Column

Psychologists, torture and the rules

By ROBYN BLUMNER
Published October 14, 2007

In Ariel Dorfman's riveting play Death and the Maiden, a former political prisoner believes that the man who has given her husband a lift after his car breaks down was in fact her torturer 15 years earlier. But because she was blindfolded during her abusive interrogations, the audience is never as certain as she is. The victim claims to recognize her tormentor by the sound of his voice and the one thing she knows that this Good Samaritan has in common with her abuser: He is a doctor.

Doctors take a Hippocratic oath to do no deliberate harm, so it is particularly chilling when a doctor is an agent of suffering, even if he's doing so in the service of perceived national interests.

When I initially saw this play performed years ago, I was smugly comforted by the notion that torture was a perversion indulged in by other nations, not ours. No longer, of course. The latest revelations about Justice Department memos justifying, excusing and approving highly abusive prisoner interrogations only confirm what we already knew about our Torture Nation, irrespective of President Bush's farcical denials.

It is no longer purely academic to ask whether American medical or psychological practitioners may participate in such information eduction or whether their professions courageously stand in the way.

To its credit, the American Medical Association flatly bars medical professionals from being a part of prisoner interrogations. "Physicians must neither conduct nor directly participate in an interrogation, because a role as physician-interrogator undermines the physician's role as healer," states AMA policy. Another part of the policy bars doctors from monitoring interrogations as well. There is no daylight here. It is per se an unethical act.

Psychologists, however, have been far less categorical. While the American Psychological Association has had a longstanding policy that, in general terms, bars participation in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading questioning. It wasn't until August that the APA adopted a resolution that outlined specific interrogation techniques that were off-limits for its members.

Cruel and inhuman techniques such as waterboarding, hooding, forced nakedness, stress positions, exposure to extreme cold or heat and a variety of others that the CIA has reportedly used on detainees, were strictly prohibited under the new rules. But the organization rejected an airtight resolution that would have barred its members from participating in interrogations with any prisoner whose human rights were not adequately protected.

It also equivocated on the use of isolation or sleep deprivation, which were condemned only to the extent they caused significant suffering or lasting harm.

This cagey language left the door open for its members to continue to participate in harmful and coercive questioning.

Psychologists have been reportedly key to executing abusive interrogations within the military and the CIA. A piece by Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair, "Rorschach and Awe," describes the way two psychologists came to mastermind the CIA's interrogation methods. And America's bargain with the devil.

Eban reports how James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen reverse-engineered a military training program known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). This program was designed to help our own soldiers withstand imprisonment by an enemy that refused to abide by the Geneva Conventions, but Mitchell, who received his Ph.D. in psychology from USF, and Jessen redesigned it for use on our prisoners.

The idea behind the Mitchell-Jessen approach is to break down the detainee through isolation and other severe treatment so he has no idea whether it is day or night and can predict nothing about the future. This makes him wholly dependent upon his interrogators.

The original SERE program was based on Communist interrogation techniques. But, as Eban points out, the Communists weren't as much interested in getting actionable intelligence from their U.S. prisoners as having our soldiers confess falsely to things that could be used for propaganda.

Jack Bauer is a fictional character. In the real world, experts say that using brutality isn't likely to get you any better intelligence than using tried and true rapport-building techniques - methods that don't violate civilized norms or generate rage in Muslims worldwide.

A report, "Educing Information," sponsored by the Intelligence Science Board and put together by the nation's top interrogation experts, says things like: "(C)oercion or pressure can actually increase a source's resistance and determination not to comply," among other findings suggesting abusive interrogations are counterproductive to keeping us safe.

The APA is desperately trying to distance itself from Mitchell and Jessen. It states bluntly that their methods have been "discredited by responsible psychologists everywhere, including within the military."

But the association refuses to go the distance by telling its members that when a prisoner has been stripped of every inalienable right and the protections of the Geneva Conventions, psychologists have no business lending their expertise to the interrogations to come.

[Last modified October 13, 2007, 21:12:17]