The American Psychological Association has packed up and left stormy.
Honolulu, having concluded its 121st
annual convention this past weekend. The hundreds of symposia and
dozens of parties are likely to be soon forgotten. More consequential
will be the APA leadership’s latest victory in its long-running
campaign: the stubborn obstruction of all efforts to meaningfully
address the central role psychologists played in U.S. government torture and abuse of national security detainees.
As has been reported many times
over the past decade, psychologists designed, implemented, supervised,
researched, and provided ethical cover for abuses committed by the CIA
and U.S. military. As a result, the APA has faced repeated calls to take
action to prevent future abuses by members of the profession. But
rather than engaging in a careful evaluation and reconsideration of the ethics of psychologists’ involvement in national security settings, the Association’s leaders have instead responded,
over and over again, with little more than empty talk and feeble
resolutions devoid of any real significance. And true to form, last week
the APA successfully enacted one of the most vacuous of these recurring
exercises.
There’s a bitter irony about the location of this most recent
“triumph.” The APA had last held its annual meeting in Hawaii back in
2004. That’s the same year inspectors from the International Committee
of the Red Cross visited the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and
discovered a regime of psychological abuse “tantamount to torture.” That program was inspired by the recommendations of two psychologists who, just two months later, were advertising their CIA credentials as exhibitors at the APA convention in Honolulu. And that same weekend, nine years ago, an APA presidential citation
was awarded to the former chief psychologist of that same Guantanamo
facility, “for his exemplary balance of professional psychology and
military leadership.”
Nine
years is a long time, but apparently not long enough for APA leaders to
recognize that the ethics code should not cater to the interests and
bidding of the military and intelligence
establishment. Last week the APA’s governing body, its Council of
Representatives, endorsed this troubling status quo by officially
approving a new policy document that “consolidates” several previous
policy documents.
The consolidation effort was the 18-month project of the Board-endorsed “Member-Initiated Task Force.” The initiative’s real intent was never hard to discern. It was a direct response to growing calls for annulment and repudiation
of the APA’s infamous 2005 report on psychological ethics and national
security (the PENS Report). As well, several members of this five-person
task force were vocal opponents of the successful 2008 membership-wide referendum
– opposed by APA leadership – that placed clear constraints on the
involvement of psychologists in national security settings (while
expressing verbal support for their members’ wishes, the APA has failed
to enforce this referendum). And one of the task force members is
currently president of a major defense contractor that has received tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Defense and related agencies (a fact conveniently hidden from visitors to the task force website).
Not surprisingly, the newly approved consolidated policy document grants cover to the PENS Report mentioned above, the source of controversy and outrage ever since its release eight years ago. In 2005, the PENS Task Force met amid great secrecy. It was dominated
by representatives of the military and intelligence agencies, and a
psychologist serving as a policy official for the Bush-Cheney White
House was among the undisclosed observers. In short order the task force offered its own biased
and self-serving interpretation of the APA’s ethics code, an
interpretation that was hastily endorsed by the APA Board in an
“emergency” vote.
The PENS Report asserted that it is ethical for
psychologists to serve in various national security-related roles,
including as consultants to detainee interrogations – despite compelling
evidence of psychologists’ ethical misconduct
in these arenas. The APA leadership went even further, promoting the
claim that psychologists help to ensure that interrogation and detention
operations are “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.”
Derived from the discredited “torture memos,” this was precisely the
language provided to task force members – in advance of their meeting –
by the Department of Defense supervisor of psychologists engaged in
interrogation support. Last week’s action by APA’s Council rescinded the
tarnished PENS Report, but its policy prescriptions and presumptions –
the illegitimate foundation for many of the APA’s subsequent resolutions
and statements – were cleverly and carefully retained in the new
consolidated document.
It is regrettable that APA’s Council
endorsed a new policy document that purports to provide clear ethical
guidance to psychologists who work in national security settings – when
in fact it does nothing of the sort. But this decision is all the more
disturbing when one considers the crucial steps that APA leadership could take, but has chosen not to.
APA
could fully implement and enforce the 2008 member referendum
prohibiting psychologists from working in national security settings
(like Guantanamo) that violate the U.S. Constitution or international
law. It could repudiate the PENS Report by officially acknowledging that
the process was deeply flawed and illegitimate. It could sanction members
who have violated the ethics code in their national security work, and
it could remove the statute of limitations for violations involving
torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. It could remove
ethics code loopholes allowing researchers to dispense with informed
consent in national security research. It couldestablish clear ethical restrictions
on psychologist involvement in national security operations and
research where individuals are targeted for harm, where voluntary
informed consent is absent, and where timely outside ethical oversight
is infeasible. It couldformally support bills
introduced in state legislatures that would prohibit licensed health
provider participation in the ill treatment of prisoners. And APA could
invite and cooperate
with an independent investigation of the crucial roles psychologists
played in U.S. government torture and other abuse, and of any collusion
by the Association itself. This would be an invaluable step toward
developing meaningful measures aimed at preventing future abuses by
members of the profession and promoting greater transparency,
accountability, and institutional reform in the APA.
But
none of these essential initiatives was anywhere to be found on this
year’s agenda in Hawaii. Instead, the action by APA’s Council was the
equivalent of repairing a structurally defective bridge by giving it a
new coat of paint. The fresh coat makes the bridge more attractive to
unsuspecting drivers, but it completely ignores the urgent need to
replace the rotting supports just below the water’s surface. Still
transfixed by the lure of “war on terror” opportunities for
psychologists, the APA has created its own ticking time bomb. Victories
of bureaucratic authority and intransigence are rarely worth savoring
for very long. They do nothing to stop current or future abuses, and far
too often they are harbingers of disaster.
****
Addendum. Prior to the vote by Council, the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
(of which we are both members) asked proponents of the new policy to
describe the “clear guidance” it would supposedly provide in regard to
five scenarios, which we have reproduced below. The first three are
based on actual events, the fourth reflects the current responsibilities
of Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) psychologists, and the fifth is a likely scenario under current Department of Defense policies.
We
did not receive any responses to our request. But certainly the real
measure of a policy in this area is whether it clearly constrains
unethical behavior. So we renew our invitation to APA representatives to
explain, based on the new policy, whether these scenarios would
constitute violations of the APA’s code of ethics.
1. A
Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) psychologist picks up three
adolescent boys under the age of 16 from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan
and transports them to Guantanamo. During the entire 22-hour flight they
are dressed in diapers and orange jumpsuits, and chained to the floor
in uncomfortable positions. At Guantanamo, the same psychologist is in
charge of the boys’ interrogation, and claims this role enables him to
protect their health.
2. A Guantanamo interrogator seeks to
obtain a confession to justify an adolescent prisoner’s detention.
Concerned that this juvenile is experiencing severe psychological
distress, as indicated by his talking to pictures on the wall and crying
for his mother, the interrogator asked a BSCT psychologist to observe
the next session. This psychologist recommends that the youth be placed
in linguistic isolation, where no one speaks his language, and that he
be told his family wants nothing to do with him. “Make him as
uncomfortable as possible. Work him as hard as possible,” she writes in
her recommendations to the interrogator.
3. A psychologist at a
military detention center helps to write and implement Standard
Operating Procedures mandating that all new prisoners be subjected to 30
days of isolation indefinitely renewable. The purpose of the Behavior
Management Plan is “to enhance and exploit the disorientation and
disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation
process. It concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering
dependence of the detainee on his interrogator.” After this SOP is
promulgated, other psychologists are involved in the process of deciding
when the isolation has been sufficient and the prisoner should be
released into the general population.
4. A BSCT psychologist at
Guantanamo is asked to evaluate the likelihood that a prisoner who has
been imprisoned without evidence for over a decade will “return to the
struggle” if given his freedom. If the psychologist concludes that this
is more than a trivial possibility, the prisoner may continue to be
indefinitely detained, perhaps for the rest of his life.
5. The Army Field Manual allows the following interrogation techniques in certain circumstances:
a. Emotional Fear-Up Approach: “the HUMINT collector identifies a preexisting fear
or creates a fear within the source. He then links the elimination or
reduction of the fear to cooperation on the part of the source.”
b.
Emotional Fear-Down Approach: “the HUMINT collector mitigates existing
fear in exchange for cooperation on the part of the source.”
c. Emotional-Pride and Ego-Up Approach: “It exploits a source’s low self-esteem.”
d. Emotional-Pride and Ego-Down Approach: “is based on attacking the source’s ego or self image.”
e.
Emotional-Futility Approach: “the HUMINT collector convinces the source
that resistance to questioning is futile. This engenders a feeling of
hopelessness and helplessness on the part of the source.”
A psychologist consults on an interrogation based upon these authorized techniques.
******
This article first appeared in Counterpunch.
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. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology.
Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, where he teaches research methods and in the school's graduate programs on Psychoanalysis, Society, and Culture. He has been interviewed and written extensively
on the involvement of psychologists in the US torture program. Soldz is
a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, one of the
organizations working to change American Psychological Association
policy on participation in abusive interrogations and is a former
president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. He served as a
psychological consultant on several Guantanamo trials.
Source: Psychology Today
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