Psychologists, Torture and the Fight to Close Gitmo

Even as Democrats are trying to register their opposition to escalating the Iraq war, they're still lagging behind in overturning the Bush administration's ongoing abuse of detainees.
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Even as Democrats in Congress are trying to register their opposition to escalating the Iraq war, they're still lagging behind in overturning the Bush administration's ongoing abuse of detainees. Unfortunately, the torture, degrading treatment and suspenion of human rights allowed by this administration still blacken America's reputation and help fuel the rise in terrorism. Yesterday, even Britian's attorney general condemned the U.S.'s cosmetic changes in its military tribunal system as "too little and too late" and noted that the presence of Guantanamo undermines the "war on terror."

Human rights groups and activists are focusing on two major initiatives to undo the Bush administration's torture-friendly policies -- revising the Military Commissions Act that essentially immunizes torturers and suspends habeus corpus as well as seeking to close Guantanamo. Some Democrats, including Rep. John Murtha, have shown a preliminary interest in shutting down Gitmo. But the administration still retains legitimacy for their interrogations in Gitmo and elsewhere in part because of the cooperation of such private groups as the American Psychological Association, which approves its members' involvement in interrogations while giving lip-service to opposing torture. (See this critique of the APA's sophistry on the issue.) In the January/February issue of The Washington Monthly, I explore the inside story of how the APA's leadership pushed through a pro-interrogation policy against the wishes of many of its members; I also look at the opposition growing within its ranks. As I point out in the article:

Why, then, was the leadership of the APA, an organization representing one of the most liberal professions imaginable, so willing to essentially acquiesce with a conservative administration's efforts to torture prisoners? The answer is that it fell into a classic Washington trade-group dilemma: It became so enmeshed in the gears of the federal machine that it could be influenced by a determined administration and ended up supporting policies that many of its own members opposed.

Now the dissidents are seeking a moratorium on the APA's cooperation with military interrogations -- and this week launched a campaign to elect a leading critic of the policies, Dr. Steven Reisner, a New York psychoanalyst and faculty member at NYU medical school, to be president of the organization. It may seem like a parochial internal dispute to outsiders, but the stamp of approval given by the psychologists' group has allowed the Defense Department to continue its use of health professionals in breaking down prisoners -- even as both the the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association have refused to allow their members' involvement in any interrogations.

My Monthly article updates and builds on the great reporting on the psychologists' involvement in abusive interrogations by a variety of journalists and authors. They include The American Prospect's Tara McKelvey, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, Dr. Steven Miles in the book Oath Betrayed, psychologist Steve Soldz in Z magazine and Mark Benjamin in Salon. Benjamin did some of the best reporting looking at the way military officials skewed APA policy and also helped publicize the internal dissent at the APA.

Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! program also hosted a remarkable debate between the then-APA president and a leading opponent of the policy. On the show, the APA president, Gerald Koocher, gave perhaps the key reason the APA simply didn't bar its members from participating in interrogations: " Well, we don't, as a professional association, tell our members that they can't work for a given employer" -- even if it's a Defense Department that has ignored international torture standards.

My article adds to the previous accounts by taking readers inside the deliberations that led the APA to adopt its controversial policies and offers an exclusive look at the latest meeting of the APA in New Orleans, where the Army's Surgeon General, Major General Kevin Kiley, a commanding figure in combat fatigues, appealed to the organization's governing council to continue to support interrogations:

It was Kiley's job to convince them not to bail out on interrogations. It's an open question how much psychologists have contributed to the art of interrogation in the war on terror, but the APA provides a seal of legitimacy that the government values. If it joined the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychiatric Association by barring their members from joining the Guantanamo interrogations, it would further stigmatize the military's practices. So, armed with PowerPoint slides, Kiley argued for keeping psychologists on the offensive against "sworn enemies" of the country. "Psychology is an important weapons system," he explained. For the APA to draw up an explicit definition of abuse would be counterproductive. After all, "is four hours of sleep deprivation? How loud does a scream have to be? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

That attitude is emblematic of the mindset of military leaders and Bush administration officials who allow cruel and degrading treatment to continue. It's not surprising that the Army reported recently that there wasn't detainee abuse at Gitmo -- without bothering to interview any detainees.

Reformers within the APA and the broader human rights community are recruiting health professionals on several fronts to lobby against policies that allow torture and abusive treatment to continue. That includes joining with Physicians for Human Rights to take action to halt administration abuses and undo bad legislation -- or simply writing the APA president, Dr. Sharon Brehm of Indiana University, to get a moratorium on psychologists' involvement in any military or CIA-led interrogations; (they're also asking any health professionals who express their views to Dr. Brehm to copy those emails to apaprotest@psyact.org).

In the view of these activists, the next few weeks and months will be a critical time to see if Congress is willing to take a real stand on human rights to repair the damage of the Bush administration -- and whether health professionals, especially the American Psychological Association, will be willing to finally end their complicity with the abusive interrogations at Gitmo and other unaccountable detainee prison sites.

As Dr. Reisner, a son of tortured Holocaust survivors who is seeking to overturn the APA policy, has challenged his fellow psychologists at the APA:

I am asking you to reverse the shameful course that the APA has taken wittingly and unwittingly in participating in interrogation processes that have rightly been condemned as torture; in aligning our definition of torture with the US government and military's definitions of torture, which disregard international human rights obligations ; by tacitly approving the conditions detainees are being held in by permitting our members to collaborate with authorities in settings that have in themselves been condemned as "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment," by the International Committee of the Red Cross and a violation against the UN Convention Against Torture ; and in permitting our ethical obligation: "to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm" to be subverted...

The same clarion call to reverse a "shameful course" needs to be heeded by a Congress that has let the Bush "imperial presidency" run roughshod over accepted international standards on torture and abuse, destroying not just lives and human rights, but the moral authority of America in the world.

UPDATE: Most of the detainees at Gitmo aren't dangerous terrorists, as the most in-depth study on the topic illustrates. More than half those detained were never accused of hostile or violent acts against U.S. or allied forces, and less than 10 percent of the combantants were affiliated with al-Qaeda. And torture is so counter-productive that some in the Army's leadership are now starting to ask the producers of 24 to stop showing so many successful torture scenes because it's influencing young recruits to abuse Muslims.

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