Psychologist board to recommend getting out of the torture business
The board of the American Psychological Association will propose reforms to its ethics guidelines [PDF] reported to prohibit psychologists from participating in any national security interrogations. The new strictures will be unveiled later this week in Toronto at the annual meeting of the United States' largest professional organization for psychologists.
According to a report in the New York Times, two APA members told reporter James Risen:
The board’s proposal would make it a violation of the association’s ethical policies for psychologists to play a role in national security interrogations involving any military or intelligence personnel, even the noncoercive interrogations now conducted by the Obama administration.
But critics in- and outside the APA have expressed concern that the rule is weaker in significant ways than an earlier proposal, and contains loopholes that could allow for psychologists to again participate in questionable practices.
The proposal requires the approval of a members’ council before it becomes official policy.
The move follows, most directly, a report from an investigator commissioned by the APA that found the organization colluded with the Pentagon to shape policies that granted psychologists permission to participate in the torture of people detained by U.S. intelligence after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The report’s revelations were the latest confirmation of what had been detailed by investigative journalists (notably Jason Leopold, Jeffrey Kaye — both of whom have reported on detainee torture for Al Jazeera — Katherine Eban, Mark Benjamin and Jane Mayer) for years.
Those reporters gradually uncovered how the APA — relying on the work of former Army psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two contractors who had helped design and run the Bush administration’s “harsh interrogation” program —adjusted its ethics guidelines to provide room for member participation in torture sessions. Mitchell and Jessen each had prior ties to notorious CIA programs, some of which used psychotropic drugs and a variety of brutal and demeaning physical tactics to extract information from captives.
These revelations have since been corroborated by information in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, released late last year, and an April account by a group of medical professionals with ties to Physicians for Human Rights.
The APA had long lagged behind similar organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, both of which recommended members not play a role in post-9/11 detainee interrogations.
This disconnect stemmed from what Roy Eidelson, a former president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and Jean Maria Arrigo, a representative to the APA council, called a “deeply flawed” assumption: That “psychology should embrace every opportunity to expand its sphere of influence.”
Writing this week in the Los Angeles Times, Eidelson and Arrigo said the APA sought to become an “indispensable source of psychological expertise for counter-terrorism efforts at the Pentagon and CIA.”
In order to curry favor with the Pentagon, a big source of jobs and money for APA members, the organization set up a task force stacked with military insiders. That group “reached a disingenuous, preordained conclusion that psychologists have an important role to play, asserting that their involvement kept interrogations ‘safe, legal, ethical and effective.’”
“The Bush administration immediately used this made-to-order policy to legitimize and continue its abusive detention and interrogation programs,” Eidelson and Arrigo wrote.
According to Stephen Soldz, a clinical psychologist and professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, speaking to the New York Times in April, “the APA directly addressed legal threats at every critical juncture facing the senior intelligence officials at the heart of the program. In some cases the APA even allowed these same Bush officials to actually help write the association’s policies.”
The APA has always denied that level of collusion, but it will be interesting to see if the proposed new ethics rule provokes any further disclosures or admissions about members’ participation in the programs.
For instance, the use of sleep deprivation, stress positions and mind-altering drugs, widely documented in a variety of the abovementioned reports and articles, could necessitate a legal inquiry. As Kaye wrote for Al Jazeera in December, “The application of ‘mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality’ is a serious violation of federal law, with convictions bringing sentences up to 20 years in prison.”
Glaring omissions
The resolution before the APA council, however, contains much less stringent language than was originally proposed by a group of APA members who first blew the whistle on psychologists participating in torture programs back in 2008.
Al Jazeera has learned that there were two resolutions presented to the APA council for this year’s conference. One, drafted by Arrigo and other members from the 2008 action against torture, was first proposed early last year; that was followed by an alternative motion, seen as more friendly to military psychologists, co-authored by a former APA president.
But only one option will be put to a vote in Toronto.
Officially, the resolution now before the APA is from Arrigo and other whistleblowers. But the language has been modified, and members who have had a chance to compare versions note some glaring omissions in the new draft.
For instance, the ban on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations does not apply to domestic operations. The language in the APA resolution is quite specific:
[P]sychologists shall not conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities, including private contractors working on their behalf, nor advise on conditions of confinement insofar as these might facilitate such an interrogation. This prohibition does not apply to domestic law enforcement interrogations or detention settings that are unrelated to national security interrogations.
In a footnote to this section, the rule makes it even more explicit: “This does not include those detainees held under domestic law enforcement where Miranda Rights and the U.S. Constitution apply.”
In practice, according to Kaye, this means the APA rule will have no effect on psychologist participation in any stateside interrogations conducted by the FBI or the Obama administration’s "High-value Detainee Interrogation Group."
Kaye, himself a psychologist who resigned from the APA in 2008 citing his objections to the organization’s relationship with torture, is also critical of the lack of any enforcement provision in the resolution. For instance, language requiring licensing boards to be notified about psychologists who had participated in national security interrogations did not migrate from the stricter draft to the Toronto version.
“While this new APA policy will put it in line with other policies regarding health care professionals and interrogation put forth by the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association,” Kaye wrote in an email to Al Jazeera, “it suffers the same problem as the policies of the other two: no enforcement.”
“To this day,” Kaye continued, “despite the policy of the AMA and the psychiatric association, no torture doctor has ever lost his license or met any consequences at all for participation in either CIA or Department of Defense torture.”
But perhaps most disturbing to people like Kaye, Arrigo and other APA critics, is the refusal of the association to specifically reject that psychology has a role to play in national security investigations. It is just such a mindset, as Arrigo pointed out, that allowed the APA to get so closely involved with the torture programs during the Bush administration — and it provides a slippery pathway back to co-operation between medical professionals and national security interrogators.
While Kaye praised the APA for finally removing their reliance on the permissive U.S. reservations to the U.N. torture treaty, he noted that in the end, it is up to Congress to bring the country in line with international norms.
For Kaye, the APA has taken a step, but nothing close to the step it could or needs to take. “We are still a long way from meeting what is necessary to cleanse the medical and psychological fields from their participation in interrogations,” he said.
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