Hullabaloo

Saturday, May 09, 2009

 
Shrinking Violence

by digby

I have long thought that one of the most repellent aspects of the US Torture Regime was the participation by medical and psychological professionals. I wrote about this NY Times article way back when, about the complicity of doctors and nurses in the Abu Ghraib scandal:

Much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents. Records and statements show doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.

Two doctors recognized that a detainee's shoulder was hurt because he had his arms handcuffed over his head for what they said was "a long period." They gave him an injection of painkiller, and sent him to an outside hospital for what appeared to be a dislocated shoulder, but did not report any suspicions of abuse. One medic, Staff Sgt. Reuben Layton, told investigators that he had found the detainee handcuffed in the same position on three occasions, despite instructing Specialist Graner to free the man.

"I feel I did the right thing when I told Graner to get the detainee uncuffed from the bed," Sergeant Layton told investigators.

Sergeant Layton also said he saw Specialist Graner hitting a metal baton against the leg wounds of a detainee who had been shot. He did not report that incident.

It went on in gory detail. It was wrong of them not to report this, obviously, but the medical personnel didn't deny the prisoners care or actively participate. But clearly others did. After all, the CIA required that doctors be present during the torture sessions in case the prisoners needed emergency tracheotomies and the like if the torture went just a little too far and the prisoner started dying before he confessed.

There was this, from Gitmo:

The stories coming out of Gitmo are remarkably consistent. This is not an unusual case. Indeed, the attempted suicide rate down there is astronomical, but after this was publicized, in a typical Bushian move, they have decided to simply give attempted suicides another, less disturbing, name. From the Vanity Fair article:

In the camp's acute ward, a young man lies chained to his bed, being fed protein-and-vitamin mush through a stomach tube inserted via a nostril. "He's refused to eat 148 consecutive meals," says Dr. Louis Louk, a naval surgeon from Florida. "In my opinion, he's a spoiled brat, like a small child who stomps his feet when he doesn't get his way." Why is he shackled? "I don't want any of my guys to be assaulted or hurt," he says.

By the end of September 2003, the official number of suicide attempts by inmates was 32, but the rate has declined recently-not because the detainees have stopped trying to hang themselves but because their attempts have been reclassified. Gitmo has apparently spawned numerous cases of a rare condition: "manipulative self-injurious behavior," or S.I.B. That, says chief surgeon Captain Stephen Edmondson, means "the individual's state of mind is such that they did not sincerely want to end their own life." Instead, they supposedly thought they could get better treatment, perhaps even obtain release. In the last six months, there have been 40 such incidents.

Daryl Matthews, professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Hawaii, was asked by the Pentagon to spend a week at GuantAnamo investigating detainees' mental health and the treatments available. Unlike reporters-who must agree in writing not to speak to prisoners-Professor Matthews spoke with the inmates for many hours.

Manipulative self-injurious behavior "is not a psychiatric classification," he says, and the Pentagon should not be using it. "It is dangerous to try to divide 'serious' attempts at suicide from mere gestures, and a psychiatrist needs to make a proper diagnosis in each and every case." At Gitmo, Dr. Matthews says, the "huge cultural gulf" between camp staff and prisoners makes this difficult, if not impossible.

Across the board there were medical professionals either helping or failing to sound the alarm. But there are none who are more culpable in the torture regime than the psychologists. Which brings me to this interesting story from ProPublica, which reveals a listserv discussion among the American Psychological Association on the subject of torture:

Earlier this week we published a story examining [1] the psychology profession's tortured relationship with the Bush Administration's War on Terror. We found that psychologists warned officials as early as 2002 against using potentially ineffective and dangerous interrogation techniques on detainees, according to a recently-released Senate Armed Services Committee report. However, what had been little noticed was that the same psychologists helped develop the harsh interrogation policies and practices they warned against.

As part of our report, we posted a listserv of internal emails between staff of the American Psychological Association and members of its "Psychological Ethics and National Security" task force. (Here’s the entire listserv.) [2] That listserv offers a rare look into a process that led to the adoption of an influential and controversial policy for the world's largest professional organization of psychologists [3], which represents the profession of psychology in the United States. It also provides a window into a heated discussion among medical professionals grappling with their ethical obligations and their possible complicity in torture.

The task force was set up after news reports [4] suggested that psychologists and other health professionals had been complicit with abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, for example by sharing information about psychological vulnerabilities with interrogators. The group's charge was to examine the ethical dimensions of psychologists' involvement in "national security investigations" and consider whether the APA should develop policies to guide psychologists involved in those activities. The task force produced a 12-page report [5] stating that the APA's ethics code prohibited torture, obligated psychologists to report any instances to appropriate authorities, and banned psychologists from using health care information in ways that could harm detainees.

[2] But the report also gave psychologists an ethical blessing to continue consulting in national security-related interrogations. An organization of psychiatrists, in contrast, decided its physician members should not participate. In response, the Department of Defense changed its guidance [6] to state that psychologists, but no longer psychiatrists, should participate in so-called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams or "BSCTs" (pronounced "biscuits"), which assist interrogators in prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

After the report was issued, the APA task force itself became a target for criticism, when it was revealed that some members had consulted on interrogations at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, trained other psychologists to do so, or worked within chains of command that authorized the very practices the task force was established to consider (six of the nine voting members were members of or had consulted for the military or intelligence agencies)

Read on for details of yet another dry, technical discussion of unspeakable cruelty and barbarism. There was dissent among the group, but the report that was issued reflected the hard core faction that believed it was entirely ethical for psychologists to participate in war crimes. When the report was issued, there was a flood of complaints from members:

"APA members who have been in touch with me have expressed major disappointment," task-force member Nina Thomas, a psychoanalyst who had worked with war victims, wrote on July 8, 2005 [17]. She shared excerpts of an email from another listserv that criticized the task-force report for offering psychologists "much wiggle room" to "do whatever they see as indicated by concerns of national security."

Tensions rose. "I do not think that we should now begin to second-guess ourselves," Olivia Moorehead-Slaughter, the task-force chairperson, wrote on July 9, 2005 [18].

A July 28, 2005 New York Times [19] article showing that lawyers had stood up against harsh interrogation techniques led Thomas to lament [20], "reading it made me all the more sad that Mike Wessells, Jean Maria and I were not more successful at arguing our case for a more stringent standard for holding psychologists to account."

Moorehead-Slaughter reminded her colleagues the group had discussed including human rights standards in their report, but had concluded that "including such standards in the document would likely (perhaps definitely) put the document at odds with United States law and military regulations," she wrote on July 29, 2005 [21]. "[T]he military would simply have ignored the document – thus, the community that we would most want to reach would have been prevented from using the report."

Thomas wrote back to disagree [22]. "(I)t has been the military's own lawyers, indeed their highest ranking lawyers who have argued for the importance of using international human rights standards as the benchmark."

Koocher, the incoming APA president, supported the task force's decision to leave international standards out of their document. "I have zero interest in entangling APA with the nebulous, toothless, contradictory, and obfuscatory treaties that comprise 'international law,'" he wrote on July 30 [23]. "Rather, I prefer to see APA take principled stands on policy issued where psychology has some scientific basis for doing so."

The U.S. military apparently appreciated the report. Banks wrote on August 12 [24] to say that he, James and another psychologist had found it "a solid anchor" in an eight hour meeting with the Army's surgeon general that hammered out "the doctrinal guidelines and training model for psychologists" who support interrogations.

It sounds as if some of the psychologists had been brainwashed themselves by crude, conservative propaganda. Some of that stuff could have come out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth.

The medical profession will be tainted by this for a very long time, some more than others. Psychiatrists objected and were removed from the program. Other doctors, like that sadistic piece of garbage who declared that the attempted suicides were "brats" as he had prisoners shackled with feeding tubes forced through their nasal cavities, are culpable. But the psychologists who helped the military and the CIA develop torture techniques have a special place in hell waiting for them alongside some of the most terrible people in history. Remember their names.

digby 5/09/2009 03:30:00 PM |