I hope by now I've made it clear that current American Psychological Association policy is unique among the health professional associations in allowing its members to participate in interrogations and in supporting US torture of detainees.
Some people might still be hopeful that the APA's "unequivocal position against torture and abuse" might provide some leverage for those wishing to get psychologists off of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams that assist in coercive interrogations and torture.
Yet Stephen Soldz and Kos diarist Valtin both have observed that a last minute change to APA resolution makes even its commitment to the UN Convention Against Torture (UNCAT) utterly meaningless.
Soldz points to the following language in the APA resolution:
BE IT RESOLVED, that the term “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” means treatment or punishment by any psychologist that is of a kind that, in accordance with the McCain Amendment, would be prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984.
Soldz notes that the the apparent prohibitions against torture in the McCain Amendment were "immediately proclaimed to be null and void by President Bush, when he said in his signing statement he would decide if and when it should be followed," and I have already discussed the other reasons why emphasizing the McCain Amendment over international law is a move to allow torture to continue.
Equally important is the last part of the above paragraph from the resolution, "as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984.”
Valtin explains that
it's in the UN Convention Against Torture that the United States finds it secret weapon to maintain their legal fiction that the type of torture, uh, I mean, interrogation, they do is acceptable. . . .
Attached to such treaties are Declarations and Reservations made by various countries, amending their ratification by selective nullification or interpretation of parts of the treaty or convention. . . .
Basically, the U.S. changed the definition of torture to enable it to practice barbaric acts of so-called non-physical torture. U.S. "reservations" include:
(1) (a) That with reference to article 1, the United States understands that, in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from (1) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (2) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (3) the threat of imminent death; or (4) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality.
In other words, torture is infliction of physical pain or suffering; threat of infliction of same; use of mind-altering substances; threat of same; threat of death. You'll notice that this leaves open the use of psychological methods of torture! "Mental pain or suffering" only comes from "prolonged mental harm", and prolonged mental harm only comes from physical harm, drugs, or threat of physical harm, use of drugs, or death.
Despite US assertions to the contrary, psychological methods of torture are no less serious than infliction of physical pain or suffering. The Physicians for Human Rights report, Break Them Down makes this abundantly clear:
Psychological torture is designed to destroy the victim’s sense of privacy, intimacy, trust of others and security, as well as one’s sense of self and how one relates to one’s surroundings. According to Ian Robbins, head of the Traumatic Stress Service at St. George’s Hospital in London and a former interrogator in the Royal Medical Corps, the methods of psychological coercion are meant “to assert complete control over the victim and break down any will they might have to resist the interrogator’s demands.” Psychological torture often makes victims feel that they are responsible for the pain and suffering that they experience and induces feelings of intense humiliation leading to feelings of worthlessness. Victims often feel that they had a choice, or even that they share in the responsibility of what was done to them, when in reality they were powerless. . . . According to clinicians who treat torture survivors, severe psychological pain usually results from various combinations of intense and prolonged fear, shame, humiliation, horror, guilt, grief, and mental and physical exhaustion.
Psychological torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment can have extremely destructive health consequences for detainees. The effects can include memory impairment, reduced capacity to concentrate, somatic complaints such as headache and back pain, hyperarousal, avoidance, and irritability. Additionally, victims often experience severe depression with vegetative symptoms, nightmares, and “feelings of shame and humiliation” associated with sexual violations, among others.
Although these short- and long-term consequences can be debilitating, the suffering of victims of psychological torture is often disregarded because they do not have physical evidence of the abuse they suffered. The lack of physical signs can make psychological torture seem less significant than physical torture, but the consensus among those who study torture and rehabilitate its victims is that psychological torture can be more painful and cause more severe and long-lasting damage even than the pain inflicted during physical torture.
The outraged portions of the APA membership and the wider public need to ask why the APA has gone to such lengths to make such broad allowances for torture while deceptively claiming to oppose it.
RELATED
UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (with Declarations and Reservations.)
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