Stephen Soldz commented last week on the Defense Department’s decision to use only psychologists, rather than psychiatrists, to help get information out of prisoners at Guantanamo. First Soldz’s comment, which he titled Psychology, profession in shame:
The New York Times reports that the Defense Department is switching and will now use only psychologists, and not psychiatrists, to aid their torture efforts [they of course, use a euphemism] in Guantanamo. The reason is that the American Psychiatric Association has clearly stated that psychiatrists should not participate in interrogations at Guantanamo, whereas the American Psychological Association has taken a mealy-mouthed position that allows psychologists to do whatever they want. Presumably, the American Psychological Association is too addicted to its closeness to power to take any stand on one of the defining moral issues of our time.
This is a moment of crisis for the profession of psychology. Will psychologists stand for human decency, or will the profession become the whores of the Pentagon and the Guantanamo torturers? If psychologists as a group do not roundly condemn the gulag in Guantanamo and force the American Psychological Association to change its position, the profession will have given up standing for human decency and the dignity of the individual. In that case, American psychologists will deserve the badge of shame that we will receive around the world.
Unfortunately, I think the answer to Soldz’s question is that psychologists as a profession will probably not follow the psychiatrists’ lead. They don’t have the psychiatrists’ medical ethics to rely on. Psychologists can be more … flexible. As the Times put it:
The counterpart group for psychologists, the American Psychological Association,… said last July that its members serving as consultants to interrogations involving national security should be “mindful of factors unique to these roles and contexts that require special ethical consideration.”
Stephen Behnke, director of ethics for the organization, said psychologists knew not to participate in activities that harmed detainees. But Dr. Behnke also said the group believed that helping military interrogators made a valuable contribution because it was part of an effort to prevent terrorism.
Former military interrogators at Guantánamo told The New York Times last year that some psychiatrists and psychologists had advised them on how to “break” detainees to make them more cooperative. The former interrogators said they had been counseled on how to use a detainee’s fears and longings to increase distress. One example was their taking advantage of a prisoner’s fear of the dark, known from his medical records.
Dr. Winkenwerder, the Pentagon official, disputed those assertions Tuesday, saying he did not believe that such counseling had occurred. He said the biscuit teams gave interrogators advice only on how to establish a positive rapport with detainees.
That settles it, no?