Psychologists responsible for
the development and migration of abusive interrogation
techniques
Open Letter to the
President of the American Psychological Association
The following
Open Letter to Sharon Brehm, President of the American
Psychological Association was sent by over 40 psychologists.
[It is also available in pdf format at the above link. See also
the related briefing paper:
Q&A: How the Pentagon’s Inspector General Report Contradicts
What the APA Has Said About the Involvement of Psychologists in
Abusive Interrogations.]
06/07/07 "ICH"
-- -
June 6, 2007
Sharon Brehm, Ph.D.
President
American Psychological Association
Dear President Brehm:
We write you as psychologists concerned about the participation
of our profession in abusive interrogations of national security
detainees at Guantánamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at the
so-called CIA “black sites.”
Our profession is founded on the fundamental ethical principle,
enshrined as Principle A in our Ethical Principles of
Psychologists and Code of Conduct: “Psychologists strive to
benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.”
Irrefutable evidence now shows that psychologists participating
in national security interrogations have systematically violated
this principle. A recently declassified August 2006 report by
the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (OIG)
–Review
of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse—describes
in detail how psychologists from the military’s Survival,
Evasion Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program were instructed to
apply their expertise in abusive interrogation techniques to
interrogations being conducted by the DoD throughout all three
theaters of the War on Terror (Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and
Iraq).
SERE is the US military’s program designed to train Special
Forces and other troops at high risk of capture to resist
“breaking” during harsh interrogations conducted by a ruthless
enemy. During SERE training, trainees are subjected to extensive
abusive treatment, including sensory deprivation, sleep
deprivation, isolation, cultural and sexual humiliation, and, in
some cases, simulated drowning (”waterboarding”). By SERE’s own
admission, these techniques are classified as torture or cruel,
inhuman, or degrading treatment.
The OIG report details a number of trainings and consultations
provided by SERE psychologists to psychologists and other
personnel involved in interrogations, including those on the
Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT), generally composed
of and headed by psychologists. The OIG confirms repeated press
accounts over the last two years that SERE techniques were
“reverse engineered” by SERE psychologists in consultation with
the BSCT psychologists and others, to develop and standardize a
regime of psychological torture used by interrogators at
Guantánamo, and in Iraq and Afghanistan. The OIG report states:
“Counterresistance techniques [SERE] were introduced because
personnel believed that interrogation methods used were no
longer effective in obtaining useful information from some
detainees.”
The OIG report also clearly reveals the central role of
psychologists in these processes:
“On September 16, 2002, the Army
Special Operations Command and the Joint Personnel Recovery
Agency [the military unit containing SERE] co-hosted a
SERE psychologist conference at Fort Bragg for JTF-170
[the military component responsible for interrogations at
Guantánamo] interrogation personnel. The Army’s
Behavioral Science Consultation Team from Guantánamo
Bay also attended the conference. Joint Personnel
Recovery Agency briefed JTF-170 representatives on the
exploitation techniques and methods used in resistance (to
interrogation) training at SERE schools. The JTF-170 personnel
understood that they were to become familiar with SERE training
and be capable of determining which SERE information and
techniques might be useful in interrogations at Guantánamo.
Guantánamo Behavioral Science Consultation Team
personnel understood that they were to review documentation and
standard operating procedures for SERE training in developing
the standard operating procedure for the JTF-170, if the command
approved those practices. The Army Special Operations Command
was examining the role of interrogation support as a ‘SERE
Psychologist competency area‘” (p. 25, emphasis added).
It is now indisputable that psychologists and psychology were
directly and officially responsible for the development and
migration of abusive interrogation techniques, techniques which
the International Committee of the Red Cross has labeled
“tantamount to torture.” Reports of psychologists’ (along with
other health professionals’) participation in abusive
interrogations surfaced more than two years ago.
While other health professional associations expressed dismay
when it was reported that their members had participated in
these abuses and took principled stands against their members’
direct participation in interrogations, the APA undertook a
campaign to support such involvement. In 2005, APA President Ron
Levant created the PENS Task Force to assess the ethics of such
participation. Six of the nine voting psychologist members
selected for the task force were uniformed and civilian
personnel from military and intelligence agencies, most with
direct connections to national security interrogations. Perhaps
most problematic, it is clear from the OIG Report that three of
the PENS members were directly in the chain of command
translating SERE techniques into harsh interrogation tactics.
Although we cannot know exactly what each of these individuals
did, their presence in the chain of command is troubling.
One such task Force member is Colonel Morgan Banks who,
according to his Task Force biography
“is the senior Army Survival,
Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) Psychologist, responsible
for the training and oversight of all Army SERE Psychologists,
who include those involved in SERE training…. He provides
technical support and consultation to all Army psychologists
providing interrogation support…. His initial duty assignment as
a psychologist was to assist in establishing the Army’s first
permanent SERE training program involving a simulated captivity
experience…. In November 1991 [sic: 2001], he deployed to
Afghanistan, where he spent four months over the winter of
2001/2002 at Bagram Airfield, supporting combat operations
against Al Qaida and Taliban fighters.”
Thus, according to the OIG report, Colonel Banks had direct
command responsibility for the SERE psychologists training,
consulting, and participating in interrogations and provided
“support and consultation” to other psychologists involved in
abusive interrogations. In fact, reading the OIG report renders
it difficult to imagine that Colonel Banks was not himself
directly involved in developing and/or implementing these
abusive activities. The OIG report appears to confirm what has
been suspected at least since the publication in July 2005 of
Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article “The Experiment”: that Colonel
Banks was intimately involved in the teaching and development of
the abusive interrogation tactics documented by the
International Committee of the Red Cross, and now by the
Department of Defense, as being used at Guantánamo.
Colonel Larry James, a second PENS member, “was the Chief
Psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at GTMO, Cuba”
(PENS Task Force member biographies) starting in January 2003.
Col. Larry James has often been cited by Gerald Koocher, Stephen
Behnke, and others, as the one who ‘cleaned up’ Guantánamo and
Abu Ghraib. The OIG report, however, makes it clear that
Guantánamo BSCTs played an essential role in transforming SERE
techniques into standard operating interrogation procedure; that
the Commander of Guantánamo detainee operations requested
official approval for the use of these torture techniques in
October, 2002; and that permission was granted by Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld in December 2002. Additionally, as stated in
his PENS biography, in 2003 James “was the Chief Psychologist
for the Joint Intelligence Group at GTMO, Cuba.” In 2004, James
was Director, Behavioral Science Unit, Joint Interrogation and
Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib. It should be noted that that in
2004, according to many sources, Gen. Geoffrey Miller,
Guantánamo Commander, too, went from Guantánamo to Iraq, and
brought the SERE techniques with him. James was the commander of
the BSCTs at the time the FBI and other law enforcement agents
were reporting that severe abuses were occurring at Guantánamo.
The FBI and other Criminal Investigative Task Force agents
reporting these abuses referred to them as “SERE” and
“counter-resistance” tactics in documents obtained by the ACLU
under the Freedom of Information Act.
Yet another task Force member, Captain Bryce Lefever, had
previously been a SERE psychologist where he supervised
“personnel undergoing intensive exposure to enemy interrogation,
torture, and exploitation techniques.” He “was deployed as the
Joint Special Forces Task Force psychologist to Afghanistan in
2002,” presumably replacing Col. Banks who had previously held
that role. Capt. Lefever “lectured to interrogators and was
consulted on various interrogation techniques” (PENS Task Force
member biographies). That is, he had the requisite SERE
background and it appears that he was involved in interrogations
in Afghanistan at the time that, as the OIG report reveals, the
abusive SERE-based techniques were being utilized through
Special Forces units.
In addition to these three members who were directly in the
military chain of command responsible for employing the SERE
techniques as interrogation tactics, another member of the PENS
Task Force, Scott Shumate, stated in a conference biographical
statement that “From April 2001 until May of 2003 he was the
chief operational psychologist for the CIA’s Counter Terrorism
Center (CTC)…. He has been with several of the key apprehended
terrorists.” The CTC, according to press reports, is responsible
for managing the CIA’s Black Site facilities where the top 14 Al
Qaeda operatives in US custody were initially held and
interrogated. The “key apprehended terrorists” that Shumate
refers to are very likely those Al Qaeda operatives subjected to
the CIA’s brutal “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Thus, the
available evidence strongly suggests that the PENS Task Force
included a number of individuals who oversaw or directly
participated in torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading
treatment that is allegedly banned by the APA.
Not surprisingly, given its membership, the PENS Task Force
report concluded that “[i]t is consistent with the APA Code of
Ethics for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to
interrogation and information-gathering processes for national
security-related purposes….” The Task Force report further
echoed the Department of Defense cover story for employing BSCT
psychologists: “While engaging in such consultative and advisory
roles entails a delicate balance of ethical considerations,
doing so puts psychologists in a unique position to assist in
ensuring that such processes are safe and ethical for all
participants.”
Since the release of the PENS report, numerous articles in the
press have documented that psychologists at Guantánamo and
elsewhere have utilized abusive SERE techniques on detainees.
(Jane Meyer’s New Yorker article appeared one week after the
PENS report.) All the while, the APA leadership has ignored the
mounting evidence to the contrary and reiterated this flawed
PENS premise, as you yourself did in response to such an article
in the Washington Monthly: “[t]he Association’s position is
rooted in our belief that having psychologists consult with
interrogation teams makes an important contribution toward
keeping interrogations safe and ethical.”
Every report of horrific abuses occurring at Guantánamo and
elsewhere has not only cast doubt upon this basic premise of APA
policy, these reports have repeatedly highlighted psychologists’
abuse of psychological knowledge for purposes of cruel, inhuman
and degrading treatment. Yet the APA has never made any public
attempt to investigate such reports. Even if certain
psychologists attempted to “keep interrogations safe and
ethical,” the OIG report demonstrates once and for all that BSCT
and SERE psychologists, among others, were responsible for the
development, migration, and perpetration of abuses.
It is time for the APA to acknowledge that the central premise
of its years-long policy of condoning and encouraging
psychologist participation in interrogations is wrong. It has
now been revealed by the DoD itself that, rather than assuring
safety, psychologists were central to the abuse. This remains
true even if some psychologists made efforts to reduce such harm
during their involvement in these interrogation contexts at some
point in time. It is critical that APA take immediate steps to
remedy the damage done to the reputation of the organization, to
our ethical standards, to the field of psychology, and to human
rights in this age where they are under concerted attack. The
following steps will begin the process of correcting this
egregious error by the organization and its leadership. We
urgently recommend that:
1. The President of the APA
acknowledge errors and abuses and chart a new direction
re-emphasizing human rights. In light of the recent revelations,
you, as President of the APA, should issue a clear public
statement that acknowledges the errors made by APA, in both
policy and public statements, and abuses perpetrated by
psychologists; you should call on the association to go in a new
direction, giving primary emphasis to human rights concerns in
forging policy around ethics and national security.
2. The APA Board of Directors and
Ethics Committee endorse the APA Moratorium on psychologist
participation in interrogations of foreign detainees. It is
critical to immediately disengage psychologists from any direct
or supervisory participation in interrogations of individual
detainees. Such a step would do much to bring the APA in line
with the positions adopted some time ago by the American
Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and
the American Nurses Association. Thus, the APA leadership should
support and the Council of Representatives must, at the August
Convention, pass the
Moratorium on
Psychologist Involvement in Interrogations at US Detention
Centers for Foreign Detainees proposed by Dr.
Neil Altman and scheduled for a vote at Council.
3. The APA Board of Directors
encourage, support, and cooperate with the Senate investigations
of detainee treatment. It is essential that the APA support and
cooperate fully with the announced investigation of the Senate
Armed Services Committee (SASC) into the role of SERE in the
creation of abusive interrogation strategies, as well as the
Senate Intelligence Committee’s announced investigation into the
CIA’s handling of detainees in their custody. In fact, the APA
Board of Directors should do what it can to expedite this and
other external, non-partisan investigations of all localities
that utilize BSCT psychologists.
4. The APA Board of Directors
commence a neutral third-party investigation of its own
involvement, and that of APA staff, in APA-military conflicts of
interest. It is essential that the APA membership and the
concerned public develop an in-depth understanding of how and
why the APA accepted a rationale for psychologist involvement in
interrogations that has been revealed to have been advanced by
involved psychologists, and which permitted their continued
participation and supervision of abusive interrogation
processes. The concept of “legal, ethical, safe, and effective”
has been exposed as a euphemism for psychologist oversight of
abuse; these activities can only be considered “ethical” because
the APA Ethics Code (Standard 1.02) was rewritten in 2002 to
define complying with any law or military regulation as
“ethical.”
The membership has a right to know
why, in the face of continually emerging sets of tangible
evidence suggesting that the its policy was flawed and that
psychologists were systematically employing expert psychological
knowledge for purposes of abuse, the APA leadership refused to
investigate, and continued to give cover for these abuses.
(According to APA Ethics Director, Dr. Stephen Behnke, the BSCTs
attach a copy of the PENS report to their training manuals.)
Therefore, it is critical that an independent investigation be
launched – conducted by individuals well-known for their
commitment to human rights – into the development of APA policy
in this area, and into the broader issues that likely
contributed to a series of suspicious procedural activities.
Among the issues this investigation must examine are:
a) the numerous procedural
irregularities alleged to have occurred during the PENS process;
b) the role of the military and
intelligence agencies in the formation and functioning of the
PENS Task Force;
c) the reasons the APA and its
leadership have systematically ignored the accumulating evidence
that psychologists participating in interrogations are
contributing to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading
treatment, rather than helping to prevent it;
d) the overall nexus of close ties
between the APA staff/leadership and the military and
intelligence agencies, ties that may have contributed to a
climate that permits undo influence of military and intelligence
agencies in the creation of these policies and that encourages
turning a blind eye to abuse;
e) the transformation of the APA
Ethics Code, from one that protects psychologists’ ethical
conduct when such conduct conflicts with law and military
regulations to one that protects psychologists who follow
unethical law and military regulations.
Only such an inve stigatory
process can restore the faith of the membership and the broader
public in the APA and in the profession of psychology. To fail
to act now would be to continue an organizational policy that
maintains and protects psychologists’ roles as the architects of
what can only be interpreted as a torture paradigm; one that has
intentionally violated the Geneva Conventions, our nation’s
values, and our professional ethics.
We look forward to your affirmation, acceptance, and action in
regard to this call for immediate steps to remedy this saddening
situation for our organization and our discipline.
Sincerely*,
Stephen Soldz,
Director, Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program
Development & Professor, Boston Graduate School of
Psychoanalysis; University of Massachusetts, Boston
Brad Olson,
Assistant Research Professor, Northwestern University
Steven
Reisner, Senior
Faculty and Supervisor, International Trauma Studies Program,
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University; Clinical
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, New York
University Medical School
Mike Wessells,
Former Member, PENS Task Force; Columbia University
Rhoda Unger,
Brandeis University
Uwe Jacobs,
Director, Survivors International, San Francisco
Ed Tejirian,
New York
Bernice Lott,
University of Rhode Island
Jeffrey Kaye,
San Francisco
Elliot
Mishler, Professor
of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard
Medical School
Ghislaine
Boulanger, Steering
Committee, withholdapadues.com
Morton
Deutsch, E.L.
Thorndike Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Director Emeritus of
the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution
(ICCCR) Teachers College, Columbia University
Faye J Crosby,
Psychology Department, University of California, Santa Cruz
Marc Pilisuk,
Professor Emeritus, the University of California; Professor,
Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center
Marybeth
Shinn, Professor of
Applied Psychology and Public Policy, New York University
Stephan L.
Chorover, Professor
of Psychology, MIT
Mary
Brydon-Miller,
Director, Action Research Center, Associate Professor,
Educational Studies and Urban Educational Leadership, College of
Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services, University of
Cincinnati
M. Brinton
Lykes, Associate
Director, Center for Human Rights & International Justice,
Associate Dean, Lynch School of Education, Boston College
Ben Harris,
Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire
Barbara Gutek,
PrEller Professor of Women and Leadership, Department of
Management and Organizations, University of Arizona
Frank Summers,
Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and the Behavioral
Sciences, Northwestern University Medical School
Kevin Lanning,
Wilkes Honors College, Florida Atlantic University
Alice Shaw,
San Francisco
Lila Braine,
Professor Emerita, Barnard College, Columbia University
Stuart Oskamp,
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Claremont Graduate University
Linda M.
Woolf, Professor of
Psychology and International Human Rights, Webster University
Arlene Lu
Steinberg,
President, Division 39 Section IX, APA: Psychoanalysis for
Social Responsibility
Lew Aron,
Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
Scot D. Evans,
Community Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University
Susan
Torres-Harding,
Roosevelt University
Allen L.
Roland, Sonoma, CA
Emily K.
Filardo, Director,
Women’s Studies, & Associate Professor, Department of
Psychology, Kean University
Maram Hallak,
Borough of Manhattan Community College; the Association for
Women in Psychology (AWP)
Anthony J.
Marsella, Professor
Emeritus, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii
Barbara
Eisold, New York
Medical College
Kathleen
Malley-Morrison,
Department of Psychology, Boston University
Chrysoula K.E.
Fantaousakis, Kean
University
Karen Rosica,
Faculty, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California;
Director of Special Projects, SalusWorld.org
Hal S.
Bertilson,
University of Wisconsin-Superior
Ibrahim Kira,
Access Community Health and Research Center, Dearborn, MI
Lynne Layton,
Harvard Medical School
Allen M.
Omoto, School of
Behavioral and Organizational Sciences, Claremont Graduate
University
Richard V.
Wagner, Bates
College
*
Affiliations listed
for identification purposes only.
Note:
Additional signatories will continue to be recruited.
Contact:
Stephen Soldz
ssoldz@bgsp.edu
Steven
Reisner
SReisner@psychoanalysis.net
Brad Olson
b-olson@northwestern.edu
Click
on "comments" below to
read or post comments
Comment
Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story. We
encourage engaging, diverse and
meaningful commentary. Do not
include personal information such
as names, addresses, phone
numbers and emails. Comments
falling outside our guidelines
– those including personal
attacks and profanity – are
not permitted.
See our complete Comment
Policy and use
this link to notify us if you
have concerns about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and
remove any inappropriate
postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
