Rachel Maddow on US torture
Rachel Maddow on US torture, as directed out of the White House. She interviews Alex Gibney, Director of Taxi to the Dark Side, now on HBO.
[H/t to Mike in comments.]
Add comment September 26th, 2008
Posts filed under 'SERE'
New Arrigo & Long paper: APA: Denunciation and accommodation of abusive interrogations: A lesson for world psychology
My friends and colleagues Jean Maria Arrigo and Jancis Long have published a new article on the American Psychological Association and its approach to the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations: APA: Denunciation and accommodation of abusive interrogations: A lesson for world psychology in the Brazilian journal Psicologia: Teoria e Prática. The article can be downloaded here.
At the same time word comes of the publication of a shortened version of the article in Preventing Torture within the Fight against Terrorism, the newsletter of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims [IRCT]. Issues of the newsletter are available at the link above. The current issue with the Arrigo-Long article can be directly downloaded as a pdf here.
The indefensible position of the APA abetting detainee abuses has become a cause celebre around the world. We regularly receive communications from colleagues in various countries who are outraged by the APA policy. See, for example, the questions raised by the Nordic Psychological Associations last June, questions which, to my knowledge, have so far not been answered by the APA.
Recently the Psychologists for Social Responsibility End Torture Action Committee issued an Appeal for International Support from U.S. Psychologists: Condemn Psychologist Participation in Bush Regime Detainee Abuse. Please help distribute this Appeal to colleagues around the world.
Add comment September 17th, 2008
Interview on Oregon’s KBOO: Psychologists and torture
I ws interviewed last week by Portalnd, OR radio KBOO regrading psychologists, US torture and the role of the American Psychological Association. The show was broadcast as part of KBOO’s 9-11 special programming. The interview can be downloaded here.
Add comment September 15th, 2008
WNYC on Psychologists and Torture: Reisner, Keller, & Eban
WNYC had a devoted a portion of the Leonard Lopate show today to the issue of psychologists in interrogations. [No, I was not on it.] Here is the program description:
Psychologists and Torture
Some professionals are trying to force the American Psychological Association to bar its members from participating in coercive interrogations and torture. Dr. Steven Reisner is running for president of the APA on an anti-terror platform; Dr. Allan Keller is Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. Journalist Katherine Eban has written about psychologists and torture for Vanity Fair magazine.
Listen here:
Add comment September 11th, 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
Torture and the American Psyche: 33 minute video
Earlier we posted the video and audio from our May 3 forum: torture and th American Psyche. The film crew has now edited the three hour discussion down to 33 minutes. A fabulous job!
After watching the digest, go watch the entire show. I guarantee there are many more nuggets there.
Add comment July 28th, 2008
Two Jane Mayer interviews: Letterman and Moyers
Jane Mayer interviewed on Letterman:
Mayer was also interviewed by Bill Moyers. You can read the transcript here or watch here.
Add comment July 26th, 2008
Democracy Now! Jane Mayer on psychologists and torture
Amy Goodman interviewed Jane Mayer about her new book, The Dark Side, today on Democracy Now! today. About a third of the interview was devoted to the role of psychologists in designing and implementing the Bush administration torture program. I post that portion her. [You can read/listen/watch/download the entire interview here.]”
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Jane Mayer. She is author of the book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. Talk about the title, The Dark Side.
JANE MAYER: Well, as we all know, September 11th was a sea change. Everybody says everything changed after that. And it did, but I think one of the most important changes that the country hasn’t really thought about is America became a country that, for the first time in its history, endorsed what is torture in all but name. And since then, it changed, I think, from a war for the country’s security, the war on terror, to a battle for the country’s soul. And we have to really think about whether or not this is what kind of country we want to be.
AMY GOODMAN: You were talking about Abu Zubaydah. Let’s talk about the psychologists involved in his interrogation.
JANE MAYER: Well, they were the ones who showed up there, right by Abu Zubaydah’s side.
AMY GOODMAN: Where?
JANE MAYER: In—well, it’s in an undisclosed location, where Abu Zubaydah was being held by the CIA. Suddenly, a psychologist showed up. And the FBI’s reaction was, “Who is this person?” His name is James Mitchell. He is a contractor to the CIA, a contract interrogator or adviser to the interrogation program. And he started talking about how there were these psychological theories that would help break down the detainees.
And the theories he talked about were experiments with dogs, in which dogs were put in cages and electrocuted and in a random way that completely broke their will to resist. It’s a theory called “learned helplessness,” and it springs from experiments done in the 1970s by a very famous psychologist in America named Martin Seligman, who actually went to lecture at the—a bunch of SERE—people who were involved with the CIA’s program, including this psychologist, James Mitchell. So, James Mitchell and a partner, Bruce Jessen, became advisers to the CIA’s interrogation program.
I think, to step back, what you need to know is that the CIA had no experience really in interrogating prisoners. They had never really held prisoners before. And so, they really had no idea how to go about getting information out of people. So they turned to an incredibly strange place, which is a secret program inside the military that had studied torture, and it had studied torture in order to teach our own soldiers how to survive it if they were ever taken captive by some kind of completely immoral regime. Because they understood torture, the CIA turned to them and said, “Well, so how do you do it?” And basically they reverse-engineered this program in the most ironic way, and what became a program that was defensive became instead a—it was like a blueprint for torture. It was, you know, a rulebook.
And I actually got into this story, because in researching this subject, I started with a question, wondering why is it that all around the world we’re seeing the same really strange kind of mistreatment of prisoners. Is this the work just of freelancing American soldiers? Why do they all have hoods? Why are they shackled in the same stress positions? Why are they being bombarded with these sounds so that their ear drums are, you know, splitting? And why are they being kept up day after day and, you know, exposed to heat and cold and all these things that were particularly odd-seeming? And they were cropping up in Iraq. They were cropping up in Guantanamo and in Afghanistan.
And so, I just went into it without knowing any of the answers and just asking, you know, is there a rulebook to this thing? Is there a curriculum? And, in fact, it turned out there was a curriculum, and the curriculum is from this secret program in the military. It’s known as the SERE program, and the CIA consulted with the SERE program to figure out how to get its methods. And these psychologists that you’re talking about were the ones who basically became the experts in it.
AMY GOODMAN: What was, for example, James Mitchell’s background?
JANE MAYER: He was an instructor. He’s now—he’s a psychologist who oversaw this training program. He had never been an interrogator. He had no background in Islamic fundamentalism. I mean, one of the FBI officers, as they were struggling over what to do with Abu Zubaydah, said, you know, “Do you know anything about Islamic radicals? Do you speak Arabic? Have you got any background in this area?” And he didn’t.
But he felt that because—and I’ve actually talked to Mitchell. He’s a great believer in “Science is science,” as he says, and so he used what he thought was good science, which were experiments that had been done on dogs, to apply them to ways to break down human detainees.
AMY GOODMAN: Alright, let’s go to the—
JANE MAYER: Can I just—wait, Amy. I’ve got to just say one thing, so we don’t wander into some kind of legal problem. A lawyer for Mitchell says that these were not his theories at all and that he never meant to apply them this way. That is absolutely not what colleagues of his have said, and I cite them by name in the book.
AMY GOODMAN: Who?
JANE MAYER: Steve Kleinman, who is a colonel in the Army, and he worked at the SERE program, and he said that James Mitchell would speak continually about using this “learned helplessness” model.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to this “learned helplessness” model.
JANE MAYER: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the former president of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman.
JANE MAYER: OK. Again, and here we have to be careful, but Martin Seligman is one of the most eminent psychologists in America. He teaches at Penn, and—
AMY GOODMAN: University of Pennsylvania.
JANE MAYER: University of Pennsylvania, sorry. And he was the former head of the American Psychological Association, the organization of professional psychologists. And so, very, very prominent man.
He was called in shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured and handed over to the CIA. He was called in to give a lecture, mysterious still exactly what kind of lecture it was. But he spoke for three hours. I talked to him about it by email.
AMY GOODMAN: To whom?
JANE MAYER: I talked to Martin—who the lecture was to? The lecture was to CIA officers, including these psychologists. Both Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell were in the audience. And it took place at the SERE school in San Diego, which is where, again, this unusual program existed.
AMY GOODMAN: Survival, Evasion—
JANE MAYER: Evasion, Resistance, Escape. It’s a program that has sort of kept—that has studied torture in order, supposedly, to inoculate the US soldiers against it. But after 9/11, the same techniques started cropping up around the world, being used by US soldiers.
AMY GOODMAN: You talked to Martin Seligman about this?
JANE MAYER: Yes, I did, and—by email. And he acknowledged he gave a lecture for three hours in April to the—at the SERE school. He has added to that recently, mentioning that these two psychologists were in the audience. He has said he never assisted torture, he is against torture, that his experiments were meant to safeguard US soldiers. It may be that he was just innocently misinterpreted by the CIA.
It’s really hard to tell exactly what happened. But what we do know is that his theories began to be cited by these psychologists, who then oversaw the CIA program and started putting Abu Zubaydah, for instance, in a dog cage and also put a dog collar on another detainee and thrust him into the wall with it headfirst. And these were just the beginning of some of the things these people went through.
AMY GOODMAN: We invited Dr. Martin Seligman to join us on the program. His answer was simple: “I am not available.” But he did respond to what you have written, and I want to read what his statement is—
JANE MAYER: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: —that you have also responded to. This is what he has said, not to us specifically, but his statement to Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side. He said, quote, “The allegation that I ‘provided assistance in the process’ of torture is completely false.
“I gave a three hour lecture sponsored by SERE (the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape branch of the American armed forces) at the San Diego Naval Base in May 2002. My topic was how American troops and American personnel could use what is known about learned helplessness and related findings to resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors. I was told then that since I was (and am) a civilian with no security clearance that they could not discuss American methods of interrogation with me. I have not had contact with SERE since that meeting.
“I have not worked under government contract (or any other contract) on any aspect of interrogation or any aspect of torture. Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen were present in the audience of about 50 others at my speech, and that was, to the best of my knowledge, the sum total of my ‘assisting them in the process.’
“I have had no contact at all with the American Psychological Association about their relevant policies. Most importantly, I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.”
Your response, Jane Mayer.
JANE MAYER: Well, I have to say, first, that he—it’s not a contradiction of The Dark Side, because the allegation that he, quote-unquote, “assisted torture” comes from a blogger who was reading my book. It’s not actually what I say in the book. The book is—he confirms all of the facts in the book, which are very accurate. It describes the lecture he gave. It describes his relationship with the SERE program exactly as it was. And so, I actually—you know, the one thing I have to say is, he’s not and has not contradicted any of the facts in the book itself. He’s reacting to accounts by bloggers there. I think he’s just basically confirming it, reconfirming it. I have to say, every—
AMY GOODMAN: What did you learn from that response?
JANE MAYER: Well, I mean, what I learned is there are a lot of unanswered questions that I would really like to put to him, but when I did try to question him further, he said he had no further comment. He’s a very—obviously a very erudite and savvy man. What did he think he was doing when he went to talk to the CIA at their confab at the SERE school? How did he know Mitchell and Jessen were in the audience, unless—did he speak to them? Did he know what their role was, in terms of interrogations? You know, there are a lot of things that would be great to know. It’s hard to tell, because he keeps shutting down the conversation when it gets interesting.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to go further with the American Psychological Association and a former president. Last year, it was revealed former APA president Joseph Matarazzo is a partner of Mitchell & Jessen, and the New York Times reported the CIA interrogator of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, Deuce Martinez, now works for Mitchell and Jessen’s firm in Spokane, Washington.
JANE MAYER: Right. And it’s—this one firm keeps cropping up again and again. You know, Jessen and Mitchell, I guess, are not members of the APA, from what I understand, but the connections to the APA and this program keep popping up again and again. It may—it’s really interesting. It may say something about why the APA has been so reluctant to take a categorical stance, as psychiatrists have, saying there’s no role for this profession in torture or in coercive interrogations.
Let’s put aside the word “torture”, because it’s a semantic game. But the medical profession takes, you know, an oath. The Hippocratic Oath is “do no harm.” And I think it’s the role of medics, nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, who keep cropping up in reports that you get from detainees about—they’ll be in a moment of extremis, and suddenly a doctor will appear and certify that it’s OK to keep interrogating them. I think it’s an area that is really ripe for investigation.
AMY GOODMAN: On Democracy Now!, we’ve been covering the issue of psychologists, examining the role of psychologists in developing the Bush administration’s interrogation programs for the past two years. During a debate in 2006, the APA president—the then-APA president, Gerald Koocher, mentioned you by name, Jane Mayer. We talked to him on the telephone. This is what he had to say.
DR. GERALD KOOCHER: I wish I had the assurance that Jane Mayer and that Dr. Reisner apparently have that there are APA members doing bad things at Guantanamo or elsewhere, because any time I have asked these journalists or other people who are making these assertions for names so that APA could investigate its members who might be allegedly involved in them, no names have ever been forthcoming.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the former APA president, Gerald Koocher. Your response, Jane Mayer?JANE MAYER: Well, I mean, again, obviously, Martin Seligman was the president of the APA, and he had some role here in lecturing those psychologists who went on and designed this program for the CIA. So, I mean, there are all kinds of things that, if they wanted to be vigilant, they could look into at the APA. They seem to have a reluctance to dig beneath the surface.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, last year, Democracy Now! went to the APA annual convention in San Francisco to cover the debate that they were having around the issue of passing a moratorium on involvement in coercive interrogations. I wanted to play one of the statements. It was by Army Colonel Larry James. He was flown up from Guantanamo, the chief psychologist at Guantanamo and member of the APA governing body, to oppose the proposed moratorium on psychologists’ involvement in coercive interrogations.
COL. LARRY JAMES: Thank God this is a democracy. I actually welcome and support all of the discussion and the debate. That’s why I wear this uniform, because I’m very, very proud of this democracy. So I want to thank Dr. Altman and his colleagues for having the courage to speak out, although I may disagree with many of the things they say. God bless America.
Number two, torture is wrong. How could anyone disagree with that? So, under no conditions, with myself or any of these psychologists you see here today in the uniforms that they wear representing our country, would ever support anything that allows torture or inhumane treatment.
Thirdly and lastly, if we remove psychologists from the front, in any capacity whatsoever, innocent people are going to die. Innocent people are going to get hurt. Phil Zombardo told us this was going to happen thirty years ago. And so, in going back through the chronicles of histories, any detention facilities we’ve set up anywhere in the world, when you don’t have psychologists involved in the policy decision makings, when you don’t have psychologists involved in the day-to-day activity, bad things are going to happen, innocent people are going to die.
UNIDENTIFIED: Dr. James?
COL. LARRY JAMES: Sorry. Thank you, Madame President.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Colonel Larry James. He was head psychologist at Guantanamo, recently hired as dean at Wright State University in Ohio. Interestingly, right after that, another psychologist got up. Her name was Dr. Laurie Wagner, a Dallas psychologist. And she shot back, “If psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, then those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest by leaving.”JANE MAYER: Well, obviously there are a lot of psychologists who are very defensive about this role, and there’s a reason why. Starting in the summer of 2002, there were psychologists from the SERE program going down to Guantanamo and supervising and advising on the interrogations there, which included the interrogation of Mohammed Qahtani, the so-called twentieth hijacker, who was put through the most unbelievable program of psychological abuse. I don’t really know how anybody could defend it. Some of the transcripts have come out.
He was subjected to fifty-four days of only four hours of sleep a night. He had bags of fluid put into his veins, so that he had to urgently go to the bathroom; they wouldn’t let him get up and go, so he had to urinate on himself. They put, you know, the bra on his head. They made him do dog tricks. They put a birthday hat on his head and sang “God Bless America” to him. I mean, looking at the—they told him to bark like a dog. They told him that he was lower than a dog. I mean, it goes on and on and on. People have to see these transcripts to believe it.
And the fact that there were psychologists who were advising on this program is—if the APA doesn’t think that’s worthy of taking a look at, then I don’t know much about the—I don’t know much about the APA, but it makes me really wonder about it.
AMY GOODMAN: The APA is the largest association of psychologists in the world, almost 150,000 psychologists. How does the APA’s stance on involvement compare to the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association?
JANE MAYER: I mean, ever since World War II, during which the Nazis subverted the medical profession in the most horrendous ways, there have been ethical codes passed about what role doctors should play in this. There’s—doctors are supposed to, first, do no harm, and all scientists are supposed to, first, do no harm. And, you know, I’ve interviewed a number of scientists in this book who say that, you know, in particular, there’s a responsibility for psychologists to use their knowledge in good ways, because they have such skills in understanding people’s psyches, they really understand how to break people down, as well as they do how to fix them up. And, you know, used in the wrong way, it’s a powerful tool to really hurt someone.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, then come back to our guest, Jane Mayer. Her new book is out, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. And if you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Stay with us.
[Read the rest of the interview here.]
1 comment July 18th, 2008
Mayer on Seligman
At Andrew Sullivan’s blog Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, responds to Martin Seligman’s denial of involvement in the development of CIA interrogation tactics:
Mayer on Seligman
Professor Seligman’s disavowal actually adds a rather interesting new fact to the story of how the psychology profession played a role in the CIA’s “special” interrogation program. In “The Dark Side,” I established by interviewing him, that he had personally spoken for three hours at the Navy’s SERE School in San Diego, in April of 2002, at a somewhat mysterious confab organized in part by the head of Behavioral Science at the CIA.
This was a pretty crucial moment in the development of America’s secret interrogation and detention program. Abu Zubayda had been captured just weeks before, and the CIA was trying to come up with ways to make him talk. They had no patience for the slow, rapport-building methods used by the FBI, whose role in the case they had just superceded. But what to do? At this very moment, Professor Seligman, it seems, agreed to participate in what he says was an unexplained private high-level CIA meeting, held on the campus of the part of the Navy that runs a secret program emulating torture – the SERE School in San Diego.
Professor Seligman says he has no idea why he was called in from his academic position in Pennsylvania, to suddenly appear at this CIA event. He just showed up and talked for three hours about how dogs, when exposed to horrible treatment, give up all hope, and become compliant. Why the CIA wanted to know about this at this point, he says he never asked. But somehow- and this is what is news as far as I know – Professor Seligman does know that in his audience were the two psychologists who soon after became the key advisers to the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. So, Professor Seligman, must have had some contact with them, since he knew they were in his audience. Did he speak with them? What did they talk about?
According to sources close to the FBI, around the same time, one of those psychologists, James Mitchell, showed up where Abu Zubayda was being held, and started talking about Dr. Seligman’s theories of “Learned Helplessness” as shedding useful light on how to coerce Zubayda into talking. Specifically, he spoke of Seligman’s dog experiments, in which random electric shocks broke the dogs’ will to resist. An FBI agent was appalled – pointing out they were dealing with humans, not dogs. But Mitchell said it was “good science” for both.
(Mitchell declined to elaborate on the treatment of Abu Zubayda, when I interviewed him, but admitted he admired Seligman’s work on Learned Helplessness. A lawyer for Mitchell later claimed that he had not tried to apply the theory to detainees. But a colleague, Col. Steve Kleinman, who worked in the SERE program, said Mitchell talked all the time about how Learned Helplessness provided the blueprint for interrogating detainees).
So- did Seligman assist the U.S. Torture program? I am careful not to say so in “The Dark Side,”- I just recount the facts of his odd visit to the SERE school. So- he is not denying anything in my book.
But now that he brings all of this up again, it would be nice if he’d answer a few more questions. What exactly did he think he was doing that day in April of 2002 with the CIA? How did he know who Mitchell and Jessen were, and, what role did he think they were playing at that time? Maybe he was as clueless as he says he was. But, why doesn’t he then tell us know what he thinks of his theories being used in this way? Does he renounce Mitchell and Jessen? Does he think they used psychology immorally? He was the head of the APA- has he ever spoken out about this? Has he ever complained to the CIA about what they did with his science? Time for some more information here…instead of non-denial denials…
1 comment July 18th, 2008
Former APA President Martin Seligman denies involvement in developing CIA tactics
Former APA President Martin Seligman has sent the following comment on last night’s blog posting regarding his possible role in the CIA’s torture program and asked me to post it:
July 14, 2008
The allegation that I “provided assistance in the process” of torture is completely false.
I gave a three hour lecture sponsored by SERE (the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape branch of the American armed forces) at the San Diego Naval Base in May 2002. My topic was how American troops and American personnel could use what is known about learned helplessness and related findings to resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors.
I was told then that since I was (and am) a civilian with no security clearance that they could not discuss American methods of interrogation with me. I have not had contact with SERE since that meeting. I have not worked under government contract (or any other contract) on any aspect of interrogation or any aspect of torture. Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen were present in the audience of about 50 others at my speech, and that was, to the best of my knowledge, the sum total of my “assisting them in the process.”
I have had no contact at all with the American Psychological Association about their relevant policies.
As of today, I have not seen Jane Mayer’s book, only the blogs. If necessary, I will comment further on its contents.
Most importantly, I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.
Martin Seligman
6 comments July 14th, 2008