http://www.newsweek.com/id/164497

TERROR

The Biscuit Breaker

Psychologist Steven Reisner has embarked on a crusade to get his colleagues out of the business of interrogations.

By Dan Ephron | NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 18, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Oct 27, 2008

Before he became a psychologist, Steven Reisner didn't know much about the long history between spies and shrinks. Soft-spoken and cerebral, he'd spent seven years as a theater actor and director, switching to psychology as a profession in 1989. But the ties go back decades, to the early years of the cold war when psychologists helped the CIA experiment on U.S. citizens with mind-altering drugs. The relationship has warmed and cooled over the years, heating up whenever defense or intelligence officials wanted better mind-control methods, ways to direct people's behavior or detect deception. Since 9/11 military and civilian psychologists at Guantánamo Bay and other sites have often watched through the glass when detainees have been interrogated, part of a secret program about which few details have ever emerged.

Reisner first read about the program in a newspaper article in 2004. The 54-year-old psychoanalyst is convinced that some of the techniques used in those interrogations amounted to torture, and he has made it his mission since then to get psychologists out of the business of helping the military as they break down prisoners. Reisner's crusade has been waged largely within the American Psychological Association—in the minutiae of association bylaws and on the pages of internal listservs. Last week, balloting began for a new APA president in what for many is a referendum on the relationship between psychologists and the military. Among five contenders, Reisner has staked his candidacy on the issue.

The APA is the only remaining professional health association not to have shunned the contentious interrogations in the years since Guantánamo was opened in 2001.

Two civilian psychologists helped introduce techniques like waterboarding into interrogations, drawn from the military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) schools where troops are taught to withstand torture. Since 2002 psychologists have observed interrogations and suggested specific ways to exploit the weaknesses of detainees, including Mohammed Jawad, whose disturbing case is now being heard by a military tribunal in Guantánamo. The military claims the psychologists have only helped to make interrogations "safe, legal and effective."

Judging by recent internal votes, APA members have grown uncomfortable with the interrogation business. Reisner has received endorsements from a few big-name psychologists, including Stanford University's Philip Zimbardo. (The four other candidates in the race for president—two clinical psychologists, one professor and a researcher—have mostly campaigned on the bread-and-butter issues of the profession, such as gaining prescription-writing authority for psychologists.) If he wins, Reisner says he will use his authority to expose the precise role individual APA psychologists have played in the interrogations, not only at Guantánamo but at the CIA's "black" sites around the world. He says wrongdoers will be brought before an ethics board; like doctors and other caregivers, psychologists are bound by a do-no-harm principle. But for Reisner the main point is to air the details publicly, in a kind of truth-and-reconciliation process. "The discussions … need to have a public venue so that we can learn the lessons and not let it happen again," he says.

Reisner's passion for this issue is not only professional. He traces his interest in psychology to his parents' reluctance to talk about their experiences in World War II. Both are Holocaust survivors. Reisner found out when he was only 10 from a family friend that his mother had spent time in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. He came to know her full story—she fled a death march in the waning months of the war—when she addressed his high-school class. "I always wanted to know how people went into the darkest places and came out of them," he says.

As a psychoanalyst Reisner says he's attuned to the deeper truths people conceal when they tell their stories (his sparse office in a Chelsea walk-up features an analyst's armchair and a leather couch where the patient, in traditional Freudian fashion, faces away from the psychologist). That instinct led him to believe that there was more to the relationship between psychologists and interrogators than what had appeared in initial media reports. He began collecting documents in a file on the subject that now takes up a large chunk of his computer's hard drive. [...]

[...]

If Reisner loses the APA election (results will be announced in early December) he says he will turn to lobbying Congress and the Pentagon directly. Already his campaign has earned him enemies. Regularly, he says, other psychologists post listserv comments asking him why he cares more about terrorists than American citizens. Occasionally, he encounters biscuit psychologists face to face [...]

[...]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/164497

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"biscuit" = Behavioral Science Consultation Team

Parents and kids. A coalition of the willing.

"The combination is powerful. More than the sum of its parts."

APA could become a Truth Commission of sorts; or maybe Steven Reisner could help form one, if he's elected as the next APA president.

He could help form one anyway, even if he's defeated.

Great work, liberal bloggers, and also great work, grassroots anti-torture movement! Local groups and congregations across the country opposed Brennan by writing to Obama's transition team. Don't forget many of us also volunteered in Obama's campaign, and have been receiving that steady stream of post-election e-polls and requests for issue input for which the Obama effort is justly famous. This has been a great way to let Obama know Brennan and Miscik are unacceptable. Next up: let's use Maher Arar's rehearing on December 9 before the 2nd Circuit Court in Manhattan as an occasion to tell the public and the media that we need justice for the survivors of rendition, a thorough government investigation of the rendition and torture program, and accountability for all who took part. Resources at unitedforpeace.org (2nd item), and check out our web site at www.ncstoptorturenow.org.

So with our newfound power, can we / should we push for getting Hegel in and Gates out as SecDef? I don't have extensive knowledge on the subject but it sure seems like Hegel would be better. He's a socially conservative republican, but that wouldn't really matter in the position, and why would Obama want ANYONE left over from the Bush administration?