Should psychologists assist in torture? APA Votes on it.
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This Sunday, the American Psychological Association will vote on a moratorium on its members participating in the interrogation of military detainees. Their annual convention in San Francisco started this morning. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez dedicated this morning’s Democracy Now to the Padilla verdict and the APA moratorium. Reporting from San Francisco, they had on two members of Psychologists for an Ethical APA. Dr. Steven Reisner, faculty member at NYU Medical School and Dr. Stephen Soldz, Professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and author of the Psyche, Science, and Society blog. The APA leadership declined an invitation to appear.
I’m coming late to this story. Democracy Now has 22 segments about it including an in-depth interview with former APA president and perpetrator of the infamous Stanford Jail Experiment, Philip Zimbardo [including video clips from the original experiment]. Underlying the controversy is the secret transformation of the SERE program, initiated during the Korean War, from preparing flyers to resist if captured and tortured to “enhanced interrogation” techniques – scientifically engineered extraction of information from human captives. The APA response to this depends a lot on “what did they know and when did they know it?” The best single account I’ve seen is by Mark Benjamin appeared appeared on Salon and was mirrored by Stephen Soldz on Psyche, Science, and Society. The APA has attempted, over time, to address the issue, but the “dissidents” think a moratorium is the only real answer. According to them, the superego really hit the fan when:
A recently declassified August 2006 Department of Defense report confirms that psychologists were directly responsible for the development and use of techniques defined by the International Red Cross as “tantamount to torture.” These techniques continue to be employed against enemy combatants in Guantanamo and other military and CIA run facilities.
The APA conference has a program series, Ethics and Interrogations: Confronting the Challenge. The presenters page for this track, lists only two names with a connection to Harvard.
Robert Kinscherff, PhD., Esq.,whose gazillion government, professional association, and academic positions, includes an appointment to the Harvard Medical Faculty.
Herbert C. Kelman, Ph.D., is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Emeritus.
I don’t yet know the Harvard connection to the “dark side, if you will.” Stay tuned.
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