[Doing Harm investigates the American Psychological
Association’s complicity in post-9/11 torture programs and the
struggle to reform the psychology field.]
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“DOING HARM”: ROY EIDELSON ON THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL
ASSOCIATION’S EMBRACE OF U.S. TORTURE PROGRAM  
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Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Roy Eidelson
September 5, 2023
Democracy Now!
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_ Doing Harm investigates the American Psychological Association’s
complicity in post-9/11 torture programs and the struggle to reform
the psychology field. _

How the World's Largest Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the
War on Terror, Democracy Now!

 

A military judge at Guantánamo has thrown out the confessions of
Saudi man Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri because he had been tortured and
waterboarded at secret CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand,
Poland, Romania and Morocco before being sent to Guantánamo.
Psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, who were paid at
least $81 million by the CIA to develop and then implement the
CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, had waterboarded al-Nashiri at
a CIA black site. We get response from Roy Eidelson and discuss his
new book, _Doing Harm_, which investigates the American Psychological
Association’s complicity in post-9/11 torture programs and the
struggle to reform the psychology field. “We felt there was a lot at
stake,” says Eidelson. “It took over a decade for us to bring
change in terms of APA’s policy toward interrogation and detention
operations.” As the U.N. calls for al-Nashiri’s release, Eidelson
warns that APA leadership and military personnel are once again
pushing guidelines that expand psychologists’ role in torture.
“They want to expand the opportunities that are available for
psychologists to work in this arena where 'do no harm' is, at best,
secondary, and sometimes off the table entirely,” says Eidelson.
“It feels as though APA is slipping — slipping back into
positions that led to awful things.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is _Democracy Now!_, democracynow.org, _The War
and Peace Report_. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

A military judge at Guantánamo has thrown out the confessions of a
Saudi man because he had been subjected to waterboarding and other
forms of torture at secret CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand,
Poland, Romania and Morocco. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was detained in
2002 and held for four years at the black sites. Then, in 2006, he was
transferred to Guantánamo, where he’s been held ever since.

He’s alleged to have been the mastermind behind the bombing of
the _USS Cole_. In 2007, he confessed to his role in the bombing.
But a military judge, Colonel Lanny Acosta Jr., recently tossed that
confession, writing, quote, “Any resistance the accused might have
been inclined to put up when asked to incriminate himself was
intentionally and literally beaten out of him years before.” Acosta
went on to write, “Even if the 2007 statements were not obtained by
torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, they were derived
from it,” unquote.

During a hearing last year, the psychologist James Mitchell admitted
he and another psychologist, Bruce Jessen, had waterboarded al-Nashiri
at a CIA black site. Al-Nashiri was also subject to mock executions,
isolation, sleep deprivation and confinement inside a tiny wooden box.
In June, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for
al-Nashiri’s immediate release.

The two psychologists involved in his torture, Mitchell and Jessen,
had been paid at least $81 million by the CIA to develop, then
implement the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. According to
the ACLU, torture methods devised by Mitchell and Jessen included
slamming detained men into walls, stuffing them inside coffin-like
boxes, exposing them to extreme temperatures and ear-splitting levels
of music, starving them, inflicting various kinds of water torture,
depriving them of sleep for days, and chaining them in stress
positions designed for pain and to keep them awake for days on end.

The actions of doctors Mitchell and Jessen led to other psychologists
raising concerns about them with the American Psychological
Association, the APA, but the concerns were dismissed by the
organization’s leadership, eager to please the administration of
President George W. Bush. Anti-torture psychologists led a multiyear
campaign challenging the collusion of the APA, the world’s largest
professional association of psychologists, about 150,000 of them, with
the Pentagon and the CIA. The APA leadership was ultimately ousted,
and the APA barred its members from participating in harsh
interrogations.

Well, we’re joined now by the psychologist Roy Eidelson. He’s the
author of the new book, _Doing Harm: How the World’s Largest
Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the War on Terror_, that’s
just out today. He’s a member of the Coalition for an Ethical
Psychology and past president of Psychologists for Social
Responsibility.

We welcome you, Dr. Eidelson, to _Democracy Now!_ I was wondering if
you can —

ROY EIDELSON: Thanks very much, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. I’m wondering if
you can start off by talking about how that legacy of the APA — I
mean, they ousted their leadership — you see it continuing today.

ROY EIDELSON: Sure. The APA definitely got off on a very bad foot
right after the attacks of September 11th. And it took efforts by a
community of dissident psychologists — it took over a decade for us
to bring change in terms of APA’s policy toward interrogation and
detention operations, whether it’s at CIA black sites or at
Guantánamo. For a long time, the APA said that psychologists helped
to keep these operations safe, legal, ethical and effective. And none
of that was true.

Finally, in 2015, the APA, after Jim Risen’s book revealed
information after an internal report authorized by the APA board
revealed how the APA leadership had collaborated covertly with the
military intelligence establishment, the APA made some important
reforms in the ethics arena. One of them is that psychologists cannot
participate in national security interrogations. Another is that
psychologists cannot be present at unlawful sites like Guantánamo,
unless they’re working directly for the detainees or they’re
taking care of the military personnel, their healthcare.

So, it was a huge deal in 2015, this change. And APA leadership
almost unanimously supported it. The problem is — or, a problem,
since then, things are, step by step, seeming to slip back, and there
are powerful factions within the APA and outside of it, primarily
military psychologists and the Department of Defense, that want to
turn back the clock. And they, in fact, want to expand the
opportunities that are available for psychologists to work in this
arena where “do no harm” is, at best, secondary, and sometimes off
the table entirely.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Eidelson, could you talk about how you and
other dissenters — the battle that you had, the reaction of your
colleagues, and how you were able to get the association finally to
take a stand?

ROY EIDELSON: Sure. Again, it took years of dedicated effort by many
people, who became known as the “dissident psychologists” because
we were opposed to APA’s policies and support of the Pentagon.
Throughout that process, as we developed materials, as we pushed
the APA to change what it was doing, we were constantly confronted
by — it was either stonewalling, they would ignore us, or they would
make attempts to discredit us, or there were things that essentially
amounted to threats against some of our members, such as an ethics
complaint filed against one member of the coalition, a defamation
lawsuit filed against another coalition member.

And in their public statements, they repeatedly — they did not like
us, let’s put it that way. One APA president referred to us as
“opportunistic commentators masquerading as scholars.” A military
psychologist, in his self-congratulatory memoir, referred to us as
clowns who have never seen the whites of a terrorist’s eyes. And
another APA president, in her presidential column, seemingly
compared us to the Dementors. And if you’re familiar with Harry
Potter or the world of Harry Potter, Dementors are cloaked figures who
feed on human happiness. So, this was the position, the response we
got repeatedly.

It didn’t stop us, because we felt there was a lot at stake. And we
lost many battles, that I describe. But eventually, in part thanks to
broader awareness, public awareness of what actually had
unfolded, APA was kind of pushed to make a decision: Are we going to
continue to pretend that we’re on the right side of this, or are we
going to institute reforms? And fortunately, they picked the latter.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to follow up on our previous segment, where we
were talking about Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor. Well, prior to
entering politics, the presidential hopeful and Florida Governor Ron
DeSantis served in the Navy as an attorney at the U.S. prison at
Guantánamo, also served in Fallujah, Iraq. DeSantis’s time at
Guantánamo is coming under scrutiny after a former prisoner named
Mansoor Adayfi said that DeSantis had personally witnessed him being
force-fed and tortured. Other prisoners have backed up Adayfi’s
account. DeSantis has denied authorizing force-feeding at Guantánamo.
This is a clip.

PIERS MORGAN: _The Washington Post_ did a big deep dive on this
today, actually, about what you did out there. One of the things they
said was that you authorized the use of force-feeding, that somebody
—

GOV. RON DESANTIS: That’s not true. Yeah, that’s not true.
Yeah. Any of the stuff that people have —

PIERS MORGAN: Just to finish —

GOV. RON DESANTIS: OK.

PIERS MORGAN: Force-feeding the detainees who were on hunger strike.
Was that true?

GOV. RON DESANTIS: So, I was a — I was a junior officer. I
didn’t have authority to authorize anything. There may have been a
commander that would have done feeding if someone was going to die.
But that was not something that I would have even had authority to do.

PIERS MORGAN: So, that’s wrong?

GOV. RON DESANTIS: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Ron DeSantis in an interview with Piers
Morgan. But in an interview in 2018, he admitted to CBS Miami that
he had authorized force-feeding.

REP. RON DESANTIS: I was a legal adviser.

JIM DEFEDE: For those that were doing —

REP. RON DESANTIS: The things that would happen is — the thing
you notice the day you get down there is, for these detainees, the
jihad was still ongoing.

JIM DEFEDE: Right.

REP. RON DESANTIS: And they would wage jihad any way they can. Now,
they’re in a facility, so it’s limited. But some of the things
they would do, they would do hunger strikes. And you actually had
three detainees that committed suicide with hunger strikes. So,
everything at that time was legal in nature one way or another. So,
the commander wants to know, “Well, how do I combat this?” So one
of the jobs of the legal adviser is to be like, “Hey, you actually
can force-feed. Here’s what you can do. Here’s kind of the rules
of that.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could respond to this, Roy Eidelson, what
DeSantis’s dissent — what his response is and how you have shown
what is going on at Guantánamo?

ROY EIDELSON: Sure. Basically, in some of those interviews, he
acknowledged what he did. He did not have, from what I understand, a
high-level position at Guantánamo, but he had a position of some
legal expertise, and he recommended that one way to deal with the
hunger strikes was to force-feed. But not only did force-feeding take
place, the most brutal form of force-feeding that’s seemingly
possible was used by the Department of Defense. There was no reason to
do it that way, even if there was a decision to do it, which many
international experts would say was unlawful. But DeSantis is just, I
think, an example of a much broader concern, which is the number of
politicians who have no concern for the detainees who were ever at
Guantánamo or who are still there now.

There was a narrative built from the very beginning by the Bush
administration that the people we have captured are the worst of the
worst and that torture is working, is an effective means to obtain
information, and that using enhanced interrogation techniques have
saved many American lives. None of that is true. They were not the
worst of the worst. Most of the almost 800 detainees who were taken to
Guantánamo were swept up off of battlefields in Afghanistan or in
exchange for bounty payments from the U.S. government. They had no
connection to al-Qaeda, no connection to international terrorism. They
spent years, in some cases decades, at Guantánamo anyway. And the
message that the American people have gotten most often is that we
needed to do this; we did the right thing; these were very, very bad
people; these were people who would — you know, one general said,
who would gnaw through the hydraulic lines in a C-17 to bring it down.

And so, DeSantis, what’s most disturbing, I think, is that he has
achieved the position he has, that he’s seemingly a serious
contender to be president of the United States. And so, in that way,
he’s a bigger deal than many other politicians, but there are many
in the Senate and the House. And, of course, we shouldn’t forget
that the president before this one also had a very positive view of
Guantánamo, a very negative view of the detainees that had been
placed there, and was eager to add more people to Guantánamo.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Eidelson, the American Psychological
Association recently approved operational guidelines for its members.
Your assessment of those guidelines, especially in view of the fact
that they were written by, put together by military psychologists,
rather than ethicists or those harmed by past practices?

ROY EIDELSON: Yeah, this is a very recent new concern, and that is
that operational psychologists, who are not clinicians — they’re
focused on issues of national security and national defense — they
are eager to expand the opportunities for them to do work that
doesn’t involve avoiding harm, that doesn’t involve informed
consent, that doesn’t involve oversight by outside ethical boards.
And what they’ve managed to do, regrettably, is persuade
the APA governing council to approve a new set of practice
guidelines. And these guidelines — basically, now they have the
initial stamp of approval that APA is in favor of operational
psychologists engaging in these kinds of activities.

Three things, I guess, are especially noteworthy about those
guidelines. One, as you noted, they were written by military
psychologists, many of them, several of them, defense contractors, and
no one on that task force was an ethicist, or there was no
representation for the people who have been tragically harmed by the
abuse and torture that psychologists have produced in terms of the
treatment of detainees.

The other two things are, one, those guidelines make no mention of
this awful history of psychology and psychologists during the “war
on terror.” It seems really peculiar for someone interested in
practicing operational psychology to read a set of guidelines and not
even be told about what has happened, about the history, the troubling
history.

And the other one is there’s no mention of APA’s current policies.
So, there are policies, as I mentioned, that restrict involvement in
interrogations and that restrict involvement at Guantánamo and
similar places. There’s no mention of this in these guidelines at
all. So, it’s really troubling. It’s a sign, as I tried to
suggest, that it feels as though APA is slipping — slipping back
into positions that led to awful things. And, you know, we haven’t
given up.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Dr. Eidelson, _Democracy Now!_ has covered
this debate within the APA extensively over the years. In 2005, we
went out to the APA conference in San Francisco. I mean, you had
psychologists putting bags over their heads and looking like the
photographs we saw at Abu Ghraib, protesting what was going on. I was
really struck by the number of uniformed psychologists, as you said,
military psychologists there were within the association, that were
really directing the discussion. But we only have a minute, and I
wanted to ask you about that top lede going into you about the
military judge at Guantánamo who’s just thrown out the confessions
of the Saudi man because he had been subjected to torture,
waterboarding and other forms of torture, at CIA black sites in
Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania, Morocco. I’m talking about
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was detained over 20 years ago, held for
four years at these black sites, then, in 2006, transferred to
Guantánamo, where he’s been held ever since. Your response to the
judge throwing out what he has said because of torture? We just have
30 seconds.

ROY EIDELSON: In my view, it’s an excellent decision. It’s the
right decision. We’ll see whether it’s appealed and what comes of
that. I think it’s important, though, to emphasize that Mr.
al-Nashiri was far from the only detainee who was treated brutally,
who was abused, who was tortured, not just that CIA black sites, but
at Guantánamo, as well. So many of them have awful stories to tell,
if we’re willing to listen. This was a massive problem, and Mr.
al-Nashiri is a really important example of what happens when we fail
to uphold the principles our country is supposed to live by.

AMY GOODMAN: Roy Eidelson, I want to thank you so much for being
with us. His new book, out today, _Doing Harm: How the World’s
Largest Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the War on Terror_.

_DEMOCRACY NOW! produces a daily, global, independent news hour
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* War on Terrorism
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* Torture
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* American Psychological Association
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* Do No Harm
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