” their “disorientation and disorganization.” Medical officials monitored interrogations and ordered medical interventions so they could continue even when the detainee was in obvious distress. In one case, an interrogation log obtained by Time magazine shows, a medical corpsman ordered intravenous fluids to be administered to a dehydrated detainee even as loud music was played to deprive him of sleep.
When the C.I.A.’s inspector general challenged these “enhanced interrogation” methods, the agency’s Office of Medical Services was brought in to determine, in consultation with the Justice Department, whether the techniques inflicted severe mental pain or suffering, the legal definition of torture. Once again, doctors played a critical role, providing professional opinions that no severe pain or suffering was being inflicted.
According to Justice Department memos released last year, the medical service opined that sleep deprivation up to 180 hours didn’t qualify as torture. It determined that confinement in a dark, small space for 18 hours a day was acceptable. It said detainees could be exposed to cold air or hosed down with cold water for up to two-thirds of the time it takes for hypothermia to set in. And it advised that placing a detainee in handcuffs attached by a chain to a ceiling, then forcing him to stand with his feet shackled to a bolt in the floor, “does not result in significant pain for the subject.”
The service did allow that waterboarding could be dangerous, and that the experience of feeling unable to breathe is extremely frightening. But it noted that the C.I.A. had limited its use to 12 applications over two sessions within 24 hours, and to five days in any 30-day period. As a result, the lawyers noted the office’s “professional judgment that the use of the waterboard on a healthy individual subject to these limitations would be ‘medically acceptable.’”
The medical basis for these opinions was nonexistent. The Office of Medical Services cited no studies of individuals who had been subjected to these techniques. Its sources included a wilderness medical manual, the National Institute of Mental Health Web site and guidelines from the World Health Organization.
The only medical source cited by the service was a book by Dr. James Horne, a sleep expert at Loughborough University in Britain; when Dr. Horne learned that his book had been used as a reference, he said the C.I.A. had distorted his findings and misrepresented his research, and that its conclusions on sleep deprivation were nonsense.
Dr. Horne had used healthy volunteers who were subject to no other stresses and could withdraw at any time, while C.I.A. and Pentagon interrogators used a broad array of stresses in combination on the detainees. Sleep deprivation, he said, mixed with pain-inducing positioning, intimidation and a host of other stresses, would probably exhaust the body’s defense mechanisms, cause physical collapse and worsen existing illness. And that doesn’t begin to acknowledge the dire psychological consequences.
The shabbiness of the medical judgments, though, pales in comparison to the ethical breaches by the doctors and psychologists involved. Health professionals have a responsibility extending well beyond nonparticipation in torture; the historic maxim is, after all, “First do no harm.” These health professionals did the polar opposite.
Nevertheless, no agency — not the Pentagon, the C.I.A., state licensing boards or professional medical societies — has initiated any action to investigate, much less discipline, these individuals. They have ignored the gross and appalling violations by medical personnel. This is an unconscionable disservice to the thousands of ethical doctors and psychologists in the country’s service. It is not too late to begin investigations. They should start now.
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Leonard S. Rubenstein is a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Stephen N. Xenakis is a psychiatrist and a retired Army brigadier general.
March 1st, 2010
Back in 2007, CIA agent John Kiriakou told ABC news and the world how wonderfully waterboarding worked. After 35 seconds, Abu Zubaydah told all. The Torture Party jumped on this.When the OLC memos revealed that Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times, the claim no longer made sense. Nonetheless, given its source, it was repeated endlessly.
Now, in a new book, Kiriakou tells us it was all disinformation. He actually knew nothing about what happened. Jeff Stein explains:
CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding
A study in “enhanced reporting techniques.”
By Jeff Stein
Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.
“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”
No matter that Kiriakou wearily said he shared the anguish of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, over the CIA’s application of the medieval confession technique.
The point was that it worked. And the pro-torture camp was quick to pick up on Kiriakou’s claim.
“It works, is the bottom line,” conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the day after Kiriakou’s ABC interview. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”
A cascade of similar acclamations followed, muffling — to this day — the later revelation that Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times.
Had Kiriakou left out something the first time?
Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.
“What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”
But never mind, he says now.
“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”
In a word, it was hearsay, water-cooler talk.
“Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”
Indeed. But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn’t have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn’t. And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.”
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano dodged that mud ball.
“While I haven’t read John’s book, the line about deception doesn’t make any sense,” Gimigliano told me last week. “He apparently didn’t know as much as he thought he did. That’s a very different matter.”
Some time ago, as it turns out, ABC quietly “updated” the story. A few paragraphs down on the front page of the website version of its Kiriakou yarn, it says, “see endnote.”
A click or two later, Kiriakou, who later went to work for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, explains to readers:
“When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being water boarded on one occasion. It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques.”
Kiriakou’s insistence, however vague, that Zubaydah “revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack” has to be taken with a soupçon of salt.
As Brian Stelter, a New York Times media reporter, wrote last April, Kiriakou “was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.”
ABC’s Ross had glossed over the glaring fact in its broadcast, saying only that Kiriakou himself “never carried out any of the waterboarding” — which got lost in the telling, in light of the main story line picked up by the rest of the media.
ABC has now removed the video of its Kiriakou interview from its site. But the headline, large photo of the CIA man, and story remain, with its opening paragraph, “A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.” You have to dig deep to find that none of it is true.
Comments on the piece were closed last May, with a representative stating, “[I]n times of war, those on the front line make very tough decisions and the rights of the accused are not the ones they defend first.”
After Kiriakou repeated his waterboarding-efficiency claims to the Washington Post, the New York Times, National Public Radio, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and other media organizations last year, a CNN anchor called him “the man of the hour.”
By some measure, evidently, he still is.
January 27th, 2010
Several public accounts of abusive interrogations at Guantanamo have praised psychologist Dr. Michael Gelles for his opposition to these abuses. Similarly, the American Psychological Association (APA) has repeatedly pointed to actions of Dr. Gelles to instantiate their claim that psychologists played a crucial role in opposing abuses and protecting detainees. Gelles also has been a regular public presence, discussing the errors at Guantanamo while advocating for the APA’s “policy of participation” in interrogations. The APA policy encourages psychologists to aid interrogations to keep them “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.” But a recently released Defense Department document challenges Dr. Gelles’s role as an exemplar of psychological ethics in interrogations.
As reported by Bill Dedman, Phillipe Sands, and Jane Mayer, Gelles objected to the “harsh” interrogation tactics being used at Guantanamo. In particular, he strenuously objected to the plans to “reverse engineer” the tactics used by the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program to inculcate strategies for resistance to torture in US service members at high risk for capture.
In November 2002, the military planned to use these SERE-based techniques on prisoner 063, Mohammed al Qahtani, one of several US captives dubbed the “20th hijacker.” Gelles and colleagues from the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF), the FBI, and other agencies proposed an alternative interrogation plan for al Qahtani, one that did not involve use of SERE techniques. This plan was rejected. Instead, al-Qahtani was subjected to an interrogation that met the legal definition of “torture,” according to Bush Administration appointee Susan Crawford, convener of the Guantanamo Military Commissions. [Phillipe Sands detailed the development of the al-Qahtani torture plan in his book, The Torture Team, an extract from which was published in Vanity Fair. Sands also describes the alternate CITF/FBI plan as written by "Gelles' team" (p. 130).] Gelles reported his concerns regarding use of SERE techniques and the al-Qahtani interrogation up the chain of command, leading Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora to protest and force at least temporary change in official interrogation policy in early 2003.
A few weeks ago, in response to an ACLU’s years-long Freedom of Information Act Request, the alternative interrogation plan for al-Qahtani was quietly released, apparently unnoticed between other documents on FBI and CITF concerns about Guantanamo practices. According to the alternative plan document, it was drafted:
“by representatives of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), and behavioral specialists, psychiatrists and psychologists with the Criminal Investigation Task Force (ClTF).”
Given the prominent roles of mental health professionals in its drafting, the alternative “rapport-based” plan should be examined for consistency with Gelles’ and the other authors’ ethical responsibilities as psychologists and psychiatrists.
At the time the plan was written, on November 22, 2002, al-Qahtani had been in isolation for three months and was exhibiting signs of severe mental deterioration to the extent of psychosis. An FBI agent described this deterioration in a report to headquarters:
“In September or October of 2002 FBI agents observed that a canine was used in an aggressive manner to intimidate detainee __ after he had been subjected to intense isolation for over three months. During that time period, __ was totally isolated (with the exception of occasional interrogations) in a cell that was always flooded with light. By late November, the detainee was evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in the corner of a cell covered with a sheet for hours on end).”
Gelles and the other authors on the CITF/FBI interrogation plan also noticed his psychological distress:
“#63’s behavior has changed significantly during his three months of isolation. He spends much of his day covered by a sheet, either crouched in the corner of his cell or hunched on his knees on top of his bed. These behaviors appear to be unrelated to his praying activities. His cell has no exterior windows, and because it is continuously lit, he is prevented from orientating himself as to time of day. Recently, he was observed by a hidden video camera having conversations with non-existent people. During his last interview on 11/17/02, he reported hearing unusual sounds which he believes are evil spirits, including Satan.”
After discussing whether al-Qahtani was faking his symptoms, without coming to a conclusion, the interrogation plan proposed exploiting al-Qahtani’s distress from his prolonged isolation:
“Although we are uncertain as to his mental status and recommend a mental evaluation be conducted, there is little doubt that #63 is hungry for human interaction. Our plan is designed to exploit this need and to create an environment in which it [is] easier for #63 to please the interviewer with whom he has come to have complete trust and dependence thus developing a motivation to be forthright and cooperative in providing reliable information.”
In order to exploit this hunger for human contact, the CITF/FBI plan recommended that he be kept in continued isolation for up to an additional year:
“The long-term strategy would be to create an environment in which total dependence and trust between #63 and the interviewer is established at its own pace. Such a plan should be given up to a year to complete although the actual time may be considerably shorter depending on how events unfold.”
Al-Qahtani’s hunger for human contact would be exploited by making his interrogator the only person he saw over this year:
“To help foster an environment conducive to the establishment of dependence and trust, we propose that the interviewer initially meet with #63 every other day. This should be his only contact with other people, and we believe he will anxiously look forward to these meetings.”
It was recommended that al-Qahtani be periodically subjected to additional stresses so that his interrogator could become his savior:
“Built into this plan will be periodic stressors such as the stripping of certain items of comfort from him by guards, such as the removal of his mirror or the issuance of a sheet, half the size of the one he likes to drape around himself. These and other stressors will be carefully and subtly introduced not by the interrogator, but by guards. We believe that #63 will likely look to his only human contact, his interviewer, in an attempt to gain help. The interviewer status as a caregiver and problem-solver will thus be increased…. [D]emands by #63 for restoration of things taken from him should be honored slowly so as to create the impression that the interviewer can ultimately help him although not necessarily quickly or with ease.”
This plan for prolonged manipulation to develop al-Qahtani’s complete dependency might or might not be ethical as an interrogation strategy. However, former police investigator and veteran Army counterintelligence operative David DeBatto, who has supervised many hundreds of interrogations, disparaged the use of isolation in the CITF/FBI interrogation plan for al Qahtani (personal communication, November 28, 2009):
“That [the initial three-months isolation] is an excessively long time and on the face of it, violates the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] and international law. Two major problems I have with this is first, solitary is a punishment reserved for the worst kind of behavior by inmates in a prison, not for refusing to answer questions. Second, it is the worst possible way to interrogate anyone and will almost always produce negative results.”
At a minimum, there is no question that the participation of psychologists and psychiatrists in the development of this interrogation plan led to the recommendation of strategies that would be likely to cause severe psychological distress and clearly violated psychological and psychiatric ethics.
Prolonged isolation frequently causes severe emotional distress, including psychotic symptoms identical to those appearing in al-Qahtani, such as hearing non-existent voices and talking to non-existent people. Physicians for Human Rights summed up the psychological and psychiatric evidence regarding the harmful effects of isolation or “solitary confinement” in their Leave No Marks report on the US use of psychological torture:
“Findings from clinical research performed by prominent psychologists such as Dr. Stuart Grassian and Dr. Craig Haney, highlight the destructive impact of solitary confinement. Effects include depression, anxiety, difficulties with concentration and memory, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, hallucinations and perceptual distortions, paranoia, suicidal thoughts and behavior, and problems with impulse control.
“According to Dr. Haney many of the negative effects of solitary confinement are analogous to the acute reactions suffered by torture and trauma victims, including posttraumatic stress disorder and the kind of psychiatric consequences that plague victims of what are called ‘deprivation and constraint’ torture techniques” (pp. 32-33).
The American Psychiatric Association, concerned about the conflicts inherent in such interrogation assistance, in 2006 explicitly condemned any direct involvement of their members in interrogations of specific detainees or prisoners, in domestic or national security settings. The Association stated in May 2006:
“No psychiatrist should participate directly in the interrogation of persons held in custody by military or civilian investigative or law enforcement authorities, whether in the United States or elsewhere. Direct participation includes being present in the interrogation room, asking or suggesting questions, or advising authorities on the use of specific techniques of interrogation with particular detainees.”
Until the membership forced a change in APA policy in September 2008, psychologists were allowed to aid interrogations as long as they did not participate in torture or “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” and followed the APA’s ethics code. Psychologists like Michael Gelles are subject to the APA ethics code, if they are members of the Association, as is Dr. Gelles. In addition, the military requires psychologists consulting to interrogations to be licensed by a state as health providers and most states require adherence to the APA ethics code as a requirement of licensure.
According to the APA, the prolonged use of isolation to aid interrogations, as was clearly the case with al-Qahtani, constitutes “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” In August 2007, the APA, under member pressure, banned psychologist participation in a number of interrogation techniques as constituting either “torture” or “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” including
“the following used for the purposes of eliciting information in an interrogation process… isolation… used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.”
After this resolution was passed, it came under withering criticism from dissident psychologists and the press. As a consequence, the APA’s Ethics Director was forced to issue a clarifying statement in response to reports of four weeks mandatory isolation for new detainees at Guantanamo:
“[T]he 2007 Resolution should never be interpreted as allowing isolation, sensory deprivation and over-stimulation, or sleep deprivation either alone or in combination to be used as interrogation techniques to break down a detainee in order to elicit information.”
In February 2008, in response to criticism, the APA amended its 2007 Resolution to unambiguously condemn psychologist involvement in the use of isolation. The revised resolution proclaimed:
“An absolute prohibition against the following techniques…: … isolation…. Psychologists are absolutely prohibited from knowingly planning, designing, participating in or assisting in the use of all condemned techniques at any time and may not enlist others to employ these techniques in order to circumvent this resolution’s prohibition.”
The CITF/FBI interrogation plan for al-Qahtani indicates that Gelles clearly engaged in a prohibited activity: “knowingly planning, designing… the use of … condemned techniques… and may not enlist others to employ these techniques….” Interestingly, when I raised concerns about the loophole regarding isolation in the 2007 Resolution at the APA convention the day after its passage, Gelles said to me “Steve, you have to understand that isolation is often used only very temporarily, only for a few hours” [quote from memory]. He did not mention its use for months at Guantanamo nor his team’s recommendation that it be used for up to a year on al-Qahtani.
Another ethical concern arises from the reported psychological distress that al-Qahtani was experiencing prior to the CITF/FBI interrogation plan being developed. The interrogation plan notes al-Qahtani’s psychotic symptoms, but, other than suggesting a mental evaluation, they simply view his vulnerability as an opportunity for exploitation. This ignoring of al-Qahtani’s mental distress violates the fundamental Principle A undergirding the entire APA ethics code:
“Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm. In their professional actions, psychologists seek to safeguard the welfare and rights of those with whom they interact professionally and other affected persons…. When conflicts occur among psychologists’ obligations or concerns, they attempt to resolve these conflicts in a responsible fashion that avoids or minimizes harm.”
There is simply no evidence that Gelles and the other authors of this plan sought to “avoid or minimize harm.” Rather, as the plan makes clear, their intention was to systematically increase and exploit distress and disorientation experienced by al-Qahtani, in violation of the ethics code.
The entire plan, with its emphasis on “exploit[ing]” al-Qahtani’s need for human contact violates the ethic’s code’s ban on exploitation:
“Psychologists do not exploit persons over whom they have supervisory, evaluative, or other authority such as clients/patients, students, supervisees, research participants, and employees.” [Ethics Standard 3.08]
Clearly Gelles and the other mental health professionals had, at a minimum, “evaluative authority” over al-Qahtani as they developed their plans to exploit his weaknesses.
Counterintelligence operative DeBatto also expressed concerns regarding the plan’s proposal to impose additional stressors on al-Qahtani in order to render him more dependent upon the interrogator. As expressed by DeBatto:
“Depriving him of sheets, a mirror and adding other `stressors’ is utter nonsense and counterproductive. He has already endured months of stressors. Forcing him to endure more as a form of a ’stick and carrot’ approach will produce nothing of value. It also violates the interrogators’ ethical training and is blatantly in violation of U.S. and international law.”
Gelles’ proposals in the al-Qahtani case must be deemed unethical and, if executed, would have constituted gross violations of the APA Ethics code, as the APA itself asserted in detailing unethical conduct in detainee treatment in its resolutions of 2007 and 2008. The APA’s parading Gelles as a “heroic” upholder of ethical standards for military interrogations must be revisited. Gelles now joins the ranks of other APA psychologists, including Morgan Banks, Larry James, and Bryce Lefever, whom the organization upheld as models for ethical military interrogation processes, but who subsequently appeared sympathetic to or may have aided abusive practices.
As psychologist Jeffrey Kaye pointed out last summer in two articles [see my commentary here] ethical concerns about Gelles’ pre-Guantanamo interrogation actions had already been raised with the APA long prior to APA’s lauding him as the standard-bearer for psychological ethics in interrogations. Attorney Jonathan Turley reported filing an APA ethics complaint against Gelles for abuses in the prolonged isolation and interrogation of Navy Chief Petty Officer Daniel King, following an ambiguous polygraph result. As described by Turley in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, King requested a mental health consultation because he felt he was losing his grip on reality. Dr. Gelles met with King for a consultation and, according to Turley, ignored King’s reports of suicidal thoughts. Instead, Gelles made help for King contingent upon King’s confession to espionage charges he had denied. Turley, who represented King, reports that the APA did not respond to his ethics complaint against Gelles. To our knowledge, the APA has never commented publicly on Turley’s charges, or on the ethics of Gelles’ treatment of King.
In any case, it turns out that Gelles was well aware of the potential ethical conflicts involved in his work with the CITF. In a 2003 paper in the Journal of Threat Assessment, apparently written at about the same time, Gelles and colleague Patrick Ewing argued that psychiatrists and psychologists involved in national security work should not be subject to professional ethics codes:
“Given the grave dangers faced by the United States and its allies post September 11, the government can ill afford to lose the input of psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals in cases involving national safety and security. Such input has been and will continue to be vital to protecting the lives of many Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad. In order to maintain the ability and willingness of these dedicated professionals to continue in these roles, we cannot continue to place them in situations where the ethics of their conduct will be judged, post hoc, either by rules that have little if any relevance to their vital governmental functions or by professional organizations or licensing authorities based upon the weight the members of these bodies chose to afford competing interests…” (p. 106).
In 2005, two years after this article appeared, Gelles, along with James, Banks, and Lefever, was appointed by the APA, to the seminal APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). This military- and intelligence-dominated group gave the ethical go-ahead for psychologists to aid detainee interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
In an open letter in 2007, psychologist Uwe Jacobs posed a series of questions to Dr. Gelles including:
“[W]hat were the techniques used that you did not find objectionable? To cite a few examples, did you believe it was ethical to transport prisoners to Guantanamo under conditions of sensory deprivation, i.e. wearing hoods, goggles, earmuffs, and other devices designed to create sensory deprivation and isolation, along with very restrictive shackling? Did you believe it was ethical to keep prisoners in solitary confinement for very long periods of time? Is it ethical to deprive prisoners of sleep? Is it ethical to subject them to severe heat and cold, constant noises or lights, stress positions, short shackling, screaming abuse etc.? You know the list I am referring to. Do you agree that these techniques have long been proven to produce severe nervous system dysregulation and often lasting psychological damage? Do these techniques not by definition constitute torture, just as stated by the UN?”
Gelles refused to answer Jacobs’ questions. We can surmise, from his earlier statements, that Gelles simply did not believe that intelligence psychologists should “be judged, post hoc, either by [ethical] rules that have little if any relevance to their vital governmental functions….” The APA has yet to explain why it appointed to the PENS task force someone who had already expressed disdain for the APA ethics code and why it continues to extol Gelles as a paragon of psychological ethics in interrogations.
Note: I would like to thank Jeffrey Kaye for pointing me to the Ewing and Gelles paper.
December 7th, 2009
In a 3-part series, [part 1, part 2, part 3] Jeff Kaye adds to our picture of the development of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program by taking a closer look at the other shareholders of Mitchell Jessen, and Associates. As has been previously noted by Kaye, all of them had long connections with the SERE program and with JPRA [Joint Personnel Recovery Agency], the SERE parent agency.
Kaye cites a JPRA sources as stating that Mitchell and Jesses were not the prime actors in the initiator of the program. Rather, this source suggests, stakeholders Roger Aldrich, one of the pioneers of the SERE program, played a critical role.
Kaye also extends backwards the involvement of former American Psychological Association President Joseph Matarazzo:
David Ayers, head of Tate, Inc., was the other MJA shareholder, along with Joseph Matarazzo, yet another former president [in addition to Martin Seligman: SS] of the American Psychological Association who crossed Mitchell and Jessen’s path. Matarazzo, who Jane Mayer recently reported worked for the CIA, had been hired by Mitchell and Jessen years earlier, in 1996, along with other prominent U.S. psychologists — Charles Speilberger, Richard Lazarus, and Albert Bandura – for an internal review of SERE training procedures, according to a SERE internal document.
It is amazing how many senior psychologists seem to have been at least tangentially connected with the developers of the CIA’s torture program. And, of course, we should remember that the APA itself had Mitchell and Jessen as participants in a joint CIA-APA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception at which, accordingly to the conference description, several enhanced interrogation techniques were discussed. Someday we will understand why these and, no doubt, other prominent psychologists were so close to the SERE program and to Mitchell, Jessesn, and the other creators of the CIA torture program.
August 17th, 2009
The American Psychological Association has a new PR firm, apparently. Rather than change the policies that provided cover for psychologists aiding torture, they have changed the term they use on their web site. Their policy of keeping psychologists involved in abusive interrogations is now filed under Detainee Welfare! See their:
Timeline of APA Policies & Actions
Related to Detainee Welfare and Professional Ethics
in the Context of Interrogation and National Security
The Timeline conveniently leaves out some of the most embarrassing moments in APA’s history [pdf] of apparent collusion with the military/intelligence establishment in support of our government’s torture program. For example, they leave out the February 2006 Presidential Column: Speaking Against Torture, with its never-to-be-forgotten lines:
A number of opportunistic commentators masquerading as scholars have continued to report on alleged abuses by mental health professionals. However, when solicited in person to provide APA with names and circumstances in support of such claims, no data have been forthcoming from these same critics and no APA members have been linked to unprofessional behaviors. The traditional journalistic dictum of reporting who, what, where and when seems notably absent.
Also left out is the 2007 statement by the Association’s Division of Military Psychology attacking the proposal for a Moratorium on psychologists’ participation in interrogations at Guantanamo and the CIA’s black sites, based as they claim on
the absence of any evidence substantiating instances of abuse or mistreatment of detainees by psychologists at these facilities.
This was years after it became clear that psychologists were helping design the abusive techniques used in the detention facilities. Despite the extensive public evidence, the Military Psychology Division bravely claimed:
Nor would detainees likely be well served by a moratorium. The ethical and clinical training of psychologists make them more likely to be protective of the detainees’ interests than those who have not had such training.
I guess Mitchell, Jessen, and Maj. John Leso [who was present during the torture of Mohammed al-Qhatani] were really looking out for the detainees’ welfare, given their training and all.
Also left out of the APA’s Timeline are various omissions and failures to respond, including:
APA leaders failure to respond adequately to reports that psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen designed and implemented the CIA’s “enhanced interrogations” torture program;
Their failure to respond to teports that a prominent APA member [who served on its Council of Representatives and is now a Division President] served as Chief Psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantanamo when policies mandated a month of isolation for all new detainees to increase their dependence on interrogators;
Their failure to respond to the report that a former APA President was a Board member of the CIA torture firm, Mitchell Jessen and Associates; recent reports that this former Association President had long-time CIA connections;
The APA Ethics Director’s claim that one report that a psychologist stopped one interrogation and called a doctor to treat the abused demonstrated that the APA’s “policy of engagement” was effective;
The APA’s failure to discipline any of its members who reportedly participated in torture and abuse, despite repeated claims that they “stand ready to adjudicate” any such claims; reports that one of the APA’s ethics policy-makers on its 2005 ethics task force endorsed SERE-based torture in an NPR interview and went on to reveal APA-military collusion in setting up the task force.
Finally, the APA failed to respond to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report that another member of this “ethics” task force trained Guantanamo behavioral scientists and interrogators in SERE-based torture techniques.But Timelines created by PR firms are generally designed to disguise the truth, not to reveal it.
Of course, changing the APA’s policies and taking responsibility for their years of protecting the government’s program of torture and abusive interrogations and detentions is harder than changing the web page title. And it would require taking a chance of upsetting the APA leadership’s pals in the military/intelligence establishment. better to hire a new PR firm.
July 7th, 2009
The ACLU’s Blog of Rights published two contributions on the American Psychological Association’s interrogations policies today. The first is by Trudy Bond:
Controlled Insanity
By Dr. Trudy Bond
In the notes to his novel 1984, George Orwell described “doublethink” as controlled insanity. Doublethink, a form of trained, willful intellectual blindness to contradictions in a belief system, is synonymous with the American Psychological Association (APA) and its role in the illegal detentions, torture and abuse that began shortly after September 11, 2001.
As a psychologist determined to hold state licensing boards and the national professional organization accountable for ethics violations of their members and licensees, I am only too familiar with doublethink.
When the public was becoming more aware of the abuse and torture in detention centers such as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the American Psychological Association (APA) established the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) (PDF), ostensibly to “examine the ethical dimensions of psychology’s involvement and the use of psychology in national security-related investigations.”
The final PENS report was released in June of 2005, stating that the APA Ethics Code as previously written was adequate in providing ethical guidelines to military psychologists in national security-related investigations.
Much has been written about this report since its release, often critical, as the report allowed psychologists to continue working in the illegal detention centers and stated that psychologists could choose law over ethics in the event of a conflict.Most readers will not need a reminder of the Bush administration’s “laws” regarding detainees at that time (think John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Donald Rumsfeld).APA’s task force essentially endorsed a Code of Ethics that allowed violators of criminal law to avoid the Nuremberg Principles. Recently, Sheri Fink has described the process that led the PENS task force to these conclusions.
The PENS report became a critical turning point for many psychologists, many of whom only then began to realize the degree to which the APA was aligned with the Pentagon in its “War on Terror.” This was partially due to the number of military psychologists appointed to the task force by the APA president, as well as the presence of many participants with serious conflicts of interest.
The same month as the release of the PENS report, Time magazine published a partial log detailing the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a prisoner at Guantánamo.With the release of these documents in 2005, it became clear that Major John Leso, the first BSCT psychologist at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, colluded in torture. Dr. Steven Miles and Philippe Sands have both offered documentation of Leso’s actions, as well as many other sources.
I initially filed an ethics complaint against Leso, complete with documentation,with the APA on April 15, 2007.It wasn’t until February of 2008 that my complaint was finally, officially acknowledged.The U.S. government admitted al-Qahtani was tortured when Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of military commissions at Guantánamo, stated unequivocally,”We tortured [Mohammed] Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case for prosecution.”Leso was instrumental in devising the interrogation plan of Mohammed al-Qahtani, collaborating, colluding and watching as Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured. APA has been silent since that time, though the complaint against Leso still remains open.
As recently as last week, the APA Board of Directors stated in an open letter, “APA will continue to monitor material in official reports related to psychologist mistreatment of national security detainees, will investigate reports of unethical conduct by APA members, and will adjudicate cases in keeping with our Code of Ethics.”More doublethink. The last four presidents of APA, as well as the APA Ethics Director Stephen Behnke, have repeatedly made the same politically correct statement for four years, with absolutely no actions to support their statements. It’s become clear that the APA peddles intellectual contradiction as policy when it comes to torture, with no intent of enforcement.
Indeed, at every turn, the leadership of APA has been defending the role of psychologists in the illegal detention centers. Dr. Boulanger’s recent post describes the response of the APA to torturous interrogations:
Steven Behnke, the Director of Ethics for the American Psychological Association, emphasized the “unique competencies” that psychologists bring to their role in interrogations, and claimed that psychologists who help military interrogators made a valuable contribution. Furthermore, he argued, psychologists play a vital role in safeguarding the welfare of detainees.
When met with the increased public reporting of the collusion of psychologists in the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo and other detention sites, juxtaposed against the ethic “do no harm,” APA’s mantra became one of justifying the psychologists’ presence with the above senseless words in an attempt to reduce the dissonance, or more simply, to ratchet up the doublethink.If safeguarding the welfare of the detainees was truly the role of psychologists, many of those psychologists have gravely — and prosecutably — failed. There is story upon story of detainees released after many years of illegal imprisonment with no charges ever being brought against them, prisoners who were abused and tortured. Where were the psychologists who were conscientiously protecting the detainees, keeping the interrogations safe as Dr. Behnke suggests? The answer is: they weren’t.I filed another complaint against Leso on April 5, 2007, with the NY State Education Department’s Office of Professional Discipline. The Director of Investigations rejected the complaint via telephone, claiming that the office lacked jurisdiction over the matter. Thus the state of New York continues to license Leso to collaborate in torture. The degree of seriousness and accountability the New York regulatory agency attached to alleged violations of federal criminal law and international law is evidenced in the handling of this complaint by a phone call.
Recently, Dr. Bryant Welch, who for most of the 20-year period from 1983 to 2003 either worked inside the APA central office as the first Executive Director of the APA Practice Directorate, or served in various governance positions such as the Chair of the APA Board of Professional Affairs, described the following:
A seventeen-year-old boy is locked in an interrogation cell in Guantánamo. He breaks down crying and says he wants his family. The interrogator senses the boy is psychologically vulnerable and consults with a psychologist. The psychologist has evaluated the boy prior to the questioning and says, ‘Tell him his family has forgotten him.’ The psychologist also prescribes ‘linguistic isolation’ (not letting him have contact with anyone who speaks his language.)
The boy attempts suicide a few weeks later. On the eve of the boy’s trial, the psychologist apparently fearing her testimony will only further implicate her, indicates she will plead the Fifth Amendment if she is called to the stand.
The trial is postponed, leaving the boy in further limbo. (emphasis added)
This psychologist not only did not protect the detainee, but clearly harmed him. This psychologist’s presence in the life of this child prisoner only escalated his abuse.After significant research, I filed an ethics complaint with the state licensing board in Alabama in November of 2008, soon after this episode of torture supervised by Dr. Diane Zierhoffer described above, was publicly disclosed.
Though the complaint was twelve pages with over 150 pages of documentation, the Alabama Board of Psychology returned all my original documents within one month, like a hot potato, stating, “After careful consideration and extensive research into the feasibility of the Board’s investigation of the issues raised in your complaint of November 25, 2008, it has been determined that your request for the Alabama Board of Examiners in Psychology to accept jurisdiction over your complaint must be denied.”
I shipped my complaint and documentation back to the Alabama Board of Psychology, with a letter from my attorney reminding the Board of its legal obligations under Alabama law. To date, no response has been received, the Board has demonstrated no accountability, and legal action is the only recourse.
APA has stonewalled all complaints against military psychologists, and state licensing boards refuse to call to account the psychologists they license. After filing another complaint in Louisiana against Dr. Larry James, chief psychologist at Guantánamo during the time that the APA stated that psychologists would protect detainees, I was informed by the Louisiana Board of Psychologists that my complaint was not within the statute of limitations.
Since filing a complaint in court alleging the Board’s ruling was not valid, the Board now contends that I had no standing to file a complaint. The results of a hearing on the case to decide this preliminary issue are pending. If a psychologist cannot make an ethics complaint against another psychologist who has potentially violated federal and international law, there is no system of accountability.
PENS Rises from the Ashes
Of significant concern is the continued, insistent doublethink of previous PENS task force members. In current journal articles, task force members continue to celebrate the outcome of the PENS task force, seeming to have remained ignorant to the complex errors in the process of creating the PENS report, as well the final report itself.
Writing in the APA’s Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research in 2009, Morgan Banks, PENS member, maintains, “Just because the job of psychological support to interrogation is difficult and requires interpretation of some vaguely defined concepts, this does not mean that we should not be doing it.”
In the same article Banks describes the PENS report as follows:
Several senior military psychologists were asked to participate on this Task Force, and they brought with them the products of this ongoing collegial consultation. In short, long before the APA examined the issue, involved operational psychologists had developed a process for mutual consultation, and an ethically based set of practice guidelines was emerging. The agreed-upon guiding concepts were those of safety, legality, ethical defensibility, and effectiveness. All of these concepts are antithetical to torture. The PENS Task Force continued that development and helped formalize the ethical standards for psychologists in this developing area. This PENS report was carefully integrated into the Army Surgeon General’s policy guidance.
The Army Surgeon General to which Banks is referring is Kevin Kiley, M.D., who resigned in disgrace when it was found that the physical and psychological care of our own troops at Walter Reed, the troops for whom Kevin Kiley oversaw the care, were suffering abuse and worse.And the PENS report to which Banks refers with such self-congratulatory remarks? The correspondence among PENS members was clearly not concerned with the well-being of the prisoners. The “client” was no longer a flesh-and-blood person but had morphed into a concept, that of “military intelligence.” The vulnerable parties became the troops and the U.S. citizens, not the isolated, shackled and abused prisoners. The PENS report was not about the prisoners and abuse, but how the “operational psychologists” and the APA could avoid accountability.
Dr. Gerald Koocher, president of APA at the time of the PENS Report, stated in the PENS task force deliberations, “I have zero interest in entangling APA with the nebulous, toothless, contradictory, and obfuscatory treaties that comprise ‘international law.’” In his most recent journal article in the APA’s Psychological Services, Koocher advocates for the role of the “invisible” psychologist or psychological consultant:
The parens patriae doctrine also leads to the logical conclusion that the state may use its protective obligation in ways that may harm individuals in other ways. Indeed, violations of individual rights in quest of protecting the vulnerable have formed the foundation of many governmental actions taken in recent years as steps toward national security, relying on utilitarian ethics and permissible harms. Psychologists may find themselves called on to assist the state in its protective efforts in invisible ways.
Koocher continues in the same article to elucidate the theme of the APA’s PENS report: “. . . at times the most vulnerable party may be the public at large. In such situations, psychologists must weigh their moral obligations against legally permissible options . . . Sometimes withholding our services may yield a greater public good than providing them.”Finally, in the draft of a chapter to be released this month, APA PENS Task Force member Mike Gelles, Dr. Steve Kleinman and Dr. Randy Borum have also referred back to the PENS report:
The President of the American Psychological Association (then, Ron Levant, Ph.D.) appointed a Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). The Association adopted the PENS Task Force Report as its official position, declaring, in part, that ‘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’…Despite some continued dissension within the professions, psychologists and psychiatrists continue to consult to interrogations.
Gelles, Kleinman and Borum state in the same chapter: “No large-scale, sweeping changes are yet apparent in the USG’s ethos or national strategy for intelligence interrogation.”All of the above suggests that in spite of strong activism against the role of psychologists in detention centers and interrogations, in spite of resolutions opposing psychologists’ presence, in spite of the ever-widening knowledge of the role of psychologists in torture, “no large-scale, sweeping changes are yet apparent.”
Doublethink is not the same as hypocrisy. The “doublethinking” person deliberately must forget the contradiction between the two opposing beliefs. In Orwell’s novel, doublethink means being able to falsify public records, and then believe in the new history that the propaganda ministry, itself, has just written. Sound familiar?
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Dr. Trudy Bond is a licensed psychologist in Toledo, Ohio.
June 24th, 2009