Psyche, Science, and Society

Soldier waterboards four-year-old daughter

One of many reasons to be against torture is that the brutality is likely to be brought home, by the torturers, the witnesses, and those in our society who learn that torture is an acceptable way to deal with conflicts. A British paper, the Daily Mail, brings word that a US soldier has waterboarded his four-year-old daughter because had trouble with the alphabet!

U.S. soldier ‘waterboarded his own daughter, 4, because she couldn’t recite alphabet’

A soldier waterboarded his four-year-old daughter because she was unable to recite her alphabet.

Joshua Tabor admitted to police he had used the CIA torture technique because he was so angry.

As his daughter ’squirmed’ to get away, Tabor said he submerged her face three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline.

Tabor, 27, who had won custody of his daughter only four weeks earlier, admitted choosing the punishment because the girl was terrified of water.

he practice of waterboarding was used by the CIA to break Al Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay. Detainees had water poured over their face until they feared they would drown. President Barack Obama has since outlawed the practice.

Tabor, a soldier at the Lewis-McChord base in Tacoma, Washington, was arrested after being seen walking around his neighbourhood wearing a Kevlar military helmet and threatening to break windows.

Police discovered the alleged waterboarding when they went to his home in the Tacoma suburb of Yelm and spoke to his girlfriend.

She told them about the alleged torture and the terrified girl was found hiding in a closet, with bruising on her back and scratch marks on her neck and throat.

Asked how she got the bruises, the girl is said to have replied: ‘Daddy did it.’

During a police interview Tabor allegedly admitted grabbing his daughter, placing her on the kitchen counter and submerging her face into a bowl of water.

Sergeant Rob Carlson said the punishment was carried out because the girl would not recite the alphabet.

Police have not revealed Tabor’s military service, but his base is home to units that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tabor has been charged with assault and ordered to remain on his base and have no contact with his daughter or girlfriend, who has not been named. He is due to appear in court this week.

The girl has been taken into care. Her natural mother lives in Kansas but Tabor had been granted custody by a court.

February 8th, 2010

Anthopologists oppose counterinsurgency use of knowledge

TIME covers the controversy in anthropology around the military’s use of social scientists in its Human Terrain Systems program. Unlike the situation in psychology, where the American Psychological Association is totally in bed with the military-intelligence establishment, anthropologists have taken an ethical stand. Interestingly, the authors of the American Anthropological Association report condemning the HTS program includes several anthropologists who work with the military. [The AAA has links to additional press accounts of this issue on their web page announcing the report's release.]:

Social Science vs. The Pentagon: Should Anthropologists Go to War?

By Christopher Shay

Anthropologists have traditionally had a pretty wonkish reputation, earnestly taking field notes while interviewing a tribal chief, or lecturing in some college classroom about the intricacies of indigenous clan-systems. If the Pentagon has its way, though, more anthropologists will exchange their tweed for military fatigues and leave the halls of academe for the frontlines. For the last two years, the U.S. military has embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with American troops in order to improve the army’s cultural IQ. But last week, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a report coming out strongly against the program, saying that both in concept and application, it “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”

Since 2007, the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System has been placing social scientists in every army combat brigade, regiment and Marine Corps regimental combat team. There are now more than 500 people employed by HTS, a number that is increasing rapidly. On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, their job is to gather information and provide commanders with a greater understanding of the local population, reducing the need for lethal force by helping the army determine the needs of the community, according to Steve Fondacaro the project manager at HTS. Secretary of State Robert Gates has publicly praised the project, and one army colonel told Congress that one Human Terrain team reduced violent clashes encountered by his brigade in Afghanistan by 60-70%. As President Barack Obama revamps his Afghanistan strategy, getting ready to send 30,000 more soldiers, HTS is poised to become a major part of America’s war, helping troops navigate in a foreign land. “We’re pleased to find ourselves fully aligned with the goals [of the Obama administration],” says Fondacaro.

But if the military’s program is to continue its expansion in Afghanistan with the nation’s top scholars, it may be facing an uphill battle. The AAA says the program violates its code of ethics — a sort of Hippocratic Oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm. Two years ago, the AAA condemned the HTS program, but this month’s 72-page report goes into much greater detail about the potential for the military to misuse information that social scientists gather; some anthropologists involved in the report say it’s already happening. David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martins University in Washington and one of the co-authors of the AAA report, says the army appears to be using the anthropological information to better target the enemy, which, if true, would be a gross violation of the anthropological code. One Human Terrain anthropologist told the Dallas Morning News that she wasn’t worried if the information she provided was used to kill or capture an insurgent. “The reality is there are people out there who are looking for bad guys to kill,” she said. “I’d rather they did not operate in a vacuum.” Price and other critics see this as proof that the anthropologists don’t have full control over the information they gather and that commanders can use it to kill. “The real fault with Human Terrain is that it doesn’t even try to protect the people being studied,” says Price. “I don’t think it’s accidental that [the Pentagon] didn’t come up with ethical guidelines.”

HTS adamantly denies that its program is designed to help the army improve its targeting, saying on its website that the role of the program “is neither to directly assist in lethal targeting of insurgents nor the collection of actionable military intelligence.” But Ben Wintersteen, who recently finished the nearly five-month HTS training program and has a masters in anthropology, says oversight is lacking. Once on the battlefield, “there’s definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject,” Wintersteen says. “There’s no way to know when people are violating ethical guidelines on the field.”

Still, Wintersteen, who is waiting to be sent to Iraq through HTS, says the AAA’s decision to attack the program will ultimately put more lives in danger by undermining the organization’s ability to provide guidance and dissuading top talent from joining. So far, HTS has struggled to bring in topflight social scientists with regional knowledge. “It hurts HTS and the people downrange like the American soldiers and the locals who depend on the rational analysis that anthropology brings,” Wintersteen says. In his training class of about 50 people, there were only about 13 social scientists, five with Ph.Ds — many of the others came from a military background. Because of the AAA, “there are a lot of highly motivated, ethical, critical anthropologists who are being discouraged from helping the program.” HTS project manager Fondacaro admits that finding recruits with regional expertise is “very rare,” but, he argues, HTS is creating a population of social scientists with firsthand experience in Iraq and Afghanistan where none existed before.

HTS is not the first time anthropologists have become involved with war efforts. Before the First World War, the field techniques of the discipline were used by the British to administrate and subdue the different cultural groups at the edges of its empire. Later in World War II, anthropologist Ruth Benedict played a key role in President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to allow the Japanese Emperor’s reign to continue as part of Japan’s surrender to the U.S. According to Price, who has written a book on the use of anthropology during World War II, the majority of American anthropologists were actively involved the Allied war effort. One British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, even led a team of ruthless Kachin fighers — the indigenous group he was studying in Burma — against the nation’s Japanese occupiers.

But the relationship between the military and anthropology soured during the ’60s and early ’70s. In 1964, the U.S. army recruited scholars for Project Camelot, a program whose goals included helping the U.S. army “assist friendly governments in dealing with active insurgency problems” such as in Chile, the project’s test case. The project never moved out of Chile, however; in 1965, once the public got wind of it, Project Camelot was canceled. Later, in 1970, documents stolen from a U.S. anthropologist’s office implicated a number of social scientists in clandestine counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand. These two scandals created an uproar at the AAA, and many anthropologists grew wary of military funded programs. Over the last 30 years, according to an article by Montgomery McFate, the senior social scientist at HTS and a trained anthropologist, “the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its Ivory Tower.”

AAA policy is not against anthropologists helping the military — a few of the co-authors of the AAA report, in fact, work closely with the military. But McFate’s larger point stands: For the last few decades, anthropologists have had little influence in military or foreign policy circles. As American troops adopt a counterinsurgency strategy, cultural knowledge has become a foremost Pentagon concern. They know historically the record for winning a short-term counterinsurgency is not good, so they’ve once again sought out cultural expertise. The discipline’s checkered history, however, has made many anthropologists sensitive to the parallels between HTS and the colonial era. “Anthropology was used in much the same way to help colonial militaries and colonial occupation,” says David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped the military from asking for their help. “What’s been missing is the insight and the experiences that social scientists bring to these kinds of conflicts,” Fondacaro says. The traditional army, he says, is good at treating “the symptoms of insurgency” — fighting armed violent groups or reducing the number of IEDs, for instance — but “what HTS is focused on is the disease. There’s a reason why the population tolerates and sometimes actively supports groups that advocate violence.” That, says Fondacaro, is what HTS is trying to diagnose and ultimately cure.

When it comes down to it, the AAA has no sanctioning power, and the decision whether or not to join HTS comes down to the individual. For now at least, the Pentagon wants to leverage the cultural insights of academics to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but whether HTS has brought more top scholars into the military fold or only widened the schism between academia and the military remains unclear. James Der Derian, a professor of political science at Brown University who recently finished a documentary on HTS, and whose friend and colleague Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan, one of three HTS social scientists to die on duty, says “the emphasis in previous wars has been more about how you defeat the enemy by controlling territory,” but now, “the center of gravity shifted to a psychological territory.” HTS is a clear indication that the Pentagon has realized in order to win the wars of the 21st century, cultural knowledge will need to be integrated into combat operations. And how do we do that exactly? Says Der Derian: “We’re still trying to figure that out.”

December 13th, 2009

Psychiatrist warning of violence danger among returned Marines fired

UPDATED AND EXPANDED: In the wake of the Fort Hood tragedy, there have been media reports that mental health staff had been concerned about Major Hasan, but did not report their concerns to higher authorities. Rather, these staff hoped he would disappear, into Fort Hood and then Afghanistan.The press and pundits have been extremely critical of those professionals for failing on act on their concerns.

Meanwhile, Mark Benjamin today tells of a psychiatrist serving the military who did express his concerns about potential tragedy, and was “disappeared” by firing as a consequence. Benjamin tells the story of Dr. Kernan Manion, a civilian contract psychiatrist at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina who repeatedly warned that Marines recently returned from combat zones were in danger of acting violently, whether toward themselves or others.

“A significant number of Navy medical officials and Marine commanders do not get it,” a frustrated Manion said about the situation at Camp Lejeune. “They do not understand the implications of what happens if somebody loses it,” explained Manion, who has 25 years of experience as a psychiatrist and who also specializes in traumatic brain injury — exactly the kinds of skills needed so desperately at military hospitals, because mental problems and brain injuries are the signature wounds of the ongoing wars. “People either commit suicide, commit homicide, get drunk, beat up the wife, all these things. I’ve seen it,” he added. “That is how serious this is and they just don’t get it.”

Dr. Manion followed procedures and expressed his concerns to the chain of command:

In an April 24 memo to his superiors, including Cmdr. Robert O’Byrne, head of mental health for the Camp Lejeune Naval Hospital, Manion describes a frustrated Marine punching a telephone pole with his bare fists outside a treatment clinic, then storming around, cursing, with a piece of lumber with a nail in it, though nothing was done to ensure he didn’t hurt himself, again, or others. In another case, a severely homicidal and suicidal Marine pounded his fists into a table and stormed out of treatment. Yet the hospital, Manion complained to his superiors, made no efforts to discuss these cases or how to better handle similar events in the future.

Manion was instructed by his contractor employer to shut up:

On June 24, a supervisor for the contractor warned Manion to stop making trouble. “Kernan Manion, it is requested that you cease and desist all further correspondence with the government,” the supervisor with NiteLines, Pamela Friend, wrote to Manion.

When he got no response from his employer or the commanders at the base, he took the next step specified by regulations for complaints. He wrote to the various Inspectors General:

On Aug. 30, he appealed to a series of military inspectors general in a written complaint. He warned of an “immediate threat of loss of life and/or harm to service members’ selves or others” if conditions did not improve. He complained of a “complete disregard for … implications for patient safety and well-being.” He decried that officials at Lejeune had ignored “repeated overt and emphatically stated concerns about the very safety and overall welfare of the affected patients.” And he warned that “many patients’ lives are imminently at risk.”

As a result, four days later Manion was fired, effective immediately, with no reason given. His contractor employer told Benjamin that the firing was at the request of the Navy.

While it may be tempting to see a giant conspiracy at work here, I believe the processes involved are more subtle. There are indications that the top military brass and Pentagon officials are genuinely concerned about the rampant trauma, including PTSD among troops returning from combat zones. They have funded studies, instituted screening programs, and increased treatment resources, both on the battlefield and after deployment.

There is, however, little evidence that this concern has filtered down to middle-level officers and officials. The problem is at least partly psychological. Much of the military is still in a “see no evil, hear no evil” mode of massive denial, in which they assume that highly traumatized troops are malingerers. The macho culture of the military, especially the Marines, is threatened by real acceptance that exposure to combat can profoundly damage many otherwise healthy individuals. It is easier to assume that those negatively affected must have had something wrong with them to begin with.  The brass and Pentagon officials would need to take much stronger steps to get officers, NCOs, and officials up and down the chain of command to openly face this serious problem.

Further, to really accept the extent of combat-associated trauma among our troops is to face some of the consequences of our wars without end. The pursuit of these wars depends upon the ability to deny, to oneself and to the public, the immensity of their negative consequences. US officials denied the extent of civilian casualties in Iraq and they deny the extent of trauma their policies are creating among US troops.

Often the denial isn’t total. It is briefly acknowledged and then turned away from with a claim to oneself and to others that the problem is being dealt with. But efforts to improve the mental health of troops while laudable, remain woefully inadequate. The single action that would most improve the situation, to end the repeated deployments to combat settings where the dangers are many and the goals elusive, remains off the table.

In the meantime, Dr. Manion remains concerned about the marines he is no longer allowed to treat:

He still worries. “I don’t like seeing these guys mistreated,” Manion said. “This is akin to somebody dying on the battlefield and not being attended to,” he added. “These guys are saying they are broken and need help, and the system is saying, ‘next, next, next.’”

Mark Benjamin’s article:

Camp Lejeune whistle-blower fired
A psychiatrist who tried to prevent Fort Hood-style violence among Marines about to “lose it” instead loses his job

By Mark Benjamin

Last April, two Marines at Camp Lejeune predicted to a psychiatrist that some Marine back from war was going to “lose it.” Concerned, the psychiatrist asked what that meant. One of the Marines responded, “One of these guys is liable to come back with a loaded weapon and open fire.”

They weren’t talking about Marines suffering from a tangle of mental and religious angst, like news reports suggest haunted the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. The risk they reported at Camp Lejeune was broader and systemic. Upon returning home, troops suffering mental health problems were getting dumped into an overwhelmed healthcare system that responded ineptly to their crises, the men reported, and they also faced harassment from Marine Corps superiors ignorant of the severity of their problems and disdainful of those who sought psychiatric help.

As Dr. Kernan Manion investigated the two Marines’ claims about conditions at the North Carolina military base, the largest Marine base on the East Coast, he found they were true. Manion, a psychiatrist hired last January to treat Marines coming home from war with acute mental problems, warned his superiors of looming trouble at Camp Lejeune in a series of increasingly urgent memos.

• Continue Reading

But instead of being praised for preventing what might have been another Fort Hood massacre, Manion was fired by the contractor that hired him, NiteLines Kuhana LLC. A spokeswoman for the firm says it let Manion go at the Navy’s behest. The Navy declined to comment on this story.

While military officials and the media examine whether the Army missed warning signs that might have indicated an unhinged Nidal Hasan was capable of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Manion’s Camp Lejeune story is a cautionary tale of what happens to those who blow the whistle on conditions for military personnel with mental problems.

Manion says the April incident with the two Marines was just one of a series of disturbing events and serious problems with mental healthcare he saw at Camp Lejeune, a base that may be best known for a water contamination scandal that led to high rates of cancer and birth defects among Marines and their families who lived there. He was particularly concerned to see that troubled Marines were stricken with the overwhelming impulse to commit suicide or murder, telltale signs of severe combat stress.

In a telephone interview from his Surf City, N.C., home, Manion talked of overburdened staff and inadequate resources at the Naval hospital at Camp Lejeune. The psychiatrist charged that medical officials failed to study and discuss violent events among returning Marines in an effort to prevent further, similar events, and did little planning to improve handling distraught Marines who were killing themselves and others in shocking numbers. In 2008, for example, 42 Marines committed suicide and 146 attempted to do so, according to the Marine Corps.

Coincidentally or not, within 12 hours of Hasan’s shooting spree, Camp Lejeune officials discovered the body of one Marine and took into custody another Marine, Pvt. Jonathan Law, who is accused of killing his colleague. Law, who had served a seven-month tour in Iraq, was suffering from self-inflicted wounds when arrested.

Mirroring reports from military installations across the country, Manion also reported harassment of Marines seeking mental help. The psychiatrist began to worry about the possibility of a major outburst of violence on the base.

“A significant number of Navy medical officials and Marine commanders do not get it,” a frustrated Manion said about the situation at Camp Lejeune. “They do not understand the implications of what happens if somebody loses it,” explained Manion, who has 25 years of experience as a psychiatrist and who also specializes in traumatic brain injury — exactly the kinds of skills needed so desperately at military hospitals, because mental problems and brain injuries are the signature wounds of the ongoing wars. “People either commit suicide, commit homicide, get drunk, beat up the wife, all these things. I’ve seen it,” he added. “That is how serious this is and they just don’t get it.”

Manion believes he likely prevented a “Columbine-style attack” late last April after the two Marines who warned that someone might “lose it” directed him to a third Marine who seemed on the verge of violence. Manion also provided his superiors with documentation showing troubling incidents and neglect for the needs of returning Marines that could easily precipitate violence. Maybe not on the scale of the massacre at Fort Hood, but more like the rampage by a frustrated Sgt. John Russell, who gunned down five fellow soldiers at a military mental health facility in Baghdad last May.

Manion provided to Salon a stack of correspondence with superiors, a virtual crystal ball predicting dire consequences if mental healthcare at Camp Lejeune isn’t immediately improved.

In an April 24 memo to his superiors, including Cmdr. Robert O’Byrne, head of mental health for the Camp Lejeune Naval Hospital, Manion describes a frustrated Marine punching a telephone pole with his bare fists outside a treatment clinic, then storming around, cursing, with a piece of lumber with a nail in it, though nothing was done to ensure he didn’t hurt himself, again, or others. In another case, a severely homicidal and suicidal Marine pounded his fists into a table and stormed out of treatment. Yet the hospital, Manion complained to his superiors, made no efforts to discuss these cases or how to better handle similar events in the future.

“There was — and continues to be — no means of discussion of high-intensity/dangerous cases such as this,” a desperate Manion wrote on April 24. He warned of “immediate concerns of physical safety” at the base’s mental health facilities. Manion wanted to set up special protocols for handling intense situations, such as having specially trained MPs ready to intercede if things got bad, and a plan to hospitalize potentially violent patients quickly. “They dragged their feet on that,” he told me.

Within days that April, Manion intervened with the two Marines who’d warned of colleagues potentially losing it. They directed him to a third Marine who they believed was going to go on a shooting rampage. Manion worked hard to get that Marine into treatment, possibly averting bloodshed. The two Marines involved also reported harassment for working limited duty while seeking mental healthcare for themselves. They heatedly claimed that two noncommissioned officers had recently told them, “I don’t care why you are on [limited duty]. You are nothing but worthless pieces of shit,” according to an April 29 e-mail Manion sent to O’Byrne and others, complaining about such attitudes.

Like many healthcare providers at military bases across the country, Manion technically worked for a military contractor, Spectrum Healthcare Resources, a subcontractor for  NiteLines Kuhana LLC.

On June 24, a supervisor for the contractor warned Manion to stop making trouble. “Kernan Manion, it is requested that you cease and desist all further correspondence with the government,” the supervisor with NiteLines, Pamela Friend, wrote to Manion.

But Manion was still frustrated that Camp Lejeune did not seem to be taking these risks seriously. On Aug. 30, he appealed to a series of military inspectors general in a written complaint. He warned of an “immediate threat of loss of life and/or harm to service members’ selves or others” if conditions did not improve. He complained of a “complete disregard for … implications for patient safety and well-being.” He decried that officials at Lejeune had ignored “repeated overt and emphatically stated concerns about the very safety and overall welfare of the affected patients.” And he warned that “many patients’ lives are imminently at risk.”

Four days later, the contractor fired Manion “effective immediately,” according to his termination e-mail. The note provides no reason for the firing. Manion was directed to clean out his office the next day, under the watchful eye of a chief petty officer, and have no further contact with his patients.

In a statement to Salon, NiteLines said the Navy wanted Manion fired, but did not explain why. “The treatment facility at Camp Lejeune notified (Nitelines) that Dr. Manion did not meet the Government’s requirements in accordance with the contract, and they directed he be removed from the schedule,” it reads.

Salon e-mailed the spokesman for the Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune, Raymond Applewhite, with details of this story and then described some of these facts with him in a follow-up telephone call, requesting an interview with O’Byrne. The Navy did not respond further.

Manion left Camp Lejeune after he got fired, but he did not stop worrying about the potential for violence there. In mid-September, Manion filed a 14-page complaint with the Department of Defense inspector general. On Sept. 29, he warned the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery inspector general in writing of “serious mismanagement of post-deployment mental health services that was both endangering patient, staff and community safety as well as severely compromising the quality of care” for returning Marines. Manion noted that the poor care at Camp Lejeune continued despite “the ever present threat of life-threatening violence by distraught service members towards themselves or others.”

Finally, Manion wrote President Obama that same day. “Frankly, in my more than 25 years of clinical practice, I’ve never seen such immense emotional suffering and psychological brokenness — literally a relentless stream of courageous, well-trained and formerly strong Marines deeply wounded psychologically by the immensity of their combat experience,” he wrote to the president. Manion added, however, that at Camp Lejeune, that immense problem was being met with “inadequate treatment” and “callous indifference.”

He still worries. “I don’t like seeing these guys mistreated,” Manion said. “This is akin to somebody dying on the battlefield and not being attended to,” he added. “These guys are saying they are broken and need help, and the system is saying, ‘next, next, next.’”

November 16th, 2009

The stresses of military mental health personnnel

As we ponder the tragedy at Fort hood, the New York Times has a good article on the stresses facing military psychiatrists and other military mental health personnel.

Painful Stories Take a Toll on Military Therapists

By Benedict Carey, Damien Cave, and Lizette Alvarez

Many of the patients who fill the day are bereft, angry, broken. Their experiences are gruesome, their distress lasting and the process of recovery exhausting. The repeated stories of battle and loss can leave the most professional therapist numb or angry.

And hanging over it all, for psychiatrists and psychologists in today’s military, is the prospect of their own deployment — of working under fire in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the Pentagon has assigned more therapists to combat units than in previous wars.

That was the world that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, inhabited until Thursday, when he was accused of one of the worst mass shootings ever on a military base in the United States, an attack that killed 13 and left dozens wounded. Five of the dead were fellow therapists, the Army said.

Major Hasan’s motives are still being investigated. But those who work day in and day out treating the psychological wounds of the country’s warriors say Thursday’s rampage has put a spotlight on the strains of their profession and of the patients they treat.

Major Hasan was one of a thin line of military therapists trying to hold off a rising tide of need. So far this year, 117 soldiers on active duty were reported to have committed suicide. The Army has only 408 psychiatrists — military, civilian and contractors — serving about 553,000 active-duty troops around the world. As a result, some soldiers home from war, suffering from nightmares and panic attacks, say they have waited almost a year to see a psychiatrist.

Many military professionals, meanwhile, describe crushing schedules with 10 or more patients a day, most struggling with devastating trauma or mutilated bodies that are the product of war and the highly advanced care that kept them alive.

Some of those hired to heal others end up needing help themselves. Some go home at night too depressed to talk to their children. Others, like Bret A. Moore, a former Army psychologist at Fort Hood, ultimately quit.

“I planned for a career in the military, but I burned out” after about five years, he said.

The biggest problem, Dr. Moore said, was “compassion fatigue.”

“I thought that was a bogus phenomenon, but it’s true,” he said. “You become detached, you start to feel like you can’t connect with your patients, you run out of empathy. And the last thing you want to do is talk about it with someone else. It really puts a wedge between you and loved ones.”

Whatever the facts in Major Hasan’s case, some therapists who work with the military agree that the tragedy is likely to have a “lasting impact on how we look at mental health providers,” said Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, and the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.

The Army has added to their ranks in recent years, as the number of soldiers with the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder has climbed to 34,000. But the shooting has raised a pressing question: Who counsels the counselors? Dr. Moore and other therapists who have worked in the military or for Veterans Affairs said that mental health evaluations of therapists themselves were virtually nonexistent.

“I have worked with the Army, the Navy, the V.A., and I’m not aware of any formal, systematic process to evaluate professionals,” said Dr. Andy Morgan, a psychiatrist at the National Center for P.T.S.D.

At Walter Reed, where Major Hasan was in training until recently, Lt. Col. Brett Schneider, a psychiatrist, described a complicated system of checks and balances, including a training committee with superiors and civilians who evaluate residents and mental health staff members.

“There is a lot more built into the processes to keep tabs on each other,” said Colonel Schneider, who spoke on the condition that he not be asked any questions about Major Hasan. “If somebody is starting to get to the point where these things are a problem, there are a number of ways we can intervene.”

Generally, though, the military, like many large civilian employers, relies on self-evaluation and voluntary employee-assistance programs.

“Once training is over, you’re basically on your own,” Dr. Paulus said.

At Fort Hood, the nation’s largest military base, Major Hasan, like other therapists, would have had to manage many patients with severe combat stress. At his relatively high rank, he would have been expected to seek help on his own if he thought he needed it, experts said.

The base sees continual traffic in and out of war zones, and the work conditions are especially stressful, according to at least one report provided to the Army.

Dr. Stephen M. Stahl, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, who worked on the report, said the base’s program for soldiers returning from war simply lacked the staff it needed. He said there were about 15 psychiatrists on staff, treating hundreds of inpatients and outpatients. Generally, the psychiatrists did not do therapy but prescribed medication.

“They’re so under-resourced that people just don’t end up getting enough care,” Dr. Stahl said.

He added: “It’s a pretty damn stressful place to be. I think it’s a horrible place to practice psychiatry.”

Soldiers described similar situations at many other installations. Jason Yorty, 34, an Arabic linguist with the Army who deployed to Iraq four times and Afghanistan once, said that when he returned to Fort Gordon in Georgia two years ago, the system appeared to be overwhelmed and resistant to diagnosing problems that would require multiple visits.

First, he said, he saw a physician’s assistant at the base, then a clinical social worker, neither of whom agreed that his nightmares and panic attacks amounted to post-traumatic stress disorder. “It took me eight months just to get an appointment to see a psychiatrist,” he said. “When I got there, he blew me off.”

A few weeks later, after he refused the Army psychiatrist’s prescription for a sleep aid, a nonmilitary mental health provider gave him a diagnosis of P.T.S.D.

Experts say that the military has made big strides in taking mental health issues seriously, but that military therapists are sometimes pressured to place the needs of the force above the needs of the patient. Indeed, they can be overruled by commanders who need soldiers in the field.

Since 2001, the military has deployed many soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or other ailments. “The focus in the military is readiness,” said Charles Figley, a psychologist at Tulane University. “There is an inherent conflict.”

And in war zones, the relationships between soldiers and mental health providers can be especially fraught. Therapists in Iraq said that they could often do little more than provide a few coping tips to soldiers, just enough to keep them functioning. There were simply too many people and not enough time, as Army officials have acknowledged.

Providing care has its own risks. In studies of therapists working to soothe mental distress in victims of violence, whether criminal, sexual or combat-related, researchers have documented what is called secondary trauma: contact distress, of a kind. In one 2004 study of social workers on cases stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks, researchers found that the more deeply therapists were involved with victims, the more likely they were to experience such trauma. The same associations have been found in doctors working with survivors in war zones.

Dr. Hasan was reportedly facing his first deployment — a prospect that scares even trained fighters, many of whom become increasingly frantic before going to war, according to surveys.

The workload itself is enough to give psychiatrists and psychologists pause. In Iraq, with sectarian violence at its peak in 2007, officials say there were 200 such specialists serving more than 130,000 troops, driving between bases on bomb-rigged roads.

The experience of Lt. Col. Reagon P. Carr was common. In six months with the Second Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division in 2007, he said he saw more than 700 soldiers. In one typical week, he visited three locations, meeting with 36 soldiers who came in for immediate help: 3 were contemplating suicide, a dozen were unable to sleep, 5 said they were apprehensive about returning to a dysfunctional marriage and 16 said they were disgruntled with their leadership.

Few who are deployed feel prepared for this punishing task.

Dr. Peter Linnerooth, a former Army psychologist who treated soldiers in Germany and Iraq and at Fort Hood, said that in Schweinfurt, Germany, he was the sole psychologist for a community of 10,000 people in 2005.

At Fort Hood, he treated a burly man whose job in Iraq was to recover the bodies of soldiers. His patient was devastated by one particular loss, Dr. Linnerooth said.

“He had picked up this corpse that was so badly burned, it weighed about 20 pounds,” he said. “He was this big, tough, awesome guy. For him, it was like picking up his daughter. That was an extreme case. But you get those at least once or twice a week.”

If it turns out that Major Hasan did in fact break partly under the stress of the job and impending deployment, many veterans would not be surprised.

“If this guy can go over the edge, imagine what it is like for the actual combat troops who have been through four or five deployments,” said Bryan Hannah, 22, a disabled Iraq war veteran from San Marcos, Tex., who was stationed at Fort Hood until he was discharged a year ago because of post-traumatic stress disorder and other injuries.

He added, “There are a lot of others who are worse off than him.”

Erica Goode and Gretel C. Kovach contributed reporting.

November 8th, 2009

Afghan women on US troops: Stay? Or leave?

American Prospect has an interesting discussion of differeing attitudes among Afghan women toward the US presence there. In case you don’t read the entire article, it needs to be considered in the context of the final paragraph:

To a large degree, the answer depends on whether one believes that the American military can be a force for humanitarianism. After the last eight years, that’s a hard faith to sustain. Staying in Afghanistan seems indefensible. The trouble is, so does leaving.

I would modify this question. Presumably the US military could “be a force for humanitarianism.” but that is the wrong question. What should be asked is whether it is likely to be such a force, or is it likely to pursue US national interests there, like it does somewhere? And what are those interests?

The complete article:

A Feminist Case for War?
Women’s rights activists are conflicted over a continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

By Michelle Goldberg

Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a nongovernmental organization  that runs women’s shelters, schools, and counseling centers in three cities in Afghanistan, has watched with alarm as American opinion has turned against the occupation. An American withdrawal, its board members say, would be catastrophic for the women they work with. “Every woman who we have talked to in Afghanistan, all the Afghan women in the NGOs, in the government, say the United States and the peacekeeping troops and NATO must stay, they must not leave until the Afghan army is able to take over,” says Esther Hyneman, a WAW board member who recently returned from six months in Kabul.In fact WAW, which has over 100 staffers in Afghanistan and four in New York, is, with some reluctance, calling for a troop increase. “Women for Afghan Women deeply regrets having a position in favor of maintaining, even increasing troops,” it said in a recent statement. “We are not advocates for war, and conditions did not have to reach this dire point, but we believe that withdrawing troops means abandoning 15 million women and children to madmen who will sacrifice them to their lust for power.”

There is a growing consensus among both progressives and a few realist-minded conservatives that the Afghan war is futile. Today’s Washington Post reports on Matthew Hoh, a State Department official who, after serving in Afghanistan, resigned to protest the continuation of the war. “I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote in a letter to the department’s head of personnel. With such sentiments spreading, one of the few remaining rationales for maintaining the occupation is that it’s the only way to protect Afghan women against the return of the Taliban. But does it make sense to perpetuate America’s presence in Afghanistan on feminist grounds?

From the United States, it’s difficult to figure out who speaks for Afghan women, or even Afghan feminists. Malalai Joya, a heroic 31-year-old Afghani activist and politician, calls for an end to the occupation in her new book, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice. “I know that Obama’s election has brought great hopes to peace-loving people in the United States,” she writes. “But for Afghans, Obama’s military buildup will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians, while it may not even weaken the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”

Joya, who spent much of her childhood in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan, ran an underground girls’ school during Taliban rule. Yet as much as she hates the former regime, she loathes her country’s current rulers just as much. In 2005, Joya was the youngest person to win a seat in her country’s legislature. She was a tireless opponent of the warlords who filled Karzai’s government — so much so that in 2007 her political opponents voted to suspend her from Parliament on the grounds that she had insulted the institution. Six female Nobel Peace Prize laureates have called for her reinstatement, comparing her to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi as “a model for women everywhere seeking to make the world more just.”

Joya insists that contrary to mainstream American opinion, the war in Afghanistan has done little to liberate women. “As I write these words, the situation in Afghanistan is getting progressively worse,” she says. “And not just for women, but for all Afghans. We are caught between two enemies — the Taliban on one side and the U.S./NATO forces and their warlord friends on the other. And the dark-minded forces in our country are gaining power with every allied airstrike that kills civilians, with every corrupt government official who grows fat on bribes and thievery, and with every criminal who escapes justice.”

Joya is not the only Afghan feminist making this argument. A member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, or RAWA, has been touring the United States calling for an end to the occupation. Going only by the pseudonym Zoya, she echoed Joya’s argument that U.S. troops are only compounding Afghanistan’s anguish. “Even if they throw [in] thousands and millions of other troops, the situation will be the same, because we need a change, a radical change, in the system, which is so corrupted,” she said. “And it cannot be healed by throwing [in] more troops. So we are in favor of withdrawal of the troops immediately.”

Listening to Joya and Zoya makes everything seem simple. If these astonishingly brave Afghan women want American troops out of their country, then it would seem that feminists could, with clear consciences, join their fellow progressives in calling for an end to the war.

But there are also many seconding the message of Women for Afghan Women. “As an Afghan woman who for many years lived a life deprived of the most basic human rights, I find unbearable the thought of what will happen to the women of my country if it once again falls under the control of the insurgents and militants who now threaten it,” the Afghan human-rights activist Wazhma Frogh wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

Earlier this month, The Christian Science Monitor ran a story about a visit that the radical anti-war group Code Pink made to Afghanistan, where they met with local women’s rights activists adamantly against a pullout. “Code Pink … is one of the more high-profile women’s anti-war groups being forced to rethink its position as Afghan women explain theirs: Without international troops, they say, armed groups could return with a vengeance — and that would leave women most vulnerable,” the Monitor reported.

“I know Malalai Joya personally, I’ve always agreed with her positions,” says Hyneman. “She’s extremely brave and courageous, but this is one time when I totally disagree with her.”

Hyneman doesn’t dispute that the last eight years have been largely disastrous for Afghanistan. “There’s no question, we, meaning the United States, have done a terrible job there,” Hyneman says. “We’ve promoted the warlords, financed the warlords. We should have demanded that the warlords be bought before a court, a trial, a reconciliation process. The Afghan people want that. America under the previous administration made a chaos, a mess of Afghanistan. We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”

But unlike Joya, Hyneman believes that the United States can be part of the solution to the problems it has helped create. “Because we have botched up things there, that doesn’t mean we should leave; it means we should stay and try to fix it,” she says. “It seems rather obvious. We’ve made a mess, we’ve got the warlords in power, we’ve done everything wrong, killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians. So we just abandon them?”

To a large degree, the answer depends on whether one believes that the American military can be a force for humanitarianism. After the last eight years, that’s a hard faith to sustain. Staying in Afghanistan seems indefensible. The trouble is, so does leaving.

November 2nd, 2009

Is there an Afghan Army?

Ann Jones recently returned to Afghanistan and, in a new piece, dissects the myth of the Afghan army as a fighting force.This is the force that Senator Levin and others want the US to build as our colonial surrogates in the Afghan occupation.

A few excerpts:

The soldiers receive training in exchange for pay. It is so successful, that the same people go through the process again and again:

What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police. Why, you might ask, didn’t the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to “operate independently,” but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of “Basic Warrior Training” 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

In a country where 40% of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it’s a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin — the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets — and many are undoubtedly Taliban.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/meet-the-afghan-army-is-i_b_292864.html

The Taliban take advantage of US-supplied military training opportuinities to learn about their enemy:

Recently Karen DeYoung noted in the Washington Post that the Taliban now regularly use very sophisticated military techniques — “as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army’s Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.” Of course, some of them have attended training sessions which teach them to fight in “austere environments,” probably time and time again. If you were a Talib, wouldn’t you scout the training being offered to Afghans on the other side? And wouldn’t you do it more than once if you could get well paid every time?

Such training is bound to come in handy — as it may have for the Talib policeman who, just last week, bumped off eight other comrades at his police post in Kunduz Province in northern Afghanistan and turned it over to the Taliban. On the other hand, such training can be deadly to American trainers. Take the case of the American trainer who was shot and wounded that same week by one of his trainees. Reportedly, a dispute arose because the trainer was drinking water “in front of locals,” while the trainees were fasting for the Muslim holy month of Ramazan.

There is, by the way, plenty of evidence that Taliban fighters get along just fine, fighting fiercely and well without the training lavished on the ANA and the ANP. Why is it that Afghan Taliban fighters seem so bold and effective, while the Afghan National Police are so dismally corrupt and the Afghan National Army a washout?

Not that they need the training:

When I visited bases and training grounds in July, I heard some American trainers describe their Afghan trainees in the same racist terms once applied to African slaves in the U.S.: lazy, irresponsible, stupid, childish, and so on. That’s how Afghan resistance, avoidance, and sabotage look to American eyes. The Taliban fight for something they believe — that their country should be freed from foreign occupation. “Our” Afghans try to get by.

They are now being given weapons that likely won’t work for them, in order to make US weapons manufactorers rich:

Earlier this year, the U.S. training program became slightly more compelling with the introduction of a U.S.-made weapon, the M-16 rifle, which was phased in over four months as a replacement for the venerable Kalashnikov. Even U.S. trainers admit that, in Afghanistan, the Kalashnikov is actually the superior weapon. Light and accurate, it requires no cleaning even in the dust of the high desert, and every man and boy already knows it well. The strange and sensitive M-16, on the other hand, may be more accurate at slightly greater distances, but only if a soldier can keep it clean, while managing to adjust and readjust its notoriously sensitive sights. The struggling soldiers of the ANA may not ace that test, but now that the U.S. military has generously passed on its old M-16s to Afghans, it can buy new ones at taxpayer expense, a prospect certain to gladden the heart of any arms manufacturer. (Incidentally, thanks must go to the Illinois National Guard for risking their lives to make possible such handsome corporate profits.)

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/meet-the-afghan-army-is-i_b_292864.html

Finally, Jones cations against learning the wrong lesson:

One small warning: Don’t take the insecurity of the Afghan security forces as an argument for sending yet more American troops to Afghanistan. Aggressive Americans (now numbering 68,000) are likely to be even less successful than reluctant Afghan forces. Afghans want peace, but the kharaji (foreign) troops (100,000, if you include U.S. allies in NATO) bring death and destruction wherever they go. Think instead about what you might have won — and could still win — had you spent all those military billions on food. Or maybe agriculture. Or health care. Or a civilian job corps. Is it too late for that now?

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/meet-the-afghan-army-is-i_b_292864.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/meet-the-afghan-army-is-i_b_292864.html

Read the whole piece here.

September 21st, 2009

Military letter to the APA: Drop the Nuremberg Defense from psychologist ethics code

Capt. Lawrence Rockwood (ret.), the author of Walking Away from Nuremberg: Just War and the Doctrine of Command Responsibility,has organized the following letter from military figures to the American Psychological Association. The Letter expresses dismay by these military people to the inclusion of  ethics standard 1.02 — the Nuremberg “just following orders” Defense — in the APA ethics code. [See attorney Scott Horton's comments on 1.02 at his Harpers blog.]

The military letter was sent to President Bray and the members of the APA Council of Representatives:

August 4, 2009

To President James A. Bray and the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association:

We write as concerned, veteran military and intelligence professionals. If the American Psychological Association (APA) retains Section 1.02 in its Ethics Code, the APA will place itself in opposition to some of the best traditions of the American military profession. Section 1.02 of the APA Ethics Code undermines not only the good order and discipline of military and intelligence professionals who happen also to be psychologists, but also their responsibilities under official military doctrine and professional military ethics. This section of the APA code entails an exemption that a psychologist can follow an order from a government employer even if it is otherwise contraindicated by the APA code. This section of the APA code disregards the Nuremberg Principles as recognized in 1950 by UN General Assembly Resolution 177 and incorporated into American military doctrine in the 1956 publication of Field Manual 27-10, The Law of Armed Conflict.

The Nuremberg Principles were drafted in the United States War Department during the last year of the Second World War. Two major themes of the Nuremberg Principles have been incorporated into American military doctrine: (1) commanders and government officials are responsible for the criminal acts of their subordinates, and (2) that a person acts in response to an order from a government or of a superior does not relieve him or her from personal criminal responsibility. In the case of the prosecution for the massacre of unarmed civilians in My Lai in Vietnam in March 1968, a military court categorically ruled out the so-called Nuremberg Defense in a defense of an accused war criminal who claimed an order(s) from superiors sanctioned an otherwise criminal act.

The professional normative standards of the military professional as a whole are binding on psychologists within the military. We therefore ask that the APA remove Section 1.02, or any equivalent statement, in the APA Ethics Code and any other APA policy inconsistent with official military doctrine, professional military ethics, and the standards of international humanitarian law.

Lawrence P. Rockwood, PhD, Former Captain, US Army Counterintelligence
Author: Walking Away from Nuremberg: Just War and the Doctrine of Command Responsibility in the American Military Profession, 2007, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.

David C. MacMichael, Ph.D., former senior estimates officer, National Security Council, former captain, USMC

Terrence Karney, Former Staff Sergeant, US Army: Interrogator, and Interrogation Instructor

Peter Weiss, Sergeant, Military Intelligence, 1945, served as interrogator
of high-value German detainee in Nuremberg

Matthew Alexander, former senior interrogator for the U.S. military in Iraq,
Author: How to Break a Terrorist, 2008. New York: Free Press.

David DeBatto, U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent (ret.)

C.B. Scott Jones, Ph.D. Commander, USN Retired. South Asia Naval Intelligence, J-2 U.S. European Command, Scientific and Technical Intelligence Analyst

Virenda Verma, M.Sc., Col., Indian Army Intelligence Retired. Visiting Fellow – Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi. India-Pakistan Soldiers Initiative for Peace, Founder. Tibet Study Group, Founder and General Secretary.

Herbert Ely, Retired from Department of the Army, Senior Intelligence Analyst

August 5th, 2009

Democracy Now! on Dasht-e-Leili massacre

Democracy Now! discusses the Dasht-e-Leili massacre with journalist James Risen and Physicians for Human Rights’ Susannah Sirkin. Somewhat surprisingly, Risen emphasizes several times that investigations should focus only upon Bush administration cover-up, ignoring the possible collusion of the hundreds of US troops reported to be present at the massacre by witnesses. It almost makes me wonder if Risen is concerned that others will succeed where he failed, in elucidating the role of US troops.

I think it’s still—it’s very unclear what US personnel knew at the time. And I think the investigation should focus rather on what happened afterwards in the Bush administration.

If “it’s very unclear what US personnel knew at the time,” why shouldn’t an official investigation find out? I don’t get it.

You can watch, listen, or read here.

July 15th, 2009

Mental Health professionals’ letter asks Michelle Obama to investigate diagnostic abuse of veterans

I recently published an article — Diagnostic abuse of veterans and the dilemmas of health professional ethics — [based on reporting by Mark Benjamin and Michael de Yoanna in Salon] on Army pressures for mental health clinicians to not diagnose post traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] in returning soldiers. A group of approximately 130 psychologists and mental health professionals responded to my article by writing Michelle Obama and asking her to look into these charges. Here is their letter:

May 12, 2009

First Lady
Michelle Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C.

Dear First Lady,

We are a group of mental health professionals who hope to reach you about an issue concerning the treatment of our veterans.  We are grateful that you have taken an interest in the well-being of veterans and their families, recognizing the weight of responsibility and trauma they may carry during and after service to our country.

In writing we want to call your attention to a concern that official pressures may be interfering with returning soldiers receiving appropriate treatment.  A recent series in Salon by Mark Benjamin and Michael de Yoanna (latest May 5, 2009), reports pressure placed on mental health professionals to under-diagnose Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in returning combat veterans regardless of the clinical reality.  A number of our colleagues who work with veterans have relayed similar experiences of pressure to misdiagnose.

One consequence of this apparent misdiagnosis is that the men and women who served our country do not receive appropriate Veterans’ benefits when their diagnoses do not correctly attribute their emotional problems to their combat experiences. Instead, their problems are attributed either to less severe “anxiety disorders” or to preexisting “personality disorders.”  In addition to potential loss of benefits to which combat veterans are due, misdiagnoses can result in inappropriate treatment and in the veteran being held responsible for part or all of the cost of treatment for conditions caused by combat experience.

As mental health professionals, we are deeply disturbed that pressure is being put upon colleagues to give incorrect diagnoses for reasons antithetical to the best interests of our patients.  Those who suffer serious disorders in the service of our country deserve better.  They deserve the best treatment available.  We are also concerned that this pressure may undermine the ethical foundation upon which the mental health professions are based.

We have included an essay by Dr. Stephen Soldz, co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical APA and Steering Committee Member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, which we believe sheds important light on this subject.

We ask you to look into this matter and related issues concerning the mental health treatment of our soldiers and veterans.  We are willing to assist you in any ways we can in this endeavor.

With respect and regards,

Alice Lowe Shaw, Ph.D.
President-Elect Section IX, Division 39
Psychoanalysis and Social Responsibility

Stephen Soldz, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Research, Evaluation and Program Development
Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), organizational endorsement
700+ members

Thomas Rosbrow, Ph.D.
Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC)
San Francisco

Marilyn S. Jacobs, Ph.D., ABPP
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Dept. of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences
Los Angeles

Melanie Suchet, Ph.D.
Stephen A. Mitchell Center for Relational Studies
New York City

Lynne Layton, Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Katie Gentile, Ph.D.
Women’s Center Director
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
New York City

Karen Rosica, Psy.D.
Denver, Colorado

Richard Reichbart, Ph.D.
Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR)
Ridgewood, N.J.

Rachael Peltz, Ph.D.
PINC
San Francisco

Elizabeth Hirky, Ph.D.
Senior Psychologist
Bellevue Hospital Center
New York City

Julie Gerhardt, Ph.D.
PINC
San Francisco

Ruth Fallenbaum, Ph.D.
Berkeley,  California

Nina K. Thomas, Ph.D., ABPP
NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
New York City

Susan Gutwill, MS, LCSW
Highland Park, New Jersey

Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D.
Oakland, CA

Brad Olson, Ph.D.
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois

Susan Phipps-Yonas, Ph.D., L.P.
Minneapolis, MN

Lorri Greene, Ph.D.
San Diego, CA

Ryan Hunt

Connie Evert, Ph.D.
Philadelphia

Leni de Mik, Ph.D.
Minneapolis, MN

Larry Welkowitz, Ph.D.
Keene State College,
Keene, New Hampshire

Frank Summers, Ph.D., ABPP
Northwestern University
Chicago, Il

Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D.
Berkeley, CA

Kenneth Feiner, Ph.D.
NYC

Jancis Long, Ph.D.
President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Berkeley, CA

John Neafsey, Psy.D.
Chicago, Il

Thomas S. Greenspon, Ph.D.
Minneapolis, MN

Stephen Botticelli, Ph.D.
NYC

Loren Krane, Ph.D.
UCSF Dept of Psychiatry
San Francisco

Trudy Bond, Ph.D.
Toledo, OH

Armond Aserinsky, Ph.D.
North Wales, PA

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.
NYC

Donna Bassin, Ph.D.
Secretary APA Division 39, Section IX

Ellen G. Levine, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Castro Valley, CA

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.
Past President, PsySR

Polly Scarvalone, Ph.D.
NYC

Cynthia Colvin, Ph.D.
PINC
Oakland, CA

Laurel Bass Wagner, Ph.D.
Dallas, TX

Stefan R. Zicht, Psy.D.
NYC

Helene Goldberg, Ph.D.

Stephen Benson, Ph.D.
Blue Hill, ME

Maureen Murphy, MSN, Ph.D.
San Francisco

Virginia Goldner, Ph.D.

Nancy Burke, Ph.D.
Northwestern University
University Medical School
Chicago, Il

Elizabeth Hegeman, Ph.D.
Professor John Jay College of Criminal Justice
William A. White Institute
NYC

Leigh Messinides, Ph.D.
Tustin, CA

Peter Shabad, Ph.D.
Chicago

Ann B. Clarkson, Ph.D.
Portland, OR

Mary-Joan Gerson, Ph.D.

Sonia Orenstein, Ph.D.
NYC

Jill Bellinson, Ph.D.
NYC

Stephen Portuges, Ph.D.
Executive Editor, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies
Los Angeles

Andrew Tatarsky, Ph.D.
Past president, Division on Addiction,
New York State Psychological Assn.
NYC

Susan Bodnar, Ph.D.
NYC

Todd Essig, Ph.D.
William Alanson White Institute
NYC

Sharon Brennan, Ph.D.

Christy Paliouras, Ph.D.
Astoria, NY

Maureen C. Grix, Ph.D.
The Suffolk Institute
Garden City,  NJ

Maureen O’Reilly-Landry, Ph.D.
Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons
NYC

David Sloan-Rossiter, Ph.D.
Brookline, MA

Steven Reisner, Ph.D.
NYC

David Thurn, LMSW, PH.D.
NYC

Richard Lasky, Ph.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychology
NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
NYC

Elaine Gould, Ph.D.
New York

Susan Katz

Richard B. Gartner, Ph.D.
NYC

Eric W. Anders, Ph.D., Psy.D.
Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Oakland, CA

Linda R. Laughlin, Ph.D.

William A. MacGillivray, Ph.D., ABPP,
University of Tennessee,
Knoxville, TN

Kathryn G. White, Ph.D.
New Haven, CT

Katie L. Fitzpatrick, M.A.
University of Tennessee

Knoxville, TN

Dana Satir, M.A.
Center for Anxiety and Related Discord
Boston, MA

Kathleen W. Erickson, LCSW
(mother of an Iraq War veteran)
Knoxville, TN

Robert K. Albiston, Ph.D.
Past President, Appalacian Psychoanalytic Assn.
Knoxville, TN

Edward R. Ryan, Ph.D.
New Haven, CT

Mila R. Tecala, Lic. SW
Washington, D.C.

Greta H. Gustafson, LCSW
NYC

Mark S. Kane, Ph.D.
Michigan

Margaret L. White, Ph.D.
Upper Montclair, NJ

Christine A. Chapman, LCSW

Cathy S. Nelson, LISW
Ames, IA

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D.
NYC

Erika Vadopalas, LMFT
Coming Home Project
San Carlos, California

Annita Sawyer, Ph.D.
Yale Medical School
New Haven, CT

Steven H. Knoblauch, Ph.D.
NYC

Andrew M. Barclay, Ph.D.

Cathie Bird, MA, Psy.D.
Pioneer, TN

Debra Rothschild, Ph.D.
NYC

Luz Towns-Miranda, Ph.D.

NYC

Darlene DiGorio-Hevner, MA, MSW, LCSW
Ardmore, PA

Arlene Lu Steinberg, Ph.D.
Columbia University
NYU

Don Greif, Ph.D.
William Alanson White Institute
NYC

Spyros D. Orfanos, Ph.D., ABPP
Clinic Director
NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
NYC

Barbara Eisold, Ph.D.
Yeshiva University
NYC

Barbara Blasdel, Ph.D.

Susan R. Greene, Ph.D.
San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP)

Candy Siegel, Ph.D.
Tucson, Arizona

Carolyn Ellman, Ph.D.
IPTAR, NYU Postdoctoral Program
NYC

Robert Keisner, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
CW Post/Long Island University
Brookville, NY

Maria T. Russo, Ph.D.
East Hampton, NY

Jerome Siller, Ph.D., ABPP
NYC

Scott W. Smith, M.A.
Doctoral Candidate
Adelphi University
New York

Martha Davis, Ph.D.
Visiting scholar, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
NYC

Stephen J. Ducat, Ph.D.
San Francisco

Debra A. Lopez, MD
Clinical Associate Professor
University of Vermont Dept of Psychiatry
Burlington, VT

Jeffrey F. Johns, MD (former Air Force Psychiatrist)
Oakland, CA

Barbara F. Marcus, Ph.D.
Yale University School of Medicine
Vice President, Board of Trustees and Faculty,
The Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis
New Haven, CT

Sergio Rothstein, Ph.D.
NYC

Lawrence O. Brown, Ph.D.
Fellow Supervisor of Psychotherapy and Teaching Faculty
William Alanson White Institute
NYC

David G. Byrom, Ph.D.
Co-Director, Family Therapy Institute of Suffolk
Smithtown, NY

Juliet M. Ross, Psy.D.
NYC

Andrew B. Sieff, A.P.N., PMHCNS-BC
Psychiatric Clinical Nurse Specialist
Fayetteville, AR

Mildred Antonelli, Ph.D.
Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity
NYC

Herbert Gingold, Ph.D.
Co-Founder of the Noir Institute
Kew Gardens, NY

Marc Pilisuk, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, The University of California
Professor, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center
Berkeley, CA

Sharon L. Windwer, Psy.D.
Little Neck, NY

Bonnie J. Lipeles, Psy.D.

Margit Winkler Ph.D.
Supervising Analyst, Wm. Alanson White Institute

Lydia Seggev

Susan Lillich, Ph.D.
Williston, VT

Jules Burnstein, Ph.D.

Ronna Friend, Ph.D.
Eugene, Oregon

Cornelia St. John, MFT
Oakland, CA

Claire Hertz
Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy
NYC

Linda Schrader, Ph.D.
Bend, OR

Jeff Kaye, Ph.D.
Clinician, Survivors International
San Francisco

Gerald Gray, LCSW
Founder, Center for Justice and Accountability
San Francisco
Co-Founder Institute for Redress and Recovery
Santa Clara University Law School

Philip Hill, Ph.D.

Latika Mangrulkar, MSW, ACSW

Jean Maria Arrigo, Ph.D.

Jonathan Wormhoudt, Ph.D.

Elliot Jurist, Ph.D.

Skye Haberman, Ph.D.

Joanie V. Connors, Ph.D.

Stephen Seligman, D.M.H.
University of California, San Francisco

May 18th, 2009

Alexander: Protect our troops by stopping torture

Former Iraq interrogator Mathew Alexander says protect our troops, stop torturing others:

If We’re Going to Reveal More Memos

By Mathew Alexander

Former VP Dick Cheney has requested the release of additional memos showing that torture and abuse saved American lives by preventing terrorist attacks. If the Obama Administration decides to release these memos, then I suggest they also release statistics from Iraq showing the number of foreign fighters that were recruited because of our policy of torture and abuse. It was tracked. I know because I saw the slides and because I heard captured foreign fighters state this day in and day out. The government can also release the statistics that show that 90% of suicide bombers in Iraq were these same foreign fighters. These foreign fighters killed hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers.

After these revelations, Americans can judge whether or not a policy of torture and abuse kept us safe. Unfortunately, we’ll never be able to evaluate the damage that was done to past or future interrogations. As I experienced firsthand, detainees were less likely to cooperate when they viewed us as hypocrites. We can’t establish the trust that is required to convince a detainee to cooperate unless we live up to the principles that we preach.

I had one detainee in Iraq, a previous Al Qaida fighter, who provided me with all the information he knew willingly without me having to run an interrogation approach. He told me that Al Qaida had accused him of being a mole and tortured him before we rescued him. He then proceeded to say that the reason he was going to cooperate was because we didn’t torture him and because of that, he knew everything that he’d been told about us by Al Qaida was wrong.

Before 9/11, the protection of American soldiers from terrorist attacks was a priority for our country. Consider our responses to the Beirut Bombing, Khobar Towers, and the USS Cole. When we talk about keeping Americans safe from terrorist attacks, we need to include all Americans, especially those that serve in uniform.

May 15th, 2009