Opponents argued that allowing psychologists to work at Guanta'namo gives ethical cover to an illegal detention site where detainees are still being tortured with painful forced feedings, solitary confinement, and the hopelessness induced by indefinite detention without charges. It's worth noting that the military still refuses to allow the U.N.'s special rapporteur on torture to speak privately with detainees at Gitmo. In addition, at such a detention and interrogation site, any psychologist who was a member of, or employed by, the U.S. military would face an inevitable conflict of interest between the desires of his or her employers and the needs of detainee clients.
The 2015 resolution also prevented APA members from participating in national security interrogations, declaring that they
"shall not conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities, including private contractors working on their behalf, nor advise on conditions of confinement insofar as these might facilitate such an interrogation."
Military psychologists within the APA were not happy in 2015 about being shut out of national security interrogations and they'd still like to see psychologists back in the interrogation business. This time around, they strategically chose to focus their rhetoric on treatment rather than interrogation. However, the long-term goals are clear. Indeed, in response to a request from those military psychologists, the APA's Committee on Legal Issues recommended to the board of directors "broadening" the resolution "to allow psychologists to be involved in the practice and policy of humane interrogation." The board declined -- this time, anyway.
Here's the problem with "humane interrogation": no one ever admits to using inhumane methods. Unfortunately, there's a recent and sordid history of U.S. officials claiming that torture is actually humane -- albeit "enhanced" -- interrogation. In the George W. Bush administration, John Woo and Jay Bybee, who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, were among those who wrote memos justifying torture. As Bybee explained in an August 2002 memo to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, "real" physical torture must involve pain similar to that experienced during "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." And the effects of psychological interrogation must last "months or even years" to constitute mental torture -- obviously an impossible standard to meet, since no one knows for sure what will happen in the future. In that way, they essentially redefined any form of cruelty, including waterboarding, in any of the CIA's black sites then scattered around the world or at Guanta'namo, as anything but torture.
As it happened, even as defined by the Bush administration, much of what was done in those years would have qualified as torture. Certainly, isolating people, depriving them of sleep, bombarding them with heat, cold, light, and endless loud noise, beating them, and providing them with no hope of eventual release were not exactly acts conducive to long-term mental health. In fact, in 2016 the New York Times interviewed several freed Guanta'namo detainees, who reported that the effects of their abuse had indeed lasted "months or even years."
A Bit of History
The role of American psychologists in designing torture programs goes back at least to the 1950s, as historian Alfred McCoy documented so graphically in his book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. At that time, research psychologists at elite universities in the U.S. and Canada experimented on unwitting subjects -- including mental patients -- in an effort to develop techniques to produce a condition of compliancy in future prisoners, a condition that the CIA called "DDD" (for debility, dependency, and dread).
Much of this research culminated in that Agency's now-infamous 1963 KUBARK manual on interrogation, which the United States used to train the police and military forces of client states. That manual would be resurrected in 1983 and used in the CIA's training of the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua's civil war. Many of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that became so familiar to us in the George W. Bush years -- sensory bombardment, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, sexual humiliation -- were first laid out in that manual. But the CIA evidently misplaced it somewhere in their voluminous files because, after 9/11, instead of hauling it out yet again, they paid $80 million to two psychologists to reinvent the torture wheel. Those two, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, repackaged DDD as "learned helplessness" (borrowing a concept developed by another psychologist, Martin Seligman).
Seligman's role in developing the CIA torture program has been in dispute ever since. At most, he seems to have willingly discussed his theories with CIA personnel. In December 2001, he met at his home with both James Mitchell and Kirk Hubbard, who was then the chief of research and analysis in the CIA's Operational Division, among others. In 2002, at the invitation of CIA personnel, he lectured on learned helplessness at the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school where U.S. military are trained to resist torture. Seligman claims he had no idea how his work was being used until "years later," when he read a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer (perhaps this one) about CIA torture practices in the post-9/11 era . "If I had known about the methods employed," says Seligman, "I would not have discussed learned helplessness with" Agency officials.
Mitchell and Jessen, however, had no such compunctions. They cheerfully designed an interrogation program for the CIA that included such "enhanced techniques" as slamming detainees against walls and locking them in tiny boxes. As no one is likely to forget, they also retrieved waterboarding from history. This practice had bluntly been called "the water torture" in Medieval Europe and American soldiers were using it in the Philippines, where it was referred to ironically as "the water cure," as the twentieth century began. To waterboard is essentially to drown a prisoner to the point of unconsciousness, a "technique" the CIA used 83 times on one man (who didn't even turn out to be an al-Qaeda leader). The whole program was implemented at CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and Romania, among other places.
For part of this time, Mitchell was a member of the APA and so presumably subject to its code of ethics, which, theoretically at least, prohibited involvement in interrogations involving torture. When concerned APA members tried to bring an ethics claim against him to the group (whose only real sanction would have been to publicly expel him), they got nowhere. Eventually, Mitchell quietly resigned from the association.
Meanwhile, military psychologists were also working on interrogation matters for the Department of Defense. At Guanta'namo, they participated in behavioral science control teams (BSCTs, pronounced "biscuits"). Despite the homey-sounding name, those BSCTs were anything but benign. Staffed by psychologists and psychiatrists, the teams, according to a 2005 New England Journal of Medicine op-ed by knowledgeable insiders, "prepared psychological profiles for use by interrogators; they also sat in on some interrogations, observed others from behind one-way mirrors, and offered feedback to interrogators."
Guanta'namo's BSCTs, the Journal piece continues, favored an approach to behavioral control taught at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, which "builds on the premise that acute, uncontrollable stress erodes established behavior (e.g., resistance to questioning), creating opportunities to reshape behavior." This was to be achieved by introducing "stressors tailored to the psychological and cultural vulnerabilities of individual detainees (e.g., phobias, personality features, and religious beliefs)."
But where did the BSCTs get their information about the vulnerabilities of those individual detainees? The International Committee of the Red Cross discovered that it came from their medical records at the detention center, which, according to general medical ethics and the Geneva Conventions, are supposed to be kept confidential.
Those APA members who continue to argue for bringing military psychologists back to Guanta'namo insist that it's possible to keep a firewall between their work as clinicians and the role of interrogator. But how realistic is this, especially within an organization like the military, where obedience and hierarchical loyalty are key values? As the New England Journal of Medicine concludes,
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