** California Becomes First State to Condemn Use of Torture in 'War on Terror' **

Eisha Mason
California Progress Report
2008-08-18 01:06:00

On Thursday, the California Legislature adopted SJR 19, a resolution to prevent the state's licensed health professionals from engaging in torture.

As a result of SJR 19, state medical boards will inform health professionals of their obligations under both domestic and international law regarding treatment of prisoners and detainees. They will be warned that if they participate in interrogations that do not conform to these standards, they risk future prosecution. The state will also request the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency to remove California doctors and psychologists from settings that fall short of international standards of treatment.

The myth that the U.S. does not torture is coming apart at the seams. Every week there are new revelations of misconduct. The abuses are not the result of "a few bad apples," but rather stem from a short-sighted and reckless policy that has damaged the lives of countless people held in U.S. custody, attacked the emotional and spiritual well-being of American soldiiers who have witnessed it and undermined the moral authority of America in the world community.

A Torture Debate Among Healers

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Posted on Apr 9, 2008

By Amy Goodman

Imagine, a candidate for president who, a year or so ago, no one would have considered electable. Now the person is the front-runner, with a groundswell of grass-roots support, threatening the sense of inevitability of the Establishment candidates. No, I’m not talking about the U.S. presidential race, but the race for president of the largest association of psychologists in the world, the American Psychological Association (APA). At the heart of the election is a raging debate over torture and interrogations. While the other healing professions, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, bar their members from participating in interrogations, the APA leadership has fought against such a restriction.

Frustrated with the APA, a New York psychoanalyst, Dr. Steven Reisner, has thrown his hat into the ring. Last year, Reisner and other dissident psychologists formed the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology in an attempt to force a moratorium against participation by APA members in harsh interrogations. During the initial phase of this year’s selection process, Reisner received the most nominating votes. He is running on a platform opposing the use of psychologists to oversee abusive and coercive interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo, secret CIA black sites or anywhere else international law or the Geneva Conventions are said not to apply.

The issue came to a head at the 2007 APA annual convention. After days of late-night negotiations, the moratorium came up for a climactic vote. We saw a surreal scene on the convention floor: Uniformed military were out in force. Men and women in desert camo and Navy whites worked the APA Council of Representatives, and officers in crisp dress uniforms stepped to the microphones.

Military psychologists insisted that they help make interrogations safe, ethical and legal, and cited instances where psychologists allegedly intervened to stop abuse. “If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die!” boomed Col. Larry James of the U.S. Army, chief psychologist at Guantanamo Bay and a member of the APA governing body. Dr. Laurie Wagner, a Dallas psychologist, shot back,

“If psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, then those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest by leaving.”

The moratorium failed, and instead a watered-down resolution passed, outlining 19 harsh interrogation techniques that were banned, but only if “used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.” In other words, this loophole allowed, you can rough people up, just don’t do permanent harm.

Immediately after the vote, Reisner spoke out at a packed town hall meeting:

“If we cannot say, ‘No, we will not participate in enhanced interrogations at CIA black sites,’ I think we have to seriously question what we are as an organization and, for me, what my allegiance is to this organization, or whether we might have to criticize it from outside the organization at this point.”

Reisner and others began withholding dues. Prominent APA members resigned, and the best-selling author of “Reviving Ophelia,” Mary Pipher, returned her APA Presidential Citation award. After several months of bad publicity and internal negotiations, an emergency committee redrafted that resolution, removing the loopholes and affirming the outright prohibition of 19 techniques, like mock executions and waterboarding.

When I asked Dr. Reisner, the son of Holocaust survivors, why he would want to head the organization that he has battled for several years, he told me: “If I have this opportunity to make a change, I have a responsibility to do it. I never had the intention of being involved, but the only way to ensure this be changed was by claiming the democratic process in the name of human rights and social-justice issues. I was hoping that mass withholding of dues and mass resignations would shame the APA to come to its senses. It made them take a big step but didn’t go far enough.”

He expanded: “American people are sick of the reputation of the United States as torturers, as people who abuse prisoners. American people want to see a restoration of values from war to health care. I think what happens in the APA should point to a direction for the whole country.”

The APA’s annual meeting is this summer, in Boston. Expect interrogation to be the major issue confronting the members gathered there. Final voting for the APA president starts in October. The APA and the United States will determine their next presidents at about the same time. In both elections, a thorough debate on torture should be central.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.

Meet Amy and co-author David Goodman as they speak about their new book, Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times. See tour.democracynow.org for tour dates and details.

© 2008 Amy Goodman

Distributed by King Features Syndicate

APA’s Rhea Farberman responds to questions from the Swedish Journal of Psychology

February 19th, 2008

These are responses to questions posed by Eva Brita Järnefors, editor of the Swedish Journal of Psychology. The answers are by Rea Farberman, the Executive Director for Communications at the American Psychological Association. e.

This is part of a set of articles, together with U.S. psychologists accused of participating in torture by Eva Brita Järnefors and “That psychologists have prevented abuse against detainees is a fantasy” by Stephen Soldz [me]. I encourage you to read them all. The original of all three, in Swedish and English is available as a pdf here; all three can also be accessed in html from here.
“We want to see the documents of the `enhanced´interrogation techniques”

-We have written to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking him to expedite the review of the documents that have provided the basis for the “enhanced” interrogation techniques, says Rea Farberman, the Executive Director for Communications at the American Psychological Association, APA, in Washington.

To inform about the APA policy adopted at the 2007 convention, you sent the 2007 resolution to key members of the Congress, to President George W Bush, and to key officials within the Dep. of Defense and CIA. Have you received any positive answers from these institutions?

The “responses” have come in the form of invitations to meet with both Congressional and Federal officials to share information. These meetings have given us the opportunity to more fully communicate APA’s position that torture and other forms of abusive treatment should never be permissible in any interrogations or detainee procedure as well as to underscore the ethical obligations and science that support that position. APA also submitted testimony on psychology and interrogation for a hearing before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. That testimony addressed psychologists’ contributions to eliciting information; the need for strict ethical guidelines within interrogation policy; and the need for further research in this area.

APA says (web site: Media information) that psychologists, by staying engaged in military interrogations, “have a vital role to play in promoting the use of ethical interrogations to safeguard the welfare of detainees and facilitate communication with them”. During the last 5 years, psychologists have not, it would seem, been able to stop mistreatment of detainees to any large extent. The American Medical Association does not permit their members to remain involved in these types of interrogations. Have you considered their standpoint for APA´s members: No psychologists involved - no risk to legitimize torture and abuse?

There has been a considerable amount of study and dialogue about APA’s position, yes. The APA Council of Representatives (the Association’s policy making body) has considered the issue at each of its last four meetings. Council has passed numerous resolutions enunciating it’s no torture policy including one adopted this past summer which enumerated 19 interrogation techniques as torture and was hailed by the Washington Post as a “rebuke of Bush Administration policy”. We also had a series of sessions at APA’s 2007 convention devoted to debate and dialogue on the issue. Furthermore, the process begun by the 2005 APA PENS Task Force continues as the APA Ethics Committee works on a casebook and commentary designed to speak to any areas of ambiguity as to a psychologist’s role and ethical obligations vis-à-vis
detainee interrogations and/or treatment.

It is fair to note that while prisoner mistreatment has surely and regrettably taken place, we also know of instances of psychologists stepping in to prevent prisoner abuse or being sent into situations where abuse had taken place to prevent it from happening again. Dr. Michael Gelles, for example, was hailed by a medical ethicist for his “successful medical protest of prisoner abuse” at Guantanamo Bay. Dr. Larry James is a second example. He was sent to Abu Ghraib to take charge of implementing procedures to prevent further episodes of prisoner maltreatment. Furthermore, APA policy has been incorporated into Department of Defense policy regarding how interrogations are to be conducted. And now, there are human rights groups advocating that the revised Army Field Manual, which binds all Department of Defense interrogations,
be adopted as the uniform standard of interrogation for the entire government

What will be your next step in this question?

The Casebook I mentioned above is an important next step.APA has also written to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking him to expedite the review of the Office of Legal Counsel documents that have provided the basis for the Bush administration’s “enhanced” interrogation techniques. APA encouraged him to issue a public report of his investigation and findings. It is also likely that members will continue to study the issue and voice their opinions through convention sessions and other types of member communications. Further deliberation by the APA Council could also take place if a member of that body wishes to place the subject on an agenda for a future Council meeting.

Eva Brita Järnefors