Psychologists take ethical stand on Guantánamo interrogation

UNITED STATES:HUMAN RIGHTS Activists cheered this week when the American Psychological Association (APA) voted to ban members from taking part in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and other US military detention centres around the world

The referendum followed a lengthy dispute among psychologists about the ethics of helping interrogations of terrorism suspects and represented a victory for activists over the association's leadership.

"This is a repudiation by the membership of a policy that has been doggedly pursued by APA leadership for year after year," said Boston psychologist Stephen Soldz, who campaigned for the ban.

"The membership has now spoken and it's now incumbent upon APA to immediately implement this." The decision brings the psychologists into line with doctors represented by the American Medical Association and psychiatrists in the American Psychiatric Association, but it may not mean the end of mental health professionals' involvement in military interrogations.

The psychiatrists' group introduced a ban after its former president Steven Sharfstein visited Guantánamo in October 2005 and was shocked to discover what mental health professionals actually did there. Instead of protecting the mental wellbeing of detainees, they were advising interrogators as prisoners were being questioned.

"They had headsets and microphones, and would be talking to [interrogators] as the interrogators were talking to the detainees," he said. "I just had lots of problems with the whole process." When the psychiatrists banned their members from working with interrogators a year after Sharfstein's visit to Guantánamo, they thought they had an understanding with the Pentagon that psychiatrists would not be used.

This month, however, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that the US army was still training psychiatrists as behavioural science consultants for interrogations. The journal obtained a 26-page army memo that stated, among other things, that behavioural science consultants are expected to do psychological profiles of detainees and identify their vulnerabilities as interrogations proceed.

"Behavioural science consultants add value to detention operations, intelligence interrogations and detainee debriefing missions because of their ability to provide detailed assessments of individual detainees, their environment and the interactions between detention facility guards and interrogators and detainees," the memo said.

"Behavioural science consultants' function in intelligence interrogation and debriefing assessment is to evaluate the psychological strengths and vulnerabilities of detainees and to assist in integrating these factors into a successful interrogation/ debriefing process."

American Psychiatric Association president Nada Stotland has written to defence secretary Robert Gates to complain about the continued use of psychiatrists in interrogations but a Pentagon spokeswoman said this week that nothing that was happening at Guantánamo and other detention centres violated ethical guidelines.

Even without the help of mental health professionals, US interrogators have numerous ways of making detainees talk, as Col Steven Kleinman, an air force survival skills instructor told the senate judiciary committee on Thursday.

He said he witnessed several episodes in Baghdad in 2003 in which young soldiers sought to overcome a lack of training in interrogations by blindly using harsh survival tactics on Iraqi detainees. Many of the interrogations took place in a former ammunition bunker, which he described as "underground, cold and dark". One detainee was forced to kneel under a spotlight, flanked by guards wielding iron bars, while interrogators shouted questions at him. Each answer elicited a hard slap across the face - a pattern that was repeated without pause for 30 minutes. When Col Kleinman intervened the interrogators appeared baffled. "They didn't seem to think it was a problem," he said.

A second detainee was subjected to sleep deprivation and painful stress positions and a third had all his clothes physically torn from his body and was ordered to stand for 12 hours, "or until he passed out".

When Col Kleinman complained about the tactics, Pentagon officials agreed that they probably contravened the Geneva Conventions but by then, White House lawyers had issued legal opinions that declared Iraqi detainees to be "unlawful enemy combatants" not covered by the conventions.