Friday, June 08, 2007

Torture

Yesterday, my local news station spent nearly fifteen minutes on Paris Hilton. Your news outlet probably did the same. We had a national dialogue on Paris Hilton -- which (Americans being what they are) soon became, in private, a national dialogue on the do-ability of Paris Hilton.

That's what we care about, y'see.

What we don't care about is torture -- torture committed by Americans and funded by taxpayers. Here are a couple of stories your local news outlet probably did not cover:

Fort Huachuca runs a torture school:
Two Roman Catholic priests, Jesuit Fr. Steve Kelly and Franciscan Fr. Louie Vitale, are willing to go to prison to expose the fact that young soldiers at Fort Huachuca are being trained to torture. Further, one of those young soldiers has already committed suicide after going into the prisoners' cages as an interrogator in northern Iraq.
Alyssa Peterson, 27, was a Mormon missionary who wanted to do something good with her life. She was good at languages and thought by joining the military, she could serve humanity. She was trained as an interrogator at Fort Huachuca and sent to northern Iraq. She was assigned as an interrogator to a US air base in Tal Afar.

"After twice in the cages, she became suicidal," Vitale said. "She did end up committing suicide."

Peterson's suicide on Sept. 15, 2003, was not revealed by the military. It was exposed by news reporters using the freedom of information act. This was before the torture atrocities of Abu Ghraib were exposed.
Psychologists play a large role in American torture: Robert Lifton, as I recall, once did a study on the Nazi doctors. How is it that men (and women) trained to heal could become accessories to evil?
Two years ago, after a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross criticizing the role of health professionals in U.S. interrogations, the American Psychological Association formed its Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). There were nine voting members. Six of them were connected to the military. At the time, the identities of the panelists were secret. The PENS panel endorsed the continued participation of psychologists in military interrogations.
Col. Morgan Banks, as Mark Benjamin of Salon.com first reported, is “the senior Army Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape psychologist, responsible for the training and oversight of all Army SERE psychologists, who include those involved in SERE training. He provides technical support and consultation to all Army psychologists providing interrogation support.” Another task-force member, Capt. Bryce Lefever, served at the Navy SERE school from 1990 to ’93, then became the “Special Forces Task Force psychologist to Afghanistan in 2002, where he lectured to interrogators and was consulted on various interrogation techniques.”

Also included was R. Scott Shumate, who was the chief operational psychologist for the CIA’s counterterrorism center until 2003. He then became head of the Pentagon Counterintelligence Field Activity’s Behavioral Sciences directorate, overseeing psychologist participation in the interrogation process at Guantanamo.
The full import of this story did not become clear to me until a reader "turned on all the lights," as it were. The American Psychological Association is a private organization. (Perhaps dr. elsewhere can give us more information on what it does.) What the hell are these military officers doing shaping an important APA report?

This is an abuse of the profession as gross as anything that occurred in the Soviet Union. As my reader put it:
In this case it appears that we have military officers directly involved in manipulating a civilian organization within the USA. Possibly to provide quasi legal or ethical coverage, for acts that were neither.
Commandeering the American Psychological Association -- transforming a private professional group into an instrument of state power -- is, in and of itself, a "psyop," a psychological operation directed against the American people.

So why does the American Psychological Association refuse to pass a resolution barring members from participating in interrogations? The American Medical Association has done just that. So has the American Psychiatric Association.

I suppose we should mention, once more, that the vast majority of the poor slobs at Gitmo are not members of Al Qaeda. When Afghanistan was invaded, the American military offered big rewards to any farmers who would finger "terrorists" -- and as a result, locals desperate for some cash pointed toward whoever happened to be the least-popular guy in town. Real Al Qaeda bad guys were allowed to fly (fly!) into safe refuges in Pakistan -- as the film 911: Press for Truth makes clear.

And now, back to Paris Hilton. Hot or not? Discuss...

7 comments:

gary said...

She's really hot.

Anonymous said...

ah, joe, you done scooped me!

i'm ashamed of how woefully behind i am on this topic, as i've wanted all week to link to the excellent coverage on democracynow! amy goodman has since then penned an oped on the story, and there's more. so i promise, i'll get something out there, because it's obviously an issue near and dear to my heart.

for now, let me say this much. the apa is a private professional organization of as many psychologists as wish to join, and this includes students and trainees. it was once the grand umbrella of all psychologists, but it has slowly converted to be almost strictly clinical psychologists; most experimental psychologists have gone elsewhere.

the main reason - for me, anyway - to be a member of the apa is that it is a requisite to access to the apa trust, which brokers our malpractice insurance.

and there you have it. raison d'etre.

however, in recent years i have had a run-in with my state board (looooong story; big big mess), and i have to say i am actually grateful for the support i've gotten from the organization. their legal defense fund awarded me the largest grant they give to individuals to continue with my case, which is now in the ma superior courts. for what it's worth, the legal decision that is currently pending will likely have national influence on other boards and how they operate, but that - like i said - is a looooong story.

the only reason i bring it up is this: turns out that my expert witness was the head of the apa last year. he's a wonderful human being, and i admire him greatly, but when i first mentioned this issue to him, i was shocked at his response (more on that later). it does have some merit, but i was still shocked.

i was also shocked to learn that a member of the board who was early on involved in my case (and i suspect instrumental in seeing that it moved forward instead of being dropped as it should have been) was the chair of the torture task force.

so, as you can see, i have a bit of skin in this game (not to draw too many gross images from this topic). it is horribly unconscionable what has happened, and i can see quite clearly how the situation has become one of those slippery slope deals.

the very sad truth is that psychology, by its very nature, is so broad and touches on almost every aspect of human life and intellect, that it has always had a very hard time defining itself, let alone defining its principles (with which i've taken issue).

add to that the very real pecking order with medicine, which overtly places psychologists just beneath psychiatrists, and you have a profession that works very hard to prove itself as viable. this sort of position makes it altogether too easy to do 'whatever it takes' to play with the big boys.

all that understanding aside, i have to say i am just sick with shame over this, as are most of my colleagues. not sure if i'll make the convention in august, but it's going to be quite heated, as it should be.

more soon.

Anonymous said...

ps. as for paris, ....hot??

she actually looks cold as ice to me. way way too self-absorbed to be 'hot', or even warm.

Anonymous said...

ya listen to the amy goodman interview with two of the panelists (it was on local radio last week)two womwn who were on the panel with two totally different viewpoints . they even voted not to take notes so they could later deny what they discussed

Anonymous said...

How very funny Joe!
Yesterday as I was reading the comments on your blog (dr elsewhere's post) on pols and the state of our government (heavy duty and thought provoking), I had the TV on and after KO, I ususally watch Scarborough Country (I am not a fan of his, but he at least brings a few good guests on)as I cook and clean and read blogs. Dan Abrams was subbing for him (can you believe he is the managing director of MSNBC, or what ever his title is) and he managed to have the entire hour discussing Paris.
When I read Joe's first post on the subject, I like dr. elsewhere, was thinking he was too negative, but after Dan Abrams show, I was about to comment that Joe may just be right.
And you bring the subject up today!
That's the funny thing!

Anonymous said...

dr. e, best of luck from all of us with your conflict with that board. It seems that part of the punishment these days for not "playing along" is getting bogged down in legal tangles that you can win only in Pyrrhic victories.

As for Paris Hilton, yeah, she definitely comes across as cold (without affect?), but damn, she sure does have a cool name.

Anonymous said...

I actually feel kinda bad for Ms. Hilton.

She's as narcissitic as Bush, and unlike el Presidente, she's actually going to spend some time in a jail, one of the worst places for narcissists. She'll probably kill herself.