Re: Fwd: Congratulations to Trudy and the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
From:
"mike ferner" <mike.ferner@PROTECTED>
Date:
August 8th 2015
Congratulations, Trudy!
“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers?...Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.” --Wendell Berry
End Corporate Rule. Legalize Democracy. Move to Amend. www.movetoamend.org
On Friday, August 7, 2015 11:06 PM, Josie Setzler <josiesetzler@PROTECTED> wrote:
Heartfelt congrats, Trudy!!
These Six Rebe Psychologists Just Won A Long War Against Torture
They were ridiculed and sidelined by the leadership of the American
Psychological Association, which they accused of complicity in human
rights abuses. When the association voted to ban psychologists from
these activities on Friday, the rebels scored an improbable — and
emotional — victory.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous/the-dissidents
TORONTO — They call themselves “the dissidents.” Officially, they are the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. In reality, they’re just six psychologists united by a shared moral outrage at their profession’s involvement in torture.
Last month, these tenacious rebels were vindicated by a damning independent report,
which concluded that the American Psychological Association (APA)
colluded with the Pentagon to allow psychologists to help U.S. military
interrogators employing brutal methods on terrorist suspects.
On Friday morning, amid emotional scenes, the APA’s governing Council
of Representatives overwhelmingly backed the dissidents’ proposal to
ban psychologists from taking part in national security interrogations.
That the rebels stuck together for so long, in the face of the
powerful forces ranged against them, is remarkable — especially given
their own differences.
“We did not come together as like-minded people or friends,” Jean
Maria Arrigo, the whistleblower who the group coalesced around, told
BuzzFeed News.
Arrigo is an independent social psychologist from California who has
formed close ties with Army interrogators who oppose torture. Some of
her colleagues, meanwhile, are pacifists who wouldn’t dream of
collaborating with anyone from the military.
“We have fights about this,” Arrigo said. “We do not tend to ideological conformity.”
The coalition came together in the wake of the
APA’s Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS),
which issued the 2005 report that has thrown psychology into crisis.
Arrigo was a member, but quickly came to the view that the task force
was a sham.
It came up with no firm rules to prohibit psychologists from being
involved in interrogations using the harsh methods — including sleep
deprivation, isolation, and painful “stress positions” — that were being
used at CIA “black sites” and the U.S. military’s detention camp at
Guantánamo.
“I was manipulated into the task force and then lied to with the
result that I became complicit,” Arrigo told the APA meeting on
Wednesday. “Even though I’m an introvert and would rather be reading
poetry, I had to take this moral stand.”
Also driven by outrage about psychology’s failure to distance itself
from what was happening to detainees in the “war on terror” were Steven
Reisner, a New York psychoanalyst, Stephen Soldz of the Boston Graduate
School of Psychoanalysis, and Brad Olson, a psychologist at National
Louis University in Chicago.
That core group was later joined by Roy Eidelson, a consulting
psychologist in Pennsylvania, and Trudy Bond, a counselling psychologist
from Ohio. She opened a new front by filing ethics complaints with the
APA and state psychological associations against psychologists who had
worked at Guantánamo.
The group came under repeated attack from the APA’s leadership. In a 2006 column
in the association’s magazine, then-President Gerald Koocher criticized
“opportunistic commentators masquerading as scholars” who were alleging
abuses by mental health professionals.
The following year, after Arrigo appeared on the radio show Democracy Now,
Koocher issued an open letter alleging that she was biased by the “sad
emotional aftermath of a troubled upbringing” and the suicide of her
father.
It was an astonishing claim, given Arrigo’s father was alive at the time.
Realizing that any mistake they made would be seized upon, the
coalition became obsessive in fact-checking its statements. “When Soldz
and Reisner put something out, I know that it is right,” Arrigo told
BuzzFeed News. “I can put my life on it.”
Worse than the attacks, Eidelson told BuzzFeed News, was simply being
ignored. He took on the job of sending each of the group’s statements
to every member of the APA’s Council of Representatives. “I’d send to
175 email addresses and wait for the silence,” Eidelson said. “It would
often feel like an exercise in futility, but I would do it anyway.”
The rebels did have some key allies. They
credit Physicians for Human Rights, which similarly opposed torture, for
bringing them together. Bryant Welch, a California clinical
psychologist and former APA insider, helped out for a couple of years.
Another ally was Dan Aalbers, a psychologist at Sierra Nevada College
near Lake Tahoe in Nevada, who helped the group bypass the APA’s
leadership by appealing directly to its members. In 2008, rank-and-file
APA members backed a proposal to remove psychologists from Guantánamo and CIA black sites by 8,792 votes to 6,157.
But as the years dragged by, it was never implemented.
“We thought we had lost,” Reisner told supporters yesterday, at a
town hall meeting on the sidelines of the APA’s annual meeting in
Toronto. “We thought that we’d played just about every card that we
had.”
But there was one more card to play, held not by the rebels but by
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist James Risen. He had obtained emails
supporting the claim that the APA had colluded with the military to
ensure that the PENS task force would deliver a report that would please
the Pentagon.
When Risen’s book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War, appeared in October 2014, the APA criticized him for “innuendo and one-sided reporting.” But a month later, with the controversy refusing to die down, it commissioned Chicago lawyer David Hoffman to investigate.
“Many people in the APA believed this investigation was going to
prove, once and for all, that we were a bunch of blowhards,” Reisner
told the town hall meeting. Instead, Hoffman’s report confirmed Risen’s
claims — which echoed what the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology had
been saying all along.
The APA’s current leadership, rocked by the Hoffman report, backed
the proposed ban on psychologists taking part in national security
interrogations. But ahead of the vote, the rebels didn’t know what to
expect from the Council of Representatives — an unwieldy body whose
deliberations are hard to predict.
Larry James, formerly chief psychologist at Guantánamo, led the
opposition, arguing that the ban would put psychologists employed by the
federal government in a “dire” position by putting international law
above the U.S. Constitution.
“I think we need to slow down and think very carefully,” he told the council.
But when it came to a verbal vote, James was the only member of the
council to say “No.” As the rebels’ previous opponents lined up behind
the ban, Soldz couldn’t contain his emotion, fighting to hold back
tears.
“This is the best thing to happen for psychology in decades and
decades,” an elated Olson told BuzzFeed News, immediately after the
vote.
“The momentum of change is with us, and I think everybody realized
that they wanted to be on the right side of history,” Reisner told
reporters.
But the job isn’t finished, Reisner warned. “We have to make very
clear that the American Psychological Association will be among the
strongest voices for human rights,” he said. “But until we do that, the
public should be skeptical.”
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