People have been convicted and incarcerated for knowing an illegality was going on or even planned without taking steps to prevent it. Why should psychologists be any different. It is a legal issue as well as an ethical issue. If torture is illegal and a psychologist was present is he not complicit in the crime? If recognized torture is being preformed and someone knows about it, isn't he complicit if he does nothing to prevent it? Can a psychologist claim that the torturers were the patients and that he has Doctor-Patient privileges?

This is a no-brainer. I've been a mental health professional for nearly 30 years. Aiding torture in any way is absolutely contrary to our professional ethics. Period. End of story. Any mental health professionals who participated should lose their licenses to practice, permanently...at the very least. This is not something that requires debate...it's basic ethics.

If one prosecutes torturers, this answers itself: the attending psychologists are felons and barred from the profession.

How many laws does an act of torture have to be against? Assault and batter, and in some cases kidnapping and murder, ought to be enough.

Intelligence is not law enforcement and has no special dispensation even to imprison, including in another country.

I am a *former* APA member. Part of my leaving some years ago involved my role as an academic psychologist in an organization that used my dues primarily to act as a lobbyist organization for the *financial* well-being of its clinical practitioners. At the time I passively left (not paying dues takes a couple of years but they do finally give up on you), the money was going into the "issue" of "prescription privileges". I.e. they wanted to compete head to head with the medical profession in the move *away* from psychotherapy into the overdrugging for profit of those "diagnosed" with psychological disorders (quotes generated by such "diagnoses" as attention deficit disorder in toddlers). My remaining personal ethical concerns involve my teaching in a discipline so ethically compromised. I rationalize, I suppose, that economics is worse; and I do things in class like put www.breggin.com on the board periodically to counteract the commercialization my students are otherwise bombarded by. The whole involvement with torture makes sense if you know where the organization has been headed; but again it does pose a dilemma for my personal professional identification. How do I handle that?

Deepa

The involvement of Psychologists in torture and the tacit approval of the US Psychology Association is known to the world long ago.

Not only the psychologists but also socialogists and anthropologists have been involved to ENHANCE THE ABILITY OF AMERICAN MILITARY PERSONNEL TO KILL OR TORTURE THEIR PREY.

Read:

Jeremy Laurance, "Doctors Accuse US of ‘Unethical Practices’ at Guantanamo Bay," The Independent/UK, September 7, 2007.

"Earlier this month, news of the military's use of Human Terrain Teams -- U.S. combat units operating in Afghanistan and Iraq that contain anthropologists and other social scientists who have traded in their academic robes for body armor -- hit the front-page of the New York Times. While the incorporation of academic experts into combat units has raised ire in some scholarly circles, their use as "cultural advisers" to aid the war effort has been greeted by the military as "a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations" and in the media as an example of increased cultural sensitivity as well as evidence of a new Pentagon willingness to think outside the box.

"But the university is only one of a number of areas where an overstretched military, involved in two losing wars, is in a desperate search for new ideas. And humanizing allies and enemies alike has only been one part of the process. Dehumanizing them has been the other. At a recent conference on urban warfare in Washington, D.C., James Lasswell, a retired Marine Corps colonel who now heads the Office of Science and Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, opened an interesting window into this side of things. He noted that, as part of an instruction course named "Combat Hunter," the Marines have brought in "big-game hunters" to school their snipers in the better use of "optics." According to a September 2007 article by Grace Jean in NationalDefense Magazine, "[T]he lab conducted a war game with Marines, African game hunters and inner city police officers to search for ways to improve training." The program included a 15-minute CD titled "Every Marine a Hunter."

Read:
Nick Turse, "Targeting Iraqis As "Big Game"," Tom Dispatch.com,November 6, 2007.

In the light of the above and the overwhelming evidence of collusion between the US government, Military, CIA, academicians, legal system..., the second part of the title of the article "Critics urge inquiry into ethical question" sounds, for me, ironical. Because the question is: who conducts inquiry? And whose understanding of "ethics" become the yardstick for the inquiry?

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/05/06/us-interrogators-killed-dozens-human-rights-researcher-and-rights-group-say/

Bryce Lefever, a military psychologist who served at the detention center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, opined in one e-mail that psychologists do harm for the "greater good" when inflicting pain on US soldiers to teach them how to withstand torture at the hands of enemy captors. The same behaviors, however, "are viewed as harmful" when used on US prisoners

One is voluntary, the other forced, big difference Dr. Duh!

I say revoke their medical licences...

Cant beleive I am saying this..but Maybe Tom Cruise was on to something about psychologists..

this is one a single space difference between Therapist and The_Rapist

"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats

"Military Psychologist?" Isn't that term an oxymoron?

Working for the military is not a legitimate occupation for people. Their only purpose is murder. It's not legitimate or honorable or honest and we who pay taxes are not less guilty.

Everybody remembers the Nazi doctors. Some Czar was a big believer in discipline in the military. Any soldier caught smoking a cigarette was flogged until an attending physician reported his pulse was becoming weak.

"Newly public e-mails between psychologists involved in the Bush administration's controversial detention program have fueled a fierce debate over whether mental-health professionals should give advice on warfare, and whether the nation's largest psychology association tacitly blessed the government's use of abusive interrogations involving waterboarding and sleep deprivation."

What debate? They're guilty. They've been guilty for years now. Also torture isn't "controversial" it's illegal.

Joseph Mengele claimed to be a medical professional, too.

Aloha, salud, lechiem,
- Tobias
http://www.youtube.com/user/tobiasaurusrex

Psychology and toture? Shocking!

In the fifties, the CIA became interested in Ewen Cameron’s [Scottish-born American citizen] focus on regression – the idea that by depriving people of their sense of who they are and where they are in time and space, adults can be converted into dependent children whose minds are a blank slate of suggestibility. It was the start of Cold War hysteria. There was a growing concern in the Western intelligence community that the Communists had discovered how to “brainwash” prisoners of war. The evidence was the fact that American GIs taken captive in Korea were going before cameras, seemingly willingly, and denouncing capitalism and imperialism.

The agency launched a covert program devoted to researching “special interrogation techniques.” The program examined and investigated numerous unusual techniques of interrogation including psychological harassment and such matters as total isolation as well as the use of drugs and chemicals. First code-named Project Bluebird, the Project Artichoke, it was finally renamed MKUltra in 1953.

The CIA produced a handbook called Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation. The handbook is a 128-page interrogation manual for extracting information from resistant sources that is heavily based on the research commissioned by MKUltra and Ewen Cameron’s and Donald Hebb’s experiments. It was “shock and awe” warfare on the mind. It represents a new age of precise, refined torture – not the gory, inexact torment that had been the standard since the Spanish Inquisition. Prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early-morning raids, as the manual instructs. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation, and the use of electroshock.

In 1966, the CIA sent three psychiatrists to Saigon, armed with a Page-Russell electroshock machine, the same kind of favored by Cameron; it was used so aggressively that it killed several prisoners.

http://theformofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2007/11/6/3334794.html

Any psychologist who would participate in government torture programs out of a primitive and pious sense of Patriotic Duty isn't intellectually or temperamentally fit to be a psychologist in the first place. And this misdirected and ludicrous appeal to conscience certainly doesn't justify or legitimize such participation.

And the straw-shrink argument that it's better for psychologists to be involved, as opposed to effectively boycotting the job, because psychologists may work to reduce or eliminate infliction of pain and discomfort is bogus on its face.

It's exactly like physicians assisting in state-sanctioned homicide, i.e. executions. It's the lamest kind of self-serving bullshit to assert that those willing to dabble in the Black Arts are acting out of a sublime sensibility or higher calling that justifies their heinous malpractice.

· Yr Obd't Servant

To what do you owe alligence? Your country or your oath to the medical profession? I would say in this instance your oath to the medical profession. It stands to reason that torture is illegal and always has been ever since this country was founded (ask General Washington) so you would see that torture is not to be applied under any conditions and you can't plead ignorance on this at any time. You either know you are witnessing torture or not. If you are you must turn those responsible into the higher authorities (excuse me I know they were complicit) but you still must do it. Your oath to the human race is still higher than your oath to commit a crime against the human race and these folks have not been determined to have committed a crime and have not been brought to trial and convicted. They are human beings believe it or not just like us with loves, desires, fears and families that love them and they in return.

The APA prostituted itself to the Pentagon, abandoned the ethical standards embraced by other health professions, and has played a large and shameful role in war crimes. I'd suggest that all ethical psychologists, resign from the APA and join other, more socially responsible organizations, and that patients and fellow professionals not consult with or refer to APA members. Most psychologists are decent, ethical individuals and it's time they dissociated themselves from this disgraced group.

First: Do No Harm!

http://www.duggback.com/world_news/US_interrogators_may_have_killed_dozens_human_rights_groups/

These 'inquisitors' should be wrapped in chains and dropped off a bridge - burn the guilty floaters.

Isn't the whole thing in practical terms academic? Torture doesn't work except for gaining confessions -which are subsequently useless in court.

What does amaze me is the way that people of all walks of life and education, from army grunts to top politicians like Blair, prostrate themselves in front of inarticulate belligerent morons like Bush and then abandon any ethics or caution they might previously have possessed.

Is there something missing from their characters, is this a definable mental condition. What makes otherwise normal people abase themselves in this manner?

Torture reveals much in a conflict. As we study the use of torture we learn a great deal of useful information if we are willing to use it. What we learn is about the torturer, not the tortured, they suffer, bleed and die like the rest of us, but those who do the torture reveal the depths of their being. We allowed this to happen in our name and on our behalf, what we have learned is not pleasant to consider, but now we have to act on this new "Education". Unless we are willing to acknowledge the scope of criminal action, "legally sanctioned by our government" we will not be able to remove this cancer from our society. I fear for our grandchildren, unless we address this problem before it become full blown as children soldiers fighting against enemies at home.

05-10-09
As a health professional, the issue for me is one of ethics. The American Medical Association has a clear policy statement that the involvement of medical personnel in torture is a violation of professional ethics. The AMA hand delivered a letter to President Obama 04-17-09 which strongly stated this ethical policy. On April 18, 2009 the Wisconsin Medical Society, at its Annual Meeting of the House of Delegates, wrote a letter to President Obama unequivocally condemning torture as medically unethical and strongly supporting the American Medical Association's letter and ethics policy. Medical personnel who participate in torture have violated professional ethics and the public trust and failed to comply with professional licensing requirements and should loss their licenses to practice.
As an American citizen, the issue for me is one of the rule of law. Torture is a violation of U.S. law as well as international law, a violation of numerous treaties the U.S. has signed, amoung them the Nuerenberg convention, the Helsinki conventions and the Geneva convention. Therefore, the U.S. Justice Department is obligated to investigate the allegations of torture. Since it is alleged that former members of the Justice Dept. were involved in developing "legitamization" of torture, there is a clear need for an "independent" prosecutor, not directly related to the Justice Dept., to investigate and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law any and all who were involved in breaking our laws and participating in any way in torture. If this does not happen it normalizes torture, says that there are no consequences for breaking certain laws, and sets the stage the the atrocities occur again in the name of U.S. citizens. If this does not happen it is the fault of the American people, since we still live in, in name at least, a democracy ... of the people, by the people, for the people.