From the Director’s Desk Do Psychologists Torture?

Survivors International Director and Clinicians confront the American Psychological Association (APA) about its reluctance to make a strong ban against psychologist's involvement with torture.

From the Director’s Desk
Do Psychologists Torture?
By Uwe Jacobs

Those who are familiar with the history of torture know the answer to the general question to be affirmative: psychologists, like all health professionals, have contributed to torture throughout history. But what about now, in the US? You would think that this specific question should be just as easily answered in the negative. And indeed the American Psychological Association (APA) has been asserting just that and issued a strongly worded resolution against torture at the last annual convention in New Orleans. And there is no doubt that this is true if we accept the definition of torture promulgated by the Bush administration: the stuff that requires damage comparable to organ failure.

By contrast, Vice President Dick Cheney said on a talk show: “dunking a guy’s head under water is a no-brainer”. He referred there to water boarding, which was referred to as the “standard French torture” in the Middle Ages. It is not a prank but a serious and frightening method of terror. Eric Lomax, a British POW, tortured by the Japanese in WWII, describes in vivid detail how horrific it was to be subjected to this form of torture in his autobiography The Railway Man. And what about sleep deprivation and sensory disorientation and all the other techniques admittedly used on enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay? Psychologists and psychiatrists have studied these phenomena for decades, often finding out that these things were so dangerous that volunteer subjects started having serious symptoms and that experiments needed to be stopped.

Now that evidence of these psychological torture techniques has come to light, some APA members are trying to get something done that seems simple and straightforward: stop the involvement of psychologists in the interrogation of enemy combatants until we either have all the facts on what has been done to prisoners or until Guantanamo Bay and other such facilities have been closed. The idea is that we should stop contributing to operations in that legal and moral black hole that has attracted world-wide condemnation. We want our APA President to tell the Pentagon the same thing that Dr. Sharfstein, our psychiatric colleagues’ former president told the military: in places like Gitmo you need to proceed without us.

Some colleagues say that psychologists are needed in these places because they have been useful in preventing abuses from occurring, that we need ethical watchdogs and whistle blowers. One such whistle blower, Dr. Michael Gelles, reported human rights abuses and helped to stop some of them. He has argued argued against the moratorium (11) by referring to his own actions. We have many questions for Dr. Gelles (15a) and others in that regard, and these questions mean no disrespect to him and others who have stood up for what’s right. Unfortunately, Dr. Gelles's reply (15b) was short of a real response. I asked him once more if he would not answer the specific questions. Now that the profession of psychology has been placed at the center of the torture controversy, we need these answers to be detailed and precise.