Come See California Premier of "Doctors of the Dark Side"

American Friends Service Committee, Physicians for Human Rights, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility are co-sponsoring the California premier of “Doctors of the Dark Side.” Martha Davis’s critically acclaimed documentary will be followed by a panel discussion, which will include yours truly, along with anti-torture activist Ruth Fallenbaum, Ph.D., solitary confinement expert and UC Santa Cruz professor Craig Haney, MD, and Bob Flax, Ph.D. of Saybrook University.

[Update, 6/26: Event organizers have informed me Dr. Haney will not be able to attend, and he will be replaced with another panel participant.]

"Doctors of the Dark Side" describes the complicity of doctors and psychologists in the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The website for the film project is www.doctorsofthedarkside.com. To see a preview clip of the film, made by Martha Davis, Ph.D. and an award-winning crew, including Oscar-winners Mark Jonathan Harris (Writer), Mercedes Ruehl (Narrator), and Emmy-winner Lisa Rinzler (Director of Photography), click here.

The event will held Saturday, June 30, 7:00-9:30 PM (doors open at 6:30), at Delancy Theater, 600 Embarcadero St., San Francisco. The event is free, and it is wheelchair accessible. Donations will be welcomed.

Interested readers can also view a new video, "How to Help Doctors Prevent Torture." This is a nine-minute introduction to the crucial role of physicians and psychologists in the detainee torture program and how new state legislation could stop this post-9/11 misuse of health care professionals and secure them as a force for torture prevention. It is made with excerpts and additional footage from the documentary "Doctors of the Dark Side."

Psychologists Speak Out on Effect of Trauma on Challenging 9/11 Government Narrative

The following video presents a number of psychologists speaking about the psychological effects of witnessing the 9/11 tragedy, and how the effects of trauma intersect the problem of "hearing information that confronts our world-view." The cognitive dissonance (fear and anxiety) that confronts Americans as they consider the extent to which their government has lied to them on this very distressing topic has near paralyzed political discussion of what really happened on 9/11.

"Psychologists and Torture: Annul the APA's PENS Report" (Video)

The three-minute video below, produced by the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, is meant to publicize the call by CEP psychologists and others, to annul the American Psychological Association's PENS report. PENS stands for Psychological Ethics and National Security, and the APA's Task Force on same, and the recommendations that flowed from that task force, were written up as a report in 2005.

As a petition to annul the PENS report states, "Despite evidence that psychologists were involved in abusive interrogations, the PENS Task Force concluded that psychologists play a critical role in keeping interrogations 'safe, legal, ethical and effective.' With this stance, the APA, the largest association of psychologists worldwide, became the sole major professional healthcare organization to support practices contrary to the international human rights standards that ought to be the benchmark against which professional codes of ethics are judged.... the PENS Report was the result of institutional processes that were illegitimate, inconsistent with APA’s own standards, and far outside the norms of transparency, independence, diversity, and deliberation for similar task forces established by professional associations."

Watch the video, then go sign the petition!

Statement by Clinical Psychologists Against Torture & Current APA Policies

The following statement is a very welcome addition to the increasing pressure put upon the bureaucracy of the American Psychological Association regarding its policies around psychologist participation in interrogations and the involvement of some psychologists in torture of prisoners. It also takes head-on the APA position around its Ethics Code 1.02, which controversially allows psychologists to adhere to organizational demands above and beyond ethical prohibitions. The latter has been considered to be a major way in which military psychologists involved in abusive interrogations for the military or CIA have escaped ethical and legal (licensing board) charges.

A version of this statement can also be found at the blog Psyche, Science and Society.

SSCP Executive Board Statement Against Torture
September 9, 2009

We, the Executive Board of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology (Division 12, Section III of the American Psychological Association), hereby (1) declare our unequivocal condemnation of any involvement of psychologists in torture or abusive treatment of prisoners, including such actions that may be disguised under the euphemism of "enhanced or harsh interrogation" techniques, (2) express our serious concern about individual and systemic factors that may have contributed to any such involvement, and (3) recommend corrective action to hold all relevant parties accountable and reduce the likelihood of any involvement of psychologists in such behaviors in the future.

It has become increasingly apparent that at least a few psychologists likely were involved in the design, implementation, justification, and/or concealment of torture or abusive treatment of prisoners. Regardless of the number of psychologists involved, such actions are clearly in violation of the principles of the American Psychological Association (APA) Ethics code: "Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm… Because psychologists' scientific and professional judgments and actions may affect the lives of others, they are alert to and guard against personal, financial, social, organizational, or political factors that might lead to misuse of their influence" (Principle A: Beneficence and Nonmaleficence); "Psychologists exercise reasonable judgment and take precautions to ensure that their potential biases, the boundaries of their competence, and the limitations of their expertise do not lead to or condone unjust practices" (Principle D: Justice); "Psychologists are aware that special safeguards may be necessary to protect the rights and welfare of persons or communities whose vulnerabilities impair autonomous decision making" (Principle E: Respect for People’s Rights and Dignity).

We therefore make the following recommendations:

1. APA should make an immediate, complete, and public declaration of any information the organization possesses regarding the role of psychologists or psychological associations in the design, implementation, justification, and/or concealment of torture or abusive treatment of prisoners. Such information should be provided specifically to the membership of APA, to the State licensing boards of any individual psychologists named in the declaration who may have been involved in such actions, and to federal law enforcement authorities, so that appropriate legal and ethical judgments can be made.
2. Upon receipt of such information, we recommend that State licensing boards and federal law enforcement authorities conduct their own independent investigations of whether the psychologists' actions constitute an ethical or legal violation.
3. If APA asserts that no such information is available, the organization should declare any complaints regarding such actions that it and its committees or other organizational units have declined to accept or to take action on, and should make public what steps the organization took or is taking to discover what role, if any, psychologists and psychological associations have played in the design, implementation, justification, and/or concealment of torture or abusive treatment of prisoners.
4. APA Council should move immediately to retract the 2002 revision of Section 1.02 of the APA Ethics Code, which added a sentence inconsistent with the broader principles of the Ethics Code, specifically, the second sentence of the following passage: "If psychologists' ethical responsibilities conflict with law, regulations, or other governing legal authority, psychologists make known their commitment to the Ethics Code and take steps to resolve the conflict. If the conflict is unresolvable via such means, psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority."
5. A direct result of the retraction of Section 1.02 should be to declare immediately null and void the report of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS), which is partially predicated on the revised Ethics Code. A new Task Force should be assembled to determine APA's policy on interrogations; this process should include an open forum, including full discussion of the issues by the APA membership.
6. An independent, nonpartisan commission should be created to investigate fully the specific role of individual psychologists, their subordinates, and psychological organizations, including the American Psychological Association, in the design, implementation, justification, or concealment of torture or abusive treatment of prisoners.
   

Health Professionals: Take action to demand accountability for torture

The non-profit Bill of Rights Defense Committee has issued a series of open letters to Attorney General Eric Holder and the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. These letters address this nation's ongoing struggle to own up to the use of torture, and hold accountable those government and private individuals that planned and implemented it.

There are letters specifically written for signing by legal professional, clergy and religious lay-leaders, educators, and the general public.

The following is the text of the letter for signature by health professionals, including physicians, psychologists, nurses, medical students, or other health professionals. Both this letter and links for the other categories of signatories can be found at this link. Please go and sign the letter today.

The Honorable Eric H. Holder
Attorney General of the United States
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Dear Mr. Attorney General:

We, the undersigned health professionals, write to share our concerns that your office’s reluctance to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate potential crimes by former officials involved in torturing detainees is endangering our nation’s stated fundamental values and our credibility as a nation that values and defends human rights.

The investigation of potential crimes, as others have shown, holds profound implications for our nation’s international legitimacy and future opportunities to credibly promote human rights. It also holds immense importance for the future historical record, as well as the necessary policy debates addressing detention, surveillance, and other violations of civil liberties under the Obama administration going forward.

Our concern here is more specific, reflecting our particular expertise as health professionals. Some mental health professionals and physicians abandoned our profession’s ethical commitment to “do no harm” and instead facilitated the abuse and torture of detainees in U.S. custody.

For example, when detainees were waterboarded, or shackled by their hands and feet to induce sleep deprivation, medical personnel and psychologists calibrated the intensity of abuse to ensure that it could continue. In addition, some military and intelligence psychologists helped design, conduct, and teach abusive interrogation techniques used by the CIA and Department of Defense.

Our professions’ participation in these abuses is an appalling affront to not only our ethical code, but also the law. Efforts within our professions to hold our members accountable for their role in torture are part of the solution, but do not complete it. Nor can those efforts reach other officials outside our professions who also enabled or conducted detainee abuse. Until our nation investigates and prosecutes those responsible for torturing detainees, the future use of torture will remain a risk facing our nation, our professions, and their respective values.

We urge you, in your capacity as our nation’s senior prosecutor, to restore the rule of law by ensuring its equal application to all.

Respectfully submitted,
The undersigned health professionals

cc: [members of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]

H/T to Stephen Soldz for notification of this campaign, and to both him and Physicians for Human Rights for their assistance in drafting the letter above.

"Fair and Balanced" in Academia: Twisting Recent Torture History in the Journal "Nature"

A dust-up in academia concerning torture and the role of psychologists has failed to make a dent in the reportage of either the establishment media or the blogosphere. Nevertheless, the issue has fired up e-mail listservs over at the American Psychological Association, and among opponents of APA's long-time pro-military interrogations policy.

It all started when the May 21 edition of the prominent scientific journal Nature carried an unsigned editorial entitled "Responsible Interrogation." The editorial makes some unequivocally strong statements against the Bush policy of "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Despite plausible-sounding talk about ‘states of induced dependency' and the like, there is no scientific basis for asserting that techniques such as waterboarding, or slamming people against a wall, are fast or effective ways of getting at the truth (see Nature 445, 349; 2007). Indeed, it is hard to imagine any ethical way a controlled study on that question could be carried out....

And even if physical or mental torture could be shown to be effective in some immediate, tactical sense, that would be beside the point: torture is a violation of human rights and of international law, and is a threat to the long-term health of democracy. It is not to be tolerated.

But then, noting "there are no easy answers," the editorial launched into a discussion of the controversies that beset the American Psychological Association (APA) when it tried to reconcile professional ethics with the job of assisting military and intelligence interrogations. Even worse, especially for those APA activists who worked so hard to pass a referendum-inspired change in APA policy on interrogations, the Nature article returned to a line of argumentation that APA had supposedly now rejected.

APA Old Guard Campaigns Against Progressive Reisner

Monday, December 1, will be the last day members of the American Psychological Association can vote for president of the organization. Members can vote online at this link. They should cast their vote for the only progressive candidate standing for election, Steven J. Reisner, Ph.D.

According to the ranked nature of the APA ballot, members must mark Dr. Reisner #1 on the ballot. In a letter to his supporters, Steven describes his opponents' tactics:

The APA leadership has mounted a coordinated effort to combat my campaign for change at the APA. Nearly identical emails have gone out from members of the APA’s ‘old guard’ urging members to stop my bid for the APA Presidency by giving their top four votes to the other candidates, in whatever order, just so long as they put Steven Reisner last.

Such campaigning is perhaps not unusual, although with five candidates for office, it does represent a kind of pile-on by the opposition. The other candidates are united in one thing: stop Steven Reisner.

One reason is his association with and support of those APA members who successfully passed a referendum to change APA policy on having psychologists at military and CIA sites that violated human rights of detainees, as recognized in domestic and international law. Psychologists in particular had been associated with abusive interrogations as part of Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs) at Guantanamo and in Iraq. Psychologists were associated with similar actions with Special Forces in Afghanistan. Finally, some psychologists were intimately involved in implementing torture procedures, reverse-engineered from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program.

Most recently, a key group of anti-torture psychologists led by Stephen Soldz, a close associate of Dr. Reisner, initiated a successful petition campaign against a possible CIA directorship for torture apologist and CIA insider John Brennan. The campaign was widely viewed as contributing to the downfall of any Brennan appointment. It's precisely this kind of action that probably scares some of the APA old guard, who heavily support the military and intelligence services, believing them the source of a bevy of important jobs for current and future psychologists.

While the anti-Brennan campaign came only recently, the successful referendum campaign, which had been opposed by key APA insiders, still rankles, as demonstrated by this post from the APA Council representative for military psychologists on their division listerv (Division 19, the Society for Military Psychology):

Thank you to those who voted in the recent APA special ballot on the petition regarding the so-called “torture” resolution. Unfortunately, as we feared, relatively few APA members voted, and the resolution passed. This will be a difficult resolution for us to live with, but things could get even worse if one of the leaders of the petition movement, Steven Reisner, is elected president of APA…Soon you will receive a ballot to vote for APA president-elect. You will be asked to rank order the five candidates. Because of the vote-counting system that APA uses, it is very important that you use all five positions, and that Dr. Reisner be ranked in the #5 spot. Your Executive Committee is uncomfortable endorsing specific candidates for APA president.

According to Dr. Reisner, similar emails have gone out to the division for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and various state psychological associations. Dr. Reisner's letter gives a powerful and systemic analysis of his opponents' motivations, and offers a progressive program to address the imbalance of military and intelligence influence within APA:

We know that the status quo was roundly rejected by an overwhelming majority of APA members through the referendum vote. Yet, the authors of these emails are contemptuous of the referendum (“Unfortunately…the referendum passed”) and are still trying to delegitimize its validity ("relatively few members voted”). In fact, the referendum passed with a larger number of votes than any previous policy change and with a larger turnout than all but two elections in APA history.

For years, the APA leadership has been on the wrong side of this issue, to our shame, and to the detriment of our ability to speak as professionals with moral authority. The persistence with which the leadership maintains this position has caused some to suspect that APA's policy has much more to do with economics and power than with ethics. Many of the opponents of policy change work directly for the military and many others work for corporations, like HUMRRO, that garners millions in military contracts each year. For this reason I have called for transparency in APA dealings with government, military, and intelligence organizations, including full disclosure of government ties or contracts of any member who is involved in setting APA policies with regard to these agencies.

APA elections are often decided by razor-thin margins. This is a very important election. A relatively small group of psychologists are going to decide what direction a key civilian component of the military-industrial-academic complex takes in the coming period. No one knows what direction exactly national security and military matters will go under an Obama administration. This vote is a way to show the right way for both a President Obama and the incoming Congress.

All APA psychologists: vote for Steven Reisner in the upcoming elections, putting him as #1 choice on the ballot.

To Vote:

You may vote online by Monday, December 1, at https://www.intelliscaninc.net/apa/2008president/. You will need your membership number (on your APA card or on any APA journal mailing label) and your 'ballot control number' (located above your name and address on your paper ballot).

If you are missing either of these, you may call Garnett Coad of the APA election office at 202-336-6087, or email him at gcoad@apa.org.

Please pass this information on to all APA members you may know, and please encourage them to vote by Monday!

For those with further questions, I suggest you email Dr. Reisner, or visit his website, www.reisnerforpresident.org.

For the record, I have no association with Dr. Reisner's campaign. No member of his campaign has asked me write this, or asked for my support. I have no current association with APA. I am writing this, and supporting Dr. Reisner, because of concern for my profession (psychology), and an even larger concern for the direction of my country.

Capitalist Follies: Rancheros Visitadores, Citigroup, and the CIA

A posting the other day, quoting Chris Floyd on the machinations of the U.S. power elite, prompted a regular reader of mine to send a very interesting link to a story a friend of his worked on over the past few years.

As reported by Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Joel Connolly, Alejandro Tomas, a senior faculty member at Seattle Central Community College, has assembled a startling photo essay on one of the conclaves where the rich and privileged meet. The horse ride known as Rancheros Visitadores takes place every May in the Santa Ynez Valley near Santa Barbara, Calif. The event is one of those elite conclaves that take place annually. The best known is probably the Bohemian Grove gathering near the Russian River in Northern California.

Connolly describes the doings at Rancheros Visitadores, where no women are allowed (except maybe prostitutes):

The men are shown with sex toys around their necks, doing skits in blackface, dressed in wigs and women's clothing and consuming copious quantities of alcoholic beverages....

Who goes on the ride? The club is exclusive, white and male, with a membership limited to 600. A couple hundred invited guests and guys from the wait list attend each year.

Photos from the 1989 ride show Reagan, an honorary member, on a buckboard beside former Interior Secretary William Clark. Gen. P.X. Kelly, commandant of the Marines, also is pictured....

"I was a little taken aback by many of the attitudes," Tomas said. "Here are men at the highest rungs of power in this country. Quite blatant forms of racism and anti-Semitism and misogyny are on display. ... The festive debauchery represents a cohesion of the power class. They seem to feel stronger by putting down others."

The Rancheros Visitadores is apparently one of a number of such events, or other "Rancheros" camps. Tomas co-wrote a paper on the event with two sociologists. According to Connolly:

They argue that the "special time" each May reaffirms the riders' sense that they are the chosen leaders of American society. "The Rancheros retreat reinforces the imminent morale or esprit de corps of the corporate leaders and the landed elite," the authors report.

Masters of the Universe, Do You Need a Dime?

The ruling class is more than a collection of ideologies and bank accounts. There is a cohesiveness to their rule that suggests a cultural and social interconnectivity that transcends mere political parties.

This has been made painfully clear in the collaboration between different political groupings to give billions of dollars away, with little or no control or oversight, to the Wall Street "masters of the universe" who have looted the economy of trillions of dollars with speculative schemes, and just out and out thievery. The latest egregious hit to the U.S. taxpayers for another financial bailout comes with the announcement of a mega-billion bailout to Citigroup.

As F. William Engdahl explains in an article at Global Research:

Citigroup and the government have identified a pool of about $306 billion in troubled assets. Citigroup will absorb the first $29 billion in losses. After that, remaining losses will be split between Citigroup and the government, with the bank absorbing 10% and the government absorbing 90%. The US Treasury Department will use its $700 billion TARP or Troubled Asset Recovery Program bailout fund, to assume up to $5 billion of losses. If necessary, the Government’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) will bear the next $10 billion of losses. Beyond that, the Federal Reserve will guarantee any additional losses. The measures are without precedent in US financial history.

Yet, no one in the mainstream political discourse argues to hold these criminals to account. Instead, aim has been taken lately against unions, like the UAW, who conservatives argue have made companies like GM non-competitive in the global marketplace, with their demands for humane work rules, a decent, living wage, health care, etc. Even when the liberals criticize the CEOs of the Big Three automakers, and argue that the lack of nationalized health care puts the car companies behind the economic eight-ball, they barely raise a peep when it's argued that everyone, including the workers, will have to sacrifice to "save" Big Auto (which means tearing up the union contracts, fought for by workers over decades).

In the latest sign of complete moral, ethical, and political collapse, Bloomberg now reports the capitalists' bailout will top $7 trillion dollars -- "half the value of everything produced in the nation last year"!!! For once, the use of multiple exclamation points fails to describe the exaggerated circumstances.

But will this near-total failure of the economic system lead any respectable mainstream or blogging analyst to question the bankruptcy of the capitalist system as a whole? Not unless you're waiting for Barack Obama to lay the foundation stone for a new mammoth statue of Joseph Stalin on the D.C mall. (The rot of communism -- really Stalinism -- was declared by sober folk on both the U.S. left and right, based on far less economic failure.)

A Nicer, Kinder CIA?

The liberal hopes in Obama's incoming administration demonstrates the inability to think beyond the parameters of acceptable political discourse, which means never challenging the right of capital to rule. Nor does it challenge the right of the U.S. to continue conducting covert operations wherever it wants around the world. The fact that Obama seeks to ramp up the latter in Pakistan deters the liberals nary a bit.

When John Brennan's name was floated for new CIA chief recently, a group of dissident psychologists who fought within the American Psychological Association to change their position on torture, and with whom I have sometimes been associated, launched a campaign to stop Obama from appointing Brennan, a former member of Tenet's CIA team. They rightly pointed out that Brennan was involved in decisions and policies that promoted torture against detainees held by the U.S. in the "war on terror."

But their protest letter says nothing about about CIA covert action, nor does it even question the existence of the CIA itself. It only seeks, in what I see as a sincere but Utopian fashion to reform that institution. From the letter, quoting Brennan first:

Even though people may criticize what has happened during the two Bush administrations, there has been a fair amount of continuity. A new administration, be it Republican or Democrat — you’re going to have a fairly significant change of people involved at the senior-most levels. And I would argue for continuity in those early stages. You don’t want to whipsaw the [intelligence] community. You don’t want to presume knowledge about how things fit together and why things are being done the way they are being done. And you have to understand the implication, then, of making any major changes or redirecting things. I’m hoping there will be a number of professionals coming in who have an understanding of the evolution of the capabilities in the community over the past six years, because there is a method to how things have changed and adapted.

In order to restore American credibility and the rule of law, our country needs a clear and decisive repudiation of the “dark side” at this crucial turning point in our history. We need officials to clearly and without ambivalence assert the rule of law. Mr. Brennan is not an appropriate choice to lead us in this direction. The country cannot afford to have him as director of our most important intelligence agencies.

As John Prados pointed out in his recent history of CIA covert wars, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, the use of covert action has harmed U.S. foreign policy more than it has ever helped. Furthermore, both Democratic and Republican administrations have blocked any substantive change in the intelligence agency's charter, unwilling to forego the executive's power or use of covert action. If the psychologists wanted to send a powerful statement to President Obama, they would have called for the abolition of the CIA. But that's not a politically popular stance (at least these days).

Justice and Class Society

A very sick and sclerotic set of individuals essentially run the United States. They see nothing worth prosecuting when one of their own (George W. Bush) manipulates a country into a war that kills over a million civilians. They see nothing wrong in having a covert intelligence agency that wages war and commits assassinations wherever it wants in the world. They cry crocodile tears over the torture of detainees, but do nothing to disassemble the apparatus that perpetuates "touchless torture" (Darius Rejali's term in his magnificent compendium, Torture and Democracy).

The ingrained culture of class society, as represented in part by Tomas's photo essay on one ruling class ritual conclave, represents one of the most resistant aspects to change we truly and desperately need. It may have to all come tumbling down -- and how close we have come to that in recent days -- before the old social order gives up its ghost, and radically new ways of organizing society come into being. When the power elite fades into obscurity, so too will its championing of racial, sexual, and national/religious discrimination. (Anyone who believes the election of Obama has turned around things for African-Americans in this country should visit their local housing project, or better yet, their local jail or prison.)

Perhaps the political genius of Barack Obama (if genius he turns out to be) can hold off the inevitable, but the internal contradictions of a society that runs on class privilege and national supremacy over other countries is bound to lead to either collapse or conflagration sooner or later. We need bold action and bold leaders now.

A collection of Tomas's photos can be accessed here.

Psychologist "Swat Team" Serves Bush's Torture Gulag

Dr. Alan E. Kazdin, current president of the American Psychological Association, in a new column in the APA Monitor, brags that APA lobbyists are a vertable "swat team" in support of government dollars for scientific research. Much of that money funds the work of psychologists "in support of homeland security after 9/11", "psychological research within the Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense", and the "special relevance of psychological science on... counter-terrorism" research, among other items.

It is surely cosmic irony that places Dr. Kazdin's article in contrast to new revelations from the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. government documenting "the role of psychologists in military interrogations."

"The documents reveal that psychologists and medical personnel played a key role in sustaining prisoner abuse — a clear violation of their ethical and legal obligations," said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU. "The documents only underscore the need for an independent investigation into responsibility for the systemic abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody abroad."

In 2006, the ACLU received a highly redacted version of the Church Report, which was commissioned by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a comprehensive review of military interrogation operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay based on 187 investigations into detainee abuse that had been closed as of September 30, 2004. The report did not analyze information relating to 130 abuse cases that remained open as of that date, and issues of senior official responsibility for detainee abuse were beyond its mandate. Written by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, the report skirts the question of command responsibility for detainee abuse, euphemistically labeling official failure to issue interrogation guidelines for Iraq and Afghanistan as a "missed opportunity."

The report states that "analogous to the BSCT in Guantanamo Bay, the Army has a number of psychologists in operational positions (in both Afghanistan and Iraq), mostly within Special Operations, where they provide direct support to military operations. They do not function as mental health providers, and one of their core missions is to support interrogations."

The documents also demonstrate the failure of medical personnel to report abuses upon those ostensibly under their care. Moreover, when it comes to the use of torture techniques, such as forced nakedness, stress positions, the use of dogs, and other illegal forms of "interrogation" or incarceration, there was a decided policy of ignoring even the flimsy legal justifications and prohibitions issuing from the Department of Defense:

"The unredacted sections of the report provide new evidence confirming the use of abusive interrogation techniques after they were no longer authorized. According to the report, "the use of some of the techniques... continued even until July 2004, despite the fact that many were retracted by the October 2003 memorandum, and some were subsequently prohibited by the May 2004 memorandum."

As psychologists are implicated in the worst sort of human rights abuses at Guantanamo and elsewhere, Dr. Kazin, who is the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology, Child Psychiatry, and Institute of Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, positively gushes over the "APA... dream team of experts that is nimble and can move into action as needed with Congress, funding agencies and other organizations."

Kazin's organization, the APA, took five years to make a detailed statement against torture techniques that were documented at U.S. prisons, including Guantanamo, although even then the APA mimicked Bush administration language in saying that only psychologists who "knowingly" inflicted harm are to be sanctioned. This makes judging the intent of a torturer supposedly a crucial question. This doctrine of "specific intent" was written into the infamous Bybee memo, and represents a get out of jail free card for those who torture. (See John Mikhail's excellent discussion of the implications of that little word, "knowingly," over at the Georgetown Law Faculty Blog.)

APA Springs into Action for... Defense Funding

Despite all protestations of good faith by APA, psychologists still staff the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams at Guantanamo, and other interrogation sites, including, presumably, secret "black site" prisons run by the CIA. Psychologists at these sites are under the military chain of command, not APA ethics codes and committees. These sites are known to be in violation of Geneva Conventions and other national and international laws and agreements concerning prisoners, including the holding of detainees in indefinite detention, hiding detainees from the Red Cross, subjecting detainees to abusive conditions of detention, transferring via secret rendition some detainees to foreign prisons to be tortured, and subjecting prisoners to secret courts where hearsay evidence and evidence supplied via tortured confession is allowed.

In his article, Dr. Kazin brags how when the National Science Foundation threatened to defund some pet projects, "within approximately 12 hours, an APA swat team mobilized an effort that drew on targeted individuals, other organizations, congressional staff, grass-roots support from many psychologists, and more." Two hundred phone calls and many emails later, the bills were saved. And yet, to this day, the APA cannot find the time to pass a resolution or make a statement calling for the closure of Guantanamo prison, where basic human rights are not allowed, and a policy of isolation, sleep deprivation, fear, and a policy of indefinite detention remains in force. Show me where you put an organization's time and money, and I'll show you what that organization is really about. The APA is an obscentiy.

The newly unredacted Church report includes this statement about the role of psychologists, highlighting the use of psychologists throughout the different theaters in Bush's misnamed "war on terror":

Analogous to the BSCT in Guantanamo Bay, the Army has a number of psychologists in operational positions (in both Afghanistan and Iraq), mostly within Special Operations, where they provide direct support to military operations. They do not function as mental health providers, and one of their core missions is to support interrogations.

Supposedly, those working clinically with the disease and mental illness fostered by abusive treatment and conditions at U.S. prison sites do not share medical records with interrogators, but the report, while claiming that use of such information to "plan interrogations" doesn't take place, admits that such "sharing" has taken place:

According to the Director, Psychological Applications Directorate (US Army Special Operations Command), the only reason for sharing any medical information would be to ensure that detainees are treated in accordance with their medical requirements.

If you believe that, I've got a proverbial bridge to sell you. Meanwhile, the unredacted portions of the Church Report corroborate the findings of the Pentagon's own Office of the Inspector General report that exposed the existence of abusive techniques at Guantanamo, just at the time that APA honchos like Colonel Larry James (then Chief Psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at GTMO, Cuba) were in charge.

Alan Kazdin's article represents the mindset of the APA bureaucracy, which is dying to feed at the trough of "homeland security" and "counter-terrorism" millions drained from the public coffers to build up the power of the overtly militarist state that America has become.

Recently, APA dissident candidate for president, Dr. Steven Reisner, is campaigning on an overt call for an end to psychologist participation in military interrogations, such as at Guantanamo. While garnering a minority of votes, he still won a plurality in the first round of voting, demonstrating that rank-and-file psychologists are growing increasingly disgusted with the policy of their organization. A related group of APA dissidents are circulating a petition that psychologists "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."

When I left the APA earlier this year, I specifically cited the overall stance of that organization in relation to the national security state. While the complicity with torture and human rights abuses is bad enough, the promise of further integration into "counter-terrorism" and "homeland security" programs of the government is an ominous foreshadowing of what the APA intends to become. If those looking to change APA are unsuccessful, they must ponder what they are doing in an organization so steadfastly dedicated to serving those that torture, that are obsessed with national security at a time when the government of this country engages in illegal, genocidal wars abroad, and seems incapable of reforming its own increasingly militarist and anti-democratic policies and actions.

Vanity Fair Article Links CIA/SERE Psychologists to Torture

An important new article by Katherine Eban, "Rorshach and Awe", has just been published at the VF website. According to the blurb at the head of the article:

America's coercive interrogation methods were reverse-engineered by two C.I.A. psychologists who had spent their careers training U.S. soldiers to endure Communist-style torture techniques. The spread of these tactics was fueled by a myth about a critical "black site" operation.

The "black site" operation was the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah in Spring 2002. Eban describes how the CIA stole the operation from the FBI, and "planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they'd get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death."

The operation was headed by two SERE psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, hired for the purpose by the CIA. Eban explains they were rewarded well for their work:

Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on sere trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror, according to psychologists and others with direct knowledge of their activities. The C.I.A. put them in charge of training interrogators in the brutal techniques, including "waterboarding," at its network of "black sites." In a statement, Mitchell and Jessen said, "We are proud of the work we have done for our country."

There is much more to the article, which I and others will have to analyze and piece together with much that is already known. I've already written on psychologists involved in torture in Bush's "war on terror".

Other important articles on the use of psychologists and the military's SERE program (standing for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, and meant to train soldiers against the rigors of enemy capture) appeared recently in an important Salon.com article, and an equally important New Yorker/Seymour Hersh piece. To complete one's understanding of current revelations, Stephen Soldz's article on the revelations in the recently declassified Department of Defense Inspector General Report is also must reading.

The VF article has quite a bit more in it than I have room or time to retail here. For instance, it was believed by some that the Pentagon won the support of the American Psychological Association's tacit support for the use of psychologists in the increasingly dangerous interrogations being conducted by way of a quid pro quo allowing psychologists to prescribe medications. The latter is a long sought-after desideratum by a coterie within APA. (Eban says she couldn't get enough evidence to make that link herself.)

I strongly encourage readers to go read Eban's well-researched article. She closes with what could open another promising direction in the effort to impeach Vice President Cheney. Explaining how the purported "success" of Mitchell and Jessen in breaking down prisoners became well-known throughout much of the government and military, Eban cites many experts, some from within SERE and CIA itself, to show how self-defeating and destructive the torture really was (or is). Then, she reports (emphasis mine):

In late 2005, as Senator John McCain was pressing the Bush administration to ban torture techniques, one of the nation's top researchers of stress in sere trainees claims to have received a call from Samantha Ravitch, the deputy assistant for national security in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. She wanted to know if the researcher had found any evidence that uncontrollable stress would make people more likely to talk.

Senator Levin (who is reportedly considering Senate hearings into this whole sinister mess), how about a subpoena for Ms. Ravitch?

Postscript: I think the article raises many questions, which I would like to take up more at another time.

But the primary question is simple: what the hell is going on inside the CIA? The CIA has a long-standing history of using coercive interrogations. Why did they go outside the agency to hire SERE interrogators? As I have speculated elsewhere, this raised a good deal of resistance among some older-fashioned CIA types (not to mention from the FBI, as the article states).

But it's not like there are guys with white hats anywhere here. The more traditional CIA types only have a more nuanced view of how to conduct interrogations, relying more on sensory deprivation and more psychological forms of torture, and less on beatings and waterboarding.

From afar, this all looks like a crazy trip through a double looking glass. The insanity of even discussing the "right" way to conduct illegal interrogations in the "war on terror" belies a moral and political bankruptcy so profound that it may take us an entire political and social epoch to extirpate it.

That is, if we survive it.

Recent Report Lists U.S. "Disappeared" Prisoners, Including Children

The barbarity of the U.S. government is profound. A report issued last month by Human Rights Watch, U.S. Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the “War on Terror”, includes a new list of those the U.S. government has "disappeared", i.e., kidnapped, and taken to secret U.S. detention centers. The list, compiled by a number of human rights group, such as Amnesty International, Cageprisoners, and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU Law School, includes nationals from countries including Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan and Spain. These desaparecidos were seized in countries as far apart as Morocco, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Kenya, and Spain.

The report also includes a section on women and children, the families of the kidnapped or disappeared prisoners, who have also been taken into secret imprisonment. The best known case of wives and children seized involves the family of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. His two young sons, aged seven and nine, were also arrested with Mohammed in September 2002. According to eyewitness reports

...the two were held in an adult detention center for at least four months while US agents questioned the children about their father’s whereabouts....

The human rights groups are calling on the US government to put a permanent end to the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, and to disclose the identities, fate, and whereabouts of all detainees currently or previously held at secret facilities operated or overseen by the US government as part of the “war on terror.”

The "forced disappearance" of a person is a "crime against humanity", subject to no statute of limitation, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Of course, the United States, along with Libya, Qatar, China, and Iraq, have refused to ratify the Rome Statute. Other reluctant signators, Israel and Yemen, signed in late 2000.

The arrest and forced detention of children at secret locations must qualify as a war crime or crime against humanity if anything ever did. And -- for those who have followed my coverage of psychologist involvement in U.S. torture and war crimes -- of course, there had to be psychologists involved in this crime as well. True, they are supposedly involved in order to do good, as the handmaidens of war criminals.

According to the UK Telegraph account of the seizure of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's family:

The boys [ages 7 and 9] have been held by the Pakistani authorities but this weekend they were flown to America where they will be questioned about their father.

Last night CIA interrogators confirmed that the boys were staying at a secret address where they were being encouraged to talk about their father's activities.

"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said one official, "but we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care." [Emphasis mine]

I would like to have one of the great ethicists that seem to mushroom over at the American Psychological Association -- perhaps Stephen Behnke, or Melba Vasquez -- explain how ethical it is to be a psychologist at a secret prison, serving the kidnapped children of other kidnapped prisoners, who have no rights, and whose parents are being tortured. Is this what the tortured logic of the APA leadership has come to?

The UK Guardian reported the story when it broke early last month, including this bit on Mohammad's children:

The report also expresses concern over the fate of Yusuf al-Khalid and Abed al-Khalid, the sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They were taken into custody, aged nine and seven, in September 2002, during an attempt to capture their father. A former detainee says that he saw them in March the following year, around the time their father was captured, in a secret prison where the guards tormented them with insects.

While Sheik Mohammad's situation got the most publicity, there were other families -- women and children -- who were also kidnapped and held incommunicado. HRW reported on some of these:

On March 28, 2003, Aafia Siddiqui (see page 21) was reportedly apprehended in Karachi, Pakistan along with her three children (then aged seven years, five years and six months)....

On July 24, 2004, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a detainee who the U.S. government has acknowledged was in the U.S. Secret Detention Program and is presently held at Guantánamo Bay, was reportedly apprehended in Gujarat, Pakistan, along with two women (his wife, an Uzbek national and the Pakistani wife of South African national Zubair Ismail) and five children. His apprehension was reportedly a joint Pakistani-U.S. operation, coordinated with CIA and FBI officials.

I almost don't know how to end an article such as this one. If I could, like the last episode of The Sopranos, I'd fade to black for a long time and let this one sink in.

Here's a link to the entire HRW/Center for Constitutional Rights/Amnesty International/Cageprisoners/et al. report (PDF). And here's an Action Link regarding the lawsuit against the government on the secret dentention centers, put up by Center for Constutional Rights.

A Moral Nothingness: Red Cross Blows Whistle on U.S. Torture [Updated]

AP is reporting today [3/20/2007] that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is saying that "high-profile" terror detainees held in CIA secret prisons and later transferred to last September to Guantanamo "were kept and questioned under highly abusive conditions."

Follow me through this diary, from this major report, to the issues of psychologist participation in torture, to a meditation on the soul of our times.

The Red Cross said the techniques reported by the 14 prisoners, including sleep deprivation and the use of forced standing and other so-called "stress positions," were particularly harsh when used together....

The CIA's detention methods were designed to soften detainees and make them more likely to talk during interrogation. Human rights organizations say the CIA's extreme conditions of detention and the coercive questioning techniques constitute torture.

Apparently the ICRC report was leaked, because IRC has a policy of not reporting on the results of their prisoner visits, the better to allow them access to these otherwise inaccessible victims of the war on terror.

"The price of this is a policy of confidentiality, taking up the problems only with the people directly concerned," according to a policy statement on its Web site. The ICRC says it will only break its silence in extreme cases, such as when the condition of prisoners hasn't improved.

Update (March 22, 2004):

Stephen Soldz notes in comments that the ICRC did leak earlier on this, in 2004. He is correct, and here is the link and a quote from that news source:
Online News Hour: Charge of Abuse, Nov. 30, 2004

Terence Smith speaks with Neil Lewis, the New York Times reporter who broke the story about alleged prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay....

Abuses the ICRC uncovered in their investigation TERENCE SMITH: What were some of the abuses cited?

NEIL LEWIS: Well, on the psychological side, which again was most of what the Red Cross team had asserted was part of the stuff that was tantamount to torture, long-term isolation, various psychological techniques to make detainees as dependent as possible on the interrogators, a system of punishments and rewards. On the physical side, it said some beatings.

It also described certain practices that military interrogators used regularly, it said, such as having inmates strip to their underwear, sat down in a chair, exposed to cold temperatures for a long time, loud music, lights, the kind of things to disorient people, all in the service of getting information out of them supposedly.

End Update

What's in the Report? or Torture as Usual

We don't know who leaked the report (supposedly "U.S. officials"), but conditions certainly have not improved since news of torture in U.S. prisons overseas was first broached over three years ago. House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes says the charges of 14 detainees that they were tortured -- including a classified statement by Khalid Sheik Muhammad -- are strongly contested by the CIA. Senator Levin said the CIA Inspector General's offer to investigate the Muhammad claim in insufficient, and he will be looking into it himself.

Of course, U.S. practice of torture has a long pedigree, and I have tried repeatedly to bring this to the attention of the Daily Kos readership. I have tried to show how the CIA model of psychological torture, codified in their KUBARK counterintelligence interrogation manual over forty years ago, has been put into modified, if enhanced, practice in Bush's so-called war on terror.

The ICRC report makes clear that the same abuse is going on. The same kind of torture that began in the Eisenhower administration (or possibly the Truman administration), and continued through the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and now Bush II, either through the CIA, or their proxies, trained by the U.S. government.

In its latest incarnation, the CIA is using what it euphemistically calls EIDs: "enhanced interrogation techniques":

Those widely reported practices include openhanded slapping, induced hypothermia, sleep deprivation and — perhaps most controversially — waterboarding. In that technique, a detainee is made to believe he is drowning.

Buttressed by at least one classified legal opinion from the Justice Department, the CIA believed it was operating lawfully in detaining and interrogating roughly 100 suspected terrorists at locations from Southeast Asia to Europe.

"The (interrogation) procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary," President Bush said...

Asked last month if the prisons were still empty, a CIA official declined to comment.

As with the US Attorney scandal, you can't really believe anything the government says. The government says you can't believe the detainees.

But the massive preponderence of the evidence on torture over the years demonstrates that the ICRC report is probably more true than not.

And the truth is sickening.

Psychologists Sputter on Torture

One piece of evidence of abusive interrogation (violent torture) comes from Michael Gelles, who was the chief psychologist for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, stationed at Guantanamo. He blew the whistle on the unlawful interrogations at that U.S. prison. The information almost went nowhere: read Jane Mayer's excellent piece on that episode in the New Yorker, How an internal effort to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was thwarted.

As a result of efforts such as his, and many others in the American Psychological Association (APA), there has been an effort to halt the participation of psychologists in "enemy combatant" interrogations. But this campaign has been stymied by APA leadership and the opposition of military psychologists within APA. Now, the current effort to stop psychologist participation in U.S. torture from within the organization has received a blow from the self-same Michael Gelles.

Gelles has written a letter opposing the ban to the chief sponsor of the proposed APA Resolution calling for a Moratorium on psychologist involvement in national security “enemy combatant” interrogations. This letter was distributed by APA leadership to its Council of Representatives, while a letter answering Gelles's remarks was outrageously refused similar distribution.

Dr. Stephen Soldz, who has been one of the leaders in the fight against psychologist participation in torture has written his own excellent reply to Gelles, while also reprinting the replies of Dr. Altman and Dr. Steven Miles, author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror. Read these able psychologists and doctors in their own words, as they give a powerful refutation of the latest military collaborationist line.

The history of participation by psychologists and psychiatrists in national security researches into interrogation, mind control and torture, continues apace. What is so striking is the vast scope of the program and the involvement of prominent behavioral scientists and clinicians over the years. Some have participated out of naivete and ignorance. Others out of greed and careerism. Some, perhaps, shared the goals of their government masters.

But I fear the main reason is a moral rot, an emptiness that has taken root in the society and spread throughout the body politic.

It strikes me that many of my colleagues are morally dead. Psychologists are supposed to seek knowledge and enlightenment, and to share that knowledge for the benefit of all humanity. But something terrrible happened. And then, what was worst, a silence grew. In secret, terrible things happen.

There is a justifiable uproar over the secrecy Bush and Gonzales are maintaining over Executive Branch plots to usurp the machinery of the Justice Department. I wrote only yesterday on the behind the scenes push to bring the Unitary Executive into complete power, using the Patriot Act to stymie the judiciary and Congress.

But there is another secrecy, one that comes to the surface, one that we are afraid to look at because it is so awful. It explains why diaries on torture regularly only get a few dozen recommendations, or why this explosive report by the ICRC -- "the first independent accounting of the detainees' allegations against the CIA since its detention and interrogation program began in 2002" -- will be forgotten by almost everyone by tomorrow.

The secret is this: there is a moral nothingness at the heart of this society. A black hole. And like a black hole it threatens to suck everything into its obliterating maw.

The time is almost too late. The clock is ticking backwards. The hours are being swallowed up.

Are we even alive?

I would far rather be an outcast
upon the bosom of the great world
than be an accomplice to
a moral nothingness
From N 126 in [Edvard] Munch in His Own Words by Paul Erik Tojner, Prestel Publishing, 2001

Crossposted at Daily Kos