The Psych Student

Bush Memos Suggest Abuse Isn’t Torture If a Doctor Is There

Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman was in my home state of Washington, in Spokane to be exact, where there is based the shadowy headquarters of a CIA contractor run by pseudo psychologists who developed the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.

Applied psychology: The firm, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, is named after the two military psychologists who founded the company, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They use their training to break people mentally. Beginning in 2002, the CIA hired the psychologists to train interrogators in brutal techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and pain.

Amy interviews Mark Benjamin, National correspondent for Salon.com¹, Katherine Eban, who wrote the July 2007 article for Vanity Fair, “Rorschach and Awe²,” and Karen Dorn Steele, a local investigative reporter who covered Mitchell and Jessen for Spokane’s Spokesman-Review.

The work of Mitchell and Jessen is interesting to me, obviously not because I’m headed for the torture business, but because the work of Inernational Trauma Treatment Program (linked to in the footer of this site) got me interested in psychology to begin with. ITTP is based in Olympia and it was through working with them on a website project and also meeting some of their practitioners that I became interested in psych.

This whole episode gives the field a black eye, but what I’m particularly interested in with regards to this story is not how it was handled during the Bush (or, Cheney, as the case may be) era, but how it’s being dealt with in the age of Change under President Obama. His choice of words in his public statement to the CIA are particularly problematic.

President Obama: “Don’t be discouraged by what’s happened the last few weeks. Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn. But the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward, that is precisely why I am proud to be president of the United States, and that’s why you should be proud to be members of the CIA.”

Subjecting a person to repeated drowning and pychological trauma is a potential mistake. Something we can learn from. Learn what exactly? What have we learned that’s new or different from what was known when the use of torture was initially forbidden by our own laws?

Also chilling was the battle over whether to participate in torture that took place among members and directors of the American Psychological Association ³.

According to the Bush Administration, torture isn’t torture if a doctor is in the house. A May 2005 memo reads, “The close monitoring of each detainee for any signs that he is at risk of experiencing severe physical pain reinforces the conclusion that the combined use of interrogation techniques is not intended to inflict such pain[4. Bush Memos Suggest Abuse Isn’t Torture If a Doctor Is There .” This means that Katherine Eban was correct in her assertion in Democracy Now that “psychologists loaned their names and loaned their credentials and their Ph.D.s to this kind of activity” and that Mitchell and Jessen drove the “good name of psychologists, as it were, into this very murky, dark area.”

I would add that the APA did its share of dragging psychology through the muck as well. And while the members of the APA may have forced the organisation to reassert its temporarily lapsed stance against torture, the damage has already been done.

The U.S. has strange ways of letting bygones be bygones before checking with the agrieved side about whether the issue is truly a bygone. Already the new president is deciding against any investigation, public hearings or accountability for those who were in the know, authorized or otherwise condoned U.S. mistreatment of its prisoners of war. This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. What Gore Vidal called “Imperial America: The United States of Amnesia,” seems to still apply under Team Obama, which has ruled out taking anyone to court over the matter. When it isn’t committed to public record, there’s much more evidence to suggest that an event doesn’t get archieved in the public consciousness either, and that is what’s needed if one is to employ the term, “never again.”

Obama’s promise to even learn from past mistakes rings empty as there’s no public process through which to deal with what happened.