The Torturer’s Apprentice: Psychology and ‘Enhanced Interrogations’

Bryant L. Welch, JD, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and attorney. He is the author of State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind (St Martins Press, 2008). He can be reached at welchfirm@aol.com.

My country, the United States, has engaged in torture. My profession, psychology, has been highly complicit in that torture.

 

Psychologists have designed the techniques of torture, advised torturers on a case-by-case basis how most effectively to “break” individual detainees, and colluded with the Justice Department of President George W. Bush in creating a semantically deceptive system designed to whitewash the whole process. And, most shockingly, this has been done with the complicity of the national organisation of American psychologists, the American Psychological Association (APA).

Return to the Dark Side

From as far back as I can remember I was educated in the same lofty principles most Americans were. I was taught about the dignity of the individual and the nobility of those who defended that dignity against all obstacles. I was taught about the Bill of Rights, and I was taught about the horrors of the Holocaust. Between those two elements of my early education there was a vast chasm that separated right from wrong.

 

Torture seemed like an evil that was in disarray and on the run. Thanks to a new consciousness growing out of the horrors of the Second World War and embodied in the Geneva Conventions, the memories of these horrors were to serve as a protective, eternal reminder of how wrong things could go if the perfect storm of evil and beguiling leadership, gullible followers, and disbelieving onlookers coalesced. Stories of torture came either from distant shores where it was perpetrated by perverted dictators or from purely fictional sado-masochistic movies. If we had not evolved as a species to the point of living without the wholesale slaughter of war, at least we were now able to draw a line of demarcation separating the civilised from the barbaric; that line was torture.

 

As a young adult immediately after graduating from law school, I changed career paths and became a clinical psychologist practising psychotherapy for ten years. Later, I moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the APA. If my early education and my legal training were lessons in what safeguards are needed to protect the rights of the individual, psychotherapy was a profound introduction to the sensitivity of the human spirit and to its vulnerability to psychological and physical abuse, especially when that abuse was intentionally inflicted by other people.

 

If I do my job properly as a psychotherapist, I try to sit inside the subjective experience of a suffering patient enough to validate that experience and slowly extricate the patient from his or her suffering. When I make mistakes and misread patients’ experience, I can, no matter how well-intentioned, cause pain and leave them feeling abandoned. After seeing the exquisite sensitivity of the person I am working with, it is a terrible feeling when that happens. If, on the other hand, I can accurately leave patients feeling truly understood, they can see that in their deepest being they make sense and that whatever was done to them was “insane”; it can produce a profound sense of liberation and healing.

 

“Do no harm” is a highly compelling principle in the context of such experiences. Seeing that sensitivity, as I do in treating people in psychotherapy, one quickly realises it is a universal sensitivity that defines the most important part of being human. Presumably, this would make it inconceivable that another similarly sensitive person could wilfully add to the suffering of another.

 

But my country did just that in the most hideous form—torture—and my profession, the one designed to treat these most vulnerable areas of sensitivity, helped the torturers.

 

The United States’ descent into torture has by now been well documented. From my perspective, we had a ruling regime in the Bush administration that, understandably, was scared out of its mind by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, but was unable to acknowledge its fear even to itself.

 

Uninformed people in states of denial are often smug. The Bush administration substituted macho swagger for knowledge, diplomacy, and emotional stability. It escaped from its uncertainty by pursuing its long-wished-for war with Iraq, and by channelling its impotent rage into sadistic torture that was unconnected to any rational military objective.

 

Inflicting pain on others is not terribly difficult or complex, especially when one has complete control of the person one is trying to hurt. The Bush administration, however, had a recurrent, and what would in any other context be an almost comical, need to see itself as technologically efficient, with a superior ability to deliver military dominance in an impersonal fashion. It exercised this dominance with a disdainful expression of contempt for its adversary.

 

This led to some bizarre events in the administration’s “war on terror”, beginning with “shock and awe”, a phrase that quickly fell out of vogue after Commander-in-Chief Bush embarrassingly proclaimed “mission accomplished” aboard the aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, on 1 May 2003, failing to understand that the enemy at that stage had barely begun to fight.

 

After the shamefully botched execution of Saddam Hussein by the Iraqi police, the US military decided that for the next high-profile hanging, that of Hussein’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim, it would show the Iraqis how to get it right. It sent in a supposedly top-notch team of US hanging experts from Fort Benning, Georgia, just for the occasion.

 

When the noose was fastened on 15 January 2007, the calculations were so far off that upon the trap-door’s being opened Ibrahim was decapitated, to the shock and awe both of observers and his family waiting to take possession of his body—and presumably to the embarrassment also of the US military and its team of hanging experts.

Psychology’s Facilitating Role

When it came to torture, a similar approach was used. Torture was treated as something that required newly developed professional expertise rather than something with a sordid tradition as old as mankind itself. Throughout the process one can see how the appearance of psychological expertise helped to sanitise the odour of torture by making the practice seem more cerebral, and thus distant and acceptable, to those involved.

 

One remarkable thing about political and governmental work I noticed in Washington, D.C., is that if a person captures the ear of someone of importance, he or she can very rapidly move into positions of enormous influence regardless of training, experience, or competence. This was seemingly the case with two psychologists, Jim Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, who were soon directing the military’s euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation” programme. There were two key elements to the programme they developed.

 

In 2002, a past president of the APA, Martin Seligman, gave a talk to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on his concept of “learned helplessness”. Seligman, early in his career, had developed a research paradigm studying the effect on dogs of torture. What he learned was that after you torture dogs for a certain period of time they “learn” to be “helpless”. Remarkably, this profound “discovery” led to a career of prominence in American psychology for Seligman.

 

Asked about his presentation to the CIA, Seligman said that he asked the agency if the purpose of the presentation was to learn how to torture people. The CIA replied it could not answer that question because of Seligman’s limited security clearance. Apparently reassured by this evasive answer, Seligman gave his three-hour presentation. According to Seligman, Jessen and Mitchell were both in the room throughout the presentation. Jessen and Mitchell have elsewhere reportedly expressed deep admiration for Seligman’s work.¹

 

Mitchell and Jessen also used an existing military programme designed to help US military personnel contend with torture should they be captured. It was called SERE, standing for “survival, evasion, resistance, and escape”. The programme was an attempt to inoculate military personnel as far as possible against torture by exposing them in advance to some of the techniques to which they might be subjected. Mitchell and Jessen “reverse engineered” SERE to turn a programme designed to protect US troops from torture into one to conduct torture against US enemies.²

 

In truth, the torture programme designed by Mitchell and Jessen was hardly testimony to the insights of psychological science, any more than Seligman’s “discovery” that torturing dogs for lengthy periods of time demoralises them was a ground-breaking intellectual advance.

 

Yet, as on other occasions during the Bush era, turning torture into an expert activity with “scientific techniques” and other accoutrements of professionalism provided advantages to the torturers, conscious and unconscious. The pseudo-scientific façade Jessen and Mitchell developed for the military created a fig-leaf of cover that the torture was not the primitive and sadistic behaviour it really was. It also gave senior military personnel a chance to escape accountability by turning torture over to “the docs”.

 

The programme that Mitchell and Jessen developed was ultimately a perversion of psychological principles that were originally designed to alleviate human suffering. With their “reverse engineering”, Mitchell and Jessen turned these into instruments of human torture.

 

In my work with patients, I repeatedly see the importance to people both of sensory contact with external reality and validation of one’s own personal subjective reality. Our social connectedness is the most profound source of our feeling that we exist, and we derive our most important psychological bearings from what we can see, touch, and hear. Without those things, we can become so detached from reality that eventually we descend into psychosis and a terrifying state of mental fragmentation.

 

In therapy, if I am able to get close enough to the other person’s inner experience to reflect accurately my understanding of it to him or her and even to call attention to nuances of it that the patient has not quite seen or appreciated, I validate that experience, making the person feel more integrated and less fragmented. I am also stimulating the part of all human beings that needs meaningful and kind contact with others if they are to avoid the “learned helplessness” that Seligman “discovered”.

 

The most “psychological” component of the techniques adapted for torture by Jessen and Mitchell was designed to strip detainees of these mental nutrients that psychotherapy ought to provide. The torture techniques reversed the therapeutic process by depriving detainees of any social contact and, even more importantly, of any essential sensory input. Detainees were either placed in settings of complete sensory deprivation, with no light, sound, or human contact or, alternatively, they were flooded with sensory input that exceeded their tolerance. People were put in rooms with bright light and loud music, and deprived of sleep. Typically, while they were subjected to this, they were forced into extraordinarily painful physical positions that they were required to endure for extended periods of time. Gradually, their ability to organise their world collapsed into psychological fragmentation. Many became suicidal.

 

Mohammed Jawad, a seventeen-year-old, broke down crying during interrogation at Guantanamo in December 2003 and said he wanted to see his family. The interrogator sought advice from the psychologist who had “evaluated” him. She recommended telling him that his family had forgotten him and putting him in “linguistic isolation”, which meant he could have no contact with anyone who spoke his language. A few weeks later he attempted suicide. When the time for the boy’s military trial arrived, the psychologist, who had been subpoenaed for testimony, refused to testify on the grounds that it might incriminate her.³

Providing a Fig-Leaf

It was ironic that the psychologist had to fear she would be subject to criminal prosecution for her role in the interrogation of the seventeen-year-old detainee. Under the Bush era Department of Justice definitions of torture, the very fact of the psychologist’s involvement in the “enhanced interrogations” guaranteed the other interrogators that they were at no legal risk of prosecution for torture.

 

Legally, criminal actions have to be defined. They are broken into legal “elements”, each of which must be present for a court to find a breach of the law in question. Regarding torture, for example, “intent” is a necessary element. The perpetrator must intend to torture his or her victim. Without that element of the crime, a practice is not torture even if the detainee dies.

 

In some instances, “safe harbours” are created in which individuals are told that if they take certain reasonable steps related to the objectives of the law they are immune from being found in violation of it. This protects people from breaking the law by accident, as for example when the law is subjective or not readily understood. The US Department of Justice determines many of these definitions in the form of federal regulations.

 

All presidential administrations pay lip-service to the notion that the Justice Department is separated by a firewall from political considerations. That principle is often honoured in the breach more than in the reality. With the Bush administration, however, any pretence at such a separation was abandoned and the Justice Department became a heavy-handed instrument of the administration’s political objectives. Supposedly independent federal district attorneys who failed to comply with administration efforts to harass political opponents were targeted by Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove, and not reappointed to their positions.

 

This extreme politicisation of the Justice Department reached its nadir in the latter’s definition of torture. And psychologists were instrumental in the chicanery involved in that definitional sleight-of-hand.

 

The Justice Department’s definition of torture prohibited any interrogation that was not “safe, effective, legal, and ethical”. If these factors were present, the practice in question was not torture; if they were absent, it was torture.

 

If one stops reading at that point, the definition sounds unobjectionable. But in the Orwellian language so typical of duplicitous regimes, there was more. The Justice Department in effect created a “safe harbour” for interrogators. If a psychologist was involved in the interrogation, by the mere fact of the psychologist’s involvement, the “enhanced interrogation” was per se “safe, effective, legal, and ethical”. There was no requirement that the psychologist even do anything of a protective nature. His or her very presence, by executive definition, meant that the enhanced interrogation was “safe, effective, legal, and ethical”. Being “safe, effective, legal, and ethical”, the procedure was not torture since it did not meet the legal definition of torture.

 

The phrase “safe, effective, legal, and ethical” was used even more insidiously by torture proponents inside the APA when that body came to debate the matter.

Betrayal of Trust

With the exposé in 2003 of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it gradually became apparent that the United States was engaged in the unlawful interrogation of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba, Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, and other US “black sites”. The detainees lacked the most basic human or constitutional rights, including even habeas corpus, languishing for years in US captivity.

 

As rumours emerged of the involvement of health professionals in euphemistically labelled “enhanced interrogations”, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association moved swiftly to rule that it was unethical for their members to participate in the interrogations at these various US detention centres.

 

This contrasted with a shocking refusal by the APA to take the same position and prohibit its members from participating in the interrogations. Instead, initially, the APA simply reiterated its longstanding opposition to “torture”. Of course, knowing what we know now about the Bush administration’s definition of torture, this reaffirmation did little to protect detainees from the “enhanced interrogation” by psychologists that in the eyes of the rest of the world constituted torture.

 

Psychologists tend to be very liberal politically. As APA members began slowly to appreciate what was being done in their name, demands for more forceful opposition to what was occurring in the detention centres led to a growing political movement in the APA. These calls for change were consistently opposed by the APA’s seemingly unanimous board of directors and, surprisingly, most aggressively by the APA’s ethics office. As might be expected, military psychologists also resisted changes to APA policy.

 

In response to the mounting concerns of its membership, the APA established a task force to consider the ethical implications of the role of psychologists in interrogations, the task force on “Psychological Ethics and National Security” (PENS).

 

Typically, APA task forces are deliberately designed to represent different perspectives in the association on the issue in question. This time, however, the task force was stacked with military and intelligence-agency psychologists. Six of its nine members were literally on the payroll of the US military and intelligence agencies. Two non-military members of the task force were outspoken in their criticism of its secretive, rubber-stamp proceedings. The most vociferous of these was subjected to bizarre and false personal allegations by an APA president.

 

The report of the task force, issued in June 2005, then provided wide latitude for psychologists to participate in national-security interrogations, ostensibly to make them “safe, effective, ethical, and legal”. Of course, as we know, the military psychologists did make the interrogations “safe, effective, ethical, and legal”, just not as that phrase is normally understood.

 

After the PENS task force report was issued, arguments by proponents of the APA position on the matter reflected an apparent collusion with the deceptive Justice Department definition of torture. The APA ethics officer and others argued that psychologists’ involvement in interrogations was essential to make sure interrogations were “safe, effective, ethical, and legal”—precisely the same language as used in the Justice Department’s shell game of a definition of torture. Naturally, opponents of the APA’s position were incensed that they were being manipulated in this fashion and efforts to change APA policy intensified.

 

The APA Council of Representatives in August 2007 again refused to outlaw the participation of psychologists in interrogations, substituting instead, by parliamentary manoeuvring, a resolution that listed several torture techniques that psychologists could not use. Following that, APA members initiated a referendum on the issue to be voted on by the membership. Despite intensive lobbying by paid APA staff and a clear campaign of disinformation by senior APA officials that a vote to bar psychologists from working in detention centres would have the effect of also prohibiting them from working in many public institutions, a majority of almost 60 per cent of APA members voted for the ban in August−September 2008.

 

Undaunted by this clear expression of the will of the membership, the inner sanctum of the APA in late autumn 2008 defiantly produced a blatantly disingenuous legal opinion from the APA attorney that the measure did not go into effect for another year. During this period, the paid APA staff, especially the Public Affairs office and the Ethics Office, repeatedly issued statements inconsistent with the referendum result and even attacked in the media APA members who had been proponents of the referendum.

Military Ties

So why did all of this happen to the APA, an organisation purportedly devoted to improving human welfare, with an operating credo of “above all do no harm”?

 

I have had ample opportunity to observe both the inner workings of the APA and the personalities and organisational vicissitudes that have affected it over the last two decades. For most of the twenty-year period from 1983 to 2003, I either worked inside the APA central office as the first executive director of the APA Practice Directorate, or served in various governance positions, including chair of the APA Board of Professional Affairs and member of the APA Council of Representatives. Since leaving the APA (I resigned as a member in 2007) I have maintained a keen interest in the organisation.

 

The transformation of the APA in the past decade from a historically liberal organisation to an authoritarian one that actively assists in torture has been an astonishing process. As with many usurpations of democratic liberal values, the transformation was accomplished by a surprisingly small number of people. The APA is an invaluable case study in the psychological manipulations that influence our governmental and non-governmental institutions.

 

The APA has long had a very close relationship with the office of Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. Inouye has been a strong supporter of the war on terror. His staff aide, Dr Patrick DeLeon, a recent president of the APA, has been devoted to advancing the standing of psychologists in the federal government and in the military. He started a drug-prescribing training programme with the Department of Defence and has encouraged numerous psychologists to participate in the military, both in the prescription programme and in other ways.

 

Inouye has been very supportive of the US detention sites and was the author of the legislation that in May 2009 prevented the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention centre (he stripped the funding needed for closing the camp from a supplemental appropriations bill). Inouye, as chairman of the Senate finance subcommittee on military spending, also controls the funding for defence-related behavioural research, which is heavily lobbied for by members of the APA Science Directorate.

 

I believe that, partly because of DeLeon’s popularity with the APA governance and partly because of his perceived political acumen, there was no meaningful oversight of the connections that were developed between the APA and the military.

 

DeLeon’s influence in the APA and with many individual psychologists, especially those from Hawaii, came in very handy for Inouye in his efforts to support the Department of Defence. When the military needed a mental-health professional to help implement its interrogation procedures, and other bodies such as the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association subsequently refused to comply, the military could turn to Senator Inouye’s office, which was able to reap the political dividends of seeds sown by DeLeon over many years.

 

While we are only now uncovering the names of the individual psychologists who participated most directly in the interrogations, I think a surprising number of them will turn out to be people brought into the military through Inouye’s office, many by DeLeon himself.

A Culture of Grandiosity

Why did the governance of the APA, the world’s largest organisation of psychologists, allow it to become complicit in military interrogations? Some people assume that the APA’s horrifying recent behaviour involved large sums of money changing hands. I could certainly be wrong, but I think the more likely (and more remarkable) mechanism has little to do with money. Instead, it was a malignant organisational grandiosity that first weakened the APA and then, ultimately, allowed military and intelligence agencies to have their way with it throughout era of the Bush administration.

 

But how was the APA, of all organisations, weakened in this way? What led to this grandiose culture? An organisation does not rise or fall with a single event, any more than the fall of Rome truly occurred in 476 ad. The culture of grandiosity was carefully cultivated for more than a decade by a few self-interested individuals.

 

What has been observable and unarguable about the APA of recent years is that the pluralistic and multi-faceted governance process I witnessed when first entering the APA in the early 1980s was sharply curtailed during the 1990s. Differences of opinion disappeared, and the APA suffered a terrible organisational decline.

 

Increasingly inbred and infantilised under the tightly controlled administration of Raymond Fowler, the APA’s chief executive officer from 1989 to 2003, the association’s agenda was primarily and at times exclusively financial, focused on making money either through real-estate ventures or through what I and others felt was the unnecessarily harsh financial treatment of lower-level APA employees.

 

The governance of the APA was controlled with a beguiling programme that was characterised as “working together”. And at the highest level, the striking narcissism of key elected officers made them easy prey to clever executives.

 

The result was that much of the activity of the APA’s Council of Representatives, the legislative group with ultimate authority in governing the APA, turned away from substantive matters to an odd system of fawning over one another. Many members appeared simply to bathe in the good feeling that came from “working together”, which served as a subtle injunction against raising conflict-laden issues. The atmosphere was one of grandiose self-references and shared lofty opinions of one another. As the APA became more and more detached from reality, the organisational dysfunction became more pronounced, but this was ignored and obscured by the self-congratulatory organisational style.

The APA’s Torture Debate

This same grandiosity was ubiquitous in the APA governance’s discussions on torture. Banning psychologists’ participation in reputed torture mills was clearly unnecessary, proponents of the APA policy argued. To do so would be an “insult” to military psychologists everywhere. No psychologist would ever engage in torture. Insisting on a change in APA policy evinced a malicious attitude towards military psychologists. The supporters of the APA policy managed to transform the military into the victims in the interrogation issue.

 

Ultimately, it was the self-importance of a few APA governance members that carried the day on the torture issue. Psychologists’ participation in US detention centres, it was asserted, was an antidote to torture, since the very presence of psychologists could protect the potential torture victims. The debates on the APA Council floor, year after year, concluded with the general consensus that, indeed, psychology was extremely important to our nation’s security.

 

During this period I had numerous personal communications with members of the APA governance structure in an attempt to dissuade them from ignoring the rank-and-file psychologists who abhorred the APA’s position. I have been involved in many policy disagreements over the course of my career, but the smugness and illogic that characterised the response to these efforts was astonishing and went far beyond normal, heated, give-and-take. Most dramatically, the intelligence that I have always found to characterise the profession of psychology was sorely lacking.

 

Outside the self-absorbed culture of the current APA governance, to the rest of the world—including rank-and-file American psychologists—the APA arguments simply did not pass the “red-face” test for credibility. Instead, their transparent disingenuousness only made the APA sound embarrassingly like apologists for the Bush administration. Well-meaning members who pointed this out were vilified.

 

It goes without saying that the effect of torture on the victim is horrible. The psychological effects are so dehumanising that they last long after any physical wounds inflicted have healed. We know from an abundance of studies that tortured people suffer what are often life‑long cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, with flashbacks, panic attacks, depression, and an alternating fearfulness and numbing that leaves victims with no emotional space in which they feel both pain-free and alive at the same time.

 

What was astonishing in the APA debate on torture was the seeming obliviousness to the other aspects of the issue on which APA members were deliberating.

Symbolising Aspirations

In psychology, we know that symbols are important. They are important because they enable us to experience efficiently in highly condensed form important, complex, emotion-laden ideas or concepts. The symbolic objects take on a meaning far beyond their “objective” everyday significance. A flag is, after all, just a piece of cloth with a particular design on it. But for many people it symbolises all that their homeland represents to them—its culture, values, sense of familiarity, and also the patriotic sacrifices that have been made to preserve those things.

 

Some symbols also have powerful aspirational dimensions, not reflecting emotional states and achievements, but instead serving as reminders of our near universal wish to better the human condition. In America, the Statue of Liberty symbolises the aspiration that the United States will serve as a land of opportunity for people who have arrived from distant, less-fortunate countries. For many newcomers to America, the aspiration has been realised. For many others, especially African Americans, it has not.

 

So it is with the symbolic, aspirational component of the condemnation of torture. To some, it seems illogical and contradictory that on the one hand we should sometimes morally accept the need to bomb innocent people in the name of war, but that on the other we always reject the need to inflict pain on an individual in the form of torture, even in the service of that war.

 

And yet the civilised world recognises that the commitment to international law and the Geneva Conventions reflects the high-water mark of our species’ wish to establish some limit to man’s inhumanity to man, no matter what the context in which it occurs. We aspire to do better than we have done in our treatment of people with whom we disagree, and the abolition of torture is a symbolically important developmental milestone in that effort.

 

Ironically, most experience and research on torture indicates that it does not work. As many veteran interrogators will attest, information is best obtained from prisoners not by bludgeoning them and inflicting pain. For multiple reasons, those tactics elicit unreliable information that can be dangerously misleading rather than helpful.

 

Instead, interrogators get useful information through painstaking relationship-building and non-stressful talking to prisoners. They get a piece of information here and a piece of information there, information that is voluntarily given up and that ultimately creates a mosaic of useful data.

 

Torture, on the other hand, produces false information as a result of the victim’s willingness to say anything to stop the pain, the wish to tell the interrogator whatever the latter wants to hear, even if the victim knows it to be false, the defiant desire to send the interrogator off on a wild-goose chase, or the victim’s cognitive confusion caused by the very torture itself. Recent research on interrogation all suggests that torture makes no successful contribution to police or military objectives.

 

So why does torture persist? The need to dominate another person totally is not rooted in military science. It is rooted in deep-seated feelings of inferiority, impotence, and sexual inadequacy. At its core, torture is sexually charged sadistic domination. It is a sexual perversion, not a military tactic.

 

Some people live emotionally impoverished lives and are largely unconnected to their own inner feelings. They are relatively incapable of experiencing feelings and as a result feel chronically empty and dead. Torture, like a drug, is such an intense experience that for them inflicting it is one of the few emotional scenarios in which they feel vibrant and alive. As such, it creates a rare context in which they are able to experience sexual arousal.

Psychology and Politics: The Parallels

Psychologists are among the most moral and ethical people I know. They are sensitive and caring. US psychologists deserved better from their national organisation, just as Americans throughout the Bush era deserved better from their government.

 

The responsibility of rank-and-file psychologists for what has happened is similar to that of American citizens for the deeds of the Bush administration. Both groups let themselves be beguiled by pleasant-sounding, ostensibly affable characters who simply proclaimed their own good intentions and sincerity. Eager to take the easy way out, both the American people and American psychologists believed their “superiors”, dodging the harder scrutiny that effective citizenship requires. Thus, in the 2000 presidential elections, American voters focused almost exclusively on how the two candidates made them feel, basing their electoral choice on sentiments such as, “Al Gore is too wooden”, and “I would rather have a beer with George W. Bush”. Or, in the case of the APA, it is nice for US psychologists that we can feel like such good people because we avoid conflicts (in a legislative assembly, no less!) and fawn over one another, all the while congratulating ourselves on “working together”. Confronting and dealing with real conflicts is harder and decidedly less pleasant.

 

It did not have to be this way in either instance. In the political sphere, there were warning signs of the potential for abuse that could have been detected by astute observers and certainly warranted comment by the media. George W. Bush’s proclivity for sadism broke through his outer, affable, ostensibly innocent veneer even when he was on stage while campaigning for the 2000 presidential race. He gleefully discussed the uniquely high number of executions he authorised while governor of Texas (152 in six years, more than any other contemporary US governor). Bush’s mockery of Karla Fay Tucker’s request to be spared the death penalty, which he rejected as Texas governor in 1998, revealed the same attitude. Regardless of one’s stance on capital punishment, even most adherents of the death penalty view the matter in the sombre terms required by respect for life.⁴

 

There were similar observable eruptions of sadism in the unmasked behaviour of a small number of APA leaders who created the environment that led to psychologists’ most shameful hour. These were conveniently dismissed or overlooked, as was an organisational history of character assassination and failure to live up to responsibilities by a few crucial leaders at the APA.

 

Both politicians and APA leaders, too, shared a similar response to dissent. Under the Bush administration, Richard Clarke, Valerie Plame, and many others were the victims of vicious smear campaigns. This tactic has also characterised the APA upper echelon’s response to people who tried to sound warnings about the now well-documented role of psychology in torture. To deflect attention away from the alarm these people were sounding, they were personally accused of mental instability, bias, and multiple character flaws. The fact that the whistle-blowers’ concerns were also raised by highly respected humanitarian organisations and human-rights advocates around the world was ignored.

 

It will still be taxing for American citizens and American psychologists to confront the ambiguities and unpleasantness of what has been done as a result of the war on terror. Whether either group will be able to do so remains to be seen.

 

Ironically, last year I came out with a book that was designed to show why from a psychological perspective the American mind is so vulnerable to right-wing propagandists like Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and religious fundamentalists.⁵ To show the universality of the concepts I was discussing, I drew on other organisational and clinical examples as well. Several of the illustrations were from my experiences at the APA. But it never dawned on me in the two years I was working on the book that my very own national organisation was being complicit with the Bush administration in committing systematic torture.

Endnotes

1. For an account of the roles of Seligman, Mitchell and Jessen in the development of the “enhanced interrogation” programme, see Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 154−72.

 

2. Ibid., pp. 157−64.

 

3. Jawad’s long ordeal in US detention is detailed in Glenn Greenwald, “Mohammed Jawad and Obama’s Efforts to Suspend Military Commissions”, Salon, 21 January 2025 [http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/01/21/guantanamo/index.html].

 

4. For Bush’s record on capital punishment, see Sister Helen Prejean, “Death in Texas”, New York Review of Books 52, no. 1 (13 January 2025).

 

5. Bryant Welch, State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2008).