Psychologists for Social Responsibility Blog

The Dark Side of “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness”

PsySR Blog — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:41:07 +0000

Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz

Why is the world's largest organization of psychologists so aggressively promoting a new, massive, and untested military program? The APA's enthusiasm for mandatory "resilience training" for all US soldiers is troubling on many counts.

The January 2011 issue of the American Psychologist, the American Psychological Association's (APA) flagship journal, is devoted entirely to 13 articles that detail and celebrate the virtues of a new US Army-APA collaboration. Built around positive psychology and with key contributions from former APA President Martin Seligman and his colleagues, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is a $125 million resilience training initiative designed to reduce and prevent the adverse psychological consequences of combat for our soldiers and veterans. While these are undoubtedly worthy aspirations, the special issue is nevertheless troubling in several important respects: the authors of the articles, all of whom are involved in the CSF program, offer very little discussion of conceptual and ethical considerations; the special issue does not provide a forum for any independent critical or cautionary voices whatsoever; and through this format, the APA itself has adopted a jingoistic cheerleading stance toward a research project about which many crucial questions should be posed. We discuss these and related concerns below.

At the outset, we want to be clear that we are not questioning the valuable role that talented and dedicated psychologists play in the military, nor certainly the importance of providing our soldiers and veterans with the best care possible. As long as our country has a military, our soldiers should be prepared to face the hazards and horrors they may experience. Military service is highly stressful and psychological challenges and difficulties understandably arise frequently. These issues are created or exacerbated by a wide range of features characteristic of military life, such as separation from family, frequent relocations and, especially, deployment to combat zones with ongoing threats of injury and death and exposure to acts of unspeakable violence. The stress of repeated tours of duty, including witnessing the loss of lives of comrades and civilians, can produce extensive emotional and behavioral consequences that persist long after soldiers return home. They include heightened risk of suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse and family violence.

Conceptual and Empirical Concerns

Although its advocates prefer to describe CSF as a training program, it is indisputably a research project of enormous size and scope, one in which a million soldiers are required to participate. Reivich, Seligman and McBride write in one of the special issue articles, "We hypothesize that these skills will enhance soldiers' ability to handle adversity, prevent depression and anxiety, prevent PTSD and enhance overall well-being and performance" (p. 26, emphasis added). This is the very core of the entire CSF program, yet it is merely a hypothesis – a tentative explanation or prediction that can only be confirmed through further research.

There seems to be reluctance and inconsistency among the CSF promoters in acknowledging that CSF is "research" and therefore should entail certain protections routinely granted to those who participate in research studies. Seligman explained to the APA's Monitor on Psychology, "This is the largest study – 1.1 million soldiers – psychology has ever been involved in" (a "study" is a common synonym for "research project"). But when asked during an NPR interview whether CSF would be "the largest-ever experiment," Brigadier General Cornum, who oversees the program, responded, "Well, we're not describing it as an experiment. We're describing it as training." Despite the fact that CSF is incontrovertibly a research study, standard and important questions about experimental interventions like CSF are neither asked nor answered in the special issue. This neglect is all the more troubling given that the program is so massive and expensive and the stakes are so high.

It is highly unusual for the effectiveness of such a huge and consequential intervention program not to be convincingly demonstrated first in carefully conducted, randomized, controlled trials – before being rolled out under less controlled conditions. Such preliminary studies are far from a mere formality. The literature on prevention interventions is full of well-intentioned efforts that either failed to have positive effects or, even worse, had harmful consequences for those receiving them. For instance, in the 1990s the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) substance abuse prevention program was administered in thousands of elementary schools across the US, at a cost of many hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet, evaluations of DARE rarely found the desired effects in regard to reducing young people's later substance use (e.g., see this and this summary). In response, DARE was modified in the last decade; however, subsequent evaluation found that the revised program actually increased later alcohol and cigarette use in those who received it compared to controls.

Similarly, criminal justice researcher Joan McCord has demonstrated how well-meaning programs have caused actual harm. She conducted a 30-year follow-up of a classic delinquency prevention program. Those participants randomly selected for intervention, but not matched controls, were provided with extensive enrichment, including mentoring, counseling and summer camp. Among the matched pairs who differed in outcomes decades later, those who received the intensive assistance were more likely to have been convicted of serious street crimes; were more frequently given a diagnosis of alcoholism, schizophrenia or manic depression; and on average, died five years younger. Other studies of criminal justice interventions have also uncovered unanticipated, deleterious effects. Given this well-known record, it is especially concerning when a major intervention is rolled out for thousands – or hundreds of thousands – without careful prior examination, including an investigation of potential negative effects. The special issue of the American Psychologist gives no indication that preliminary studies of CSF were conducted.

Also problematic, the CSF program is adapted primarily from the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) where interventions were focused on dramatically different, nonmilitary populations. Even with these groups, a 2009 meta-analysis of 17 controlled studies reveals that the PRP program has been only modestly and inconsistently effective. PRP produced small reductions in mild self-reported depressive symptoms, but it did so only in children already identified as at high risk for depression and not for those from the general population. Nor did PRP interventions reduce symptoms more than comparison prevention programs based on other principles, raising questions as to whether PRP's effects are related to the "resilience" theory undergirding the program. Further, like many experimental programs, PRP had better outcomes when administered by highly trained research staff than when given by staff recruited from the community. This raises doubts as to how effectively the CSF program will be administered by non-commissioned officers who are required to serve as "Master Resilience Trainers."

Regardless of how one evaluates prior PRP research, PRP's effects when targeting middle-school students, college students and adult groups can hardly be considered generalizable to the challenges and experiences that routinely face our soldiers in combat, including those that regularly trigger PTSD. In an inadequate attempt to bridge this gap rhetorically, CSF proponents describe PTSD as "a nasty combination of depressive and anxiety symptoms" (Reivich, Seligman and McBride, p. 26). In fact, PTSD involves a far more complicated cluster of severe symptoms in response to a specific traumatic event, including flashbacks, partial amnesia, difficulty sleeping, personality changes, outbursts of anger, hypervigilance, avoidance and emotional numbing.

Ethical Concerns

We also believe that other key aspects of CSF should have received explicit discussion in this special issue. It is standard practice for an independent and unbiased ethics review committee (an "institutional review board" or "IRB") to evaluate the ethical issues arising from a research project prior to its implementation. This review and approval process may in fact have occurred for CSF, but the manner in which the principals blur "research" and "training" leads us to wish for much greater clarity here. This process is even more critical given that the soldiers apparently have no informed consent protections – they are all required to participate in the CSF program. Such research violates the Nuremberg Code developed during the post-World War II trials of Nazi doctors. That code begins by stating:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

Disturbingly, however, this mandatory participation in a research study does not violate Section 8.05 of the APA's own Ethics Code, which allows for the suspension of informed consent "where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations." Despite the APA's stance, we should never forget that the velvet glove of authoritarian planning, no matter how well intended, is no substitute for the protected freedoms of individuals to make their own choices, mistakes and dissenting judgments. Respect for informed consent is more, not less, important in total environments like the military where individual dissent is often severely discouraged and often punished.

More broadly, the 13 articles fail to explore potential ethical concerns related to the uncertain effects of the CSF training itself. In fact, the only question of this sort raised in the special issue – by Tedeschi and McNally in one article and by Lester, McBride, Bliese and Adler in another – is whether it might be unethical to withhold the CSF training from soldiers. Certainly, there are other ethical quandaries that require serious discussion if the CSF program's effectiveness is to be appropriately evaluated. For example, might the training actually cause harm? Might soldiers who have been trained to resiliently view combat as a growth opportunity be more likely to ignore or underestimate real dangers, thereby placing themselves, their comrades or civilians at heightened risk of harm?

Similarly, by increasing perseverance in the face of adversity, might the CSF training lead soldiers to engage in actions that may later cause regret (e.g., the shooting of civilians at a roadblock in an ambiguous situation), thereby increasing the potential for PTSD or other post-combat psychological difficulties? Or, might the resilience training lead some to overcome, for the time, the disabling effects of traumatic episodes and thereby increase the likelihood of their redeployment to situations with further risk of serious disability? The likelihood of these eventualities or other negative effects, is unknown. But certainly they are sufficiently plausible – as plausible as McCord's unexpected findings, noted earlier, of intensive counseling and summer camp leading to increased crime, mental illness diagnosis and early death among participating youth – that they cannot legitimately be ruled out a priori. These possibilities increase the ethical responsibility of those promoting CSF to conduct pilot studies, carefully monitor them for possible negative effects upon soldiers or others, submit the program to careful ethical review and seek informed consent.

It is also important to note here two controversial aspects of the CSF program that have already received attention from investigative journalists. First, Mark Benjamin has raised provocative questions, not yet fully answered, about the circumstances surrounding the huge, $31 million no-bid contract awarded to Seligman ("whose work formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration's torture program") by the Department of Defense for his team's CSF involvement. Benjamin notes that the government allows sole-source contracts only under very limited conditions. The Army contract documents note that "there is only one responsible source due to a unique capability provided and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements." But as we have detailed above, public claims about the effectiveness of the PRP and its superiority to alternative prevention programs are significantly overstated, casting doubt upon the rationale for awarding the sole-source contract.

Second, Jason Leopold and others have raised serious questions about the "spiritual fitness" component of the CSF program, which appears to inappropriately promote a religious worldview as an important path to greater resilience and purpose. The special issue article by Pargament and Sweeney confirms the legitimacy of this concern. It includes a range of theologically oriented terms and references and it specifically identifies the Army's chaplain corps as a resource "to assist individuals in their quests to develop their spirits" (p. 61).

The Limits of Positive Psychology

CSF draws heavily on "positive psychology" in aiming to reduce the incidence of psychological harm resulting from combat and post-combat stress. The field of positive psychology has grown dramatically over the past decade and has many exuberant supporters and evangelists. Rather than focusing on distress and pathology, they emphasize human strengths and virtues, happiness and the potential to derive positive meaning from stressful circumstances. Few would dispute the benefits of broadening psychology's purview in this way. But writers such as Barbara Held, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eugene Taylor and James Coyne have offered compelling critiques of positive psychology, including its failure to sufficiently recognize the valuable functions played by "negative" emotions like anger, sorrow and fear; its slick marketing and disregard for harsh and unforgiving societal realities like poverty; its failure to examine the depth and richness of human experience; and its growing tendency to promote claims without sufficient scientific support (e.g., the relationship between positive psychological states and health outcomes or the mechanisms underlying "posttraumatic growth").

These and related concerns are directly relevant to CSF. As described by Cornum, Matthews and Seligman in the special issue, the CSF program aspires "to increase the number of soldiers who derive meaning and personal growth from their combat experience" (p. 6). But in many ways, the technocratic language of military training programs and the positive psychology strategies that characterize the CSF program appear inadequate for the task. Activities such as the "three blessings exercise," in which the individual reflects on what went well that day and why, seem ill-suited for encouraging and supporting the deep questioning and open exploration of existential issues that often arise for soldiers facing extreme circumstances. By all indications, the program's positive psychology orientation also fails to scrutinize those very institutions that subject recruits to potential trauma in order to create people sufficiently hardy to engage in death-defying and death-inflicting experiences.

In this regard, it is worth noting how special issue authors Peterson, Park and Castro briefly discuss the lower trust scores of female soldiers on the CSF program's Global Assessment Tool (GAT), which measures psychological fitness in four domains (social, emotional, spiritual and family). They interpret these results as suggesting "Female soldiers do not feel as fully at ease in the Army as do male soldiers," and they recommend further research to "understand the needs and challenges of female soldiers and to help them attain the same morale as male soldiers, which perhaps would reduce attrition among them" (p. 15-16). What goes unmentioned is that the extremely high rates of sexual assault on women soldiers, condoned or covered up by others higher in rank, is clearly a source of distrust and trauma – and it calls less for building a positive, resilient outlook among the victims than for recognition of how the commonplace victimization of women in war should be vociferously prevented.

In important ways, key lessons of humanistic psychology are also regrettably overlooked in the CSF program. For many soldiers, combat awakens questions regarding the meaning of life and of its worth, which can become more persistent after returning home. Too often, our veterans face anomie, lack of community and the replacement of caring ties with the competitive values of marketability when their military service is over. Humanistic and related perspectives more directly and fully attend to this void, the emptiness of contemporary society that increases the difficulties in recovery from trauma, than does positive psychology. Because of the limitations of quantitative psychology to date, the data for phenomena of this type are more frequently found in stories than in self-report inventories such as the GAT. Limited data encourage a limited view of the phenomenon of PTSD and of any resilience that is based upon denial. In contrast, it is through revelations such as the Winter Soldier testimonies of US veterans and active duty soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq, through studies of the phenomenology of returning soldiers by Daryl Paulson and Stanley Krippner or accounts of soldier participants in US torture as relayed by journalists Joshua Phillips and Justine Sharrock, that we are able to see how much distress comes from abuses soldiers commit either as a result of commands from superiors or due to the morally disorienting effects of ambiguous combat situations.

Indeed, among the most traumatic psychological scars that soldiers sustain are those resulting from what they have done to others. Some of the particularly intense characteristics of PTSD are found among perpetrators. As Col. Dave Grossman and others have described, human beings have an inherent resistance to killing other human beings. As a result, waging war almost always relies upon propaganda and training designed to dehumanize the enemy and elevate one's own cause. Psychology and psychologists have contributed to training programs aimed at increasing soldiers' willingness to kill. Now, this newest positive psychology program for resilience promises to shield soldiers from some of the debilitating consequences of their actions and, as Reivich, Seligman and McBride note, it aims to better enable soldiers to "live the Warrior Ethos – 'I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade'" (p. 27).

Missing, it would seem, is any meaningful CSF component devoted to helping soldiers grapple with the profound ethical dilemmas involved in their duties, including killing others in furtherance of state policy. Brett Litz and his colleagues have used the term "moral injury" to describe the exceedingly difficult challenges and consequences that soldiers face in response to "perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations" (p. 700). These are especially troubling omissions from the CSF program when we also consider the regrettable reality that many recruits, often drawn to the military by economic necessity and deceptive marketing strategies, are never told about the types of injuries to which they will be exposed or the level of slaughter in which some of them will take part.

The US Military and American Psychology

In the closing article of the special issue, Seligman and Fowler (former CEO of the APA) attempt to counter the objections they anticipate from readers who have concerns about how closely the APA and the profession of psychology should align themselves with the agenda of the US military. Certainly, such reader concerns are not entirely unfounded, especially given the tragic repercussions of the APA's decisions post-9/11 to shape its ethics code, policies and pronouncements to meet the perceived needs of an administration that viewed torture and other detainee abuse as legitimate components of national security practice. Unfortunately, however, Seligman and Fowler's arguments serve only to instill greater concern about the foundations of the CSF program and the role of institutional psychology in advancing it, as we explain below by responding to three statements from their article.

"It is not the military that sets the nation's policies on war and peace. The military carries out the policies that emerge from our democratic form of government. Withholding professional and scientific support for the people who provide the nation's defense is, we believe, simply wrong" (p. 85).

No one recommends withholding services from anyone in need. Indeed, health professionals deserve to be commended for providing such support to our soldiers and veterans. But when acting ethically, health professionals address the needs of their clients before the wishes of the institutions that hire them. Therefore, if those institutions constrain the options available for the well-being of the practitioners' clients, these professionals have an obligation to consider remedies beyond the narrow institutionally defined interests. For example, the CSF program does not include a component whereby participants are invited to listen to fellow soldiers and veterans who have enhanced their own safety, well-being and sense of purpose by refusing to comply with illicit orders, or by deciding, as have so many other American citizens, that the war they are fighting is unjust and immoral.

In addition, whether the US military plays a role in establishing policies is not a matter to be determined by recitation of formal rules. Scholarship involves an obligation to look at the actual evidence. Generals routinely make political statements in which they advocate for the latest war. Major military contractors work closely with military officials to sell both weapons of war and war itself. Retired military officers are then often hired as lobbyists for these same corporations and some appear as military "experts" in the media without revealing their conflicts of interest. The exorbitant budget for "perception management" services paid to professional propaganda organizations is also used by the military to spin news and promote war to government officials and the public alike. And, as recently reported by Rolling Stone, psychological operations ("psyops") techniques were used by the military on visiting US senators to strengthen their support of the increasingly unpopular Afghan war effort.

"The balance of good done by building the physical and mental fitness of our soldiers far outweighs any harm that might be done" (p. 86).

It is disappointing that researchers who have emphasized the purported empirical underpinnings of the CSF program would here abandon all semblance of scholarly rigor. The authors offer their cost-benefit claim as transparently true (i.e., the good outweighing the harm). But they offer no evidence in support of this crucial claim. For example, in their calculation, how much weight do they give to the tragic numbers of civilian casualties in Iraq (minimally estimated in the hundreds of thousands) and Afghanistan – the dead, the injured and the displaced? Does this harm matter at all to those promoting CSF? Have we reached the point where "do no harm," the fundamental principle underlying the psychology profession's ethics, has become "do no harm to Americans, unless it serves the interests of the state"? These issues deserve careful consideration, not evasion.

We should also keep in mind that every effort to support military operations is billed as "support for our troops." Whether it is the use of drones that kill from a continent away or tapping into a soldier's capacity to kill without a serious hangover, all are justified as for the brave troops. But the decisions to use military force are not made with the well-being of military personnel in mind, nor are they made by soldiers or even influenced by their desires. Master resilience trainers in the Army will not be urging soldiers to report violations of the rules of engagement by their superiors. They will not encourage soldiers to empathize with the humanity of the adults and children whom they may have killed as collateral damage, nor to use forms of restorative justice for apology and reconciliation that have a potential for deeper healing. And they will not encourage troops to build supportive ties with those critical of the wars they are fighting or the tactics required of them.

"We are proud to aid our military in defending and protecting our nation right now and we will be proud to help our soldiers and their families into the peace that will follow" (p. 86).

The blind embrace of overly simple notions of "patriotism" is inappropriate for professional psychologists dedicated to the promotion of universal human health and well-being. Ideological convictions based upon mythologies of American exceptionalism are no substitute for an examination of their verity. If it is not true that the US is defending its democratic foundations against ruthless adversaries, then the balance shifts dramatically toward averting the alleged harm of making healthier killers. By tying the CSF program to claims of the rightness of American military goals and actions, Seligman and Fowler are, unrecognized by them, requiring that an ethical evaluation include a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the justification for those policies.

Such an evaluation likely will find that the view of US military history as being primarily "defensive" in nature, rather than one of imperial control, is false. Rather, the US has a long history of intervening in other countries and overthrowing their governments when they act in ways considered to be against US national interests. Where does the "defending and protecting" reality lie in regard to the war in Iraq or the invasion of Grenada or the support for the Venezuelan coup or the bombing of Serbia or military aid to dictators around the world? Sadly, history (and scholars such as retired US Col. Andrew Bacevich, among many others) has shown how remarkably war-prone the United States has been in the nondefensive pursuit of its foreign policy and "national interest." The US is, in fact, at best only inconsistently a defender of democracy. Our empire-building behavior has caused great harm to our own safety and well-being – and to the principles our country purports to value. Meanwhile, the promise of peace following military victories has surely not materialized, while the case for the extent of US engagement in wars that were unneeded is extensive and compelling. It is not professionally responsible to ignore these facts.

Conclusion

In addition to our deep concerns about CSF, the APA's unrestrained enthusiasm for the program is especially worrisome for what it says about the APA, the largest organization of psychologists in the country, indeed the world. As we have demonstrated, there are many complex issues regarding the CSF program's empirical foundations, its promotion as a massive research project absent informed consent and the basis on which its psychologist developers justify the program. We would, therefore, expect a special issue of the American Psychologist, a journal edited by the APA's CEO Norman Anderson, to encourage an extended discussion of these matters.

In contrast, guest editors Seligman and Matthews have assembled 13 articles that include no independent evaluation of the empirical claims underlying CSF. They contain no unbiased discussion of ethical issues raised by the program. They do nothing to enlighten psychologists about ethical challenges posed by consulting and research work with the military. And they most certainly offer no encouragement for questioning the foreign policy context in which our soldiers are sent into combat, to face physical and moral hazards for which even the best program can never adequately prepare them. Unfortunately, the APA's uncritical promotion of the CSF program reveals much about the current moral challenges facing the psychology profession itself.

Psychology should maintain an ethical and critical stance distinct from and resistant to the lure of patriotic calls, which are part of each and every military undertaking – by all nations – regardless of the legitimacy of the cause. As psychologists, we should tread carefully when our efforts are solely directed toward sending soldiers back into combat rather than counseling them away from participating in misguided wars. In a similar way, assessing soldiers for their potential to withstand such horrors of war and building their resilience through teaching mental toughness skills are not necessarily healthy alternatives compared to affirming and assisting them in their expressions of doubt and dissent.

Ultimately, there is a paradox that should be foremost in the minds of professional psychologists. Helping people who have already been harmed by trauma is essential. But should we be involved in helping an institution prepare to place more people in harm's way without careful and ongoing questioning and review of the rationale for doing so? Whatever the needs for a military for national defense or the benefits of team building, loyalty, camaraderie and a positive outlook, militaries are, among other things, authoritarian institutions that kill, maim, deceive and actively reduce an individual's sense of independent agency.

The enormous toll that armed conflict exacts on soldiers, veterans, families and communities is a key reason why we should send young men and women to war only as an absolute last resort – and we should bring them home as quickly as possible, rather than sending them back again and again. If the CSF program is truly about enhancing well-being, then we should also question whether these soldiers might be helped more effectively by finding non-military ways to resolve the conflicts and concerns for which they carry such heavy burdens.

NOTE: This essay previously appeared on Truthout, Counterpunch, and ZNet.

Roy Eidelson, past president of PsySR, is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational and group conflict settings. He is associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com.

PsySR advisory board member Marc Pilisuk is professor emeritus, the University of California, and professor, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. He is the author (with Jennifer Achord Rountree) of "Who Benefits from Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System" (Greenwood/Praeger, 2008) and the co-editor (with Michael Nagler) of "Peace Movements Worldwide" (Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2011). Marc can be reached at mpilisuk@saybrook.edu.

Stephen Soldz, president of PsySR, is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He has conducted extensive research on psychosocial prevention and treatment interventions. He edits the Psyche, Science and Society blog and is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Stephen can be reached at ssoldz@bgsp.edu.

Why the U.S. Wants Military Commission Show Trials for 9/11 Suspects

PsySR Blog — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:35:22 +0000

Jeff Kaye

A number of commentators have replied to Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement today that five suspects in the 9/11 attacks, including alleged Al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will not be tried in civilian courts for the terrorist attacks almost ten years ago, but will be tried by President Obama’s revamped military commissions tribunals. What no commentator has stated thus far is the plain truth that the commissions’ main purpose is to produce government propaganda, not justice. These are meant to be show trials, part of an overarching plan of “exploitation” of prisoners, which includes, besides a misguided attempt by some to gain intelligence data, the inducement of false confessions and the recruitment of informants via torture. The aim behind all this is political: to mobilize the U.S. population for imperialist war adventures abroad, and political repression and economic austerity at home.

Holder claims he wanted civilian trials that would “prove the defendants’ guilt while adhering to the bedrock traditions and values of our laws.” The Attorney General blamed Congress for passing restrictions on bringing Guantanamo prisoners to the United States for making civilian trials inside the United States impossible. Marcy Wheeler has noted that the Congressional restrictions related to the Department of Defense, not the Department of Justice, and there is plenty of reason to believe the Obama administration could have pressed politicians on this issue, but chose not to. (Others see it differently.)

Human rights organizations have responded with dismay, if not outrage. Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorneys have been active in the legal defense of a number of Guantanamo prisoners, stated, “The announcement underscores the fact that decisions about whether to try detainees in federal court or by military commission are purely political. The decision is clearly driven not by the nature of the alleged offense, or where and when it was committed, but by the unpopularity of the detainee and the political culture in Washington.” CCR also compared the precedent-setting behavior to “Egypt’s apparent plans to use military trials for protesters at Tahir Square.”

Human Rights First spokesperson Daphne Eviatar said, “Decisions on where to prosecute suspected terrorists should be made based on careful legal analysis, not on politics. This purely political decision risks making a second-class justice system a permanent feature U.S. national security policy – a mistake that flies in the face of core American values and would undermine U.S. standing around the world.”

Most organizations stressed the fact that this was an about-face for the Obama administration. Indeed, one of the oldest human rights organizations in the United States, Human Rights Watch, called the decision a “blow to justice.” HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said, “The military commissions system is flawed beyond repair. By resurrecting this failed Bush administration idea, President Obama is backtracking dangerously on his reform agenda.”

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers statement concentrated on the faults of the military commissions themselves, headlining their press release, “At Guantanamo, “Detainees Are Presumed Guilty”:

“Despite some cosmetic changes since the Bush-era commissions, the commission rules still permit the government to introduce secret evidence, hearsay and statements obtained through coercion,” said the association’s Executive Director, Norman Reimer. “NACDL maintains that the rules and procedures for these commission trials raise serious questions about the government’s commitment to constitutional principles upon which our country was founded. “

Anthony Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU, echoed this today when he called the military commissions “rife with constitutional and procedural problems,” noting the outstanding cases “are sure to be subject to continuous legal challenges and delays, and their outcomes will not be seen as legitimate.”

The Origins of the Military Commissions

CCR, HRF, HRW, and NACDL are all correct, so far as they go. It is evident to many observers that only peculiar military exigency, backed by facts, could allow for military tribunals, as the Supreme Court’s 2006 Hamden decision made clear. It is a matter of historical record that the Bush-era military commissions policy, adopted by President Barack Obama, was initially pushed by former CIA employees William Barr and David Addington, with the encouragement of former Vice President Dick Cheney, along with other “War Council” participants John Yoo, Defense Department counsel under Donald Rumsfeld, William Haynes, and Bush lawyers Alberto Gonzales and Timothy Flanigan.

At the same time the military commissions proposal was initiated, via a military order by Bush, the Bush administration was stripping detainees of Geneva Conventions protections, as well as implementing a program of torture, with Haynes soliciting the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) as early as December 2001 for techniques used in the “exploitation” of prisoners.

In a recent article by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, it was shown that the JPRA program that was “reverse-engineered” was Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) course SV-91, “Special Survival for Special Mission Units,” whose mission was to train U.S. military and intelligence personnel to withstand torture meant to “exploit” them for enemy purposes. Those purposes went far beyond the gathering of intelligence. As then-SERE psychologist Bruce Jessen, who was later to work as a contract psychologist and interrogator for the CIA beginning in 2002, noted in notes for SV-91 written in 1989:

“From the moment you are detained (if some kind of exploitation is your Detainer’s goal) everything your Detainer does will be contrived to bring about these factors: CONTROL, DEPENDENCY, COMPLIANCE AND COOPERATION,” Jessen wrote. “Your detainer will work to take away your sense of control. This will be done mostly by removing external control (i.e., sleep, food, communication, personal routines etc. )…Your detainer wants you to feel ‘EVERYTHING’ is dependent on him, from the smallest detail, (food, sleep, human interaction), to your release or your very life … Your detainer wants you to comply with everything he wishes. He will attempt to make everything from personal comfort to your release unavoidably connected to compliance in your mind.”

Jessen wrote that cooperation is the “end goal” of the detainer, who wants the detainee “to see that [the detainer] has ‘total’ control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.).”

A former colleague of Dr. Jessen, and along with him a founder of the SV-91 SERE class, former Captain Michael Kearns told Leopold and Kaye:

“What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”

The Stalinist governments of the USSR and East Europe used to make a great practice of show trials, one of the most famous being the trial of Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty. Arthur Koestler’s famous book Darkness at Noon is about the show trial and confession of an “old Bolshevik” under Stalin’s regime. Such show trials still occur in many parts of the world, from China and Vietnam, to Indonesia, Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and the list could go on and on.

That list now includes the United States, where most recently, former child prisoner Omar Khadr was tried in a military commission, pleading guilty with a coerced confession, after years of torture and imprisonment in solitary confinement, his penalty phase of the military tribunal amounting to a show trial, complete with psychiatric “expert” testimony about Khadr’s supposed propensity for “terrorism.” The result? A 40-year sentence for the young man who never spent a free day as an adult, part of a staged deal with the U.S. military prosecutors, who presumably will release Khadr to Canadian authorities in a year or so, where he will continue to be imprisoned, pending any appeals there. But the penalty “trial” got a lot of press, and the U.S. was able to garner a propaganda “victory.”

Without Accountability, Whither America?

The United States is only a small step away from some kind of dictatorship. This may sound like hyperbole to some, but the lack of a clear and strong opposition to military and intelligence community institutional pressures has driven the Obama administration to the right even of the Bush administration on matters of secrecy and executive power. Proposals for “terrorist” or “national security” courts continue to be seriously considered, while the public uproar over the use of torture on prisoners has died down ever since Barack Obama told his Democratic Party followers not to “look back,” and made clear that accountability for war crimes would not happen on his watch. Meanwhile, tremendous inroads are made on privacy rights, while surveillance of private citizens, strip searches at airports, seizures of personal computers, and gathering of personal data from emails and phone calls are now everyday occurrences.

As a result, Obama has been the active creature of militarist forces within the government, and on point after point, has given way to lobbying by the military and intelligence establishments, themselves beholden to a power elite that holds the economic reins of the country, from oil to finance, in their hands. Obama’s role is most evident in his recent military actions against Libya.

The courts, too, have stepped back from their gesture towards judicial independence under Bush, with the Supreme Court ruling today that it would not hear three Guantánamo detainee cases, appeals on rejected habeas reviews regarding Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad Al Odah, Ghaleb Nassar Al-Bihani and Adham Mohammed Ali Awad. While the cases concerned issues surrounding use of hearsay, other evidentiary standards, the role of international law, and the right to a meaningful challenge to detention, the Court gave no explanation for denial of cert. Courthouse News noted, by the way, that new Justice Elena Kagan “does not appear to have recused herself from consideration of two of the cases because of her prior work as U.S. Solicitor General.”

Meanwhile, some anti-torture activists are trying to pursue accountability the best they can, going after the licensure status of mental health professionals who participated in the Bush torture regime. Complaints against former Guantanamo Chief Psychologist Larry James and CIA contract interrogator James Mitchell have not gotten very far, with their cases dismissed.

Another case against former Major John Leso, a psychologist working for the DoD Behavioral Science Consultation Team at Guantanamo, who in 2002 helped write an interrogation protocol that relied in part on SERE “reverse-engineered” torture techniques, was also dismissed, but according to Raw Story, this Tuesday the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) will ask the New York Supreme Court to reconsider the decision of the New York State Office of Professional Discipline (OPD) not to investigate the misconduct complaint against Leso.

The issue of the military commissions must be considered in the context of its embedded existence as part of a full-scale exploitation plan upon prisoners, implemented as part of a war policy with strong imperialist ambitions, initiated by the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. The agitation for such a war preceded 9/11. The terrorist attack set lose this militarist policy, whose appurtenances — military tribunals, exploitation of prisoners, psychological warfare, secret prisons, false confessions, experimental torture programs, and unchecked executive power — threaten to end the semblance of democracy in the United States once and for all.

PsySR member Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist who lives in Northern California. He has been  blogging at Daily Kos since May 2005, and maintains a personal blog,  Invictus. This essay originally appeared on Firedoglake. Jeff can be contacted at jeffkaye@sbcglobal.net.

Spend Money on Negotiation and Development — Avoid More War: Open Letter to Congress

PsySR Blog — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:42:05 +0000

Anne Anderson

As a member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), an international organization dedicated to bringing psychology to the service of peace and social justice, I am most concerned about the recent suggestions to “zero-out” the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and cut State Department Funds. These agencies are on the front lines of providing for our national security through their efforts through negotiations to promote the interests of the United States of America, manage conflict non-violently, watch for future threats, and build more peaceful and open societies that will be good for democracy, economic development, and the well-being of their peoples.

In PsySR’s recent message on supporting democratic change in the Middle East (February 1, 2011), the organization noted that:

“From events like these [in Egypt] – driven by the collective power and pent up frustrations of a long-suffering citizenry – emerge outcomes that are often tenuous and unexpected. Sudden change brings with it both opportunities and dangers. Popular revolts can lead to more just and democratic societies. However, history shows that the dethroning of tyrants does not guarantee a quick transformation to democratic rule, and sometimes instead sets the stage for new autocracies. Lasting democratic progress depends upon continued broad participation, and the relationships and structures that encourage it.” [emphasis added].

Currently, the United States of America is spending only about 1% of its annual budget providing resources to our Foreign Service Officers at the State Department and the US Agency for International Development—the very folks who have the professional expertise to help struggling countries develop broad democratic participation and the civic relationships and structures, both governmental and non-governmental structures (like functioning political parties) that encourage it. These are the people who are trained to provide careful oversight of our foreign assistance funds, who know how to run free and fair elections, who can help new democracies create independent judiciaries, build educational capacity, and increase economic development, based on a specific country’s needs as identified by that country.

Building more peaceful and open societies that are stable, more educated and more able to care for their people’s needs is a critical aspect of our entire national security strategy, and so should be considered as an essential component of our national security budget. After all, isn’t it cheaper to avoid wars, to manage conflicts peacefully, to be able to have both our soldiers and civilians stand down and rest and have more come home, whole in body and mind?

I hope that members of Psychologists for Social Responsibility will join me in calling on Congress to consider the long-term consequences of short-term cuts that are being proposed for the State Department and USAID. When our Foreign Service Officers are under-resourced, under-staffed, over-stretched, they have grave difficulties in handling the major responsibilities they are being expected to fulfill—like stepping into the breach as our soldiers come home from Iraq and Afghanistan to help those war-torn countries with the transition to post-war political, economic community interactions and functions.

It is in our national security interest to fully fund the USAID and the State Department and support their current efforts to improve the functioning and accountability in foreign assistance (see www.foreignassistance.gov for the Foreign Assistance Dashboard). USAID needs more staff to meet their increased responsibilities, and they need to be fully resourced so that they can be even more effective in the field. USAID is most effective when our Foreign Service Officers can work in full partnership with civic leaders in-country who lead the development process and identify the needs that resources from the United States can provide, whether they come in the form of technical assistance through NGOs, financial backing for projects, or coordination of international resources.

Current policy has USAID officers serving as part of Provincial Response Teams, a tactic fraught with problems for the long term. However, the civilian Foreign Service Officers that are part of the Provincial Response Teams meet all the same challenges that our soldiers do, and are often in the field for longer tours of duty and sent out again on back-to-back tours with very little rest time in between. The Agency is woefully understaffed for the responsibilities it carries and extended tours in stressful conditions are wearing people out.

I very much hope that Congress will rethink the penny-wise, pound-foolish cuts they are proposing to USAID and State budgets, and I hope that the administration will rethink their deployment tactics. It is time to support critical efforts of Foreign Service Officers with an acknowledgement of the part they play in promoting our national security through implementation of long-term development strategies and full funding of their agencies.

Anne Anderson, MSW
anneandersonlicsw@earthlink.net

PsySR member Anne Anderson, LICSW, is a social worker in private practice with the Washington Therapy Guild in Washington, DC. She served as PsySR’s Coordinator from 1984-2006. She can be reached at anneandersonlicsw@earthlink.net.

12 Most Frustrating Moments of “Waiting for Superman”

PsySR Blog — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:16:35 +0000

Josh Eidelson

- The way Davis Guggenheim used the kids’ stories. Each of the kids was sympathetic, and they dramatized the deep inequality of opportunity in America. But neither the kids nor their parents got much chance to talk about what they thought would make their school better or worse. Instead we got Guggenheim intoning that if this girl didn’t get into a charter school, her life would basically be hopeless. If Guggenheim believes that these kids are suffering because too many of their teachers should be fired but won’t be, why not let the kids say so? If he believes these kids are suffering because teachers or administrators have low expectations for them, why not let the kids say that? And if the kids instead talked about classes that were too big, or teachers that were overwhelmed or undertrained, or being hungry in class, that would have been interesting too.

- Something that sounded like Darth Vader’s Imperial March played over slow motion shots of Democrats appearing with members of teachers’ unions. This was especially agitating watching the movie as the Governor of Wisconsin is trying to permanently eliminate teachers’ bargaining rights in the name of closing a deficit he created with corporate tax cuts.

- The repeated montages of lots of US presidents signing bills and talking about education, implying that nothing of significance has changed in the past several decades in US education. Especially galling: the lack of any mention of school integration, which was kind of a big deal (no mention either of how schools have been becoming more segregated, or how that affects kids’ learning). Especially awkward: Tee-ing up No Child Left Behind with some shpiel about how it looked like people were “reaching across the partisan blah blah blah” and then…never mentioning it again. Does Davis Guggenheim think NCLB was a good idea or a bad idea? Not a rhetorical question.

This undifferentiated montage of politicians that didn’t fix education reminded me of the biggest omission in An Inconvenient Truth: What about the eight years that Al Gore was Vice President of the United States?

- The off-hand mention that only one out of five charter schools gets really good results. Why does Guggenheim think this is? The other ones aren’t firing enough teachers? They’re located too close to non-charter schools and mediocrity just rubs off on them? Again, not a rhetorical question.

- The repeated implication that education funding just isn’t that important. This is especially aggravating given that the film came out during a period of nationwide teacher layoffs. Related: Jeffrey Canada gives a shout-out for wanting to prepare kids for success from the time their babies, but you wouldn’t know from watching this movie that there are programs out there like Head Start and public preschool, or that there are big fights over funding them. (Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick’s book The American Dream and Public Schools showed some of the problems with funding stats like Guggenheim’s, including how those stats ignore special education).

- The too-cute moment when Guggenheim says something like “Teachers should just be putting knowledge in students’ brains, but instead…” and then says non-uniform local and state educational standards get in the way. I’m not trying to be obtuse, but the cartoon showing lots of lines bouncing across a map and numbers falling out of kids brains did not help me understand how Guggenheim thinks the process of putting knowledge in kids heads is just being disrupted by disparities in standards. Related: What does he think about NCLB? Also, if standards were all that gets in the way of teachers putting knowledge in kids heads, how is it the teachers’ fault?

- Speaking of which, the moment when he says that Michelle Rhee “solved the most intractable problem in public education” by proposing that teachers give up job security for higher pay. Because “the greatest challenge in education” is how to fire more teachers.

- Then we hear that “the Union was so threatened by Rhee’s proposal, it didn’t even let the members vote on it.” Does Guggenheim believe that union democracy requires that the members hold a vote every time management makes them an offer? Did he also want Adrian Fenty’s constituents to vote every time the union made an offer back? Guggenheim could have made an argument that the union leadership, or the negotiating committee, was out of step with what the members wanted. But to do that, he would have needed to talk to the members.

(Which brings us to the most frustrating moments missing from the movie…)

- Guggenheim didn’t talk to any of the current members. In DC, or anywhere else. He didn’t talk to any current teachers that aren’t administrators (the closest thing was clips from a movie he made ten years ago showing that teaching is really hard). Instead, we got journalists and administrators talking about teachers, and cartoons. (He talked to kids, but didn’t really ask them about their teachers either) And we got Jonathan Alter telling us that teachers are great but their unions are “a menace.” Another non-rhetorical question: Does Guggenheim think that most teachers support the changes he wants to see in their working conditions? If so, why not interview some of them? If not, why not come out and say that teachers are wrong rather than just bashing unions?

Policies don’t just appear out of thin air. Most rules governing work are either there because workers wanted them or management wanted them. If Guggenheim really believes that union leaders have gotten rules in place members don’t support, show us that. If he thinks the rules in place reflect what the majority of teachers want, let us hear from them. Tell us why they’re wrong. Then either tell us teaching jobs are too good overall, or that we should make them better in some ways in exchange for coming after their job security.

- Also not heard from regarding the job security that represents “the most intractable problem in public education”: those dread union leaders. Randi Weingarten is given the chance to explain why teachers’ unions started way back when, and to criticize Michelle Rhee’s style a little, but a viewer would come away with no idea what she has to say about job security in today’s schools, or longer school days, or standards, or teacher evaluations, or tracking, or having high expectations for kids. You would think, having gotten this menacing woman on camera, Guggenheim would want to put her on the spot Michael Moore-style and expose the flaws in her arguments. Either he didn’t try, or he did try and it must not have gone very well for him. It’s hard to imagine that Guggenheim had great footage of himself stumping the head of a 1.5 million member teacher’s union and he cut it out to make room for more cartoons.

- Absolutely no mention of successful unionized charter schools, like the Green Dot schools.

- Also would have liked to hear from some of the academics and experts out there engaging with how factors like poverty, integration, health, teacher training, and funding impact education. It’s not too much to expect a documentarian to try talking to people he disagrees with about the things he cares about (check out Inside Job). Were none of the advocates and academics behind the Broader, Bolder platform available? Instead, Guggenheim makes the outrageous implication that people who say we should be attacking poverty to improve education don’t believe in poor kids.

(Quotes are from memory. Diane Ravitch’s more comprehensive take on the movie here).

PsySR member Josh Eidelson has worked as a union organizer since receiving his BA and MA degrees from Yale. He’s written about politics as a contributor to Campus Progress, a columnist for the Yale Daily News, and a research fellow for Talking Points Media. He lives in Philadelphia and can be reached at jeidelson@gmail.com This essay orginally appeared on his blog Little Wild Bouquet.

PsySR Calls on U.S. to Support Democratic Change

PsySR Blog — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:27:33 +0000

In light of unfolding events in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and beyond, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) has issued the statement below calling on leaders of the United States to stand firmly in support of democratic change. This statement is also available on the PsySR website.

PsySR Calls on U.S. to Support Democratic Change in the Middle East

The rapidly unfolding events in Egypt and Tunisia have stunned and engaged the world. The governments of these countries have long been criticized for their widespread human rights violations, including restrictions on freedom of expression and association, the abuse of state of emergency powers, the imprisonment of dissidents, the use of torture, and the persecution of journalists and human rights defenders. But today we are witnesses to the extraordinary power manifest when ordinary people join together and challenge undemocratic rulers, expressing the seemingly timeless human aspiration to be free of tyranny, oppression, and exploitation.

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) is an international organization dedicated to bringing psychology to the service of peace and social justice. We are keenly aware of the importance that people place on the right to speak up for the safety and well-being of their families and themselves, and we recognize the importance of the images they hold about the fairness of their governments. From psychological studies of mass violence, we also know that bystanders who do not protest brutality serve, in effect, to legitimize it and to empower the aggressors. In this light, the mass protests, military tanks, and clashes between civilians and government forces are a potent reminder that calls for law and order do not always drown out a people’s cry for justice – and for change. The loss of life in these situations is tragic, as is the perpetuation of corrupt regimes that rely daily on violence and intimidation to maintain control.

From events like these – driven by the collective power and pent up frustrations of a long-suffering citizenry – emerge outcomes that are often tenuous and unexpected. Sudden change brings with it both opportunities and dangers. Popular revolts can lead to more just and democratic societies. However, history shows that the dethroning of tyrants does not guarantee a quick transformation to democratic rule, and sometimes instead sets the stage for new autocracies. Lasting democratic progress depends upon continued broad participation, and the relationships and structures that encourage it.

Therefore, amid the turmoil and uncertainties, PsySR affirms its unwavering support for movements and leaders that fully embrace a commitment to the key principles reflected in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We recognize that peace and stability are far more valuable when accompanied by individual rights and freedoms, and by justice for all segments of society.

Speaking in Cairo in June 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama explained:

“I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.”

At this critical time, PsySR calls upon the United States government to carefully consider the effects of any contradiction between word and deed. The Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and Egypt under Mubarak are two of several repressive governments that have received U.S. financial and military support for decades – support that has enabled them to suppress their own people. Current events offer the U.S. an opportunity to alter its image as a too frequent defender of authoritarian tyrants. In the days and weeks ahead, the actions of the United States will influence the consciousness, the perceptions and the hopes of people throughout the world. We therefore encourage support for the democratic aspirations of people in the Middle East to challenge undemocratic governments and to choose their own leaders.

February 1, 2011

Open Letter: The Solitary Confinement of PFC Bradley Manning

PsySR Blog — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 02:47:07 +0000

Psychologists for Social Responsibility is deeply concerned about the pretrial detention conditions of alleged Wikileaks source PFC Bradley Manning, including solitary confinement for over five months, a forced lack of exercise, and possible sleep deprivation. It has been reported by his attorney and a visitor that Manning’s mental health is suffering greatly from his treatment.

As a response, PsySR has issued the Open Letter below to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressing our concerns about this misuse of solitary confinement and alerting him to the psychological literature on its harmful effects. It has been sent to the Secretary and PsySR is now releasing it publicly, The text of the letter and a PDF version are also available on PsySR’s website at www.psysr.org/gates-manning-letter.

PsySR Open Letter on PFC Bradley Manning’s Solitary Confinement

January 3, 2011

The Honorable Robert M. Gates
Secretary
100 Defense Pentagon
Washington, DC 20301

Dear Mr. Secretary:

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) is deeply concerned about the conditions under which PFC Bradley Manning is being held at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia. It has been reported and verified by his attorney that PFC Manning has been held in solitary confinement since July of 2010. He reportedly is held in his cell for approximately 23 hours a day, a cell approximately six feet wide and twelve feet in length, with a bed, a drinking fountain, and a toilet. For no discernable reason other than punishment, he is forbidden from exercising in his cell and is provided minimal access to exercise outside his cell. Further, despite having virtually nothing to do, he is forbidden to sleep during the day and often has his sleep at night disrupted.

As an organization of psychologists and other mental health professionals, PsySR is aware that solitary confinement can have severely deleterious effects on the psychological well-being of those subjected to it. We therefore call for a revision in the conditions of PFC Manning’s incarceration while he awaits trial, based on the exhaustive documentation and research that have determined that solitary confinement is, at the very least, a form of cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment in violation of U.S. law.

In the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court case Medley, Petitioner, 134 U.S. 1690 (1890), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller wrote, “A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.” Scientific investigations since 1890 have confirmed in troubling detail the irreversible physiological changes in brain functioning from the trauma of solitary confinement.

As expressed by Dr. Craig Haney, a psychologist and expert in the assessment of institutional environments, “Empirical research on solitary and supermax-like confinement has consistently and unequivocally documented the harmful consequences of living in these kinds of environments . . . Evidence of these negative psychological effects comes from personal accounts, descriptive studies, and systematic research on solitary and supermax-type confinement, conducted over a period of four decades, by researchers from several different continents who had diverse backgrounds and a wide range of professional expertise… [D]irect studies of prison isolation have documented an extremely broad range of harmful psychological reactions. These effects include increases in the following potentially damaging symptoms and problematic behaviors: negative attitudes and affect, insomnia, anxiety, panic, withdrawal, hypersensitivity, ruminations, cognitive dysfunction, hallucinations, loss of control, irritability, aggression, and rage, paranoia, hopelessness, lethargy, depression, a sense of impending emotional breakdown, self-mutilation, and suicidal ideation and behavior” (pp. 130-131, references removed).

Dr. Haney concludes, “To summarize, there is not a single published study of solitary or supermax-like confinement in which non-voluntary confinement lasting for longer than 10 days where participants were unable to terminate their isolation at will that failed to result in negative psychological effects” (p. 132).

We are aware that prison spokesperson First Lieutenant Brian Villiard has told AFP that Manning is considered a “maximum confinement detainee,” as he is considered a national security risk. But no such putative risk can justify keeping someone not convicted of a crime in conditions likely to cause serious harm to his mental health. Further, history suggests that solitary confinement, rather than being a rational response to a risk, is more often used as a punishment for someone who is considered to be a member of a despised or “dangerous” group. In any case, PFC Manning has not been convicted of a crime and, under our system of justice, is at this point presumed to be innocent.

The conditions of isolation to which PFC Manning, as well as many other U.S. prisoners are subjected, are sufficiently harsh as to have aroused international concern. The most recent report of the UN Committee against Torture included in its Conclusions and Recommendations for the United States the following article 36:

“The Committee remains concerned about the extremely harsh regime imposed on detainees in “supermaximum prisons”. The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to, the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (art. 16).

The State party should review the regime imposed on detainees in “supermaximum prisons”, in particular the practice of prolonged isolation.” (Emphasis in original.)

In addition to the needless brutality of the conditions to which PFC Manning is being subjected, PsySR is concerned that the coercive nature of these conditions — along with their serious psychological effects such as depression, paranoia, or hopelessness — may undermine his ability to meaningfully cooperate with his defense, undermining his right to a fair trial. Coercive conditions of detention also increase the likelihood of the prisoner “cooperating” in order to improve those circumstances, even to the extent of giving false testimony. Thus, such harsh conditions are counter to the interests of justice.

Given the nature and effects of the solitary confinement to which PFC Manning is being subjected, Mr. Secretary, Psychologists for Social Responsibility calls upon you to rectify the inhumane, harmful, and counterproductive treatment of PFC Bradley Manning immediately.

Sincerely,

Trudy Bond, Ph.D.
Psychologists for Social Responsibility Steering Committee

Stephen Soldz, Ph.D.
President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility

For the Psychologists for Social Responsibility Steering Committee

A Commitment to Address Poverty and Inequality

PsySR Blog — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 02:22:21 +0000

Psychologists for Social Responsibility has issued the following statement, developed by PsySR’s Poverty and Inequality Project, in an effort to direct greater attention to these urgent issues from psychologists, other mental health professionals, policymakers, and the general public.

Poverty is the single greatest threat to individual human development and it simultaneously creates profound social disruption in the United States and around the world. Unless institutions and citizens take steps now to reduce and prevent poverty—and the growing inequality that deepens and widens its damaging repercussions—we will face a nightmarish future that can be measured in untold numbers of destroyed lives, communities, and institutions.

Poverty and inequality are responsible for adults often being too stressed to parent well; inadequate access to nourishing food, clean water, and sanitation; dilapidated housing, homelessness, and dangerous communities; schools unable to educate children to read, write, and think for themselves; conflict, crime, and violence; few work opportunities and low pay for jobs that do exist; daily struggles to manage personal, family, and financial chaos; and risks for premature birth and early death. All of these consequences contribute to the developmental damage that results from limited access to the basic resources that nurture us. Ultimately, poverty and inequality engender hopelessness, helplessness, and misery, and they tear at the social fabric of families and communities.

For children who grow up in poverty, risks for adverse outcomes far outweigh those experienced by children in more affluent families. Children of low income families are at higher risk for premature death; injuries from accidents; abuse and neglect; the witnessing of violence; lower scores on developmental tests; more behavioral problems; lower academic functioning; incapacitating illnesses; and psychological disorders. Research indicates that poverty actually harms children’s developing brains, creating potentially lifelong impairments.

Powerful systemic factors frequently hamper movement out of poverty, so the adverse effects of an impoverished childhood often carry into adulthood. Adults who were poor as children are more likely to experience or engage in the following: continuing poverty; difficulty finding and keeping adequately paying work; relationship problems; violence and criminal acts; single motherhood; use of illicit substances; and health problems. Many who plunge into poverty as adults also experience increased stressors that can be a significant blow to psychological and socioeconomic functioning. These numbers are likely to increase given the life-harming vicissitudes of economic recession, climate change, large-scale conflicts, and other severe risks to human stability and safety.

Poverty now afflicts nearly half of the world’s population, including one billion children. In the United States, over 43 million people live in poverty, while tens of millions more live with low incomes that create similar problems. Children, women, and minorities of color face a disproportionate burden. According to a 2010 report from the Census Bureau, in the U.S. children constitute 24% of the population but comprise about 34% of the nation’s poor; and 26% of African-Americans, 25% of Hispanics, and 12% of Asian Americans live in poverty, compared to 9% of Whites. This racial gap has remained remarkably stable since the 1970s and shows no sign of narrowing.

The conditions of poverty and growing inequality between the rich and poor are associated with a broad range of local and global problems with rippling effects, including wars, terrorism, environmental degradation that contributes to droughts and famines, the abuse of women, crime, school failure, delinquency, health problems, and homelessness. These problems affect most of us either directly or indirectly, such as through the taxes we pay to support our military, legal, educational, and healthcare systems. Poverty, then, harms the poor most—but it is everyone’s problem and demands that all of us attend to its solutions.

False beliefs about poverty that blame the poor are tragic hallmarks of a society doing little or nothing to help the impoverished. Such misperceptions about poverty’s causes and effects allow too many institutions and individuals to ignore its consequences. In fact, research shows that how we structure our economies and business practices—including low wages, lack of workers’ benefits, and insufficient community resources—are significant contributors to poverty. Moreover, government programs to help the poor don’t enable most of them to escape the structural dynamics that limit their access to much-needed resources.

Beyond the individual human toll, poverty’s costs to society are staggering. A 2007 study estimated the U.S. spends $500 billion a year, or 4% of GDP, to counter poverty’s direct and indirect effects on the nation’s citizens. Meanwhile, some countries also pay the price for poverty and inequality through conflicts and wars over scarce resources that exacerbate poverty; through environmental degradation as the poor manufacture goods for the wealthy or seek to eke out a living but in so doing destroy the land and water that support them; and through inordinate human suffering, including thirst, starvation, and the perils of refugee status.

Clearly, the costs of poverty and inequality to society are enormous. Yet studies invariably suggest that ending poverty costs far less than we think. One 2006 study estimated the cost to alleviate poverty in the U.S. at about $400 billion, and such an investment would return that amount nearly four-fold through reduced costs in social services and other domains. The U.N. Millennium Project, backed by leading scientists and practitioners from many fields, estimated that by 2015 the cost to reduce poverty by half in developing nations would be under $200 billion, requiring a contribution of only 50 cents from every $100 of income in rich-world countries. Other estimates suggest that less than 1% of the GNP would eliminate child poverty in the U.S. and that in European countries transferring 1% to 4% of wealthier individuals’ incomes to the poor would eliminate their citizens’ poverty.

Apart from any financial analysis, it is important to recognize that addressing poverty is in everyone’s interest. Research shows that inequality in society is harmful to all citizens. More unequal societies have higher rates of most social problems, including violent crime, poor health, mental illness, low educational attainment, teen births, and lack of social mobility. This pattern holds for the U.S. as well—states with greater inequality tend to have higher levels of these same social ills. Such findings highlight an under-appreciated reality: reducing poverty and inequality not only benefits the poor. It also leads to a better life for those who are relatively well off today.

Beyond all of the considerations described above, there is the simple, powerful moral imperative that we, as a society, should do all we can to help those that poverty and inequality harm. Research and practice point to a variety of means to thwart poverty and inequality and their damaging effects on so many people around the world:

Implement policies that promote high-quality education for all and full employment at decent and fair wages, both of which will provide equal access to and the just distribution of resources needed to live healthy lives.

Facilitate economic growth in ways that, instead of accruing the most benefits to corporations and wealthy citizens, focus on assistance to bring the most needy into the socioeconomic fold.

Work with governments, NGOs, and communities to meet the basic physical and psychosocial needs of citizens living in poverty more effectively, more consistently, and more quickly.

Provide early childhood intervention with a strong parent-support component.

Re-envision justice services for the poor, who are more likely to be caught in the snare of police actions because of poverty’s association with criminal behavior, profiling, and stereotyped assumptions.

Focus on the needs of women and people of color, who often bear the largest brunt of poverty’s harm as they struggle to care for their children, homes, and communities.

Address other essentials that people living in poverty need, including improved access to decent housing and transportation, quality child-care services, and safer communities.

Pursue accountability and justice in response to abuses linked to exploitation of the poor and disadvantaged.

These and other strategies have been shown to be effective in dismantling the conditions that enable poverty and inequality to persist in a world that can better distribute its resources. Meaningful progress also requires that we fully value and respect the dreams and lived experiences of those too often relegated to positions of powerlessness. It is therefore crucial that the poor themselves have a significant voice in policy deliberations, and that they be a vital part of any coalition working for change.

Ultimately, as part of this coalition, mental health professionals, social scientists, activists, and leaders of our myriad institutions must make the elimination of poverty an urgent priority. Anything less will enable poverty’s devastation to directly endanger and diminish the lives of too many millions of our fellow human beings and to indirectly harm all of us, and the world we live in, for generations to come.

September 29, 2010

Wake Up Call

PsySR Blog — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 02:19:22 +0000

Gloria Gordon

Jon Stewart broke the news recently that the Daily Show will throw a “Rally to Restore Sanity” on Saturday, October 30th on the Washington Mall. He exhorted viewers to come and “Take It Down A Notch For America.” Going beyond a parody of the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor Rally in August, Stewart builds on the “sanity” theme—and invites all of us folks who haven’t been out there yelling stupidities to show up. “Think of our event as Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement.” Stewart’s rally will meet a dueling “March to Keep Fear Alive,” led by his Comedy Central ally Stephen Colbert.

Hearing of the Stewart-Colbert plans is the tonic I’ve needed ever since watching the video of an address by Chris Hedges at the annual convention of Veterans for Peace (VFP) in August. Hedges, a former war correspondent, reviewed recent and current U.S. political and economic behavior and drew a chilling picture of what he sees for the future—a dark-age period that it is too late to prevent.

Hedges talk was a wake-up call for me. His observations fit what I have been noticing, but I had not connected the dots to face the full grip that corporate America has on our status as a democracy. At the same time, neither I nor my friends in the VFP audience agree with his opinion that it is too late for citizen action to turn things around.

Here are some of Hedges’ themes: national economic collapse while profiteers walk off with millions; imperial wars we can no longer afford; environmental devastation; corporate media dominated by half a dozen companies; armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington; privatization of government services; and principles of globalization that sacrifice working conditions on the altar of free trade, promoting hunger, child labor and pollution. He states that “we live in a culture of junk politics” that personalizes issues rather than clarifying them, that “eschews real debate for fake issues” and fosters citizen inactivity.

“The paradigm of power has altered,” Hedges concludes, “the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant.” He says we have gone through a coup d’etat in slow motion. “They won; we lost.” He thinks that perhaps we can weather the coming collapse if we remain globally concerned while building “self-contained structures,” small physical enclaves away from cities—places where people can live in the future for extended periods much as monks in the Medieval years, preserving culture against the barbaric onslaught (my sense of his remarks).

While not believing that this disastrous future is inevitable, I am now reading one of Hedges’ key source books and recommend it highly: Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism by the prominent political theorist Sheldon Wolin. The author explains, in a style accessible to a general audience, that the U.S. is moving in a totalitarian direction, although not the kind that occurred in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Soviet Russia.

In those cases the political system controlled the economy. In our case corporate business is increasingly controlling our political process, degrading it to a “managed democracy” where the citizenry is manipulated to support the interests of corporate America. Because of the reversal in comparison with earlier versions of totalitarianism, Wolin calls it “inverted.” He adds the element of U.S. military imperialism to the basic corporate agenda.

Wolin does not say it is too late. Rather he lists major changes our country must make to veer off the current road to totalitarianism.

As someone whose grasp of democracy was shaped by the activist political climate of the Great Depression and the New Deal, I am not ready to throw in the towel. But in reality this is a formidable challenge for us as citizens and leaders. Courageous study and collaborative action at the grassroots level will be required for our response to succeed.

Independent-minded psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and others with expertise in human thinking, emotion and behavior will be needed to help shape effective responses to corporate manipulation causing fear and loss of morale—via advertising, political spin and distraction.

Strange to say, I am somehow relieved to encounter the terrifying reality that there is an overarching disease (“the fix is in”) that accounts for the great many separate crises we face. If we can deal with this reality, we have a greater chance to make a difference. We can move beyond strategies where we scurry to follow the trail that is laid down by each separate issue.

What I like about the “Rally to Restore Sanity” is that it has a chance to address the whole scary situation, and do it in a way that lets us laugh. We’re going to need those laughs.

PsySR member Gloria Gordon is a psychologist who lives in St. Louis, MO. Now retired from research and teaching, she trains and supervises support group peer leaders, and also participates in the peace movement. Gloria can be contacted at gordon.gc@gmail.com.

Mental Health in Haiti

PsySR Blog — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 02:17:18 +0000

Yosef Brody

Even before the earthquake of January 12th — before the physical, psychological, and social catastrophe that killed as many people as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki— the psychosocial state of Haiti was extremely fragile. The living ghosts of slavery, terror and exploitation by foreign and domestic powers, political violence in the streets, destructive hurricanes, lack of social infrastructure, near famine conditions…the majority of the Haitian people have been dealing with chronic, elevated life stress for many years. Haitians have undergone a particularly traumatic social history, a collective experience lived out over the course of centuries.

Today, the basics of everyday life are either hard to come by or are simply not available: shelter, food, school, doctors, and clean water cannot be taken for granted. The stress that comes with living under these conditions—traumatic events aside—increases the likelihood that a human being will lose her ability to function as effectively as possible. When a massive disaster such as the 2010 earthquake, which had both natural and man-made causes, is added in to the mix, psychological problems spike. Mental health care in Port-au-Prince today is practically non-existent, a fact that has dire implications not only for current suffering, but one that also increases the probability that psychological problems will be passed down to future generations.

Living in abject poverty everyday and every night tends to take a toll on one’s psychological functioning. According to the UN, 55% of the country lives on less than $1.25/day and 58% of the population is undernourished. When new traumatic experience occurs in such an impoverished environment, the chances of cracks in psychic structures for those vulnerable to mental illness are significantly increased; psychotic disorders, the most severe and dramatic of the mental illnesses, touch approximately 5%-12% of the patients we see here.

Many others are suffering from more difficult-to-see or invisible wounds. The problems treated by our psychologists here, whether directly related to the earthquake or not, have most commonly included anxiety and depressive disorders. Post-traumatic stress and clinical depression are rampant, and loss and pathological mourning have trapped a good portion of the population inside themselves —loss of important people, of structures, of status, of limbs, of way of life, of normal. When trauma and depression intersect, the suffering is compounded.

The earthquake of 2010 is the latest addition to a historical list of severe traumatic stressors suffered by Haitian families. According to psychologist Daniel Derivois, the first trauma was being kidnapped from Africa and forcibly taken on slave ships to work plantations across the Atlantic; each successive trauma has only compounded and crystallized the psychic suffering, effectively amputating the collective memory of the people. The country has become the patient.

Mental illness in Haiti comes with a huge stigma and people here are reluctant to talk about their problems, show emotion, or ask for concrete help, so many suffer alone. A good portion of Haitians somaticize their negative emotional responses to their environment and suffer from terrible headaches, probably the most common presenting complaint at our outpatient clinics here.

Health care in Haiti has traditionally been the domain of Vodoo, the Haitian religious culture derived from West African traditions and French Catholicism. A recent study by the World Health Organization explains that Vodoo:

includes healing practices, health promotion and prevention of illness and promotion of personal well-being… Vodou provides information on how to promote, prevent and treat health problems, with theories of illness, treatment interventions, and prescriptions for behavior that are congruent with widely held explanatory models… A first level of interpretation of illness in Vodou is based on the need to establish a harmonious relationship with the spirit world of the ancestors. A second level deals with the role of magic or sorcery attacks in which the afflicted person is the victim of a spell. According to the causal explanations of Vodou the health and illness of a particular person depends on his or her connection to tradition and place in the social and moral order and in a wider universe of being that includes the ancestors and the gods…Vodou is based on a vision of life in which individuals are given identity, strength and safety in a dangerous world through the thick fabric linking them together with other human beings, as well as spirits and ancestors. For this reason, disturbances in health or luck are a sign that relationships have been disrupted and may need to be mended. Vodou rituals heal individuals and groups “by exercising, strengthening, and mending relationships among the living, the dead, and the spirits”…The only way to control health and luck is through “the care and feeding of family, in the largest sense of that term”… [emphasis added] (“Culture and Mental Health in Haiti: A Literature Review”, WHO, 2010)

The culture of vodoo means that differential diagnoses of clinical conditions in Haiti need to be made with extreme care by Western psychologists and psychiatrists. If a patient in New York explains that he was hit in the face by an invisible man, or that he regularly has visions or sees spirits, he is likely suffering from psychosis and the prescription of neuroleptics would probably be appropriate; if a Haitian says the same thing, however, chances are he is not psychotic but has internalized the norms of his culture and religion. The incidence of certain psychological problems also differs from Western consumer society: We see a lot fewer suicide attempts here in Haiti, as well as less evidence of borderline personality disorder, compared to the United States and Western Europe. On the other hand, hysterical conversions, essentially a thing of the past back home, are not uncommon here.

Besides oungans and mambos, other traditional healers, such as herbalists or leaf doctors, continue to be popular. Fortunately, Western mental health practices can be effectively applied in parallel with folk medicine. Clinical psychology arrived in force in Haiti during the 1980s with the AIDS epidemic—an epidemic probably imported from the US, according to medical-anthropologist Paul Farmer. Today, Haiti claims only about 300-400 undergraduate-level psychologists/psychotherapists, and a paltry 10-15 psychiatrists, for the entire country of 9 million people (in comparison, New York City, which has the same population, has 7000 licensed doctoral-level psychologists, thousands of psychiatrists, and many thousands of other mental health clinicians and unlicensed psychotherapists). The principal Haitian psychiatric center for acute illness, Mars & Kline, brings to mind a 19th century prison in disrepair and the treatment of patients there resembles a form of psychiatry practiced in America during the first half of the 20th century. A lack of sufficient funding means that the families of the destitute and psychotic patients must pay for treatment, adding to their strain.

Trauma symptoms related directly to the earthquake appear to have diminished six months later, yet many of our patients continue to relive this event everyday through flashbacks and other intrusive memories that come imbued with overwhelming anxiety. These images, thoughts, and feelings can be absolutely debilitating. For some patients, the post-traumatic stress remained dormant for months, only to manifest unexpectedly following a more trivial stressor. Sometimes, the experience of internal bodily shaking is still there months later, as if the earthquake just happened a few minutes ago.

Endless stories of trauma and loss can be cited:

For example, there’s the young man who lost his potential girlfriend under his house after she came by to do him a favor; he dug up her body three days later and the image of her bruised and bloody face stays with him; a week after the earthquake, when the girlfriend’s mother tracked him down and called him, he denied who he was and told her she was talking to the wrong person, adding to his incapacitating guilt…. There’s the adolescent sister and her younger brother who left their father’s house to go live with their mother only to have the new home collapse days later on their mom, their aunts and their cousins; Dad has not been heard from since the 12th and the two kids currently live with a man they met that day who offered to help and who has since become the sister’s boyfriend; he beats her and coerces her but there are few other options…There’s the story of the girl who was trapped alive under the rubble for four days with her older sister, their youngest sister’s decaying body lying next to them, literally pressed against the face of the young girl the whole time, imprinting it; they kept their dry lips moist with urine and eventually stopped with the useless screams; the only way to tell if it was day or night above was by the sound of activity nearby…Another girl sang me an unforgettable little ditty that she soothed herself with that night while trapped under her house: “En bas décombres/En bas décombres/En bas décombres …(Under rubble/Under rubble/Under rubble)….”

Treatment methods for psychic trauma vary but usually involve reliving the trauma in a safe environment with goal of learning to cope with the problem-causing memories. Instead of avoiding the difficult images—a classic symptom of post-traumatic stress—the person can habituate themselves and master them. The associated anxiety can also be managed using concrete techniques. In addition, irrational thoughts linked to the psychic trauma (e.g.,“My life is over”,”I don’t exist any more” “I can’t go on”) that lead to more problems can be recognized, restructured and replaced with more logical, realistic and helpful ideas so that the person can begin to actively rebuild her personal and emotional life.

Many problems are more indirectly related to earthquake trauma. For example, one couple—one of the lucky ones with a house and a job— kept the door unlocked so that they could escape easily if another quake hit. Unfortunately a street gang used the opportunity to walk into their house at 2AM, rape her, beat him, and rob them both; they didn’t even have shoes to wear to go to the hospital.

So the crisis continues. More than half of Port-au-Prince still lives under plastic sheeting with a floor of dirt, or in tents that were made to last for no more than six months that are now disintegrating. Entire camps have been forcibly displaced and more people are scheduled to be evicted. Many of these tent cities will be there for years. The heavy rains that have started in the last few weeks—often impressive in their violence and intensity—turn dirt to mud and augment the raw living conditions.

While there have been improvements in lighting, the lack of official or unofficial security in many of the camps remains poor, putting women, and especially adolescent girls, at risk. Unsafe living conditions mean rape is often committed by unknown men, sometimes in groups. According to KOFAVIV, the Haitian commission against sexual violence:

Because of persistent insecurity, people cannot leave their tents at night, feeling obliged to stay inside and stay vigilant because they are scared of violence…children are often left alone, either because they don’t have parents or their parents have to leave to look for food or work…if water is not provided by the camp, young people must leave to look for water for their family, exposing them to elevated risk of rape. (Report on Security in the Camps, 18 July 2010)

While gender-based violence is also epidemic in the US and Europe (perhaps more commonly between two people that already know each other, or have an intimate relationship) the ongoing humanitarian crisis here in Haiti make reports of rape particularly spectacular. Adding to the problem, the instant reintegration into society of thousands of prisoners, including violent criminals, the day of the earthquake, means that criminal violence, especially against women and girls, remains a public health problem.

There is no private life in the camps. Children witness everything that adults say and do, including fights and sex. In addition, according to CATWLACH, an anti-trafficking commission, parents are finding it particularly difficult to control their children due to the inevitable and self-propelling, “homogenous mélange” of kids that forms. They describe social life in the camps in particularly chilling terms:

Children hear, or become a part of, the intimacies of others. Everything is permitted in the camps and is seen by everybody. This means that some of the children who witness hideous scenes committed by adults are subject to repeat them. As a consequence, these children will not have any respect for human dignity. They are losing a real sense of life. Becoming rapists, assassins, prostitutes, or killers will matter little since their life is denied of sense. (“Rapport sur la situation des femmes et des filles dans les camps à Port-au-Prince apres le séisme du 12 janvier, 2010. Mois d’avril et de mai.” La Coalition Régionale contre la Traite et le Trafic des Femmes et des Filles en Amérique Latine et dans la Caraïbes dont Haïti. )

In this way, tent camp life adds more layers of stress to an already fragile population, increasing the likelihood that further traumas will be inflicted in the future, digging deeper at the open wounds.

The mental health team at the World Health Organization is today working with the Ministry of Health and foreign NGOs to build an effective, decentralized mental health care system in Haiti. I had the opportunity to contribute to this project during my nine weeks in Port-au-Prince. The long-term plan is to put such a mental health care system in Haitian hands. Such a transfer is essential. Unfortunately, these hands are currently bloody and bound.

PsySR member Yosef Brody is an American clinical psychologist based in Paris, France, where he teaches and works in private practice. More about his work in Haiti can be found at http://haitijustice.tumblr.com. He also blogs at http://brodypost.tumblr.com/ on issues related to public health, social justice, and U.S. and international politics. Yosef can be reached at brody.yosef@gmail.com.

Seeking Answers from Social and Personality Psychologists: 10 Research Questions in the Torture/Interrogation Debate

PsySR Blog — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 02:13:23 +0000

Bradley Olson

As someone trained in personality and social psychology—and now also working as a community psychologist—it’s clear to me that social and personality theory and research make essential contributions to understanding social justice issues.

I’ve long been an activist on the American Psychological Association (APA) torture issue and a member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR). This led to an invitation to participate in a session chaired by Chris Crandall at the 2009 Society for Experimental Social Psychology conference in Portland, Maine. The session involved presentations of several excellent studies related to U.S. torture and interrogation. My role was to act as a discussant and to suggest what other areas, as an activist, I thought should be studied empirically.

For several decades, the horrors of WWII and the racism that led to the civil rights movement inspired the work of U.S. social and personality psychologists. As several participants mentioned at the session in Portland, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and Guantanamo can have similar influences on the discipline in the years ahead. I agree. From my perspective as an activist, here are 10 questions I would love social and personality researchers to help answer:

1. How does a nation that once publicly reviled torture come to accept it as an unfortunate necessity?

Group-oriented social psychologists have often focused on social conversion and societal change. Norm changes may reflect compliance or internalization, minority influence or polarization. But bringing the political world into the social psychological laboratory and exploring these paradigms with GWOT stimuli would advance our understanding of the national dynamics around the issue of torture.

2. How can the public be inoculated against propaganda and pro-torture political media and marketing?

Briefings from the White House, conservative cable media outlets, and each episode of “24” present social psychologists with research opportunities that can lead to policy changes and preventive interventions. Elaborations on McGuire’s inoculation theory — to prepare people for pro-torture arguments (like the ticking time bomb)—would be a good start. Such interventions could focus on protecting the American public by giving them stronger ethical and intellectual foundations against torture. Public norms on torture may be pushed to extremes through normative and informational influence. One hope is that if all the sound arguments against torture were available, torture would be less acceptable. If Americans could be encouraged to search more thoroughly for deeper and varied pools of informational influence, would they polarize against torture? One hypothesis is that we would be better off if more Americans vigorously exposed themselves to a wider variety of arguments—even those of the pro-torture side.

3. What are the distinct roles of authoritarianism, conformity, and aggression in pro-torture views?

Right-wing authoritarianism is a topic that combines personality and social psychology. Its nature and its surrounding correlates involve a fairly complex set of characteristics. Right-wing authoritarianism is somewhat different from the construct of social dominance. Social dominance is different from low openness; a high level of fear and insecurity is different from the cognitive narrowing associated with dogmatism. We might ask, for instance, when does escalation of insecurity play a role in pro-torture views? A tendency toward aggression or prejudice might be other pieces of the puzzle. How might some or all of these human characteristics moderate American views, decisions, and actions around the issue of torture? And, how do these views interact with the reasons people give for supporting torture? Research of this type might contribute to more effective ways of influencing those who might otherwise endorse or promote national uses of torture.

4. Does psychological salience impact empathy for and action to help detainees at places like Guantanamo?

Milgram’s original salience and proximity manipulations in his obedience studies still teach us much. Latane’s social impact theory also emphasized salience. Salience may be the most interesting concept in understanding torture in the Global War on Terror. The holding facility for terror suspects was placed on Guantánamo, an island located on the southeastern end of Cuba, at least partly for psychological reasons. The distant and inaccessible island reduces psychological salience, for Americans and for the rest of the world. Without salience, it’s hard to have empathy, and without empathy, it’s difficult to motivate the public around justice-oriented causes. Research could examine this issue more closely. For instance, what effect does diminished salience have on public support for torture? How might increases in salience motivate greater public resistance against pro-torture policies?

5. Why is psychological torture perceived by Americans to be more socially and legally acceptable than physical forms of torture?

It appears that the American public grossly underestimates the harm associated with psychological forms of torture compared to physical forms. Many are were convinced that techniques like sensory deprivation are more innocuous than physical techniques, whereas released detainees consistently say the opposite is true, that the psychological abuse is the most unbearable. Although ethical constraints prevent us from tackling this question directly, social psychologists may be able to devise stimulus materials and experimental designs to better understand these perceptions. Such studies could begin to understand more about our beliefs and attitudes around psychological versus physical harm. For example, is psychological harm perceived as less harmful because it’s invisible, thereby reducing natural human tendencies toward empathy?

6. How does the average American make moral decisions around torture?

Naturalistic and descriptive work on moral decision-making around torture would also be useful. Do people use some variation of Kant’s categorical imperative (e.g., what if everyone did this)? Do they apply Rawls’ veil of ignorance (e.g., putting the most vulnerable at the forefront in their minds)? The world would benefit from some experimental tests of folk theories. On the torture issue, do we apply a utilitarian equity and exchange model (e.g., weighing costs and benefits, to individuals or to society at large)? If so, do we consider costs and benefits for ourselves, for our ingroup members, or for society at large? What interventions would lead to more reasoned and ethical choices?

7. What is the relationship between American exceptionalism and ingroup favoritism? And how might such factors play a role in the torture debate?

Allport believed it was often ingroup love that initially forms prejudice—and there is no doubt that these problems can occur at a national level. Once that love becomes exclusive, an implicit fence is built—and there is always something on the other side of that fence. Is American exceptionalism a macro-level variation of ingroup favoritism? Are there unique features to exceptionalism? Does it lead Americans to believe detainees don’t deserve the protections of U.S. law or that international law is irrelevant? How does ingroup favoritism as exceptionalism contribute to the widespread acceptance of torture for non-citizens?

8. What is the psychology of bureaucracy and how does it contribute to torture-accommodating policies in organizations?

Organizational bureaucracy can epitomize the banality of evil. Many saw the APA not as consciously pro-torture, but as an association with an organizational culture that had its values in the wrong place. Its 2002 revision of Ethical Standard 1.02 seemingly usurped every other proscription in the code. Under the requirements of regulations, law, or governing authority, standards such as “Do No Harm” and “Do Not Exploit” could be ignored. Whether 1.02 was intentionally adopted to protect military psychologists or whether it was excessive moral caution in the service of guild-based interests is unclear given the current evidence. Bureaucratic features like guild-based protectionism seemed to be a primary problem for the APA, on Standard 1.02 and every other torture-related policy. Paradoxically, risk aversion imperiled the stability of the organization. How can such processes and decisions be better understood? Are they inevitable in large bureaucracies, or are effective interventions possible?

9. What non-violent dissident strategies are most effective in bringing about positive forms of social change?

The early minority influence work of Moscovici provided hope in a world of majority influence. How can we defy senseless forms of majority influence and obedience in places that support torture? What are the best strategies for the non-violent, social justice-oriented dissident? Saul Alinsky, the famous Chicago community organizer, believed verbally aggressive approaches worked best. He stated definitively: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Gandhi’s social action required the exact opposite, arguing that “Non-cooperation is not a movement of brag, bluster, or bluff” and “Not a negative thought or action should be had against others. One may not respect another, but do not insult him.” The comparative effectiveness of such strategies could be separated in the laboratory.

10. What are the psychological dimensions of truth and reconciliation commissions compared to current U.S. trial systems?

The field of psychology and the law has brought substantial knowledge about how our traditional legal system works. But what do we now know about alternatives to this system? Can we experimentally compare truth and reconciliation approaches with more punitive methods on issues related to torture?

The global war on terror and the mainstreaming of torture and interrogation, by psychologists and others, has put social psychology at the center of another scientific and philosophical crisis. Fortunately, key advances in our understanding and potential solutions are solidly within the domain of experimental social psychology. Many people will benefit from the efforts of social and personality psychologists to address these challenging questions in their work.

PsySR Treasurer Brad Olson is Assistant Professor of Psychology at National-Louis University in Chicago and Co-Director of the Community Psychology Doctoral Program. He is also a member of the Coaltion for an Ethical Psychology. Brad can be reached at bradley.olson@nl.edu. This essay originally appeared in Dialogue, the official newsletter of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology .