The American Psychological Association's Complicity in Torture

During the Bystanders No More conference, we were privileged to hear a presentation by Steven Reisner. Together with colleagues, who formed the Coalition for an Ethical APA, he has tirelessly fought over the past 5 years to expose the complicity of psychologists and other health professionals in the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and centres within the USA. He talked about the shift from bystander to witness and ultimately activist - roles with which some of us in South Africa are familiar in our own personal histories.

Complicity of South African Health Professionals during Apartheid
South Africa has a vicious history of torture and also experienced complicity of health professionals - both prison doctors and psychologists.
During the apartheid years of the Nationalist government, torture was being used to "break" detainees so that they would inform on their comrades. In "Red in the Rainbow", Lynn Carneson writes about her father Fred's first months in detention in 1965. Solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and interrogation for days on end were commonplace. Fred was subjected to more than that until he "broke" - which meant in his case that he gave information that he knew the Special Branch already had.

Among black detainees, brutal assaults were frequent and deaths in detention not uncommon. District surgeons were supposed to attend to prisoners regularly and to pronounce on the cause of death. In the case of Steve Biko, who died in detention in 1977, despite all evidence to the contrary, i.e. that he was brutally tortured and sustained a brain injury as a result, the doctor concerned, pronounced that his death resulted from a hunger strike. In the following decade, the security police cover-up story when detainees died of injuries, was that they had somehow "fallen out of windows" of prisons around the country.

It became harder for doctors to be complicit with the police due to the efforts of one courageous young doctor - Wendy Orr. In 1985, while working in the medical examiner's office in Port Elizabeth she became the first and only doctor in government employment to reveal police torture and abuse of political detainees, when she applied to the Supreme Court, detailing a pattern of extensive torture and abuse of detainees, for a restraining order against the police. In a widely publicised outcome, she successfully obtained a court order to protect detainees from police assault.

Torture and the APA
After 9/11, US policy in relation to detention of suspects and interrogation changed, and with it the role of psychologists in US foreign policy. On the evening of September 11th, Col. Morgan Banks, the senior psychologist responsible for all the survival and resistance training of army personnel under severe conditions, was seconded to Central Command to oversee interrogation of detainees. Thus began a new era of psychologists' involvement in interrogation and torture.  

As was the case in South Africa, the whistle-blower who exposed the extent of this involvement was a woman. In 2005 Dr Jean Maria Arrigo, a social psychologist, was appointed to an APA presidential task force to investigate the role of psychologists in coercive interrogation after photographs of abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib went round the world. The committee came to the unusually hasty conclusion that psychologists were playing a "valuable and ethical role" in assisting the military.

She later discovered that six of the nine voting members were working for the Department of Defence or involved in lobbying for funds from the department (something that was never publicly disclosed). After encouragement from human rights activists and members of the Coalition, which included Steven Reisner, she courageously exposed the nature of the task force and its workings in a report to the APA convention in 2007. The APA has a long history of association with the military and many psychologists depend on it for their careers and income. After the extent of this complicity was revealed, Steven decided to stand for election as President of the APA to try to create a different kind of directorate.

I can't really do justice to this story, which reads like a political thriller. It is beautifully laid out in Steven's own account of the events in his chapter - "From resistance to resistance: a narrative of psychoanalytic activism." in "First Do No Harm" eds Adrienne Harris & Steven Botticelli. Chap. 6, Routledge (2010).