An Opinion piece first seen here
The American Psychological Association now says that its members can’t take part in water-boarding, sleep deprivation or sexual humiliation, among other techniques that have become part and parcel of Bush tactics against alleged terrorists at Guantanamo. If they see such activities, they are now required to intervene to stop them, report them to superiors, and to report the names of participating psychologists to the APA.
What? You say you thought the premier professional society of psychologists would have long ago adopted such ethical strictures? After all, psychologists, those most politically liberal and emotionally empathic of healers, are supposed to be in the business of healing emotional pain, not causing it.
The Post described the move as a “rebuke” of Bush interrogation tactics. Yet the APA rejected an all-out ban on psychologists working at places like Guantanamo; the group says it’s fine for psychologists to serve in places where the American government practices torture because they can protect the prisoners and show the torturers how torture doesn’t work.
Right. That’s a self-serving proposition, and there’s a reason for such unethical, craven behavior not named in the Post article: the APA’s sordid history in confronting this issue.
It begins with the psychological profession’s intimate relationship with the military, extending at least as far back as World War I and helping devise interrogation techniques used during the Cold War and by the CIA to torture their Latin American captives during the Reagan years.
In this devastating critique of the APA by Washington Monthly contributing editor Arthur Levine, published earlier this year, psychologists are shown to have distinctly ambivalent attitudes towards torture and their participation in it. Levine notes that psychology has always been seen as a lesser science, abstract and subjective, and as a result psychologists have always sought the respect of their healing-profession peers. The military connection helped immeasurably, not least with job security. Psychologists also want things from the government, like research money and the authority to prescribe psychopharmacological drugs.
Another thing they want: to avoid prosecution for helping with torture. And so in 2004, the APA rejected a members’ demand that the group prohibit its members’ participation in the kinds of interrogation that had been exposed at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Such a prohibition could open psychologists working with torturers to criminal charges.
In 2005, the APA convened a “blue ribbon” panel to come up with guidelines. Six of the panel’s 10 members were military. Let’s see now - one of the members wrote a lecture entitled Brainwashing: The Method of Forceful Interrogation; another was the chief psychologist at the Army’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, which trained soldiers to resist many of the techniques later used at Guantanamo. One of the military shrinks said of sleep deprivation, “Maybe it’s useful to an interrogation to wake someone up early.” When a civilian panelist said the government should follow the Geneva Conventions, the panel’s leader, psychologist Gerald Koocher, said: “We’re not going to go there. International law doesn’t have any standing in U.S. courts.”
Well, you can imagine the panel’s findings. Its report said psychologists are ethically obligated to report torture, but it didn’t define torture, saying that “over the course of the recent United States military presence in locations such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cuba, … rules and regulations have been significantly developed and refined.”
Psychological understatement of the decade, courtesy of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and sock puppet Alberto Gonzales. Lancet magazine called the report a “disgrace.” If that kind of reception fazed the APA, it wasn’t evident when APA president Ronald Levant visited Guantanamo on the Pentagon’s dime. His press release gushed: “I saw the invitation as an important opportunity to continue to provide our expertise and guidance for how psychologists can play an appropriate and ethical role in national security investigations.”
The APA supported the McCain anti-torture amendment in 2005, but Koocher used it as a sleazy bit of self-congratulation:
Supporting an amendment in direct contradiction to the Administration’s wishes was decidedly not the politically expedient thing to do in order to advance APA’s financial interests. It was, however, the right thing to do, and APA did it, despite that doing so placed significant funding for psychology in jeopardy.
There you have it. You can see just how much that amendment (signing-statemented out of existence) meant to the APA: Even after its much-derided report, conferees at the group’s 2006 New Orleans gathering listened in thrall as Army Surgeon General Kevin Kiley reinforced a notion they’ve apparently bought into whole hog: “Psychology is an important weapons system.” And what’s the definition of torture anyway? “..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?”
The group also continued to let its members obey military commands rather than the APA’s own ethics rules. Levine quotes psychoanalyst Stephen Soldz shredding that approach: “What sort of experts on ethics write the Nuremberg defense into their professional ethics code?”
Well, at the same conference where Kiley talked about psychology as a weapons system, Koocher said this: “The dictum of ‘do no harm’ has evolved to ‘do as little harm as possible.’”
Now, with this latest venture into the scary and unfamiliar world of professional ethics, the APA has at least defined torture and said its members cannot participate and must report those who do. Unlike the AMA and the American Psychiatric Association, however, it did not bar its members from serving at Guantanamo. Once again, the military got its way. As the Post article reports, an Army psychologist told the group, “If we lose psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die.”
Question for the APA: If the government thinks that psychologists are going to report torture, does the APA think psychologists will be allowed to witness it? As Leonard S. Rubenstein, executive director of the group Physicians for Human Rights, said, “It is unfortunate the APA did not recognize you cannot practice ethical psychology in interrogation settings in the context of pervasive violation of human rights.”
What you’re seeing in this sorry state of affairs is an ethically challenged profession still trying to have it both ways: Keep the military jobs (and resulting APA dues) and the research money while denouncing torture. That denunciation, though, comes with a wink-wink nod-nod to the Bush government. George Bush and the psychologists understand each other perfectly.
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