Collective unconscionable: how psychologists, the most liberal of professionals, abetted bush's torture policy

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2007 by Arthur Levine

At around six-foot-eight and clad in combat fatigues, Kevin Kiley, the army surgeon general, cut an imposing figure. It was August 2006, and Kiley was in New Orleans to address the governing council of the American Psychological Association (APA) on the subject of psychology in the war on terror. For over a year, the organization had been under fire from human-rights groups and many of its own members, because psychologists had been tied to coercive interrogations and abuse at Guantanamo Bay and other places. Now, many APA members wanted the organization to draw up a firm policy--one that mandated adherence to international standards barring abuse--to prevent psychologists from participating in such practices again.

It was Kiley's job to convince them not to bail out on interrogations. It's an open question how much psychologists have contributed to the art of interrogation in the war on terror, but the APA provides a seal of legitimacy that the government values. If it joined the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychiatric Association by barring their members from joining the Guantanamo interrogations, it would further stigmatize the military's practices. So, armed with PowerPoint slides, Kiley argued for keeping psychologists on the offensive against "sworn enemies" of the country. "Psychology is an important weapons system," he explained. For the APA to draw up an explicit definition of abuse would be counterproductive. After all, "is four hours of sleep deprivation? How loud does a scream have to be? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

Kiley had the blessing of the organization's leadership. Despite the controversial nature of the topic in question, APA leaders had originally invited no other speakers to counterbalance Kiley with an opposing view. When this fact was reported by Salon, the group hastily issued a last-minute invitation to Steven Reisner, a New York psychoanalyst who had circulated an online petition protesting APA's involvement in interrogations. Reisner was visiting his parents in Florida when the call from APA came, and he arrived in New Orleans in an ill-fitting off-the-rack suit and without a formal speech.

Reisner made his pitch nonetheless. ("The Hippocratic oath says 'do no harm.' It does not say 'measure harm and see if it is the correct amount,'" he reminded the crowd.) But, having had almost no time to prepare, he was no match for Kiley's slick presentation and call-to-arms rhetoric. Ultimately, APA's governing council passed a blandly worded resolution that, most critically, left the definition of the phrase "cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment" up to current government interpretations.

This wasn't the first time the APA had declined to take a firm position against the administration's interrogation policies. After reports first surfaced in 2004 of psychologists participating in interrogation procedures, many of the APA's more progressive members demanded that the organization take a stand. In response, APA convened a task force to draw up guidelines for members but rejected efforts to ensure that they were specific and enforceable.

Why, then, was the leadership of the APA, an organization representing one of the most liberal professions imaginable, so willing to essentially acquiesce with a conservative administration's efforts to torture prisoners? The answer is that it fell into a classic Washington trade-group dilemma: It became so enmeshed in the gears of the federal machine that it could be influenced by a determined administration and ended up supporting policies that many of its own members opposed.

SERE no evil

Psychology has long had ties to the military and the government. Indeed, the armed forces may have played a larger role than any other institution in establishing psychology as a technical and scientific profession. During World War I, psychologists were placed in charge of aptitude tests given to soldiers--a task they again carried out in World War II, by which time they had been thoroughly integrated into the military structure. By the 1950s, they were helping to conduct Cold War studies on interrogation that included experiments with sensory deprivation and hallucinogens meant to serve as "truth serum" (LSD, for example)--and developed techniques used by the CIA to torture prisoners in Latin America in the 1980s.

It wasn't surprising, then, that psychologists and psychiatrists were on hand in early 2002, mostly in clinical roles, when detainees who'd been captured in Afghanistan started arriving at Guantanamo. For most of that year, however, intelligence yields from the inmates were poor, and psychologists did not play a major role. That began to change later that year, with the arrival at Guantanamo of a new commander. Major General Geoffrey Miller believed strongly in breaking detainees down, and that psychologists were crucial to this effort. (Miller would later be dispatched to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize" the prison by giving advice on detainee treatment, where, according to one general, he told subordinates that detainees should be "treated like dogs.")