Nuremberg to Guantanamo

What sort of experts on ethics write the Nuremberg defense into their professional ethics code?

That's psychologist Stephen Soldz quoted in the new article by Arthur Levine, about the role the American Psychological Association's support of its members' participation in military interrogations and torture.

Much of the article is familiar ground to readers here, but it is an excellent summary of the processes that have led some psychologists away from the healing professions and into the operational role of calibrating pain.

Along the way, Levine drops rich details that are new to print. Perhaps the most original portion of the article is Levine's treatment of the APA's Psychological Ethics and National Security task force, which has given cover to the ongoing role of psychologists in US torture.

[I]n February 2005, [Gerald] Koocher and APA president Ronald Levant led the creation of the blue-ribbon, 10-member Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) task force to study the problem. But they stacked the deck by ensuring that six of the 10 members were from the military. One was Capt. Bryce Lefever, a trainer at the Navy’s SERE School and author of the lecture “Brainwashing: The Method of Forceful Interrogation.”

Another was R. Scott Shumate, director of behavioral science for the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity division, who, according to his own bio, had “engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees.” There were also Michael Gelles, chief psychologist of the Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service; Col. Larry James, chief psychologist for the intelligence group at Guantánamo in 2003; and Robert Fein, whose biographical blurb describes him as “a consultant to the Directorate for Behavioral Sciences of the Department of Defense Counterintelligence Field Activity.”

The boldest choice of all was Col. Morgan Banks, the very man accused of helping to introduce SERE techniques to Guantanamo. “It was like a Monty Python spoof,” says Dr. Steven Miles, a professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota medical school who followed the process for his book, Oath Betrayed. “At a certain level, you had to laugh.” Asked about charges that the APA stacked the deck, Koocher responded in an email that “the task force worked by consensus.”

Any countervailing influence, then, would have to come from the four civilian members. But when the task force’s discussions began, it soon became clear that the APA leadership was determined to resist their proposals. When Jean Maria Arrigo, an independent scholar on the ethics of military intelligence, and Michael Wessells, a professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College, and a specialist in how children are affected by armed conflict, argued that international law such as the Geneva Conventions should be the gold standard in the APA’s ethics code, Koocher, serving as a liaison from the APA board, was dismissive. “We’re not going to go there,” he announced. “International law doesn’t have any standing in U.S. courts.” (According to Arrigo, one of the military psychologists was even blunter, declaring: “We’ve taken an oath to our commander-in-chief.”) Then, when Arrigo argued for an appendix of case histories that would clearly illustrate some examples of banned behavior, such as water-boarding, an APA lawyer who was advising the panel rejected the idea, warning that such examples could be used in court against psychologists. Wessells, still dissatisfied by the lack of specificity, cited the use of techniques like sleep deprivation as clearly out of bounds. To which one of the military panelists responded: “Maybe it’s useful to an interrogation to wake someone up early.”

Drafting the task-force report fell primarily to Stephen Behnke, a lawyer and psychologist who heads the APA’s Office of Ethics. Behnke produced a rough draft on day one, a model of ambiguous wording that effectively determined the scope of the discussions. Ultimately, the final report did assert that “psychologists are alert to acts of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment and have an ethical responsibility to report these acts to the appropriate authorities.” But, crucially, it did not offer specific guidance on what did and did not constitute torture. And it noted pointedly that “over the course of the recent United States military presence in locations such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cuba, … rules and regulations have been significantly developed and refined.” In other words: Things are changing. Good luck feeling your way about.

Read the rest of Arthur Levine's article in the Washington Monthly, "Collective Unconscionable: How psychologists, the most liberal of professionals, abetted Bush’s torture policy."