FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE_JUNE 7, 2007_11:18 AM
CONTACT: Concerned Psychologists Against Torture
_Stephen Soldz ssoldz@bgsp.edu_Steven Reisner
SReisner@psychoanalysis.net_Brad Olson
b-olson@northwestern.edu
Open Letter to the President of the American
Psychological Association
WASHINGTON - JUNE 7 -
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
# posted by DISASTERPRESIDENT @ 10:22 PM
