The Hoffman Report: The Investigation into the American Psychological Association (APA)

The Hoffman Report is the informal name for the 2015 investigation into the American Psychological Association’s (APA) practices regarding its relaxing of ethical standards for psychologists involved in torture interrogations. The full name for the report is, Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture. It was authored by attorneys David Hoffman, Danielle Carter, Cara Viglucci Lopez, Heather Benzmiller, Ava Guo, Yasir Latifi and Daniel Craig of the law firm, Sidley Austin, LLP.

It was an extensive investigation spanning 6 months that reviewed over 50,000 documents and conducted over 200 interviews with 148 people.

The report notes that,

“Although most individuals were quite cooperative and willing to meet with us, that sentiment was not universal, and there were several individuals who declined to meet with us or did not respond to our requests.”

Also,

“This inquiry is made more difficult by the amount of time that has elapsed since the important events occurred. The key events relating to the APA task force report occurred 10 to 11 years ago, and the events relating to the ethics code revision occurred 13 to 19 years ago.”

The independent investigation resulted in a 542-page final report. It is available for download here

Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture (PDF)

US soldier who shot five troops was 'broken' by counsellors

As seen in the Telegraph

Army Sgt. John M. Russell, 44, has been charged with murder and aggravated assault in the Baghdad shootings, which his father said took place about six weeks before the end of his third tour of duty in Iraq.

Wilburn Russell, 73, alleged his son had been treated poorly at the stress centre and had e-mailed his wife calling two recent days the worst in his life.

"I hate what that boy did," said Mr Russell, speaking in front of the two-story suburban home his son is buying with his wife. "He thought it was justified. That's never a solution."

Excerpts of his military record, obtained by The Associated Press, show Sgt. Russell previously did two one-year tours of duty in Iraq, one starting in April 2003 and another beginning November 2005. The stress of repeat and extended tours is considered a main contributor to mental health problems among troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His father said the soldier, an electronics technician, was at the stress centre to transition out of active duty. He said his son was undergoing stressful mental tests that he didn't understand were merely tests, "so they broke him."

"John has forfeited his life. Apparently, he said (to his wife), 'My life is over. To hell with it. I'm going to get even with 'em,"' he said.

"He lived for the military," Mr Russell said. "We're sorry for the families, too. It shouldn't have happened."

The soldier's son, John M. Russell II, said that he has communicated with his father by e-mail regularly. In the last message he received from him, April 25, his father sounded normal and planned to be back in Texas to visit in July.

"He's not a violent person," he said. "He's just a loving, caring guy.

He doesn't like to see anyone get hurt. For this to happen, it had to be something going on that the Army's not telling us about."

Related Articles

• US soldier shoots dead five comrades in Baghdad
• US soldier kills 5 troops in Iraq
• US soldier jailed for 'execution' murders in Iraq
• Iraq withdrawal: background to the war
• US army soldier sentenced to life in prison for murder of Iraqi prisoners
• US Army sergeant convicted of murdering four Iraqi detainees

Waterboarding, Interrogations: The CIA's $1,000 a Day Specialists

As reported on ABC News

As the secrets about the CIA's interrogation techniques continue to come out, there's new information about the frequency and severity of their use, contradicting an 2007 ABC News report, and a new focus on two private contractors who were apparently directing the brutal sessions that President Obama calls torture.

According to current and former government officials, the CIA's secret waterboarding program was designed and assured to be safe by two well-paid psychologists now working out of an unmarked office building in Spokane, Washington.

Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, former military officers, together founded Mitchell Jessen and Associates.

Both men declined to speak to ABC News citing non-disclosure agreements with the CIA. But sources say Jessen and Mitchell together designed and implemented the CIA's interrogation program.

Click here to see Jessen refusing to talk to ABC News.

"It's clear that these psychologists had an important role in developing what became the CIA's torture program," said Jameel Jaffer, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Click here to see Mitchell refusing to talk to ABC News.

Former U.S. officials say the two men were essentially the architects of the CIA's 10-step interrogation plan that culminated in waterboarding.

Associates say the two made good money doing it, boasting of being paid a $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the techniques on top al Qaeda suspects at CIA secret sites.

"The whole intense interrogation concept that we hear about, is essentially their concepts," according to Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator.

Both Mitchell and Jessen were previously involved in the U.S. military program to train pilots how to survive behind enemy lines and resist brutal tactics if captured.

Mitchell and Jessen Lacked Experience in Actual Interrogations

But it turns out neither Mitchell nor Jessen had any experience in conducting actual interrogations before the CIA hired them.

"They went to two individuals who had no interrogation experience," said Col. Kleinman. "They are not interrogators."

The new documents show the CIA later came to learn that the two psychologists' waterboarding "expertise" was probably "misrepresented" and thus, there was no reason to believe it was "medically safe" or effective. The waterboarding used on al Qaeda detainees was far more intense than the brief sessions used on U.S. military personnel in the training classes.

"The use of these tactics tends to increase resistance on the part of the detainee to cooperating with us. So they have the exact opposite effect of what you want," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich).

The new memos also show waterboarding was used "with far greater frequency than initially indicated" to even those in the CIA.

Abu Zubaydah was water boarded at least 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed at least 183 times.

Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou Says Waterboarding is Torture

That contradicts what former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who led the Zubaydah capture team, told ABC News in 2007 when he first revealed publicly that waterboarding had been used.

He said then, based on top secret reports he had access to, that Zubaydah had only been water boarded once and then freely talked.

Kiriakou now says he too was stunned to learn how often Zubaydah was waterboarded, in what Kiriakou says was clearly torture.

"When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded on one occasion," said Kiriakou. "It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques."

A federal judge in New York is currently considering whether or not to make public the written logs of the interrogation sessions.

The tapes were destroyed by the CIA, but the written logs still exist, although the CIA is fighting their release.

A CIA spokesperson declined to comment for this report, except to note that the agency's terrorist interrogation program was guided by legal opinions from the Department of Justice.

Nearly 20% of the U.S. Army in Afghanistan is on Prozac

Snippets from a much larger article in Time Magazine, much of with seems to be in a factual feel good tone. The wonders of modern medicine, etc.

What is bothersome is the fact of troops coming home with a variety of mental problems to begin with, and the extended problems of nasty side effects from a large variety of psychiatric drugs. The combination of the two factors is suspicious, and certainly needs more investigation

[...]

For the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines. Data contained in the Army's fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope. Escalating violence in Afghanistan and the more isolated mission have driven troops to rely more on medication there than in Iraq, military officials say.

At a Pentagon that keeps statistics on just about everything, there is no central clearinghouse for this kind of data, and the Army hasn't consistently asked about prescription-drug use, which makes it difficult to track. Given the traditional stigma associated with soldiers seeking mental help, the survey, released in March, probably underestimates antidepressant use. But if the Army numbers reflect those of other services — the Army has by far the most troops deployed to the war zones — about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were on such medications last fall. The Army estimates that authorized drug use splits roughly fifty-fifty between troops taking antidepressants — largely the class of drugs that includes Prozac and Zoloft — and those taking prescription sleeping pills like Ambien.

In some ways, the prescriptions may seem unremarkable. Generals, history shows, have plied their troops with medicinal palliatives at least since George Washington ordered rum rations at Valley Forge. During World War II, the Nazis fueled their blitzkrieg into France and Poland with the help of an amphetamine known as Pervitin. The U.S. Army also used amphetamines during the Vietnam War.

[...]

[...]

And yet the battlefield seems an imperfect environment for widespread prescription of these medicines. LeJeune, who spent 15 months in Iraq before returning home in May 2004, says many more troops need help — pharmaceutical or otherwise — but don't get it because of fears that it will hurt their chance for promotion. "They don't want to destroy their career or make everybody go in a convoy to pick up your prescription," says LeJeune, now 34 and living in Utah. "In the civilian world, when you have a problem, you go to the doctor, and you have therapy followed up by some medication. In Iraq, you see the doctor only once or twice, but you continue to get drugs constantly." LeJeune says the medications — combined with the war's other stressors — created unfit soldiers. "There were more than a few convoys going out in a total daze."

About a third of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq say they can't see a mental-health professional when they need to. When the number of troops in Iraq surged by 30,000 last year, the number of Army mental-health workers remained the same — about 200 — making counseling and care even tougher to get.

"Burnout and compassion fatigue" are rising among such personnel, and there have been "recent psychiatric evacuations" of Army mental-health workers from Iraq, the 2007 survey says. Soldiers are often stationed at outposts so isolated that follow-up visits with counselors are difficult. "In a perfect world," admits Nash, who has just retired from the Navy, "you would not want to rely on medications as your first-line treatment, but in deployed settings, that is often all you have."

And just as more troops are taking these drugs, there are new doubts about the drugs' effectiveness. A pair of recent reports from Rand and the federal Institute of Medicine (iom) raise doubts about just how much the new medicines can do to alleviate PTSD. The Rand study, released in April, says the "overall effects for SSRIs, even in the largest clinical trials, are modest." Last October the iom concluded, "The evidence is inadequate to determine the efficacy of SSRIs in the treatment of PTSD."

Chris LeJeune could have told them that. When he returned home in May 2004, he remained on clonazepam and other drugs. He became one of 300,000 Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and suffer from PTSD or depression. "But PTSD isn't fixed by taking pills — it's just numbed," he claims now. "And I felt like I was drugged all the time."

So a year ago, he simply stopped taking them. "I just started trying to fight my demons myself," he says, with help from VA counseling. He laughs when asked how he's doing. "I'd like to think," he says, "that I'm really damn close back to normal."

Psychiatrist Fired after Death of Patient

A psychiatrist has been implicated and disciplined in the the death of a wounded veteran under going treatment at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The family is understandably upse and demanding investigations, etc. From the Courier journal in Louisville, Kentucky

A psychiatrist who treated Sgt. Gerald Cassidy, the wounded Iraq veteran from Indiana found dead in his Fort Knox barracks, has been "relieved of his duties," a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh said yesterday.

Bayh press secretary Jonathan Swain identified the psychiatrist as Dr. William Kearney.

The civilian doctor, contracted by the Army, is the fourth person to face job action in connection with the Sept. 21 death. Three soldiers in Cassidy's chain of command have already lost their posts.

Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, has linked the Westfield man's death to inadequate staffing and problems with care at the Fort Knox Warrior Transition Unit, which opened in June and is devoted to healing the wounds of war.

"The fact that (Kearney) has been relieved of his duties confirms the validity of the questions Sen. Bayh and the family have been asking," Swain said.

Although the Army is still investigating the death and its cause, preliminary reports show that the brain-injured National Guardsman may have been unconscious for days and dead for hours before someone checked on him.

Cassidy left a wife, a 5-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son.

"This was a beautiful young man who did nothing wrong," said Cassidy's mother, Kay McMullen of Carmel, Ind.

She declined to comment specifically on the psychiatrist, but said: "The Army killed him with incompetent care."

Bayh is seeking clarification from the Army about whether Kearney's departure is temporary or permanent, and Kearney could not be reached for comment.

Constance Shaffery, public affairs officer at Fort Knox, confirmed that the psychiatrist is no longer working at Ireland Army Community Hospital but would not comment further, saying it is a personnel matter.

She also confirmed that representatives of Sens. Barbara Boxer of California and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut were on the base yesterday, although she said "it isn't primarily about Sgt. Cassidy."

"Staffers from the offices of Senators Lieberman and Boxer came to Fort Knox as one in a series of visits to Army installations to look at mental health care and Warrior Transition Units throughout the Army," Shaffery said. "Our elected officials often send staffers to visit Fort Knox and other Army posts to learn more (about) the Army and our missions."

Lieberman is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Boxer has been working with other senators to examine mental health care for service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Natalie Ravitz, Boxer's communications director, said the visit is part of a series of planned visits to bases nationwide, "but Sgt. Cassidy's death did prompt our staff to move up their visit to Fort Knox.

"One of the issues Senators Boxer and Lieberman have been looking at closely is treatment for Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD," Ravitz said.

Cassidy, 32, suffered brain injuries in a roadside blast in Iraq and was assigned to one of 35 transition units that were created after The Washington Post revealed substandard outpatient care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Bayh said Cassidy received "substandard care" at Fort Knox and tried unsuccessfully for five months to get transferred to a specialized private facility in Indianapolis that could deal with his condition.

[...]

McMullen's voice broke with emotion as she said she hopes Bayh's efforts prevent other families from suffering like hers.

"I think things have gotten better" at Fort Knox, she said. "But I think they've got a long way to go."

Widow sues Tripler Army Medical Center over veteran’s suicide - Psychiatrist implicated

From Hawaii's Star Bulletin

The widow of an Air Force veteran who jumped from the 10th floor of Tripler Army Medical Center is suing the U.S. government for his death.

The medical malpractice suit, filed last Thursday in U.S. District Court, claims the staff at the hospital ignored the suicidal thoughts of retired Master Sgt. Robert Roth, 50, who worked as a clerk in the records section, said attorney Rick Fried, who is representing Roth's widow, Satsuki Roth.

Tripler, in a short statement, said, "The case will be vigorously defended."

Roth died Jan. 2, about two weeks after he warned doctors he wanted to leap from the top of the hospital or the Makapuu cliffs, according to an internal criminal investigation by the Army.

On Dec. 16, 2006, Roth, of Sioux Falls, S.D., had to "wait several hours" to see an assistant psychiatrist who later released him, saying "he appeared to be OK to go home," the Army report said.

Ten days later, Roth stormed out of the hospital against medical advice after experiencing another long wait caused by the emergency room having only one doctor during the Christmas holiday, it said.

"Twice he basically came to the emergency room, and they ignored him," Fried said yesterday. "He came with a backpack to be admitted."

On Jan. 2, Roth had a doctor's appointment but found the hospital closed because of the federal holiday observing President Gerald Ford's death. He got into the building through an emergency door that had its alarm turned off by other workers, walked up to the 10th floor and plunged 89 feet, landing on a web of air-conditioner pipes.

The suit will seek monetary damages that would be used to care for Satsuki Roth, 47; Robert Roth's 74-year-old mother, Joyce Ulmer; and his 23-year-old son, William Roth, Fried said.

CFB Gagetown psychiatrist loses license, again

From this New Brunswick Canada report

A former St. John's psychiatrist who had admitted to having sex with a patient has lost his medical licence in a second province.

Dr. James Hanley, whose Newfoundland and Labrador licence was revoked in March, has now had his privileges taken away in New Brunswick. He closed his psychiatric practice in St. John's in 2005, before relocating to New Brunswick.

Hanley, who had admitted that he had a sexual relationship with a patient, had been treating patients at Canadian Forces Base Gagetown.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of New Brunswick, though, issued an interim suspension and review of his licence.

Hanley had argued that the military's dire need for psychiatric service should have helped him keep his licence.

But Dr. Ed Schollenberg, registrar of the New Brunswick college, said other factors were more important.

"The need was certainly real and it certainly needed to be thought of a great deal," Schollenberg said Tuesday.

"Inevitably, there is some harm to that access when you take action, but at the end of the day, you still have to decide that there are certain kinds of things which just cause you to forfeit your right to practice."

Hanley has a month to file an appeal of the New Brunswick college's decision.

Hanley's case became the first public hearing involving the Newfoundland and Labrador College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Hanley admitted to having had sex with patient Kathleen Wiseman, who had been under his care for 17 years. Wiseman brought a complaint to the Newfoundland and Labrador college, arguing that Hanley took advantage of her during a vulnerable period in 2003.

Hanley had voluntarily closed his office in 2005 and then relocated to CFB Gagetown.

Before the decision in March, the Canadian Forces had backed Hanley's work at the base. Defence officials have said there will be an increased need in the forces for psychiatric services as troops return from Afghanistan.

Frankenstein's Children: Modern Torture's Scientific Bible

Of course our interest is in the criminality and lack of morality displayed by these experts on the mind when working for a government (not just the US government)

A frightening and detailed review of a book that is best described by this quote:

What if there was a book that dispassionately looked at the history and methodology of torture? What if this book looked at human physiology and psychology and tried to scientifically establish how to best break another human being and bend him or her to your will? What if this book were written by top behavioral scientists and published in the United States? And, finally, what if the studies published in this book were financed by the U.S. government?

Look no farther, there is, or rather was, such a book. Published in 1961 by John Wiley & Sons, The Manipulation of Human Behavior was edited by psychologists Albert D. Biderman and Herbert Zimmer. This book, unfortunately, cannot be found online, nor was a second edition or printing ever made (not surprisingly). But I will provide a review here, and an introduction into the nightmare world of science, torture, and politics that helped shape our modern world and today's news.

In recent months, it went on-line and and can be viewed at Internet Archive:

The Manipulation of Human Behavior - The text is copyright 1961, but not renewed (and therefore expired in the US). HTML formatting from unknown source.

We include this summary of the text:

The titles of the book's essays are bone-chilling in their scientific bland exactitude. Here they are, with authors, for the record:

1. The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject as it Affects Brain Function, by Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr., Assoc. Professor of Clinical Medicine in Psychiatry, New York Hospital

[I have come to see over the past months of research that this essay by Hinkle is often referenced, and is key in understanding later methods of psychological and modern torture.]

2. The Effects of Reduced Environmental Stimulation on Human Behavior: A Review, by Phillip E. Kubazansky, Chief Psychologist, Boston City Hospital

3. The Use of Drugs in Interrogation, by Louis A. Gottschalk, Assoc. Professor of Psychiatry and Research Coordinator, Cincinnati General Hospital

And because you probably can't wait, and to juice up this account, I'll admit, yes, this is the chapter that goes into LSD, mescaline use and all that. Gottschalk found enough data in the research literature to find that LSD-25 might have "possible applications... to interrogation techniques".

The conclusions reached on mescaline hold equally for the possible applications of this drug to interrogation. As a tool in the advancement of knowledge of psychopharmacology, LSD-25 is a drug on which clinical and experimental research is likely to continue. (pp. 123-124)

Likely to continue..." An ironic understatement?

4. Physiological Responses as a Means of Evaluating Information, by R. C. Davis, Professor of Psychology, Indiana University

5. The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation, by Martin T. Orne, Teaching Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard University Medical School

An aside: Some of you may recognize Martin Orne as the psychiatrist of the famous poet Anne Sexton, who in the early 1990s released the tapes of her psychotherapy sessions with him to a biographer, precipitating a storm of controversy.

6. The Experimental Investigation of Interpersonal Influence, by Robert R. Blake and Jane S. Mouton, Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, and Social Science Research Associate, University of Texas, respectively

7. Countermanipulation Through Malingering, by Malcolm L. Meltzer, Staff Psychologist, District of Columbia General Hospital

Six of the essay contributors were psychologists; two were psychiatrists.

Military Bars Soldiers with 'Personality Disorders' - Families Say the Disorders are the Result of the War.

From National Public Radio with radio show feed on the site

Thousands of military personnel have been dismissed for "personality disorders" since the war in Iraq began.

The military says the soldiers had pre-existing mental conditions that it is not responsible for treating. But soldiers, their families and veterans' groups counter that the mental condition is post-traumatic stress disorder caused by their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Daniel Zwerdling says if a soldier's medical unit diagnoses him with PTSD, the treatment could last months and make the military liable for the soldier's disability benefits. But if the soldier is diagnosed with a personality disorder — a condition that predates his military service — then the treatment would only last a couple weeks and the military would not be liable for the disability benefits.

Zwerdling says he found no evidence of a military psychiatrist diagnosing a soldier with a personality disorder in order to avoid the extended treatment and costs. However, he did hear that the personality disorder diagnosis has been used to discharge problem soldiers quickly.

William Wooldridge, who was an Army specialist in Iraq, says he was dismissed from the service for having a personality disorder.

During his second enlistment, Wooldridge says he underwent a stressful deployment to Iraq and had a breakdown. When he returned to the U.S., he was evaluated by an Army psychiatrist and received a discharge for having a personality disorder.

Wooldridge fought the diagnosis and eventually got it changed to PTSD.

Zwerdling says the military also needs to figure out how it will deal with the tens of thousands of soldiers and Maries who are returning home with serious mental health problems that interfere with their daily lives.

Currently, he says, the military has a terrible system for dealing with mental health problems and it is not doing much to make the system better.

Zwerdling and Wooldridge talk to Alex Chadwick about the issue.

Shifting the Blame for the Effects of Combat Fatigue

As seen in this report

Thousands of U.S. soldiers in Iraq — as many as 10 a day — are being discharged by the military for mental health reasons. But the Pentagon isn't blaming the war. It says the soldiers had "pre-existing" conditions that disqualify them for treatment by the government.

Many soldiers and Marines being discharged on this basis actually suffer from combat-related problems, experts say. But by classifying them as having a condition unrelated to the war, the Defense Department is able to quickly get rid of troops having trouble doing their work while also saving the expense of caring for them.

The result appears to be that many actually suffering from combat-related problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injuries don't get the help they need.

Working behind the scenes, Sens. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., have written and inserted into the defense authorization bill a provision that would make it harder for the Pentagon to discharge thousands of troops. The Post-Dispatch has learned that the measure has been accepted into the Senate defense bill and will probably become part of the Senate-House bill to be voted on this week.

The legislation sets a higher bar for the Pentagon to use the personality-disorder discharge, and also mandates a review of the policies by the Government Accountability Office. Bond said it also would "force the Pentagon to stop using this discharge until we can fix the problem."

Bond said he learned of the practice from returning Iraq veterans. He called it an "abuse" of the system and "inexcusable."

"They've kicked out about 22,000 troops who they say have pre-existing personality disorders. I don't believe that," Bond said in an interview Friday. "And when you kick them out, they don't get the assistance they need, they aren't entitled to DOD or Veterans Administration care for those problems."

Obama said the practice is "deeply disturbing" because "it means that those who have served this country aren't getting the care they need. …"

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Vician declined Friday to discuss the matter because it was related to current legislation.

Defense Department records show that 22,500 cases of personality-disorder discharges have been processed over the last six years.

Jon Soltz, an Iraq war combat veteran who founded the group VoteVets.org, said untreated psychological problems were contributing to the highest military suicide rate in a quarter-century and to growing homelessness among veterans, he said.

If such widespread mental problems really existed before people joined the military and saw combat, they would have been uncovered when the recruits were enlisting, Soltz said.

STRESS FACTORS

The issue of personality-disorder discharges is a window into the broader problem of psychological damage to Iraq veterans, which experts say has three main causes:

— Multiple and longer deployments.

— The stress of fighting an insurgency with no breaks and everyone always on the front line.

— Better and faster medical care that helps troops survive horrific physical injuries that often leave psychological scars.

"You land in Iraq, and you're on the battlefield, whether you're a quartermaster or a medic or a cook," said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organizations at the University of Maryland. "All you have to do is get on the highway to go somewhere from the airport."

The military and lawmakers are only slowly coming to grips with the consequences, Segal said.

"I think we have failed to recognize the extent of the problem," he said. "We've produced a problem that's going to be plaguing us for generations."

Past wars, through the Persian Gulf war, produced three casualties for every fatality, while now in Iraq "we're up to about 16-to-1," Segal said. Those killed are "really the tip of the iceberg" as far as the toll on soldiers, he added.

One Republican congressional staff member who works on military issues said the rationale behind the Pentagon's practice was: "We didn't break you, you were already broken. You're not our responsibility."

"One soldier I know received a diagnosis for a personality disorder after a 45-minute talk," said the staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He'd been in the military 10 years, had made it his career, and then he was told he was being shuffled out in a couple of weeks. We keep getting these stories."

In the House, Rep. Phil Hare, D-Ill., is leading the effort to get similar legislation approved.

"It defies logic to think that tens of thousands of our servicemen and women slipped through the cracks during the pre-screening process," Hare said. "We have a moral obligation to review the discharge process and ensure we are getting it right."

Psychiatrist wants immunity for testimony regrading her treatment of a soldier charged in a brutal rape and murder.

All of which leads to some suspicion regarding the psychiatrist. From this report

A military psychiatrist who treated at least three U.S. soldiers charged in the brutal rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the slayings of her family said Thursday she would not testify unless she had blanket immunity.

Elizabeth Bowler, an Army reservist, has been called to testify in the court-martial of Pfc. Jesse Spielman, who has been charged with rape and murder in the assault.

Spielman's court-martial resumed Thursday with prosecutors scrambling to overcome a soldier's recanting of his story that Spielman conspired to participate in the March 12, 2006, assault of a family in Mahmoudiya, a village about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Baghdad. Spc. James Barker, who has admitted his own role in the assault, testified Wednesday that he had allowed investigators to draft sworn statements for him that implicated Spielman in the crime. Barker testified that several portions of the document were untrue.

The court-martial proceedings began Monday with Spielman pleading guilty to lesser charges of conspiracy to obstructing justice, arson, wrongfully touching a corpse and drinking. Bowler was sworn in Thursday to testify after the jury had been excused so a military judge could decide if her testimony would merit immunity from prosecution.

Defense attorney Craig Carlson asked Bowler under oath what she would do if she was called to the stand. She said she would exercise her constitutional right against self-incrimination. Bowler was in charge of a combat stress team attached to the Spielman's unit during its deployment last year.

The Justice Department last month denied a request to grant Bowler immunity. Maj. William Fischbach, the military prosecutor, said he was planning to ask the military authorities overseeing Spielman's court-martial if immunity could be granted to Bowler by the end of the day.

Prosecutors have only a handful of witnesses to call before resting their case against the 101st Airborne Division soldier.

The Psychopathology of Shrinks

By Alexander Cockburn in CounterPunch. While we do not agree about Paris Hilton (the use of a bogus psychiatric diagnosis to avoid personal responsibility is reprehensible) the ironies of the impact of Tony Soprano and the misuse of psychoanalytic procedures should not be passed up

Summer’s hot breath draws closer and the psychoanalysts of New York and Boston prepare their patients for the difficult two or three weeks of holiday separation. Traditionally, many Boston shrinks take their seaside weeks on Cape Cod, around Truro, sunning and gossiping while their patients muster on their beach towels a few hundred yards away. The touching scene is duplicated further south around the Hamptons on Long Island.

Undoubtedly beach chat among both analysts and analysands will ripple over the June excitements of the psychoanalytic trade, starting with the gallant efforts of Paris Hilton’s psychiatrist, Dr Charles Sophy, to engineer what her costly but incompetent lawyers failed to do, namely spring her from L.A. County Jail where – given the triviality of her offenses - she is grotesquely pent. But of course the prime topic will surely be the end of the Soprano series which, across the past eight years, courtesy of Lorraine Bracco's Jennifer Melfi – Tony Soprano’s analyst -- has been the biggest boost to the shrink business since Lee J. Cobb starred in The Three Faces of Eve.

Truly comical has been the solemnity with which psychoanalysts across the United States have been deploring the “breach of professional ethics” at a shrinks’ dinner party in one of the concluding Soprano episodes in which the identity of Dr Melfi’s patient as Mobster Tony was disclosed. The rare moments when shrinks aren’t seducing their female patients (70 per cent, in an informal New York survey some years ago) are usually consumed by such indiscretions, a tradition stretching all the way back to the notoriety of the patients trotting up the stairs of Bergasse 19, Freud’s chambers in Vienna.

It’s true that some psychoanalysts were indignant at the way Melfi, chided by her colleagues for enabling a sociopath, promptly dumped the Mafia boss as a patient, the climax of a process identified back in 1999 in the British Medical Journal by Dr Tony David as the collision of “the superego of Melfi’s civilised values and the intellect… with the murky id that is Soprano’s stock in trade.” “The strict ethical principles established by the American Psychological Association”, wrote one APA member furiously, “do not allow for the arbitrary dismissal of a client even if they are sociopathic in nature (unless there is danger to the therapist).”

It so happens that these same “strict ethical principles” of the APA have been the topic of unsparing rebuke which probably won’t be cited much on those holiday beaches. A recent report by the Pentagon’s Inspector General confirms what has been detailed in a number of news stories since 2005 concerning the starring role played by American psychologists and psychoanalysts in devising and supervising torture techniques as administered by the U.S. military in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other secret interrogation centers run by the CIA.

These techniques -- as has been recently described here by Stephen Soldz have been “reverse-engineered” from the Pentagon’s SERE (“Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape”) program in which US military and intelligence personnel are taught how to withstand harsh interrogation. Psychologists have always been central to this enterprise and are now similarly central to the use of sleep deprivation, sexual and cultural humiliation and waterboarding in grilling America’s enemies. “Reverse-engineered” simply means the Pentagon is using the techniques to torture suspected terrorists.

In 2002 the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that “interrogation methods used were no longer effective in obtaining useful information from some detainees” and, as the Inspector General’s report details, “recommended that the Federal Bureau of Investigation Behavioral Science Unit, the Army's Behavioral Science Consultation Team, the Southern Command Psychological Operations Support Element, and the JTF-170 clinical psychologist develop a plan to exploit detainee vulnerabilities.” The use of dogs, sexual humiliation, and kindred tortures were only a couple of months away.

Amid furious protests from such APA members as Soldz and others the APA leadership has piously maintained that "psychologists have a critical role in keeping interrogations safe, legal, ethical and effective." The Pentagon Inspector General’s Report make clear this claim is ludicrous. So here we have shrinks refining Tony Soprano’s brutish violence, draping his id with the national flag. The August meeting of the APA’s “Council of Representatives” will be stormy as the members vote on a motion introduced by Neil Altman urging "A moratorium on psychologist involvement in interrogations at US detention centers for foreign detainees.”

The US Army, Military Ethics, and the Problems with Military Psychiatry

The problem with military psychiatry is that they have to keep a human healthy enough to continue with an inhuman task, the killing of other human beings. And if you are working in the 'civilized world', this killing is done by following a set of rules which are presented as the ethical means for waging war. No surprise then that the US Army has released a report that highlights the extensive problems in "battlefield ethics" in Iraq. From the Baltimore Sun

In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, less than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.

More than 40 percent support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10 percent reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said today in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.[...]

Findings included:

• Sixty-two percent of soldiers and 66 percent of Marines said that they knew someone seriously injured or killed, or that a member of their team had become a casualty.
  
• Only 47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of Marines said noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect.
  
• About a third of troops said they had insulted or cursed at civilians in their presence.
  
• About 10 percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating civilians or damaging property when it was not necessary. Mistreatment includes hitting or kicking a civilian.
  
• Forty-four percent of Marines and 41 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to save the life of a soldier or Marine.
  
• Thirty-nine percent of Marines and 36 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to gather important information from insurgents.

Full Report here (PDF file)