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By dissent, November 15, 2011 6:46 pm

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on this blog. I’ve been busy with work and my other blogs, but my concern and involvement in promoting respect for human rights continues offline.  And I’m delighted to post this announcement from Dr. Ken Pope, for whom I have the greatest professional and personal respect:

The journal  Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology will soon publish an article I wrote: “Are the American Psychological Association’s Detainee Interrogation Policies Ethical and Effective? Key Claims, Documents, and Results.”

Here’s how the article begins:

[begin excerpt]

The devastating events of 9-11 brought a tangle of complex issues, dangerous realities, and hard choices.

To help meet these challenges, the United States began interrogating detainees.

The interrogation settings included the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, the Detention Center at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and Camps Delta, Iguana, and X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

The American Psychological Association (APA) played a key role in supporting detainee interrogations and highlighted psychologists’ contributions to this aspect of national security.

For example, APA submitted a statement on psychology and interrogations to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence explaining that “psychologists have important contributions to make in eliciting information that can be used to prevent violence and protect our nation’s security”; that “conducting an interrogation is inherently a psychological endeavor”; and that “psychology is central to this process” (American Psychological Association, 2007b).

U.S. officials also saw a central role for psychologists: “Pentagon officials said . . . they would try to use only psychologists, not psychiatrists, to help interrogators devise strategies to get information from detainees at places like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The new policy follows by little more than two weeks an overwhelming vote by the American Psychiatric Association discouraging its members from participating in those efforts” (Lewis, 2006).

APA promoted support for its interrogation policies in its press releases, its journals, its web site, its Internet lists, its conventions, the APA Monitoron Psychology, and other venues.

This article assumes that the public interest, the profession, and psychological science are best served when we meet the vigorous promotion of policies, claims, and conclusion with equally vigorous critical examination.

Critical thinking about policies, claims, and conclusions is essential no matter how prestigious, authoritative, trusted, or respected the source, or how widely-accepted, strongly held, and seemingly self-evident the policies, claims, and conclusions.

This article’s approach is not to provide a simplified set of supposed answers, preemptive conclusions, or confident certainties.

Its purpose is to highlight key APA policies, procedures, and public statements that seem in urgent need of rethinking and to suggest some questions that may be useful in a serious assessment.

[end excerpt]

I’ve put a copy of the article on my website at:
http://bit.ly/APADetaineeInterrogationPolicies

As always, Dr. Pope offers a reasoned and principled discussion of an important issue. I encourage everyone to read it and think about it.

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By dissent, April 19, 2011 9:07 am

The issue of whether some psychologists should face professional disciplinary action for their alleged role in the interrogation and treatment of detainees at Gitmo continues. Kyle Anne Uniss reports on Courthouse News that a complaint in Ohio that did produce desired results has lead to the complainants filing for a writ of mandamus to compel the state psychology board to take action:

Two doctors, a minister and a disabled veteran sued the Ohio Board of Psychology, claiming it failed to act on their detailed complaint against a psychologist, an Army colonel who “was responsible for the abuse and exploitation of detainees as a senior psychologist at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, in violation of Ohio law and Board ethics rules.”

The plaintiffs seek writ of mandamus to compel the State Board to take “formal action” against Dr. Larry C. James, a board-licensed psychologist and Dean of Wright State University’s School of Professional Psychology.

[...]

The plaintiffs are Dr. Trudy Bond, a practicing psychologist from Toledo; Michael Reese, an Army veteran, member of Disable (sic) American Veterans, and a former counselor for people with disabilities; the Rev. Colin Bossen, a Unitarian minister from Cleveland Heights; and Dr. Josephine Setzler, director of an Ohio chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

The plaintiffs say they filed a 50-page complaint against James with the Board on July 7, 2010. They ask that if the board does not take “formal action” against james, that it be compelled “to provide clearly articulated reasons grounded in fact or law for any decision, and to show that it investigated meaningfully and/or carried out a formal proceeding in good faith.”

Read more on Courthouse News, where you can also reading the complainants’ court filing.

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By dissent, April 15, 2011 10:00 pm

The 2011 issue of Annual Review of Clinical Psychology was just published this month and it includes an article by Dr. Ken Pope, “Psychologists and Detainee Interrogations: Key Decisions, Opportunities Lost, and Lessons Learned.” Here is the Abstract of the article:

After the 9-11 terrorist attacks, U.S. psychologists faced hard choices about what roles, if any, were appropriate for psychologists in the detainee interrogations conducted in settings such as the Bagram Airbase, the Abu Ghraib Prison, and the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camps.

The American Psychological Association (APA) sparked intense controversy with its policies and public statements.

This article reviews APA decisions, documents, and public statements in this area, in the context of major criticisms and responses to those criticisms.

The review focuses on key issues: how the APA created and reported policies in the areas of ethics and national security; transparency; psychologists’ professional identities; psychologists’ qualifications; ethical-legal conflicts; policies opposing torture; interpretations of avoiding harm; and effective interrogations.

It suggests lessons learned, missed opportunities, and questions in need of a fresh approach.

A copy of the published article is available at: <http://bit.ly/KenPopePsychologistsAndDetaineeInterrogations>

PLEASE FORWARD THIS ANNOUNCEMENT TO ANY LISTS OR INDIVIDUALS WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN THIS AREA.

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By dissent, February 25, 2011 7:47 pm

I’ve been so busy with work and blogging on the main sites that I haven’t had much time for this blog, but I received a notice today from Dr. Ken Pope that is so important that I had to really just drop everything to post this:

Involvement in detainee interrogations presented psychologists with a wide span of complex ethical and practical challenges.

Taking a fresh look at the profession’s struggles to meet these challenges provides opportunities to learn from the past, to make unexpected discoveries, and to grow and mature as a profession.

In an article that is now in press in the *Annual Review of Clinical Psychology*, I brought together primary source documents and other materials, particularly those that have sometimes been overlooked.

The article is “Psychologists and Detainee Interrogations: Key Decisions, Opportunities Lost, and Lessons Learned.”

Here’s the abstract:

[begin abstract]

After the 9-11 terrorist attacks, U.S. psychologists faced hard choices about what roles, if any, were appropriate for psychologists in the detainee interrogations conducted in settings such as the Bagram
Airbase, the Abu Ghraib Prison, and the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camps.

The American Psychological Association (APA) sparked intense controversy with its policies and public statements.

This article reviews APA decisions, documents, and public statements in this area, in the context of major criticisms and responses to those criticisms.

The review focuses on key issues: how the APA created and reported policies in the areas of ethics and national security; transparency; psychologists’ professional identities; psychologists’ qualifications; ethical-legal conflicts; policies opposing torture; interpretations of avoiding harm; and effective interrogations.

It suggests lessons learned, missed opportunities, and questions in need of a fresh approach.

[end abstract]

A pre-publication version of this article is available on my web site; however, it is an uncorrected version so there will be changes to this draft prior to publication in print.

The uncorrected pre-publication version is available at:
http://bit.ly/KenPopePsychologistsAndDetaineeInterrogations

PLEASE FORWARD THIS ANNOUNCEMENT TO ANY LISTS OR INDIVIDUALS WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN THIS AREA.

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By dissent, February 4, 2011 5:50 pm

Andrew Welsh-Huggins of Associated Press reports:

The Ohio Psychology Board has declined to pursue disciplinary action against a retired Army psychologist accused of observing abusive interrogations of military detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and doing nothing to stop them.

It’s the third time in three years that boards in Ohio and Louisiana have decided not to take action against Larry James, dean of professional psychology at Wright State University in Dayton.

Read more in the Columbus Dispatch.   There are those who will say that their decision was proper.  There are those who will say that this an act of cowardice on the part of the state psychology boards or a cover-up.  I wonder what the public thinks about the profession in light of the accusations that psychologists were either directly involved in, or failed to stop or protest,  human rights abuses against detainees.

The complaint was filed in July 2010 by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic.

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By dissent, January 12, 2011 11:32 pm

Danny Robbins and Adam Goldman report that James Mitchell, one of the psychologists involved developing (and perhaps implementing?) the harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA on detainees will be investigated by the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists. Previous coverage of his role can be found in earlier posts on this blog.

The investigation is based on a complaint that was lodged against Mitchell in June. Board executive director Sherry Lee said Tuesday she couldn’t comment. However, a document obtained by The Associated Press shows an informal settlement conference has been scheduled for Feb. 8.