Following my response to Frederic - yes I do agree that the matter could
be taken up through the BPS - as it were to try and 'proof' the society
against influence from the APA stance. I tend not to go to BPS events
but maybe there are people who would like to take this forward. We
could also look at doing a letter in the Psychologist to raise awareness.
Frederic Stansfield wrote:
> 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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