Friday, June 29, 2007

How Psychologists Aid Torture

I've been to one APA conference. It was in New York City during the founding conference of Support Coalition International. The only reason I got in to the APA conference was because I had a press pass. I was covering the events for Vision - Pennsylvania Mental Health Consumers Association's newsletter. Aside from meeting a lot of great people the moment I'll always remember is when I came out of the Jacob Javits Centers big hall exclaiming to the White Light Film Company "The Real Drug Pushers are in There!" The story that follows brought back some great memories. Like meeting Howie the Harp and Kate Millett for the first time (Kate's book The Loony Bin Trip was published that week) . It also brought back some unpleasant memories of my ECT (shock) Treatments. Just being there and protesting the shock docs made everything better. I found this story on Alternet, It's worth reading.

How Psychologists Aid Torture
By Deborah Kory, HuffingtonPost.com.

Many psychologists are in denial about their role in society -- their social responsibility to keep the human race from being self-destructive.

Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm. In their professional actions, psychologists seek to safeguard the welfare and rights of those with whom they interact professionally and other affected persons. -- Principle A, Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, 2002

In August, the American Psychological Association (APA) will hold its annual convention in San Francisco. Notably absent from the program: the application of psychology to current world events. War, terror, genocide. "Our War on Terror that has led to the Deaths of Hundreds of Thousands of People" -- how about that for a plenary session? Of course there are divisions inside the APA organizing against the Bush Administration's policies and trying to have an impact on public discourse about the war in Iraq, but they are marginalized and fighting an uphill battle in a professional organization whose adherence to the status quo allows it continued legitimacy and access to power.

Many psychologists have their own mechanisms of denial and self-delusion about their role in society. "We're not political," they'll tell you, "We are just doing what we can in our way to make things better, one person at a time, one research project at a time." Most have no understanding of the collective impact of their profession and no sense that they have any obligation as psychologists to social responsibility. Wars, global poverty, ecological destruction? "That is not in our professional domain," they argue, "though as individual citizens we might get involved in these issues." As a profession, psychologists refuse to ask what the psychological foundations are for the global insanity that manifests in violence, wars, and indifference to the fate of others -- and what, as professionals, our obligation is to address and seek strategies to heal the pain that leads the human race in self-destructive directions. Of course, the majority of psychologists are compassionate, moral people who worry about these issues -- but they believe they must do so as individuals outside the framework of their profession rather than as part of a profession that makes these issues central.

The American Psychological Association is not just another professional association so caught up in the excitement of its own advancements in research that it has become disconnected from our current social reality. Some of its respected members have been actively aiding and abetting torture at illegal detention sites set up by the Bush administration, and the leadership of the APA has actively blocked attempts by its members to ban any and all engagement with interrogation proceedings at sites like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and the secret detention centers set up through the Administration's policy of "extraordinary rendition" ( i.e., outsourcing torture to countries that have no laws against it). In his book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Alfred McCoy documents the CIA's decades-long exploitation of psychological research for the purpose of developing effective methods of psychological torture, which, it was hoped, would render detainees incapable of withholding information. This knowledge was also used to inform elements of the U.S. Military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) program, which trains service members and civilians in the art of surviving captivity. The SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks (who later served on the APA's PENS Ethics Task Force), was involved in training BSCT (or "Biscuit") teams in Guantanamo and served at the Bagram detention center in Afghanistan. According to Human Rights First, the interrogation that led to the death of Iraqi Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush involved the use of techniques learned in the SERE training program. Internal FBI memos and press reports have pointed to SERE training as the basis for some of the harshest techniques authorized for use on detainees by the Pentagon in 2002 and 2003.

Please read the rest of the article at http://www.alternet.org/story/55309/