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From: MSmith on 24 Jul 2008 14:44
Linda wrote:
> If Seligman didn't want the entire world to know the Philly MOB is in
> charge of Torture, USA, then, the Philly Mob ought not have tortured
> me and mine for 8 friggen years.
>
>
> http://www.pubrecord.org/commentary/200.html?task=view
>
> Physicians, Psychologists & the Problem of "The Dark Side"
>
> By J. Valtin
> The Public Record
> Tuesday, July 15, 2008
>
> Favoured : 18
>
> Published in : Commentary
>
>
>
> "Any of us could be the man who encounters his double." -- Friedrich
> Durrenmat (1)
> Jane Mayer's new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War
> on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (not due out in the
> bookstores until tomorrow), is already creating headlines and
> generating controversy. This article will examine the issues around
> U.S. torture practice, in light of new allegations in the book, and
> review an email conversation between myself and a prominent nationally-
> known psychologist whom Mayer says assisted in the planning of U.S.
> government torture.
>
> Scott Shane at The New York Times wrote an article last Friday
> describing how Mayer reveals that the International Committee of the
> Red Cross (ICRC) told the CIA last year in a report that the
> interrogation of "high-level" detainees, such as Abu Zubaydah,
> "categorically" constituted torture, were illegal, and amounted to
> prosecutable war crimes. Zubaydah, famously, was one of three
> prisoners the government has admitted were waterboarded. A videotape
> of his interrogation was destroyed by the CIA.
>
> In an July 14 interview with Scott Horton at Harper's, Jane Mayer
> discussed the reaction to the ICRC charges:
>
> ... Abu Zubayda claimed to have been locked in a tiny cage, in which
> he had to remain doubled up for long periods of time, prior to the
> period when he was waterboarded. This account � which he gave to the
> International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) � was confirmed to me
> independently by a former CIA officer familiar with his
> interrogation....
>
> The reaction of top Bush Administration officials to the ICRC report,
> from what I can gather, has been defensive and dismissive. They reject
> the ICRC�s legal analysis as incorrect. Yet my reporting shows that
> inside the White House there has been growing fear of criminal
> prosecution...
> Ms. Mayer concludes that the addition of an immunity provision in the
> Military Commissions Act passed by Congress in 2007 was an attempt to
> address such fears among administration figures. She further opines
> that it seems unlikely to her that anyone in the Bush administration
> will actually face domestic prosecution for war crimes, as the
> "political appetite" seems lacking. And then she adds the following
> (emphasis added):
>
> An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress
> sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be
> counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised.
> A Prominent Psychologist Comes Under Fire
>
> While medical personnel associated with the ICRC have played a heroic
> role in documenting and advocating for prisoners' rights, doctors and
> psychologists associated with U.S. detention and interrogation of so-
> called "enemy combatants" in the "war on terror" have not acquitted
> themselves with the same ethical probity. In fact, they may be guilty
> of war crimes themselves.
>
> Jane Mayer's new book also looks more closely at the utilization of
> SERE techniques as a template for U.S. torture of detainees. (SERE
> stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, & Escape, and is a military
> program aimed at training U.S. soldiers for torture at the hands of
> vicious captors, those who would not honor Geneva Convention
> protocols. Ironically, the U.S. itself announced that "enemy
> combatants" are not bound by those same Geneva agreements.)
>
> It's been a year since SERE military psychologists James Mitchell and
> John Bruce Jessen were accused, in an article by Katherine Eban in
> Vanity Fair, of teaching SERE techniques to interrogators at
> Guantanamo and elsewhere. (I covered the "nuts and bolts" of how SERE
> procedures were taught at Guantanamo in a recent essay.) According to
> a different article by Jane Mayer last year, Mitchell utilized the
> theories of "learned helplessness" in implementing his interrogation
> lessons. (Mr. Mitchell denied this assertion.) Mayer wrote:
>
> Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced
> interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said
> that �learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.� Mitchell, he said,
> �draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts
> with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners� ability to forecast
> the future�when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom.
> It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the
> K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to
> confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn�t after intelligence.�
> This torture model of dread, debility through isolation, and
> dependency may have been the model of the K.G.B., but it was
> intellectually codified by U.S. psychologists and psychiatrists in the
> 1950s, most notably in a 1956 article in the journal Sociometry,
> Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread).
> One of the authors of this article, Harry Harlow, went on to become a
> president of the American Psychological Association (APA).
>
> In Mayer's new book, she implicates another former APA president in
> the development of torture, Martin Seligman, the creator of the theory
> of "learned helplessness". I have not seen Mayer's book, which hasn't
> been released yet, so my accounts come from statements online by Scott
> Horton, as well as the latter's interview with Mayer previously cited.
> Horton wrote (emphasis added):
>
> [Mayer] traces the development of the torture techniques to the work
> of two contractors, Mitchell and Jessen, and disclosed the specific
> techniques they developed. She notes that the techniques rely heavily
> on a theory called "Learned Helplessness" developed by a Penn
> psychologist Martin Seligman, who assisted them in the process.
> Seligman is no obscure academic, or bureaucrat. He is one of the best
> known psychologists in the country, a prominent professor, and leader
> of the Positive Psychology movement, often quoted in the nation's
> psychology textbooks. Mayer's allegations about Seligman were picked
> up anti-torture activist and psychologist Stephen Soldz at his blog.
> This brought a rejoinder from Seligman himself, denying he assisted in
> torture in any way. He continued:
>
> I gave a three hour lecture sponsored by SERE (the Survival, Evasion,
> Resistance, Escape branch of the American armed forces) at the San
> Diego Naval Base in May 2002. My topic was how American troops and
> American personnel could use what is known about learned helplessness
> and related findings to resist torture and evade successful
> interrogation by their captors.
>
> I was told then that since I was (and am) a civilian with no security
> clearance that they could not discuss American methods of
> interrogation with me. I have not had contact with SERE since that
> meeting. I have not worked under government contract (or any other
> contract) on any aspect of interrogation or any aspect of torture. Mr.
> Mitchell and Mr. Jessen were present in the audience of about 50
> others at my speech, and that was, to the best of my knowledge, the
> sum total of my �assisting them in the process."
> What Seligman Told Me
>
> In December 2006, following suspicions (at that time uncorroborated by
> government documents) that SERE had been used to reverse-engineer
> torture, as reported by Jane Mayer in a July 2005 New Yorker article,
> which mentioned Seligman by name, and by Mark Benjamin at Salon.com, I
> wrote to Seligman and asked him about reports he had taught at the
> SERE school. I was then researching an article on psychological
> research into sensory deprivation and torture. (The article turned
> into a presentation at the APA convention in 2007, and was
> subsequently published as "Psychology and Research into Coercive
> Interrogation".) Dr. Seligman's answer to me then (December 2006) was
> much the same as that made to Soldz above.
>
> I tried to push Seligman a little harder on the issue:
>
> I really have only one outstanding question that remains from my
> original questions: Were you aware -- or do you even believe -- that
> your work on learned helplessness has been used not only to help our
> soldiers withstand coercive interrogation, but to conduct such types
> of interrogation by U.S. interrogators themselves?
> Martin Seligman replied tersely:
>
> I am not available for further comment. (2)
> About seven months later, as further revelations about SERE and
> torture surfaced, including admissions by the Pentagon Office of
> Inspector General (in a report publicly released in May 2007) that
> SERE reverse-engineering had taken place, and that Mitchell and Jessen
> were involved, I revisited the issue with Dr. Seligman in August 2007:
>
> When I wrote to you before, you declined to comment on my question.
> But I think it is incumbent upon you now to say more about what you
> know, as well as what you think, about the use of your work by
> military and CIA psychologists to instigate torture. I ask you this as
> a colleague in the field, and as a psychologist interested in stopping
> torture, and ashamed of the actions of some in our field in
> perpetuating abusive behavior. I would think you would like to clear
> your name, which otherwise remains linked (even if in obscure ways) to
> some of the worst episodes in our nation's and our profession's
> history.
> Dr. Seligman replied (emphasis added):
>
> I am entirely out of this loop, having had zero contact with SERE
> since my talk in April 2002. I know nothing at all about how they have
> applied LH concepts to either help our own people or to the
> interrogation of prisoners. When I asked about the latter at my talk,
> they told me that they could not give me any information at all, since
> I had no "classification."
>
> My talk was about how to teach our people to resist LH [Learned
> Helplessness] and my life work has been devoted to the issues of
> undoing LH, not about inducing it in other human beings.
> Once again, I persevered, intrigued that Seligman appeared to be
> admitting that he had asked about application of "learned
> helplessness" techniques to the interrogation of prisoners. Why, in
> December 2002, had he bothered to ask? Was he suspicious? Did he know
> more than he was saying, or even worse, had he done more than he was
> admitting? I wrote (emphasis in original):
>
> I appreciate your quick reply, and I understand that you had nothing
> to do with how LH concepts were used by others. But, given the
> controversy over psychologist participation in interrogations (a vote
> on competing resolutions is due at the next [APA] Council meeting),
> and the fact that your ideas and research were obviously used (you
> even asked them about it), what is your position on the use of your
> research by others, and on psychologists involved in military/CIA
> interrogations under the current administration?
> Dr. Seligman replied:
>
> The only "position" I am comfortable staking out is "Good science
> always runs the risk of immoral application. It goes with the
> territory of discovery."
> Doubling and Collaboration with Torture
>
> Dr. Seligman's "position" was startling. Even if one accepts his
> denial of further association with the torture program initiated by
> the Bush administration, utilizing SERE coercive techniques, Seligman
> seems to believe it's okay to settle for a "see no evil" approach. In
> his point of view, he is a scientist, a discoverer of new knowledge.
> If his work might be abused, that is not a concern of his.
>
> This is an immoral position, of course, even if not necessarily
> criminal, in a forensic sense. If I could question him further, I
> would ask why he was asked to give this particular "lecture" at a SERE
> school at this time, and who asked him to do so. (Mayer says Seligman
> was connected with the CIA, but no further details are given.) I would
> further ask what led him to inquire about the possible use of SERE
> techniques on interrogations of prisoners, and why, when he was waved
> off, he acquiesced so meekly.
>
> For years now, Dr. Seligman has been quiet about the use of his own
> theories in the application of horrifying torture techniques. Why this
> silence?
>
> The situation with Seligman, like those of other psychologists and
> psychiatrists who worked for the CIA's MKULTRA and like programs over
> forty years ago, reminds me of the analysis Robert Jay Lifton made of
> the behavior of doctors in Nazi Germany, who were implicated in anti-
> semitic purges of Jews from the medicine field, and in programs of
> forced sterilization, euthanasia of mental patients, and later, in the
> operations of the concentration camps. (The Germans, I should note,
> were not the only people to engage in forced sterilizations. The
> United States, too, engaged in eugenics policies such as forced
> sterilization earlier in the twentieth century, and many doctors
> participated in that.)
>
> In his book, The Nazi Doctors, Lifton describes the phenomenon of
> "doubling", or "socialization to evil."
>
> Doubling arises in the context where a professional must "function
> psychologically in an environment... antithetical to his previous
> ethical standards..." The person must be able to connect with both the
> prior, ethical self and the new, unethical environment or institution.
> The splitting of the professional self allows for an adaptation to
> evil and an escape from subsequent feelings of guilt or wrong-doing,
> as "the second self tends to be the one performing the 'dirty work'."
> What makes the entire process so insidious is that it usually takes
> place outside of individual consciousness, even as it involves "a
> significant change in moral consciousness." Thus, doubling can be
> understood as an adaptation to an extremely immoral culture or
> institution, allowing for disavowal of guilt. (See The Nazi Doctors,
> Lifton, pp. 421-423).
>
> We can see this in Seligman's disavowal of any wrong-doing, and even
> his strong protestations of being against torture. Now, it's
> notoriously difficult to psychoanalyze someone from afar, but how else
> are we to explain the monumental and repeated violations of basic
> ethical practice by physicians and psychologists over the years,
> whether it has to do with secret study done on unknowing African-
> American subjects as part of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis patients
> experiments that lasted for forty years, until 1972; the human
> plutonium radiation experiments of the last century; the CIA mind
> control programs noted above; or the development and implementation of
> current psychological torture programs, which continues to date?
>
> Are We Morally Doomed?
>
> I think Jane Mayer is wrong on one point. As pointed out earlier, she
> is pessimistic that this nation has the "political appetite" to bring
> the perpetrators of torture to the bar of justice in his country. I
> hear that from many. But where there is a will, there is,
> proverbially, a way. It is not about "appetite" anymore. It is about
> what we must do, if we are not to take that final step into the dark
> side, a place Vice President Cheney so-famously told us we would have
> to go. We know now what awaits us there.
>
> Worse even than the doubling of an individual like Martin Seligman is
> the behavior of the professional organizations for doctors and
> psychologists. The American Medical Association, while officially
> having a policy of not participating in interrogations at Bush's war
> on terror prisons, has taken no steps I know of to investigate or
> police violations of this policy. For years, the American
> Psychological Association has maintained that, while against torture,
> it supports psychologists working at prisons like Guantanamo, even if
> they do not allow basic human rights, because supposedly they lessen
> the possibility of abuse. The logic is grotesque, at best, and grossly
> misleading when you realize it's psychologists who have been
> implicated in organizing the abuse. But on this, the APA remains
> silent, rendering that organization, in Mayer's own characterization,
> "worthless."
>
> In the famous legend, Faust bargains away his soul to the devil for
> the privilege of obtaining knowledge. In Goethe's rendering of the
> story, Faust is redeemed in the end, and the spirits who help him
> remind us, "He who persists in striving ever upwards, him we can
> save."
>
>
> (1) Quote taken from Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors, Basic
> Books, 1986/2000, p. 418.
>
> (2) The quotes from my email correspondence with Dr. Seligman were the
> source of some quandary for me, as I was unsure whether to utilize
> them. I sought consultation for this issue with a long-time, highly
> respected journalist who thought it appropriate. I do want to make
> clear that all who communicate with me by voice or by writing
> (including email) and ask for confidentiality or non-attribution will
> have their request respected. My quotations from the Seligman
> correspondence with me are drawn from a professional exchange and not,
> in my opinion, privileged.
>
> Last update : Tuesday, July 15, 2008
>
>


You make my work so easy, you paranoid psycho, proving once again, that
no one should waste a moment to pay any heed to Osama bin Linda.
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