Member of 2005 APA Task Force on Psychologist Participation in Military Interrogations

The Pentagon has just declassified a report from their Inspector General looking at the various investigations they conducted into repeated claims of prisoner abuse by the US military. The report finds that the abuse allegations "were not consistently reported, investigated, or managed in an effective, systematic, and timely manner."

But perhaps the most important information in the report is that it provides further documentation that psychologists played a role in military interrogations.

In particular, the Pentagon Inspector General provides concrete evidence that techniques developed by the US military for withstanding torture are being used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. After 9/11, the Pentagon began using so-called behavioral science consultants, or "biscuit" teams to advise the military on how to "break" prisoners to make them more cooperative.

The biscuit teams were advised by psychologists and medical staff versed in techniques employed at a Pentagon-funded program known as SERE or "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape." SERE was created by the Air Force to teach pilots and other personnel considered at high risk of being captured by enemy forces how to withstand and resist extreme forms of abuse.

The interrogation techniques devised at Guantanamo with the help of the Biscuit teams eventually migrated to Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons.

Last year the Pentagon reportedly moved to only using psychologists, and not psychiatrists, to help in interrogations. Why? Because the American Psychiatric Association had adopted a new policy discouraging its members from participating in military interrogations. As did the American Medical Association. But their counterpart, the American Psychological Association did not.

The APA eventually convened a 2005 Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security to examine the issue. After just two days of deliberations, the task force concluded: "It is consistent with the APA Code of Ethics for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation or information-gathering processes."

When the report was released however, it did not include a list of its members. It wasn't until a year later that that the membership was finally published in Salon.com. It revealed that that six of nine voting members were from the military and intelligence agencies with direct connections to interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

We host a roundtable discussion on this issue:

* Dr. Leonard Rubenstein, Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights.
* Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo, member of the 2005 APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security. She is a social psychologist and independent scholar. She founded the Intelligence Ethics Collection at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and she is a founder of the International Intelligence Ethics Association.
* Dr. Nina Thomas, a member of the APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security. She is a psychologist and psychoanalyst and is a faculty member and supervisor at New York University's Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
* Dr. Eric Anders, former Air Force officer who underwent SERE training. He is now working as a psychoanalyst and is starting a private practice in the east bay this summer.

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/01/1457247