Psyche, Science, and Society

Peter Galbraith pushed Iraqi constitution provisions that could earn him $100 millon

The New York Times reveals that noted foreign policy expert, partial author of the Iraqi Constitution, and advocate of Kurdish autonomy, Peter Galbraith, stands to gain upwards of $100 million from secret investments in Kurdish oil. In other words, he apparently helped fleece the Iraqis of their oil.  Glenn Greenwald relays the story:

The sleazy advocacy of a leading “liberal hawk”
Peter Galbraith’s vast, undisclosed financial interests in the policies he spent years advocating as an “expert.”

By Glenn Greenwald

The New York Times today details the unbelievably sleazy story of Peter Galbraith, one of the Democratic Party’s leading so-called “liberal hawks” and a generally revered Wise Man of America’s Foreign Policy Community.  He was Ambassador to Croatia under the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s and, in March, 2009, the Obama administration (specifically, Richard Holbrooke, Galbraith’s mentor) successfully pressured the U.N. to name Galbraith as the second-in-command in Afghanistan.  The NYT does a good job today of adding some important details to the story, but it was actually uncovered by Norwegian investigative journalists and reported at length a month ago in pieces such as this one by Helena Cobban.  In essence, this highly Serious man has corruptly concealed vast financial stakes in the very policies and positions he has spent years advocating while pretending to be an independent expert.Galbraith was one of the most vocal Democratic supporters of the attack on Iraq, having signed a March 19, 2003 public letter (.pdf) – along with the standard cast of neocon war-lovers such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Danielle Pletka, and Robert Kagan – stating that “we all join in supporting the military intervention in Iraq” and “it is now time to act to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”  As intended, that letter was then praised by outlets such as The Washington Post Editorial Page, gushing that “it is both significant and encouraging that a bipartisan group of influential foreign policy thinkers, veterans of both Democratic and Republican administrations, has signed on to a statement of policy on Iraq that makes sense on the war.”  Throughout 2002 and 2003, Galbraith appeared in numerous outlets — including repeatedly on Fox News and with Bill O’Reilly — presenting himself as a loyal Democrat firmly behind the invasion of Iraq.  In 2002, he was an adviser to Paul Wolfowitz on Kurdistan.

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After playing a key role in enabling the invasion of Iraq, Galbraith first became one of a handful of U.S. officials who worked on writing the Iraqi Constitution, and after he resigned from the government, he then continuously posed as an independent expert on the region and, specifically, an “unpaid” adviser to the Kurds on the Constitution.  Galbraith was an ardent and vocal advocate for Kurdish autonomy, arguing tirelessly in numerous venues for such proposals — including in multiple Op-Eds for The New York Times – and insisting that Kurds must have the right to control oil resources located in Northern Iraq.  Throughout the years of writing those Op-Eds, he was identified as nothing more than “a former United States ambassador to Croatia,” except in one 2007 Op-Ed which vaguely stated that he ”is a principal in a company that does consulting in Iraq and elsewhere.”  When he participated in a New York Times forum in October, 2008 — regarding what the next President should be required to answer — he unsurprisingly posed questions that advocated for regional autonomy for Iraqis generally and Kurds specifically, and he was identified as nothing more than the author of a book about the region.

What Galbraith kept completely concealed all these years was that a company he formed in 2004 came to acquire a large stake in a Kurdish oil field whereby, as the NYT put it, he “stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars.”  In other words, he had a direct — and vast — financial stake in the very policies which he was publicly advocating in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other American media outlets, where he was presented as an independent expert on the region.  As Cobban wrote:

For the preceding four years, while Galbraith was an influential participant in Iraq-related constitutional and political discussions, he also had an undisclosed financial interest in a KRG-authorised oil development venture. . . .

Here in the U.S., Galbraith has long been associated with the “liberal hawk” wing of the Democratic Party . . . Many members of this group have been liberal idealists – though some of those who, on “liberal” grounds, gave early support to Pres. George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq later expressed their regret for adopting that position.

Galbraith has never expressed any such regrets, and last November, he was openly scornful of Bush’s late-term agreement to withdraw from Iraq completely. The revelation that for many years Galbraith had a quite undisclosed financial interest in the political breakup of Iraq may now further reduce the clout, and the ranks, of the remaining liberal hawks.

Unfortunately, that last sentence is likely wishful thinking.  What Galbraith has done, as sleazy and dishonest as it is, is simply par for the course in accountability-free Washington.

Galbraith’s relationship with the Kurds goes back many years.  He undoubtedly knew that overthrowing Saddam would empower his Kurdish friends and their ability to dole out oil contracts.  Indeed, in his own 2006 book, he recounts that he began working on Kurdish autonomy and independence “two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein.”  Less than a year later, having helped convince the public — and many Democrats — to invade Iraq, he formed a company that then acquired a huge stake in Kurdish oil.  And he then spent years running around trying to use his status as Foreign Policy Community expert to exploit the war he cheered on for his own massive personal gain, while keeping completely concealed those glaring conflicts of interests.

Reider Visser, a historian of southern Iraq, told The Boston Globe last month:  ”Galbraith has been such a central person to the shaping of the Iraqi Constitution, far more than I think most Americans realize. All those beautiful ideas about principles of federalism and local communities having control are really cast in a different light when the community has an oil field in its midst and Mr. Galbraith has a financial stake.”  So here’s a leading advocate of the war on Iraq who used his influence in the U.S. Government and the Foreign Policy Community — as well as the break-up of Saddam’s regime — to enrich himself on Iraqi oil.  As the NYT put it:

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

Some officials say that his financial ties could raise serious questions about the integrity of the constitutional negotiations themselves. “The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless,” said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, a principal drafter of the law that governed Iraq after the United States ceded control to an Iraqi government on June 28, 2004.

In effect, he said, the company “has a representative in the room, drafting.”

Remember how all those freakish and paranoid people — on the crazed “Arab street” and in American-hating leftist circles — actually believed in “conspiracy” theories such as the wacky notion that one of the motives for invading Iraq was a desire to exploit its oil resources?

Here we have yet another example of one of America’s most Serious and respected “experts” advocating various policies while maintaining huge, undisclosed financial and personal interests in his advocacy.  He was given access to every major media outlet virtually on demand to do so — the NYT, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, Fox — all while those interests remained concealed.  His uniting with the country’s most extreme neocons to support the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq didn’t prevent the Obama administration from pushing him to be hired as the U.N.’s number two official in Afghanistan.  He continued to be revered by leading establishment Democrats as an important and respected expert.  In other words, Peter Galbraith is a perfect face showing how America’s Foreign Policy Community and our political debates function.

UPDATE:  Jonathan Schwarz recalls what was done to those who suggested that part of the motive in invading Iraq might have something to do with that country’s oil reserves.

UPDATE II:  The New York Times is forced to publish an Editor’s Note today in light of this story, noting that “Mr. Galbraith signed a contract that obligated him to disclose his financial interests in the subjects of his articles”; he “should have disclosed to readers that Mr. Galbraith could benefit financially” from the policies he was advocating in his Op-Eds; and “had editors been aware of Mr. Galbraith’s financial stake, the Op-Ed page would have insisted on disclosure or not published his articles.”

November 13th, 2009

Olson & Eidelson: American Psychological Association, don’t violate GLBT boycott!

In addition to the American Psychological Association’s involvement with protecting psychologists’ participation in potentially abusive interrogations, the APA is now under attack for its plans to center much of next summer’s annual convention in a hotel in violation of a boycott. Brad Olson and Roy Eidelson have just posted on the Psychologists for Social Responsibility blog a Call for Change in APA’s position on this issue:

A Call for Change in APA’s Position on the Boycott at the Manchester Grand Hyatt

By Brad Olson and Roy Eidelson

This open letter calls for the immediate reconsideration of the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) current plan to use the Manchester Grand Hyatt as a headquarters hotel for the 2010 Annual Convention in San Diego. In particular, we respond here to what we view as a highly troubling September 26, 2009 letter sent by APA president-elect Carol Goodheart to APA Council members.

In November 2008, California’s Proposition 8 abolished same-sex marriage in the state, setting back our nation’s progress toward equality for all. Prior to the vote, Doug Manchester, owner of the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, contributed $125,000 to help fund the campaign – a campaign that relied on deceptive ads, appeals to prejudice, and fear-mongering to ultimately overturn equal rights for same-sex couples in California.

Following Manchester’s contribution, local GLBT and labor rights supporters united as a coalition and called for a boycott of Manchester’s Hyatt. This boycott has now entered its second year, and it continues to grow. In September of 2009, the Courage Campaign and Equality California signed on to the boycott effort, joining Californians Against Hate and Unite Here (see Say No to Doug Manchester).

Supporting the boycott, organizations have moved their events to other locations. According to the Lesbian and Gay Lawyers Association of Los Angeles, this list includes the American Association of Law Schools; the San Diego County Pension Fund; the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation; the San Diego Association of Realtors; the California Nurses Association; the Conference of Delegates of California Bar Associations; and the International Foundation of Employee Benefits.

The APA’s response stands in sharp contrast, despite the Association’s resolution stating that it “shall take a leadership role in opposing all discrimination in legal benefits, rights, and privileges against same-sex couples.” President-elect Goodheart’s recent letter re-affirms the APA’s plans to keep the Manchester Hyatt as its lead convention headquarters hotel and to hold its Board and Council meetings there. In contradiction to its professed commitment to same-sex rights, the letter evades and misrepresents the crucial social justice issues at stake.

We therefore call upon the APA Board to reconsider its decision. Doug Manchester and the Hyatt management should be notified of APA’s desire to renegotiate or cancel the contract. The legality of the current contract should be thoroughly investigated, and a broader analysis of all potential financial ramifications should be conducted. At the very least, the APA should move its Board and Council meetings and associated events to a different hotel. Divisions, other entities, and all convention attendees should be encouraged to make independent decisions based on their own values.

The right of same-sex couples to marry is a civil rights issue of no less consequence – nor of more ethical complexity – than any other in our nation’s history. The American Psychological Association’s current position regarding the Manchester Hyatt is unacceptable. We encourage those who share our views to communicate their concerns to Dr. Goodheart, APA’s Board of Directors, the Council of Representatives, and other division leaders.

Below we respond in detail to the claims made and issues raised by Dr. Goodheart in her most recent letter (a response to her earlier late-August letter is available here). Thank you for your time, attention, and consideration. We welcome any and all dissemination of our letter.

Sincerely,

Roy Eidelson and Brad Olson

12 Concerns about APA President-Elect Carol Goodheart’s Recent Letter

1. Dr. Goodheart asks APA divisions not to join the hotel boycott and to reconsider any decisions to do so. It is wrong for APA’s leadership to actively encourage or pressure divisions to use the Manchester Hyatt for convention business meetings and hospitality suites – and to therefore ignore their concerns of conscience. This is particularly problematic for divisions that have re-established themselves as “societies” for the express purpose of maintaining their independence. In her letter Dr. Goodheart also expresses the fear that too many divisions may make autonomous decisions to boycott the Manchester Hyatt. Perhaps this worry is recognition that the APA Board’s position runs counter to the moral commitments of a good portion of its members.

2. Dr. Goodheart reveals that in February 2009 the APA Board decided it “would have to honor” the original Manchester contract. There is no indication that any effort was made to renegotiate or dissolve this contract, even in light of recent events. This is disappointing and hard to explain, especially since there may be legitimate and persuasive legal grounds for taking such action. For example, the National Lawyers Guild of San Francisco has noted that the hotel may be violating its contractual commitments to provide “a quiet and non-controversial venue” for association meetings.

3. Dr. Goodheart’s two reasons why the APA must honor the contract are unconvincing. First, she notes that “Board policy is to not cancel hotel contracts unless there is imminent danger to attendees or staff.” Second, she writes that, “in a time of serious financial crisis, cancellation of the contract would deplete the APA’s limited resources by over a million dollars.” Of course, by offering this second reason (the national financial crisis), Dr. Goodheart communicates that “Board policy” alone is insufficient grounds for honoring the contract. As for the stated financial repercussions, any meaningful assessment would seemingly require a thorough strategic and legal analysis of the likely outcomes of contesting the contract or pursuing a reasonable compromise – and there is no indication the APA ever conducted such an analysis.

4. Dr. Goodheart’s letter misrepresents the most important and enduring consequences of a boycott for Doug Manchester and his hotel. In a short-sighted argument, Dr. Goodheart states that “a boycott, although a strong symbolic gesture, would not achieve the desired results; the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel would receive the same revenue…because of major contractual penalties of up to $500,000.” But the power of a successful boycott is not measured solely by its effect on immediate revenues. More important are the ever-widening ripple effects produced as more and more groups and individuals take notice and join the boycott effort. A well-publicized decision to stay away from the Manchester Hyatt by an organization with APA’s membership size and clout would be no small matter and far more than a mere “gesture.”

5. Dr. Goodheart wrongly compares the current situation to APA honoring past convention contracts in Toronto during the SARS outbreak and in post-Katrina New Orleans. Toronto and New Orleans were two host cities confronting economic fallout from tragic and fear-inducing natural events. Some organizations altered, canceled, or relocated their conventions; the APA did not. But to argue similar circumstances now apply in San Diego – in regard to a particular hotel – is to strain credibility. If there is a principled stand based on the greater good that explains the current position of APA’s leadership, it has not yet been made clear. Indeed, the letter leaves the reader doubting that the APA Board, all else being equal, would actually prefer to find an alternative to the Manchester Hyatt.

6. Dr. Goodheart’s letter presents misleading and seemingly biased information about the labor issues involved. That the APA sides so fully with hotel management over workers in the letter is rather transparent and appears to suggest that the APA leadership is far too comfortable serving those in power. Indeed in the emailed letter to APA Council, a letter from Doug Manchester himself was attached, while no opposing voice was given the opportunity to present an alternative view. Why the APA would adopt such a trusting attitude toward an ultra-wealthy hotelier while taking such a questioning stance toward advocates for labor rights calls for further clarification.

7. Dr. Goodheart endorses management representations of favorable working conditions at the hotel, emphasizing that the Manchester is managed like all other Hyatts. But only last month the Boston Globe reported that 100 long-time workers at three Boston-area Hyatts were abruptly fired after they had finished training lower-paid workers. Management had initially claimed the temps would only be filling in during vacations. More generally, in vouching for the Manchester’s labor policies, Dr. Goodheart’s letter displays no awareness that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process for resolving disputes between labor and management is deeply flawed. These inequities are well-documented in the Unfair Advantage report from Human Rights Watch; in numerous reports from the Economic Policy Institute, including No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing; and in efforts by President Obama and a bipartisan Congressional coalition to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

8. Dr. Goodheart’s anecdotal observations from her recent visit to the Manchester Hyatt are misleading. She reports “We saw firsthand that there was no picket line because it is not a union hotel and there were no demonstrators.” But one need only conduct a quick internet search to find news articles and photos documenting that picketing has indeed taken place over the past year. For example, the San Diego News Network reported last month: “Most nights there is a noisy picket line in front of the hotel.” If the hotel’s non-union workers are not joining these lines, it is likely because workers without union representation are routinely subjected to severe and often illegal repercussions when management suspects them of any interest in organizing. This includes being fired for union activity; required attendance at anti-union meetings with supervisors; and threats of worksite closure if a union is formed. Compared to union workers, non-union employees receive lower wages and are less likely to have employer-provided health insurance and pension plans – and they face growing, health-impairing workload demands (see Creating Luxury, Enduring Pain). In short, the APA leadership’s quick embrace of the status quo calls for reconsideration.

9. Dr. Goodheart’s letter blurs the LGBT community’s key complaint against the Manchester Grand Hyatt. The basis for the boycott could not be clearer: owner Doug Manchester contributed $125,000 to abolish the right of same-sex couples to marry, and he continues to support this form of discrimination. Dr. Goodheart’s observation that the Global Hyatt Corporation, headquartered in Chicago, received a “Best Places to Work” designation from the LGBT-rights focused Human Rights Campaign is irrelevant. In fact, after Manchester’s Prop 8 contribution, the Human Rights Campaign demanded that its “Best Companies” logo be removed from Hyatt material referencing Manchester’s San Diego hotel. Any suggestion by the APA leadership that LGBT rights advocates are divided on this boycott is entirely unsubstantiated.

10. The APA Board’s anti-boycott argument in the letter presents inconsistent financial figures, while failing to provide meaningful context. From the letter, APA’s actual financial exposure is exceedingly difficult to assess. Within the space of consecutive paragraphs, Dr. Goodheart first warns “cancellation of the contract would deplete APA’s limited resources by over a million dollars”, and then alludes to “major contractual penalties of up to $500,000.” Both are large numbers; but one more than twice the other, and “up to $500,000″ is impossibly vague. The letter also fails to note that the APA is an organization of close to 100,000 members and has assets – based on the APA’s most recent Annual Report – that conservatively exceed $200,000,000, even after the severe economic downturn. The apparent worst-case scenario of a $500,000 penalty therefore averages out to $5 per member (with basic annual membership dues of $287 per person). There are other ways the APA can lose $500,000. Losses of that magnitude will quickly accrue if, for instance, roughly 1,800 psychologists decide to avoid the 2010 convention or decline to renew their annual membership (or decide not to join the APA).

11. Dr. Goodheart’s letter promotes an unjustified “either-or” view of how to address the Manchester Hyatt situation. Rather than endorsing the boycott, proposing direct actions, and demonstrating an unequivocal commitment to equal rights, the letter recommends alternatives deemed “positive” and “affirmative,” such as a press conference and information packets. These activities should be offered regardless – but in no way can they be considered sufficient. And the APA leadership’s proposal that “visible support” for same-sex marriage can be demonstrated by wearing a “button” is simply inadequate. One can hardly imagine where other hard-earned civil rights would stand today if their supporters had done little more than wear buttons in such circumstances.

12. Finally, Dr. Goodheart’s letter withholds answers to a broad range of important questions. Why did Dr. Goodheart and other APA staff recently travel to San Diego and visit the Manchester Grand Hyatt? After all, according to the letter, the APA leadership had already decided to honor the contract back in early 2009. With whom did they visit while there? Did they meet with any boycott representatives to gain their perspective? Did they meet with any members of the hotel’s housekeeping staff (or only with the hotel’s management)? Who are the anonymous “key stakeholders,” “knowledgeable members of the LGBT community,” “constituents,” “community informants,” and “key players” alluded to in the letter? How were members of the “work group” selected, and what charge were they given? Lastly, what has transpired over the past month that should reasonably alter the view of those APA divisions and members who support a boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt?

Given the pressing civil and human rights issues involved, we reiterate the need for the APA to attempt to renegotiate or cancel the Manchester hotel contract, investigate the legal and financial ramifications more thoroughly, move its Board and Council meetings to other locations, and encourage divisions/societies, other entities, and convention attendees to make their own independent decisions.

For more information or to join on to this effort, please contact Roy Eidelson (reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com) and/or Brad Olson (bradley.d.olson@gmail.com).

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PsySR member Brad Olson is a community and social/personality psychologist, activist, consultant, and research faculty at Northwestern University. He is a co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, and former chair of Divisions for Social Justice (DSJ), a collection of 12 divisions of the APA. .

PsySR president Roy Eidelson is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings.

2 comments October 7th, 2009

Senate Armed Services report to highlight psychologists’ role

Jason Leopold is reporting that the Senate Armed Services Committee [SASC] report on U.S. military [as opposed to CIA] interrogations and torture is due out soon, perhaps within a week. I’m a bit skeptical as I’ve been hearing it would be released in “one or two weeks” for months now, so we’ll see. The report was completed in December, but has been undergoing negotiations about declassification all this time. The Executive Summary was released in mid-December.  The full report is  believed to add crucial details to the outline provided by the Executive Summary.

According to Leopold, psychologists will play an important role in the report:

“The declassified version of his report will include a full account of the roles military psychologists played in assisting the Bush administration implement a policy of torture.”

Unfortunately, I doubt the SASC report will contain a full account of the role the American Psychological Association played in providing cover for the psychologist-torturers. Rather than act to stop the abuse, in 2005 they appointed some of the key psychologists in the chains of command responsible for the abuse to dominate their “ethics” task force formulating policy on psychologists involvement in detainee interrogations.

Rather than tackle reports of abuse that filled the press by that point, this task force agreed that psychologist participation in a variety of national security operations, including interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere, was “ethical” and secretly concurred with the opinion of the then APA President-Elect, a renowned expert in “psychological ethics,” that:

“The goal of such psychologists’ work will ultimately be the protection of others (i.e., innocents) by contributing to the incarceration, debilitation, or even death of the potential perpetrator, who will often remain unaware of the psychologists’ involvement.”

While the APA ethics code states in its Principle A: Beneficence and Nonmaleficence:

“Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm. In their professional actions, psychologists seek to safeguard the welfare and rights of those with whom they interact professionally and other affected persons.”

Evidently, this “ethics” task force found no conflict between “benefiting those with whom they work and take care to do no harm” and “contributing to the incarceration, debilitation, or even death of the potential perpetrator.” I guess “debilitation, or even death” do not count as “harm” when done in the name of “national security.”

By the way, the until very recently, the APA leadership still expressed pride in the performance of this task force and disingenuously claims that the task force membership was not kept from the public and APA membership. However, against the will of those leaders, the APA membership resoundingly rejected their leadership’s policies on participation in interrogations in a referendum last fall. Since then, to the APA leadership’s credit, and likely in acknowledgment of a new climate among their Washington contacts and in the country at large, they have moved to implement the policy ratified by their membership.

[Those wanting fuller accounts of the APA's systematic duplicity during the scoundrel times can examine my just released chapter "Closing Eyes to Atrocities: U.S. Psychologists, Detainee Interrogations, and Response of the American Psychological Association" and a response my colleagues and I wrote to an APA press release reiterating their indefensible claim to have actively opposed torture and detainee abuse.]

However, there is much more to be learned about the role of the APA. We desperately need a full investigation, either as part of a national Committee of Inquiry into US torture and detainee abuse or as a free-standing investigation.

We also need investigation into all the health professionals — physicians, psychologists, nurses, medical technicians, etc. — who, wrote false death certificates,  monitored detainee interrogations, stitched up the bodies and minds of the maimed, and force fed those protesting abusive detention while virtually never attempting to stop the abuse or documenting or reporting it.

Meanwhile, none of the health professional associations took adequate steps to deal with this complicity of their member professionals. None of the psychologists, physicians, or other health professionals has been sanctioned by and professional association or state licensing board, despite several complaints having been filed.  The traditional mechanisms of professional ethics enforcement have grievously failed when faced with a program of state-sanctioned torture and abuse. In order to better understand the magnitude of these failures, and the institutional reasons for them, we need a Health Professionals Truth Commission. This Commission would  conduct a full investigation, including of the varied professional associations, in order to recommend ethical, policy, and structural changes to prevent a recurrence of this complicity when the next crisis comes.

Ideally this health professionals investigation will be conducted as a component of a larger national Commission of Inquiry into US torture and detainee abuse. However, if the larger commission doesn’t materialize or fails to tackle health professionals’ complicity, the professions themselves, in conjunction with human rights organizations, must act. We owe it to our members an to the public we serve to draw a bright line between our professions, dedicated as they are to improving the health and welfare of our patients and others’ whom we serve, and state-sponsored programs of abuse. To fail to draw this line will undermine public faith and trusts in our professions, to our detriment and to the detriment of those needing our help.

Here is the Leopold article [h/t Valtin]:

Senate Report to Reveal New Details of Bush Officials’ Role in Torture

By Jason Leopold

While Congress has focused primarily on the country’s economic turmoil and the lavish bonuses paid to Wall Street executives, a Senate Armed Services Committee report currently in the process of being declassified will force lawmakers to shift gears.

The Armed Services Committee will release–possibly as early as next week—its voluminous report on the treatment of alleged terrorist detainees held in U.S. custody and the brutal interrogation techniques they were subjected to, according to Defense Department and intelligence sources who described the report as the most detailed account to date of the roles senior Bush administration and Defense Department officials played in implementing a policy of torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other detention centers.

The full declassified version of the report is 200 pages, contains 2,000 footnotes, and will reveal a plethora of new information about the genesis of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. The investigation relied upon the testimony of 70 people, generated 38,000 pages of documents, and took 18 months to complete. The declassified version of his report will include a full account of the roles military psychologists played in assisting the Bush administration implement a policy of torture.

The committee released a 19-page summary of its investigation last year and voted last November to accept the full classified version of the report’s findings. According to the executive summary, “efforts by administration officials to place responsibility for detainee abuses mostly on lower ranking military personnel as both inaccurate and misleading.”

The release of the full declassified version of the Armed Service’s Committee report will also put additional pressure on the Obama administration to immediately launch a full-scale investigation into the Bush administration’s interrogation program. Last week, the ACLU called on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to probe Bush administration officials who signed off on and approved the torture of prisoners.

But at his first prime-time news conference in February, Obama said in response to questions about the Bush administration’s interrogation practices that no one is above the law but that he favored looking forward, not backward.

“What I have said is that my administration is going to operate in a way that leaves no doubt that we do not torture that we abide by the Geneva Conventions and that we observe our traditions of rule of law and due process as we are vigorously going after terrorists that can do us harm,” Obama said.

“My view is also that nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing then people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen. But generally speaking I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.”

Levin has asked Holder to appoint someone to further probe his report’s findings and make a recommendation to Holder on how to proceed. The attorney general hasn’t yet responded. Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said Friday he was working on obtaining a response to Levin’s recommendation to Holder but Miller was unable to provide The Public Record with a response by the time this story was published. We will, however, update this report with Miller’s response when we receive it.

In January, at a progressive media summit, Levin said, “There needs to be, I believe, an accounting of torture in this country.”

“I suggested to Eric Holder, who will be the next Attorney General despite the delay that took place today, that he select some people or hire an outside person who’s got real credibility, perhaps a retired federal judge, to take all the available information, and there’s reams of it,” Levin said Jan. 21. “Look, the Vice President, the former Vice President of the United States, acknowledged that they engaged in torture. He says that waterboarding’s not torture, he’s wrong. Waterboarding is torture, period.

“And this administration and Eric Holder has said so. It’s torture and there’s other forms that they engaged in, so what needs to be done, I believe, in addition to finishing the investigation, is for the Attorney General, the new Attorney General, to identify some people in his office to take the existing documentation. The acknowledgment, folks, this is not a very difficult — this is almost like a case in court with an agreed upon statement of facts, that the previous administration acknowledges that they engaged in waterboarding, period. . .”

John Yoo

The Armed Serivces Committee investigation has already concluded that “members of [Bush’s] Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed. National Security Council Principals reviewed the CIA’s interrogation program during that period.”

But the declassified committee report contains detailed information about those secret meetings. John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, participated in several of these meetings prior to writing a legal opinion authorizing interrogators to subject detainees to waterboarding and other brutal techniques.

Last year, in response to questions by Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, Condoleezza Rice, who was National Security Adviser when interrogation methods were discussed, said that beginning as early as the summer of 2002 Yoo provided legal advice at “several” meetings that she attended and that the Department of Justice’s advice on the interrogation program “was being coordinated by Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales.”

Yoo met with Gonzales and David Addington, counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, to discuss the subjects he intended to address in the August 2002 torture memos, according to a declassified summary of the Armed Services Committee report.

Those meetings and the legal opinions that followed have also been scrutinized in a separate report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which spent four years reviewing the legal work of Yoo and other attorneys at the OLC. The OPR report, which is still classified, zeroed in on the meetings Yoo participated in and concluded that Yoo had breached “professional standards” by acting as an advocate for White House policy, according to Justice Department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report is still classified.

SERE Techniques

The declassified report will include a full accounting of how the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program, which was meant to prepare U.S. soldiers for abuse they might suffer if captured by an outlaw regime, was reverse engineered and used against detainees during interrogations. SERE training techniques include stress positions, forced nudity, use of fear, sleep deprivation and, until recently, the Navy SERE school used the waterboard.

Already, the committee has revealed that discussion surrounding the use of SERE techniques on detainees began in the spring of 2002 and inquiries about the use of SERE methods were made in December 2001, well before the issuance of a legal opinion authorizing the use of harsh interrogation methods.

“Resistance training (the “R” in SERE) was a subject of discussion,” Levin said in a statement last December accompanying an executive summary of his committee’s report. “We discovered that in July 2002, at the request of [Department of Defense] General Counsel Jim Haynes’s office, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) – the DoD agency that oversees SERE training – provided Haynes’s office a list of techniques used in SERE school and an assessment of the psychological effect of using those techniques on students.

“In December 2002, Secretary of Defense [Donald] Rumsfeld authorized some of those same techniques for use against detainees at [Guantanamo]. We discovered that, in January 2003, SERE instructors traveled to [Guantanamo] and trained interrogators to hit detainees and put them in stress positions. And the investigation revealed that instructors from JPRA’s SERE school participated in at least one abusive interrogation and were present for others during a visit to Iraq in September 2003.

“Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there,” the Armed Services Committee report concluded.” Secretary Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 approval of Mr. Haynes’s recommendation that most of the techniques contained in [Guantanamo’s] October 11, 2002 request be authorized, influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, including military working dogs, forced nudity, and stress positions, in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The investigation found that the CIA’s interrogation program “included at least one SERE training technique, waterboarding.”

“Senior Administration lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the President, and David Addington, Counsel to the Vice President, were consulted on the development of legal analysis of CIA interrogation techniques,” a declassified summary of the report said. “Legal opinions subsequently issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) interpreted legal obligations under U.S. anti-torture laws and determined the legality of CIA interrogation techniques.

“Those OLC opinions distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws, rationalized the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody and influenced Department of Defense determinations as to what interrogation techniques were legal for use during interrogations conducted by U.S. military personnel.”

Last June, Levin said he sent Jay Bybee, the former assistant attorney general at OLC who signed the infamous Aug. 1, 2002 torture memo, a list of questions about the implementation of SERE methods.

“In his response to my questions, Jay Bybee said that, in July 2002 – just before those two OLC opinions were issued and about the same time Jim Haynes’s office requested a list of SERE training techniques and information on the psychological effects of SERE (including waterboarding), the CIA provided OLC with an assessment of the psychological effects of SERE resistance training,” Levin said last December. “Jay Bybee wrote me that the assessment provided by the CIA was used to “inform” the August 1, 2002 OLC legal opinion that has yet to be made public. (CIA officials, including George Tenet and acting General Counsel John Rizzo declined to answer questions relating to both that assessment and the CIA’s interrogation program.)

“Judge Bybee’s answers provide insight into how senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques used in SERE training, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

Bybee’s legal work in this area was also harshly criticized by OPR, according to sources familiar with the contents of the watchdog’s report. Bybee is now a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The investigation Levin’s committee conducted concluded that a Feb. 7, 2002, action memorandum signed by George W. Bush that excluded “war on terror” suspects from Geneva Convention protections was responsible for the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

“Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody,” the committee’s report concluded.

“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

Rumsfeld and Chertoff

Rice told Levin in written responses to his committee’s queries last September that the CIA’s interrogation program was reviewed by National Security Council principals and that Rumsfeld participated in that review.

Rice said that when the CIA sought approval of the interrogation program she asked Tenet to brief the principals and asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to “personally advise NSC Principals whether the program was lawful.”

John Bellinger, Rice’s Legal Advisor, told Levin that he asked CIA lawyers to seek legal advice not only from the OLC, but also from the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, headed at the time by Michael Chertoff.

Chertoff reportedly advised the CIA General Counsel Scott Muller and his deputy, John Rizzo, that the August 1, 2002, legal opinion protected CIA interrogators from prosecution if they used waterboarding or other harsh tactics.

In February 2005, during his Senate confirmation hearing to become Homeland Security secretary, Chertoff said he provided the CIA broad guidance in response to its questions about interrogation methods, but never addressed the legality of specific techniques.

Abu Zubaydah’s Torture

The declassified report will also for the first time include a full account about the fierce objections the FBI had toward the CIA’s interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an alleged “high-value” al-Qaeda detainee, and an in-depth accounting of the meetings and discussions that led to his torture..

According to documents Levin’s committee obtained from the Department of Justice, Daniel Levin, the former head of the agency’s Office of Legal Counsel, indicated that in 2002 “in the context of the Zubaydah interrogation, he attended a meeting at the National Security Council (NSC) at which CIA techniques were discussed.

Daniel “Levin stated that a DOJ Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorney gave advice at the meeting about the legality of CIA interrogation techniques. Levin stated that in connection with this meeting, or immediately after it, FBI Director Mueller decided that FBI agents would not participate in interrogations involving techniques the FBI did not normally use in the United States, even though OLC had determined such techniques were legal,” according to questions directed to Rice by Sen. Levin.

Daniel Levin was forced to resign in 2004 when Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General because he objected to waterboarding.

The CIA videotaped Zubaydah’s interrogations and the tapes were destroyed. Two weeks ago, author Mark Danner disclosed a report prepared by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), concluding that the abuse of 14 “high-value” detainees, including Zubaydah, “constituted torture.”

“In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” according to the ICRC report. Since the ICRC’s responsibilities involve ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions and supervising the treatment of prisoners of war, the organization’s findings carry legal weight.

The ICRC report also found that there was a consistency in many details from the detainees who were interviewed separately and that the first “high-value” detainee to be captured, Abu Zubaydah, appeared to have been used as something of a test case by his interrogators. Zubaydah was one of the prisoners whose interrogations were videotaped by the CIA.

In her responses to Sen. Levin’s questions regarding Zubaydah’s interrogation, Rice said she had “general recollection that FBI had decided not to participate in the CIA interrogations but I do not recall any specific discussions about withdrawing FBI personnel from the Abu Zubaydah interrogation.”

The final conclusion of Levin’s investigation was that the “abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own.”

“Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at [Guantanamo],” a declassified summary of his report said. “Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.”

April 2nd, 2009

Is parents’ rally in Boston a harbinger of wider protests?

In Boston today we had 700 or so parents rallying at the State House and lobbying the legislature to protest the budget cuts  that threaten to do serious damage to public education in the city. the rally had an amazing energy, as parents throughout the city sacrificed their lunch hour to protest.

The movement started among parents at Boston Latin School, an elite, “exam school,” with many middle class parents. BLS was originally scheduled for an 18% budget cut, which would remove all music, physical education, and many Advanced Placement classes, while replacing one subject with yet another study hall each day.

Rather than simply fight for their kids and their school, the BLS parents wisely decided to reach out to parents throughout the system many of whom aren’t as privileged. the rally today, while disproportionately white, did represent parents from throughout the school system. One State Representative said it was the largest rally he’d ever seen there and made quite an impact among his colleagues. My representative, Angelo Scaccia, however, ran for a hiding place and disappeared, along with all his aids, when 50 parents from his district tried to meet with him.

The rally got some press attention, but Boston.com, the website of the Boston Globe, appears to be downplaying it.

Parents of children who attend the Boston public schools rallied at the Statehouse this afternoon, hoping to convince the governor and the Legislature to send more money to the city to avert budget cuts that could result in the loss of more than 500 school jobs, including those of many teachers.

The parents advocated for a larger share of federal stimulus dollars. They also voiced support for the Legislature to pass measures that would enable communities to raise more revenue, such as increasing the local meals and lodging taxes.

“What we are interested in is keeping more teachers in the classroom,” said Karina Meiri, a Boston Latin School parent and one of the organizers, in an interview before the event.

They are giving much greater play to a vampire rumor at Boston Latin than to hundreds of outraged parents. Neither their article not the picture they chose gives any sense that more than a few dozen parents participated. Our other paper, the less-respected rag, the Boston Herald, did a far better job conveying the spirit of the rally:

Hundreds of boisterous Boston parents packed the State House today to protest the governor’s move to cut the city out of $168 million in state stabilization funds to schools.

“We have bare bones and now the bare bones are being cut and all we have are teachers and now they are being taken away,” said Bonnie Manzi, a mother of a 15-year-old girl attending Boston Latin Academy [a separate "exam school" from Boston Latin School].

The West Roxbury mom was joined today by scores of other parents chanting “Do the right thing” and wearing T-shirts reading, “Save BPS arts,” while amassing inside the State House.

It was a show of Boston-baked outrage over the future of the schools.

One wonders if movements like this are occurring across the country, as parents and other  citizens fight back against the massive cutbacks accompanying the economic meltdown. If so, perhaps these movements will gradually unite, taking on a wider agenda while bringing together people from diverse geographic regions. After all, the cutbacks, like the economic crisis, are occurring at a national, indeed an international level, and affect us all. A successful fightback will take more than people in one city. nd the damage to public education is only one aspect of the damage that will becaused by the destruction of government budgets while trillions are spent paying off the banks to “resume lending.” If citizens unite to resist, democracy in the country could be revitalized as we cease to let the politicians, the bankers, and their ilk decide our fate.

March 26th, 2009

Boston rally to close Guantanamo, January 14

To my Boston-area friends and readers, I will be speaking at an Amnesty/ACLU of Massachusetts vigil next Wednesday, January 14, outside the Federal Building in Government Center, Boston, 4:00.

Save the date!

This is one of a series of vigils being held across the country to demand that Obama follow through on his pledge to close Guantanamo. Seven years is far to long!

As a reminder of the need for our continued pressure, 10% of Guantanamo detainees are now on hunger strike and being force fed.

I will post more details if I can get them.

January 9th, 2009

New York Sun on referendum victory

New York Sun on referendum victory:

Psychology Group Changes Policy on Interrogations

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the New York Sun | September 18, 2008

In a dramatic turnaround that could strain the long-standing ties between the psychology profession and the military, the American Psychological Association has reversed its policy of encouraging members to assist in the interrogation of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other overseas prison sites.

The professional association’s new policy, which was reached by a referendum, goes beyond telling members, even those who are military personnel, that it is off-limits to participate in interrogations at detention centers abroad. Members would be prohibited from working at such sites in any capacity that directly assists the government. The prohibition would apply to psychologists who work as psychological profilers or even as clinicians who treat detainees as mental health patients.

“This goes beyond interrogations,” a Boston psychologist who has sought to change the APA’s position, Stephen Soldz, said. “The thought is that if you are there and a part of the military chain of command, then you are part of the system.”

The new policy represents “a significant change” in the association’s policy on the involvement of psychologists in interrogations, the association said in a statement. A spokeswoman, Rhea Faberman, declined to make any officers at the APA available for comment. According to the bylaws of the APA, the policy does not go into effect for another year.

Previously the APA has generally encouraged a policy of “engagement” – or involvement in national security interrogations – for the purpose of stopping “interrogations that cross the bounds of ethical propriety,” as the director of the APA’s ethics office, Stephen Behnke, wrote in a letter earlier this year. APA officials also had encouraged engagement in the interrogation process by psychologists, on the grounds that psychologists have expertise to lend and ought to assist in the country’s anti-terrorism efforts.

The APA had already banned its members from participating in any of 19 interrogation techniques, including the use of hoods, forced nakedness, and waterboarding.

Since June 2006, the Defense Department has relied increasingly on psychologists to staff the behavioral science consultation teams, which advise interrogators on how to attempt to elicit information from detainees. Before then, psychiatrists had participated on such teams, but the Defense Department announced it would increase its reliance on psychologists after the American Psychiatric Association began a policy of instructing its members not to participate.

The role that psychologists played in advising interrogators is not well-documented but is increasingly coming under scrutiny. During a court proceeding at Guantanamo last month, lawyers informed the court that a military psychologist would invoke her right under the military’s equivalent of the Fifth Amendment, were she called as a witness. At issue was the psychologist’s role in devising the conditions of detention and the tactics of the interrogation of a detainee facing war crimes charges, Mohammad Jawad. The detainee’s attorney, Major David Frakt, claims in court papers that the psychologist advised that Mr. Jawad be put under extremely isolating conditions and that interrogators exploit his concerns about his family.

While not all licensed psychologists are members of the APA, a majority are, according to information provided by the association. The APA’s military psychology group has 442 members, although it was not clear whether all of those were uniformed military personnel. Because the APA can conduct investigations against its members for violating APA ethics codes and forwards any adverse findings on to state psychologist licensing boards, the new policy goes far beyond a statement of principles.

It is unclear how the military will respond to the APA’s new policy and whether it will remove psychologists from teams that advise interrogators. The new policy also would apply to any detention sites run by the Central Intelligence Agency, but would allow psychologists to be present at such sites if they were employed by an “independent third party working to protect human rights,” such as the Red Cross.

The measure could put pressure on military psychologists involved in detainee programs to seek other work.

“These people are going to want to go back into the civilian work force some day,” Dr. Soldz said. “This will make it harder for the military to recruit psychologists, if the military asks them to do things that are unprofessional.”

The new policy was decided by a vote put to the 90,000 members of the APA’s voting membership. Of about 15,000 members who returned ballots, 59% voted for the resolution and 41% against.

The chief executive officer of the group Physicians for Human Rights, Frank Donaghue, said the vote was a “blow against medical complicity in torture.”

The text of the resolution states, in part, that “psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law or the US Constitution.” Because the conditions at prisons in America are occasionally found, during the course of a civil rights lawsuit, to violate the Constitution, a strict reading of the new policy would suggest that APA members could not work in such facilities.

September 18th, 2008

Are American Psychological Association staff interfering in the Referendum vote?

American Psychological Association members are currently voting upon a ground breaking Referendum that would pull psychologists out of US detention centers that violate international law or the Constitution. The key paragraph of the Referendum states:a

Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights

As Referendum voting has progressed, we have become concerned that APA staff have been intervening inappropriately, by rallying sentiment against the Referendum.

Coalition member Bryant Welch, who had worked for the APA as its Executive Director of the Practice Directorate for nearly a decade, has written APA CEO Norm Anderson expressing concern about this staff interference in the voting process. His initial letter was:

August 23, 2008

Norman Anderson, Ph.D.
CEO, American Psychological Association
750 First St. N.E
Washington, DC 20002

By Facsimile and First Class Mail

Dear Norm:

I regret we have not had any chances to talk since you became CEO. I have heard consistently from staff that you have brought kindness and concern for staff welfare to the APA.  I know they appreciate it very much.

I am writing to express my concern at the current use of APA staff and central office resources to oppose the referendum currently before the APA membership. As you may know, I have been mortified by APA’s failure to join with the other organizations in taking an unequivocal position against the Bush Administration’s detention centers. The point of this movement by our sister organizations is obviously symbolic. It is designed to send the message to the American people that a government that treats its prisoners in the inhumane ways that the Bush Administration has deserves the moral condemnation of professional organizations like the APA. This is operationalized by a blanket refusal to participate in the detention centers.

APA’s attempt to treat the matter as a nuanced issue, of course, creates the appearance of equivocation on this important issue and makes us appear to be insensitive to the real and shocking behavior that is taking place in the detention centers. The arguments advanced in support of APA’s position strike most people outside of the APA as transparent rationalizations for colluding with the military. The military’s promise to prefer psychologists over psychiatrists in DOD interrogations as a result of our position even makes us look like immoral opportunists in the context of torture and abuse. This view has been reinforced by recent attempts to defeat the referendum because of a seemingly far-fetched hypothetical impact on psychologists in public work settings. Even were these concerns correct it, again, appears to make the moral issue of torture subservient to psychologists’ economic interests.

The detention center problem is going to be exacerbated by the recent decision of a military psychologist to plead the military equivalent of the Fifth Amendment. It is now clear that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg of psychologists’ involvement in the torture problem, and we will probably soon be reading psychological reports advising interrogators on how to “break” detainees. This is a scandal that will not be erased for decades, if ever. Trying to act like these reports in this process is the act of a few renegade psychologists, especially after APA’s equivocal position on the matter, only further undermines our public image and credibility.

This brings us to the current referendum and my reason for writing to you. The referendum is now the only potential damage control still available to APA on this matter. After the election, the Bush Administration will be gone, and whether it is McCain or Obama no one will have an incentive to cover up what has taken place at Gitmo and the black sites. In all likelihood, the atrocities will be horrible, and APA’s refusal to have joined with the other professions will subject the field to even more opprobrium.  At that time, APA will be in no position to change its policy. It will be too late. We will stand exposed in the eyes of the world, and APA will be seen as complicit in what is certainly one of the most shameful chapters of US history. The positions that I believe in truth reflect longstanding organizational regression will, instead, be perceived as character flaws in psychologists themselves.

The passage of the referendum, at least, will let us say that the membership stepped in and expressed the true moral values of the field. The problem can then be honestly attributed to some flawed, but temporary, decisions that were repudiated by the members at large. It will with time, hopefully, be forgotten.

When I worked at APA it was an absolute rule that staff were not to participate in organizational political issues. After the reorganization by-laws vote, for example, a very senior staff member was advised by your predecessor to find alternative employment because he assisted in sending out a mailing in support of the reorganization plan. This principle was widely recognized in the APA.

In the current referendum campaign, it is very clear that this longstanding principle has been completely disregarded. The APA Ethics officer has been quite outspoken in opposition to the referendum and tireless in his efforts to defeat it. The director of public information and her staff have released numerous documents to the media and to the membership in support of the policy that was adopted by Council and the Board of Directors. At the recent APA Convention, five proponents of the referendum were literally followed through convention corridors to a coffee stand and their remarks surreptitiously tape recorded without their knowledge by a staff member from the APA public information office. She said it was her job to “find out what people are saying about the APA.”  In the current political climate and given the nature of the issue at hand, this is very inappropriate and, quite frankly, bizarre and chilling.

This, of course, also puts the APA governance and central office in conflict with the APA by-laws. The principle of a referendum by the membership to overturn decisions by the Board of Directors and the Council of Representatives, guaranteed by the by-laws, is obviously rendered meaningless if the membership in seeking such relief can be opposed by a Board of Directors and Council of Representatives using the full staff and financial resources of the central office. These resources belong to the members, not the Board or the governance, and they should not be used to support a position the very nature of which is being challenged by the membership. I think the logic of this position is quite clear and compelling.

It is also important to note that this apparently new policy of putting mid-level staff out front on major political issues, frustrates organizational accountability. Ms. Farberman and Dr. Behnke are presumably not the policy makers on this issue and not acting on their own initiative. While the members have a right to know who is making the decisions on this important policy, this information is nowhere to be found in APA’s pronouncements either to the public or to the membership. Since Dr. Levant and Koocher have left office, one gets the sense that there is no one home at APA on the issue except for the aforementioned APA staff members. The current APA president in the context of this dispute, for example, is alleged to have said that presidents “have no power” in APA.

Accordingly, Norm, this extraordinary effort on the part of the staff to advance a position currently in dispute within the association creates a huge “tilt” in the election process and, I believe, will justify putting aside the results of any negative vote on the referendum should that occur. Hopefully, for the good of everyone, that will not happen. Winning the referendum vote, as the current governance hopes to do, will be a terrible pyrrhic victory for the APA governance, and it will be a defeat of disastrous proportions for the profession.

I hope you will reconsider what I believe is a serious and inappropriate misallocation of APA staff and resources. I also hope you will see to it that in future APA communications mid-level staff people are not used to obscure the identities of the higher-ups that are actually making the decisions, whoever they may be at this time. The membership has a right to know who these individuals are. Most importantly, the right to petition on a policy matter is a meaningful right only if one side to the dispute is not opposed by the vast resources of the APA central office.

I doubt if the current APA inner sanctum desires advice from me at this point, but I can assure you it is well-intended and based on years of experience and training in these kinds of matters. For what it is worth, I hope the governance will stop trying to rationalize and reframe their initial decision and, instead, support the referendum. It will be a lot easier for them to make that decision now than it will be to tolerate the contempt that will be directed toward them, the APA, and the profession of psychology if the referendum is defeated. Group think rationalizations by the APA governance and staff, including attempts to scapegoat the people who oppose them (which are also so reminiscent of the Bush Administration), simply will not wash outside the APA inner sanctum.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter, Norm. I regret that our only contact since you have assumed your position has been of this nature. I don’t think either of us could have imagined that APA would ever be in this situation with respect to something like torture.

Best personal regards,

Bryant L. Welch, J.D., Ph.D.

cc. Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

Board of Directors, American Psychological Association c/o Alan Kazdin, Ph.D.

CEO Dr. Anderson replied in a letter agreeing that staff should not advocate but denying that they do so. Bryant Welch has replied to Dr. Anderson:

September 11, 2008

Norman Anderson, Ph.D.
CEO, American Psychological Association
750 First St. N.E
Washington, DC
20002

Dear Norm:

Thank you for your letter of September 2nd responding to my concerns about staff participation in the ongoing APA-wide dispute about the role of psychologists in the Bush Administration detention centers. As I understand it, we both agree that APA staff and resources should in no way be used to advance or oppose the referendum.

As I also understand it, you believe that the role of staff to date has merely been to answer questions and explain APA policy. On this, I respectfully disagree.

I think, for example, if one examines the recent statements of the public affairs office, they are unquestionably designed to convince the public that existing APA policy is sufficient to prevent psychologists from engaging in inappropriate detention center behavior. In fact, they are very artfully crafted to that end. In some APA statements, it requires considerable familiarity with the torture issue and/or very careful reading of the APA documents to understand that in spite of these extant APA policies, psychologists are still able to participate in Gitmo interrogations while being in compliance with all APA anti-torture policies.

To illustrate my point about the staff statements, on August 17, 2008 the APA Central Office sent the following to the Boston Globe in response to anti-torture leader Stephen Soldz’ op-ed in the Boston Globe on August 10.

In his recent piece (“Ending the psychological mind games on detainees,” Op-ed, Aug. 10), Stephen Soldz seriously mischaracterizes both the actions and position of the American Psychological Association regarding psychologists’ involvement in the interrogation of detainees.

In a series of resolutions dating more than 20 years, the APA has resoundingly condemned torture and the involvement of any psychologist in torture or abuse.

One year ago, the association’s governing body passed a resolution condemning the abusive interrogation techniques that Soldz mentions.

This statement is very partisan advocacy. It argues the very points that are in contention within the referendum debate, whether APA has both “resoundingly condemned torture and the involvement of any psychologist in torture or abuse.” Clearly the message is that the referendum is unnecessary. Further, it is an APA staff member making a global statement that impugns the reliability of one of the leading spokespersons for the referendum.

I have also received allegations that the APA Ethics Officer has on numerous recent occasions advanced the argument that the referendum, if passed, would jeopardize employment opportunities for psychologists in public work settings, the very argument that Dr. Resnick advanced in his con statement on the referendum vote. Given that the APA is overseeing the referendum process, as you point out, these partisan staff statements are particularly worrisome and will inevitably cast doubt on the credibility and integrity of the referendum process.

I don’t think these APA statements about APA policy are being perceived in the same manner that you perceive them, and, thus, for the good of all of us, I hope you will reconsider the position you have outlined in your letter. For example, just a week after receiving the APA staff letter, the Boston Globe took the highly unusual step of making its own editorial statement that condemned APA’s policy on torture and directly contradicted the factual rendition provided by APA staff. The perceived disingenuousness of APA’s public statements is reflecting negatively on all members of the psychology profession.

Out in the public arena APA staff attempts to stretch existing APA policy to cover the current crisis created by the Bush Administration are viewed widely as transparent cover-ups by an organization that is collaborating with this same Administration in a moral drift unprecedented in psychology’s history and maybe even in America’s history.

Finally, it is hard to reconcile your dismissing the reality of APA staff partisanship with the fact that a member of the public affairs office literally followed five of us down several long corridors to record our conversation with a journalist without even telling us she was recording it. I can assure you we were not in need of her help to answer questions about APA policy or to interpret it. I doubt very much if she did this with any opponents of the referendum, and regardless, it is absolutely bizarre and inappropriate behavior under any circumstances.

I want to emphasize that in raising these specific examples I am not suggesting that the individual staff members are to blame. Instead, it is clear this is a systemic problem. I believe it is a violation of the APA by-laws.

I realize this issue has been very difficult for all of us, but I hope we can still find some way to prevent it from doing permanent and irrevocable damage to the profession.

Sincerely yours,

Bryant L. Welch, J.D., Ph.D.

cc. Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Board of Directors, American Psychological Association

September 12th, 2008

Democracy Now! appearance August 18

Last Monday, as I was preparing to leave town for a week of vacation, I was on Democracy Now! together with my colleague Brad Olson of the Coaltion for an Ethical Psychology; Leonard Rubinstein, President of Physicians for Human Rights; and California State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas, sponsor of the just passsed SJR19 that banns California licensed health providers’ participation in torture. We were originallty scheduled for most of the show, but th overnight resignation of Pakistani President Musharraf took precendence, reducing the segment.

You can watch or listen to the segment here. The story has also been posted on YouTube in three segments. Unfortunately, the first segment seems to have the audio and visuals out of sync, at least on my computer:

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Here is the transcript:

August 18, 2008, Democracy Now!, w/ Amy Goodman & Juan Gonzalez
Referendum on Torture: Debate Over Role of Psychologists in Military Interrogations Comes to a Head at APA Annual Convention

The debate over the role that psychologists should play in military interrogations heated up this weekend at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association. After years of back-and-forth discussion and several resignations from the association, APA members are now voting on a referendum that could make any participation in coercive prisoner interrogations a violation of their code of ethics. Meanwhile, California became the first state in the nation to officially condemn the participation of health professionals—including psychologists—in coercive interrogations of prisoners in the so-called war on terror. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Brad Olson, Assistant Research Professor at Northwestern University. He is a founding member of the Psychologists for an Ethical APA.

Leonard Rubinstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights.

Stephen Soldz, Psychoanalyst, Psychologist, Researcher and Activist. He is a faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and a co-founder of the Psychologists for an Ethical APA.

Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas, Democratic State Senator from Los Angeles. Introduced Senate Joint Resolution 19 to prevent California health professionals from participating in coercive interrogations.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The debate over the role that psychologists should play in military interrogations heated up this weekend at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, or the APA. Over a hundred people were at a rally Saturday urging the APA to explicitly ban its members from participating in interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan and the secret CIA black sites.

After years of debate and numerous resignations from the association, APA members are now voting on a referendum that would make any participation in detainee interrogations a violation of their code of ethics.

Dissident psychologist Steven Reisner, a co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, is also one of the leading candidates for the APA presidency. He spoke at Saturday’s rally in Boston.

DR. STEVEN REISNER: […] exists for one reason. It exists to prohibit psychologist participation at sites, by their very existence which violate international law and human rights and perpetrate war crimes. The sites—let me give you an example. In the fall of 2002, the CIA were looking to capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and when they went to where they thought he was, they found his two children there instead, two boys, aged seven and nine, whom they captured instead and brought them to a CIA black site, where they were held both, at first, to pressure their father to give up, to get information from them about his whereabouts, and later on, after he was captured, they kept them there to pressure their father into talking. When the people who were holding the children of Mohammed were asked about their care, they said, “They are being overseen by child psychologists. They are being given the best of care.”

When I hear that story, when I hear about psychologists participating in CIA black sites in the kidnapping of children, I know that something is wrong in the state of psychology and how psychology is being used. At this moment, there is no policy at the APA that prohibits psychologists from being present and behaving in that manner at CIA black sites, even though—and I have this on the word—I spoke to the UN rapporteur on torture from the UN Committee Against Torture, and I asked him whether participating in the operations, whether participating in what is taking place at CIA black sites, where people are being disappeared, is that a war crime? And he said that is prosecutable as acquiescence to a war crime. And yet, to this day, that is not a violation of APA policy or ethics on psychologist behavior. This referendum has a clear intent, and it is to stop participation in war crimes and human rights violations in the name of national security and psychology around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Psychologist Steve Reisner, running for presidency of the American Psychological Association. He was speaking at a rally outside the APA convention this weekend in Boston. This year’s convention comes on the heels of a string of revelations that psychologists played a key role in designing the CIA’s so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

Last week, lawyers for the Afghan Guantanamo prisoner Mohammad Jawad asserted that a psychologist had recommended a month-long isolation program that allegedly drove Jawad to attempt suicide. But the psychologist refused to testify, invoking the military equivalent of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Independent filmmaker and writer for The Nation, Ross Tuttle, asked APA Ethics Office director, Dr. Stephen Behnke, about the significance of this development.

DR. STEPHEN BEHNKE: There’s been a report that has appeared that there was a psychologist who was involved in an abusive interrogation. I think we’re deeply concerned about that. We’ve been very clear that the acts, as they have been reported on a blog, would be against our professional rules, and we will take a very close look at that. We have jurisdiction only over our members. But whenever a psychologist is involved in any torture or abuse, that reflects on the entire profession.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Behnke and the APA leadership are opposed to the referendum that has currently been put forward.

We’re joined now by two guests who support the referendum. Stephen Soldz is a faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. He blogs at psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog. And Brad Olson is a faculty member at Northwestern University, also a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. They join us from Boston. We’re also joined in Washington, D.C. by Leonard Rubinstein, who is the head of Physicians for Human Rights.

I want to first go to Brad Olson. You’re one of the authors of this referendum that the APA leadership has opposed that is now being voted on by the members of the American Psychological Association. Can you explain what it is?

DR. BRAD OLSON: Yes. The referendum is focused on the problem in Guantanamo Bay and the CIA black sites. I mean, these are settings that are against the law. I mean, they’re extralegal, extra illegal. And what we’re basically saying in this referendum, that psychologists should work in these settings, but psychologists should not work in these settings when they’re working for the chain of command. We’d like to see psychologists from human rights organizations working with the International Committee of the Red Cross. So, basically, what the referendum is saying is that psychologists should work independently for the detainee or should not be at these settings at all.

JUAN GONZALEZ: If the referendum were passed, what direct effect would it have on the individual practices of these psychologists?

DR. BRAD OLSON: Well, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, back prior to the American Psychological Association’s policy, they made very similar policies that basically said physicians and psychiatrists should not play a role in these national security interrogations. And we had the Department of Defense say that they preferred psychologists in these behavioral science consultation roles. So, what we’re hoping to is we’re hoping in 2008 to get back to where we should have been in 2005.

AMY GOODMAN: Leonard Rubinstein in Washington, D.C. with Physicians for Human Rights, the significance of this referendum in the broader picture in this country around the issue of torture?

LEONARD RUBINSTEIN: Well, the referendum, in the broad picture, is really whether we’re going to have psychologists and other health professionals participate in disorienting, breaking down, destroying detainees as part of the interrogation process. We know very clearly now from documents from the Pentagon that the behavior management plans at Guantanamo were designed to exploit and enhance disorientation or disorganization of the personality, and that was done through isolation and other means and that psychologists were at the center of this.

The problem is that it’s not enough, as the APA has said, “Don’t participate in torture, don’t use these techniques.” We have had a system in which the entire purpose of the system was to break people down. It’s like telling people to go to a slaughterhouse and advise the people killing the animals and advise them not to hurt the animals. It’s an impossible position to say, “You can participate, so long as you don’t harm,” when the entire system is designed to inflict harm.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Leonard Rubinstein, what about the issue of the liability or the responsibility of psychologists, in terms of the Geneva Conventions or internationally accepted rules of behavior for psychologists?

LEONARD RUBINSTEIN: Well, the problem is that the structure and the system invited violations of all those standards, whether they were international ethical standards or international legal standards like the Geneva Conventions. And try as the association might to carve out a role that enables psychologists to participate without being engaged in the violations is an impossible task.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, and when we come back, we will also be joined by a California state legislator, Mark [Ridley- Thomas], who sponsored a resolution that just got passed by the California legislature that prohibits members of the health profession from participating in coercive interrogations. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll be joined by all of our guests in just a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: California has just became the first state in the nation to officially condemn the participation of health professionals, including psychologists, in coercive interrogations of prisoners in the so-called war on terror. Senate Joint Resolution 19, which passed in the state legislature Thursday, instructs the state’s licensing boards to inform California health professionals they may one day be subject to prosecution if they participate in interrogations that don’t conform with international standards of treatment of prisoners.

The resolution was introduced by Democratic State Senator from Los Angeles, Mark Ridley-Thomas. Senator Ridley-Thomas joins us now on the phone from Los Angeles.

Can you talk about what inspired you to introduce this legislation and the significance of the state legislature adopting it?

SEN. MARK RIDLEY-THOMAS: Well, thanks very much. I’m glad to do so. This was brought to our attention by the American Friends Services Committee, the Physicians for Social Responsibility and a campaign sponsored by Californians to Stop the Torture. And it seems to me that it is entirely appropriate, in light of the radical departure from international, federal and state law initiated by the Bush administration, that made it more possible and tolerable for physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, dentists, nurses, just the whole range of those in the helping profession, health professions, to become complicit. And we deemed it appropriate to call it to the attention of the nation and start in the California state legislature, and I’m pleased that my colleagues, albeit on a partisan vote, chose to send this message to all our licensees. And it will be significant.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, this was a resolution. Would it have any actual impact on the licensing of psychologists in California who violated it, the spirit or the intent of the resolution?

SEN. MARK RIDLEY-THOMAS: The resolution is very clear in that regard. It makes it abundantly clear that any California licensee is subject to prosecution, and obviously then they could lose their license, pursuant to it being determined that they participated in any way in acts of torture.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Steve Soldz, faculty member at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, co-founder of Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Can you talk about the significance of what California has done and then the significance of this referendum that is now being voted on by members of the American Psychological Association?

DR. STEPHEN SOLDZ: Well, the California resolution is a landmark one. It establishes a clear line that health professionals have no role in this organized system of abuse that our government has been perpetrating these last number of years. It is—though it is a resolution, it makes a clear public statement that the legislature and the citizens of California repudiate both the system of torture and the role of health professionals in it. The referendum in the American Psychological Association is a similar and parallel effort to try and get members of that association, psychologists, to make a similar statement, that we will not cooperate with this organized system of abuse that our country has constructed.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn back to Stephen Behnke, the director of the APA Ethics Office. He spoke near the rally on Saturday.

DR. STEPHEN BEHNKE: Taking as a starting point everyone is against torture and abuse—there’s complete consensus on that point—the question then becomes, do you pursue a strategy of engagement or disengagement, of involvement or non-involvement?

That question is the subject of deep debate within the association. Some of our members, many of whom are here today, feel that any engagement implies complicity with an illegitimate administration. Other members say, no, we must be very present for the very reasons that we have been called rebuking the administration’s policies, that we have to be clear and present where interrogations take place that an interrogation, ethical interrogation, never involves torture or abuse.

Then we need to ask the question, can an interrogation be done in an ethical manner? If the answer to that question is no, the conversation stops, because if an interrogation can’t be done in an ethical manner, no one should be doing interrogations. If an interrogation can be done in an ethical manner, then we pose the question, what is the appropriate role for a psychologist in that process?

AMY GOODMAN: That was Dr. Stephen Behnke, a member of the APA leadership, which has opposed this referendum. Your response, Dr. Stephen Soldz?

DR. STEPHEN SOLDZ: Well, clearly interrogations can be done in an ethical manner. Veteran military interrogators that we have talked to—and we’ve talked to many of them—are aghast at what this administration is doing. But what they also say is many of them do not want psychologists there. They say they don’t help. And what one of these veteran interrogators I’ve talked to said, and I think it’s so clear, he says, “As a citizen, I don’t want psychologists. Your profession is based on a principle of ‘do no harm.’ Your job is to help people, to serve the public and help distressed people. If we have you here, that violates your professional ethics of ‘do no harm,’ and it’s a loss for all of us, because we can no longer count on your profession to uphold the highest ethical standards.” The medical doctors and psychiatrists have said that participation in interrogations violates the standard of “do no harm.” And psychologists have to do the same thing. We need that as citizens.

We’re hearing from soldiers in Iraq that they will not go to psychologists, some of them, because they’ve heard about their participation in interrogations, and there’s a lack of trust. Our profession needs that trust, that we will always look out for the good of people and not participate in efforts to break them down.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask Brad Olson, assistant research professor at Northwestern University, about ten colleges and universities have gone on record as—the psychology departments—as opposing this kind of participation by psychologists in coercive interrogations, including Guilford College, Smith College, University of Rhode Island, California State at Long Beach. But that’s a very small group compared to the number of universities out there. Why have not more university psychology departments not taken a stand on this issue?

DR. BRAD OLSON: Well, those departments, really are just brave great people at those universities who decided to organize their own efforts in their departments. We really haven’t pushed an initiative in that area. But I think that’s exactly what’s happening here, that we’re seeing, and what we’re trying to do with the referendum is we’re really trying to bring it to the membership, because we know that the American Psychological Association’s governing body, council and their board are just really not—have come up with policy after policy that secures psychologists in these detention sites and in the interrogation role.

AMY GOODMAN: How is this different from last year when you put forward a resolution? How is this referendum different? And what does it mean that you’re now bringing it directly to the membership? How are people voting?

DR. BRAD OLSON: People are voting by September 15th. They’re getting a ballot in the mail right now, as we speak, and then they’re supposed to send that in September 15th. And the difference from the past resolution is this one focuses on settings. These are—I mean, the CIA black sites and Guantanamo Bay have, as we all know, just systemic harm. And so, what this is saying is that there is no role for psychologists at those sites unless those psychologists are focused directly on the detainees.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me go back to the state legislator, Ridley-Thomas. Are you saying that, given the current guidelines, the American Psychological Association, a psychologist could be brought up on charges for participating in coercive interrogations at, say, Guantanamo?

SEN. MARK RIDLEY-THOMAS: That’s essentially what the resolution asserts, and it’s been transmitted by the secretary of the Senate to all of the boards that govern health professions. And we have sent this in a rather unequivocal way. It is also being sent to the federal government to cause them to know that we stand against torture and the participation of those whose oath causes them to do no harm. Yes, the resolution is being taken seriously by all the boards who are specifically affected by state law, in this instance, first, and then federal law and then obviously international law. We are very serious about this issue.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, at a hearing this June, the Armed Forces Senate Committee released a series of previously classified documents detailing how the Pentagon and the CIA transformed the military’s SERE resistance training program into a blueprint for interrogating terrorist suspects. Committee chair, Senator Carl Levin, explained the timeline of implementing the SERE, or Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, techniques and the role of military psychologists in devising these routines.

SEN. CARL LEVIN: On October 2nd, 2002, a week after John Rizzo, the acting CIA general counsel, visited Gitmo, a second senior CIA lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, went to Guantanamo, attended a meeting of Gitmo staff and discussed a memo proposing the use of aggressive interrogation techniques. That memo had been drafted by a psychologist and psychiatrist from Gitmo who a couple of weeks earlier had attended that training given at Fort Bragg by instructors by the SERE school.

AMY GOODMAN: Leonard Rubinstein, we only have about thirty seconds, but can you sum up right now the significance of the special role that psychologists have played, as opposed to medical doctors and psychiatrists?

LEONARD RUBINSTEIN: It’s been very unfortunate that psychologists were at the very heart of the design and implementation of the techniques of torture that have been used at Guantanamo and by the CIA and that that was part of an effort that was quite deliberate to destroy people as a way of getting information. It’s good that the American Psychological Association has come out against torture in very explicit ways, but their policy now is asking people to be heroic, that is, going to places where the policy is to destroy people and say—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. Leonard Rubinstein, thanks for joining us, also Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas, Steve Soldz and Brad Olson.

August 25th, 2008

Press Release: Military Psychologist Refuses to Testify About Abusive Treatment of Detainee at Guantánamo

I was scheduled to testify at the Guantánamo Military commission yesterday. At the last moment the testimony was canceled. Here is a Press Release from the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and Psychologists for an Ethical APA explaining why.

Military Psychologist Invokes Right to Remain Silent at Guantánamo Hearing, Refusing to Testify About Abusive Treatment of Detainee

Psychologists and Human Rights Groups to Rally Saturday Against American Psychological Association’s Controversial Torture Policy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Thursday, August 14, 2008

BOSTON – A military psychologist who recommended isolation torture techniques on a Guantánamo detainee today invoked her right not to incriminate herself, refusing to testify in the case of Mohammad Jawad.

Her testimony was sought by defense attorney Maj. David Frakt in a hearing on his motion to dismiss charges based upon government misconduct in using prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, and other torture techniques against his client in an attempt to make him more pliable in interrogations. Following a month-long isolation, apparently recommended by the military psychologist, Mr. Jawad – who entered Guantánamo as a teenager — attempted suicide.

The psychologist’s testimony would have marked the first time that a member of the secretive Behavioral Science Consultation Team (known as BSCT or “biscuits”) had been called to testify in a detainee hearing. The BSCT program has been highly controversial among psychologists and other health professionals.  The psychologist invoked her rights under Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military equivalent of the 5th amendment right against self-incrimination/right to remain silent.

“The fact that the BSCT Psychologist now apparently recognizes that her conduct was criminal in nature is very significant,” said Maj. Frakt.  “We have alleged, based on classified government records that the BSCT psychologist’s recommendation led directly to the illegal abuse and inhumane treatment of Mohammad Jawad. This invocation of the right to remain silent seems to confirm that.”

“The evidence in this case confirms our worst fears, that military psychologists are working to break down detainee’s psyches,” said Dr. Stephen Soldz, an expert psychologist who had been called by Maj. Frakt to testify that the BSCT psychologist had violated the professional credo of “Do no harm.”

“Today’s developments only confirms our view that a full accounting of the shadowy BSCT program is long overdue,” he added.  Dr. Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, and faculty member at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

The news comes on the eve of a rally against torture to be held this Saturday outside the Boston Convention Center where the American Psychological Association, the largest group of its kind, is meeting this weekend.  The APA has come under increasing fire for its refusal to ban its members’ participation in Bush administration coercive interrogations and torture, as the AMA and the American Psychiatric Association have done.

“The continuing silence of the APA on member involvement in torture is telling,” Dr. Soldz said. “No APA leader or official has ever uttered one word critical of actual U.S. abuse, or of the role of psychologists and psychological expertise in that abuse. They continue to stonewall on disciplining any psychologists who participated, despite promises to investigate.”

At Saturday’s rally, psychologists speaking out against the policy will be joined by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and American Friends Service Committee and hear songs from “Raging Grannies” and local musicians.

The torture issue is of increasing concern to all Americans, APA members say, but of particular importance to psychologists because it violates their primary ethical obligation to “Do no harm.”  As has been documented by numerous journalists and official government reports, psychologists helped develop, implement, standardize, and disseminate abusive interrogation techniques that have led to torture.

Ignoring this evidence, the APA has repeatedly claimed that psychologists aiding interrogations keep those interrogations “safe, legal, and ethical.”  Dr. Soldz said that the actions of the BSCT psychologist in Jawad’s case, typical as they appear to be of the BSCT program, show the falsity of APA’s claim. Rather, BSCTs use their psychological expertise “to identify weaknesses in detainees that can be exploited to break them down psychologically and render them dependent upon the interrogators,” he said.

In the absence of ethical leadership from the APA, a referendum to remove psychologists from sites in violation of international law has been proposed by members; ballots went out to the membership last week and are due back in mid-September.

In a recent letter in support of the referendum, Bryant Welch, a clinical psychologist, attorney and former long-time APA official, said: “In the eyes of the world psychologists are being seen as aiders and abettors of torture. The damage to the profession grows day by day, and the shamefulness of it reflects on all of us, whether we like it or not.”

In his closing argument delivered today before the military commission in the case of U.S. v. Jawad, Maj. Frakt said: ” What has this country come to when a licensed psychologist, a senior officer in the U.S. Armed Forces, someone trained in the art of healing broken hearts and mending broken minds, someone with a duty to do no harm, turns her years of training and education to the art of breaking people, to the intentional devastation of a lonely, homesick teenage boy?”

For more information go to:

http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/index.php?s=boston+rally

www.ethicalapa.com

www.reisnerforpresident.org

1 comment August 15th, 2008

Globe Op Ed: Ending the psychological mind games on detainees

I have a Op Ed in the Boston Globe today:

Ending the psychological mind games on detainees

By Stephen Soldz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 comment August 10th, 2008