i can't get to London on 16th October but wish to support any effort to get psychologists critiquing our discipline and practice and promoting social justice - so good luck with the launch and yes I feel this should be on the agenda.
Thanks to Mark for informing us about the position of APA on the matter of torture.
Annie
-----Original Message-----
From: The UK Community Psychology Discussion List on behalf of Venables,Keith (Children and Younger Adults)
Sent: Sun 10/09/2006 12:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: More on APA and psychological torture by US military
The Psychologists for Social Responsibility Launch takes place in London on 16th October (6.00 - 8.00, Lucas Arms, Gray's Inn Road).
Should this be on the agenda?
Keith Venables
-----Original Message-----
From: The UK Community Psychology Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Frederic Stansfield
Sent: 10 September 2006 11:52
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [COMMUNITYPSYCHUK] More on APA ans psychological torture by US military
I agree that it is odd psychologists need to be told not to torture people and outrageous if they are involved in practices such as Mark Burton describes.
However, to consider this a little more try thinking the other way round. What methods are legitimate for an intelligence officer to interrogate a prisoner with information? If the officer has somebody in hs custody who, say, he has good reason to believe knows about a plot to fly a plane into a skyscraper and kill thousands of innocent people it is obvious that (s)he will wish to find out information from the prisoner to prevent this event from happening. Sexual humiliation based on the prisoners' culture clearly goes too far - apart from the moral objecton and probably being ineffective its long term results are worse than any short-term gain. But surely the intelligence officer should not be limited to asking name, rank and number?
We can talk about this issue, but the question is what psychologists should do about it. One posibility is for members of the British Psychological Society to raise this at the Annual Conference (either in a session or by putting an item for consideration at the AGM) or to press for the BPS to act through its committee structure relating to Psycholgical Societies internationally.
Mark Burton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
It is odd, but the problem is deeper than that. The torture used in Abu Graib, Guantánamo Bay, Bagrahm etc. has its roots in the CIA funded experiments on sensory deprivation done by Hebb and others. The methods entered CIA handbooks used in Vietnam, Chile and Central America by the US and its proxies and. The torture methods used today in the 'war of terror' are these same methods although now augmented by additional violent methods such as the use of dogs and by sexual humiliation based on assumptions about Arab/Islamic culture and 'self inflicted pain' (i.e. being forced to stay in stress positions). The issue here is not so much that we have to tell psychologists not to torture but that military psychologists and psychiatirists are indeed deeply involved in the practice. The problem then is not that the APA isn't telling people torture is wrong but that it is legitimating that torture through the Nuremburg defence (only obeying orders), just as the Reagan and Bush regimes legitimated that torture by defining it as 'not torture'. We have to be concerned about this because of the pervasive influence of US psychology. Just as we learned as undergraduates about sensory deprivation in courses on perception, without any connection made to the purpose and application of that research (at least if you learned your psychology as long ago as me!), so we can expect a corrosion of the ethics of the discipline worldwide unless the current collaborationist APA position is exposed and denounced.
Mark
Craig Newnes wrote:
Isn't it odd that psychologists need to be told not to torture people?
Craig
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