Michael G. Gelles, Psy.D., ABPP
4 Professional Drive
Suite 120
Gaithersburg, MD 20879
301 346 5177 mggelles@cs.com
April 5, 2007
Dr. Neil Altman, PhD Dr. Uwe Jacobs, PhD Dr. Steven Miles, MD
Dear Drs. Altman, Jacobs, and Miles,
Thank you for your correspondence, in response to my letter to Drs.
Altman and Moorehead-Slaughter. I appreciate your commitment to this
issue and hope that we can find common ground in our approach. It is
clear to me that we all seek the same goal: An ethical means of
eliciting accurate and reliable information in order to prevent acts of
violence and loss of life. I must say, however, that based upon my
extensive work in consulting to law enforcement, police and military
around the world, including in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan,
the position you set forth in your letters and the questions you pose
rest upon substantial misconceptions about the nature of
interrogations, the role of psychologists in national security
settings, and the likely impact of APA disengaging from this critical
debate and of APA members withdrawing from the practice of
interrogations.
Please allow me to begin by emphasizing: Psychologists should not
defer to lawyers on the question of what constitutes torture or cruel,
inhuman, or degrading treatment. I believe Dr. Altman’s resolution is
considerably off the mark on this score. I took action when I learned
of abusive behaviors. I didn’t go through a legal analysis, nor did I
consult with attorneys even though many were present and, like me,
troubled by what was occurring. I became involved because behaviors
that were wrong came to my attention, not because an attorney
intervened or a definition in a legal text had been violated. APA
should focus on specific behaviors, not on legal definitions.
Moreover, nothing in my experience supports your concern that
psychologists will be forced to engage in behaviors they believe to be
unethical. I am not aware of any psychologist who has been ordered to
support a coercive interrogation or to train interrogators in abusive
processes, nor am I aware of any psychologist who has been disciplined
for communicating concerns or refusing to participate in a
consultation. In the time since I reported concerns to my chain of
command—an action that was followed by a promotion—ethics has become a
focus for psychologists being trained for this role. Current Department
of Defense policy makes explicit reference to APA’s PENS report and
includes the actual report itself. The community of military
psychologists, together with civilians who consult to national security
and law enforcement, have formed a tight network where didactic
seminars and peer consultation on ethics are frequent. Through the PENS
Task Force and subsequent Council of Representative actions, APA is
playing a critical role in bringing moral clarity to the debate over
what constitutes an ethical consultation to an interrogation, as well
as science to the practice of interrogations. Removing psychology and
psychologists would stop the steady and measurable progress we have
made and are making. From my perspective, a moratorium would be to
abdicate rather than to embrace our ethical responsibilities.
In his thoughtful letter, Dr. Jacobs states that “our professional
organization has to protect our own.” I wholeheartedly agree. We are a
professional association whose members have extensive experience and
expertise in a broad range of practice areas—an aspect of APA that is
to our decided advantage. If we want to protect psychologists working
in detention facilities, let’s ask our colleagues who are most familiar
with operations in these settings: military psychologists, police
psychologists and correctional psychologists. What protection do our
colleagues working in these settings and in these areas of practice
believe they need? What steps do they think APA can take that will best
offer that protection? Does a moratorium offer the protection that
military psychologists seek? Let’s begin our discussions by respecting
the experience and expertise that resides within these communities—in
the same manner we would proceed with a complex treatment intervention
only after having consulted at length with the psychologist who knows
the patient best.
Dr. Jacobs quotes Alberto Mora and asks whether I agree with his
statement, “To my mind, there’s no moral or practical distinction
between cruelty and torture … cruelty … destroys the whole notion of
individual rights.” I have an enormous admiration and respect for
Alberto Mora. This quotation captures the essence of what we are
talking about: Torture, cruelty and abuse have no role in
interrogations. They are wrong. They violate human rights. They
increase—not decrease—the long-term likelihood of violence. This is
Alberto Mora’s position. This is my position. This is APA’s position.
Let us assert and emphasize that position at every opportunity, in
every venue possible, especially where interrogations are taking place.
Sincerely,
Michael G. Gelles
There is not one mention of the terrible human rights violations that have occurred, and are still occurring,
at Guantanamo, not to mention the role of psychologists in those
abuses. He ignores the evidence that it is precisely his pals, “the
community of military psychologists, together with civilians who
consult to national security and law enforcement,” who are reported by
virtually every reporter who has looked into the matter — Jane Mayer (New Yorker), Mark Benjamin (Salon), Bill Dedman (MSNBC), art Levine (Washington Monthly)
— to be one ones who were sent to Guantanamo to develop torture
techniques, not to prevent them. Evidently Dr. Gelles considers himself
to be one of a tight-knit community with these people, not to mention
those psychologists who helped developed the special technique used at
the CIA black sites.
Perhaps Dr. Gelles’ being a member of this “tight network” helps
explain why, despite his concerns regarding the horrible abuses
involving BSCT psychologists at Guantanamo, he never went public.
Rather, he sent a report up the chain of command that resulted in a
two-year internal struggle over interrogation practices, a struggle
which, according to Jane Mayer’s account (How an internal effort to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was thwarted)
was lost by Dr. Gelles’ superiors who were trying to reign in the worst
abuses. It is always possible that going public and throwing the
spotlight directly on what this community was doing would have been
more successful at reducing abuse. But Dr. Gelles chose to confine his
efforts to bureaucratic struggles up the chain-of-command, not engaging
public opinion as force for reform, just as now he asks us to trust
this same community of psychological consultants to act ethically, in a
situation where, because of near-total secrecy, public oversight is
essentially impossible.
Dr. Gelles asserts “moreover, nothing in my experience supports your
concern that psychologists will be forced to engage in behaviors they
believe to be unethical. I am not aware of any psychologist who has
been ordered to support a coercive interrogation or to train
interrogators in abusive processes.” If these Behavioral Science
Consultation Team (BSCT) psychologists, whose behavior during
interrogations Dr. Gelles is famous for complaining about, were never
“ordered to support a coercive interrogation,” then either Dr. Gelles
doesn’t recognize a coercive interrogation when he sees one, or Dr.
Gelles is cleverly parsing words here, or these psychologists engaged
in abuses without orders. Further, the statement that there is no
evidence “hat psychologists will be forced to engage in behaviors they
believe to be unethical” may be true, because these psychologist think
that the extreme techniques that they utilize(d) are, indeed ethical.
Any of these possibilities does not support the position that
psychologists’ participation in interrogation is likely to reduce
abuses. Further, all reports from military officers are that
disobedience of orders carries severe consequences, making the need for
“force” to get psychologists to participate extremely unlikely.
Another of Dr. Gelles’ rhetorical tricks is to conflate “military
psychologists, police psychologists and correctional psychologists.”
While there may be difficult ethical issues involved in psychologists
aiding police and correctional interrogations, surely Dr. Gelles should
be able to understand that there is a world of difference between those
in the criminal justice system who have, at least in principle,
constitutional rights and legal mechanism to protect those rights and
detentions of so-called “enemy combatants” who have been stripped of
all rights and may be locked up for the rest of their lives on the
authority of a single individual, the President, and whose trial,
should it ever occur, does not include the right to hear testimony
against them or even to know the details of the charges against them,
the right to procure witnesses in their favor, the right against
self-incrimination, or even the right to not have coerced (and
unreliable) testimony used against them.
While I respect Dr. Gelles’ honorable act of reporting abuses to his
superior, I must say that his inability to see, or his unwillingness to
acknowledge, these fundamental moral distinctions between the rule of
law, however flawed in practice, and the despotism characterizing
America’s detention system reduces his moral stature in my eyes. I
agree with Dr. Gelles that “torture, cruelty and abuse have no role in
interrogations.” In a system, such as the American detention system,
which is built upon cruelty and abuse, if not outright torture, as
Amnesty International pointed out yet again just today(Cruel and Inhuman: Conditions of isolation for detainees at Guantánamo Bay),
there is no such thing as an interrogation devoid of “torture, cruelty
and abuse.” That this fact casts a dark shadow upon our government and
upon our people makes it no less true. Thus, by Dr. Gelles’ own
statements, psychologists have no role in interrogations in America’s
lawless detention system.
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