Psychologists to CIA: We condemn torture

At least on paper, what happens in San Francisco could make a big difference to the CIA. Mike McConnell told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" last month that under Bush's new executive order the CIA was going to continue to mentally pressure detainees, using a "psychological approach to causing someone to have uncertainty and in a situation where they will feel compelled to talk to you about what you're asking about." He insisted that the pressure did not amount to torture and there would be no permanent damage to prisoners, but admitted that "I would not want a U.S. citizen to go through the process."

McConnell assured Russert that the program would be "under medical supervision." And the executive order Bush signed to continue the CIA interrogation program calls for "effective monitoring of the program, including with respect to medical matters, to ensure the safety of those in the program."

But since doctors and psychiatrists have ruled themselves out, that leaves psychologists as the last of the medical professionals willing to support the interrogation of so-called high-value detainees. Presumably, what the APA deems unacceptable would make a big difference.

But it is unclear whether an APA resolution will have any effect on real-world interrogations conducted by the CIA. Salon reported in June that two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were in the cross hairs of Senate investigators looking into the genesis of the brutal, and very similar, post 9/11 interrogation regimes developed by the CIA and the military.

Mitchell and Jessen are part of a cabal of psychologists associated with the military's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program. The program trains soldiers to resist torture if captured by exposing them to brutal techniques employed by Cold War adversaries who would violate the Geneva Conventions to provoke confessions: water-boarding; forced nudity; stress positions; lengthy isolation; sleep deprivation; sexual humiliation. The plan was to reverse-engineer those techniques for use on real detainees.

The military employed the same game plan at the same time, suggesting high-level government coordination. A previously classified Department of Defense inspector general report released in May detailed efforts in 2002 by the Army Special Operations Command's Psychological Directorate to reverse-engineer SERE training for use at Guantánamo, including a September 2002 "SERE psychologist conference" at Fort Bragg to brief staff from Guantánamo on the use of SERE tactics.

But Mitchell and Jessen, the psychologists who helped the agency, are not APA members. So a resolution might not matter much to men like them.

Theoretically, a psychologist could lose his state-issued license for violating an APA resolution, regardless of APA membership, which might plant a seed of doubt in a psychologist's mind when he steps into a CIA interrogation booth. Military psychologists, for example, are required to maintain a state license.

But the CIA might not be so strict. When asked a series of questions on whether the CIA requires psychologists working with that agency to maintain a state license, CIA spokesman George Little responded, "On these questions, I decline to comment."

Still, psychologists predict that their colleagues -- even those employed by the CIA -- will be less inclined in the future to participate in harsh interrogations that have been explicitly condemned by the APA. "These are our rules and our professional ethics," said Brad Olson, president of the Divisions for Social Justice within the APA. "What this whole group of professionals believes does matter. What psychologists say they are willing to do and not willing to do does matter."

The simmering debate over interrogations inside the APA has been increasingly heating to a boil for several years. In 2005, a group of 10 psychologists drafted new APA ethics guidelines that condemned torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment -- but that also noted that psychologists helping interrogators were performing a "valuable and ethical role to assist in protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm." (Salon reported last summer that six of the 10 psychologists who drafted that policy had close ties to the military, including the chief of the Army Special Operations Command's Psychological Directorate, Col. Morgan Banks.)

Then last summer, the APA's council passed a resolution reaffirming a "condemnation of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment wherever it occurs."

But the positions taken by the APA so far -- the ethics principles drafted by those 10 psychologists and the resolution last summer -- contain legal vagaries of the flavor repeatedly exploited by the Bush administration to pursue coercive interrogations in one theater or another. The concern among psychologists is that their profession is being dragged along for the ride. And that is what is driving the resolutions the psychologists are wrestling with now, to specifically outlaw individual interrogation techniques or even ban psychologists from interrogations altogether.

In its continued effort to fashion a legal defense of the CIA's interrogation program, the Bush administration has employed a dexterous strategy: decry international standards that ban detainee abuse as hopelessly "vague." Demand detailed clarifications from Congress, and then drive loopholes into those clarifications to allow coercive interrogations to continue.

The most recent example is the Military Commissions Act, a law signed by Bush last October that contains a detailed ban on prisoner abuse. Experts in international law have been scouring the bill for loopholes inserted by the Bush administration, including language that could give the administration wiggle room to inflict mental pain on detainees -- the specialty of the CIA. An example is a definition, apparently included at the behest of the White House, that seems to outlaw serious mental pain and suffering, but defines it as suffering that must be "serious and non-transitory."

"If I screw up your brains for two weeks, three weeks, a month, is that non-transitory?" Scott Silliman, a professor at Duke University School of Law who specializes in national security, asked rhetorically. Water-boarding is simulated drowning. It creates sudden, extreme, brief panic. "If I was defending someone in the CIA who was charged with water-boarding, I would make an argument that unless the government can prove that serious mental harm was prolonged and non-transitory -- which means permanent -- then there has been no offense." The executive order that Bush signed July 20 to continue the CIA interrogation program was written to comply with the Military Commissions Act.

The CIA will not comment on the future of the agency's high-value detainee interrogation program, or the possible role of psychologists. Little, the CIA spokesman, would say only that the program had been "implemented lawfully, with great care and close review -- including extensive discussion within the executive branch and oversight from Congress."

But whatever happens, it will be done in secret. Little confirmed that the CIA will not allow officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit the agency's detention facilities or monitor detainees held by the agency. Simon Schorno, an ICRC spokesman in Washington, said his organization "deplores any form of undisclosed detention and repeats its call to have access to any person who might be detained by the United States."

He also said his organization remains concerned about people who have been held by the CIA since 9/11 but seem to have disappeared. In June, six human rights groups published the names of 39 such individuals believed to have been held by the CIA in secret locations. Said Schorno, "The ICRC remains gravely concerned by the fate of the persons previously held in the CIA detention program who remain unaccounted for."

Psychologists now have to decide if they still want to associate themselves with that kind of a program. Or if after six years of brutal interrogations, enough is enough.

"Psychologists have been involved one way or another in supporting the CIA in various forms of psychological torture for years," said Leonard Rubenstein, president of Physicians for Human Rights. "The issue is coming to a head because there are so many people within the profession who really feel that the whole integrity of the profession is at stake ... This is the profession coming to terms with itself."

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