NYRB: The Psychologists Take Power
A review of a number of recent books on psychology and their claim to have access to deep morality. The review also traces this claim of such access to the cooperation of psychologists with torture programs implemented by the CIA and the US Department of Defense. Among the books discussed in the review are: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker, and Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene.
An excerpt from the review:
As described in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, many techniques were tried on this prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including sleep deprivation, keeping him in a freezing room and waterboarding him eighty-three times, to the point that he was hysterical, vomiting, and ultimately “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The Senate Committee’s report makes clear that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” yielded no information that could not have been otherwise obtained and in many cases yielded faulty intelligence on crucial intelligence issues.
The Senate report also tells us that the CIA misrepresented the results of the program to policymakers and the Department of Justice, maintaining that it was obtaining “a high volume of critical intelligence.” In the case of two prisoners tortured by Mitchell—Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—the CIA attributed to them the statement that “the general US population was ‘weak’, lacked resilience, and would be unable to ‘do what was necessary’ to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals.’” But the Senate report tells us: “There are no CIA operational or interrogation records to support the representation that KSM or Abu Zubaydah made these statements.”
In spite of the clear lack of effectiveness of their “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Jessen and Mitchell continued to apply them and were eventually paid $81 million for doing so. When the involvement of psychologists in interrogations in Guantánamo Bay and Iraq came to light in a New York Times article in late 2004, the APA assembled a task force to look into it and issue ethical guidelines. In discussing their report, one board member, Diane Halpern, insisted they included a statement asserting that torture was ineffective. The task force did not pursue the question of effectiveness and did not include a statement on it.
When the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published its extensive report on official torture in December 2014, Jonathan Haidt tweeted a link to an article by Matt Motyl, his former Ph.D. student, claiming that the report would not change anyone’s views on the morality or effectiveness of torture, owing to the phenomenon of cognitive bias, which distorts people’s assessment of the relevant evidence. Motyl warned that none of us should assume that our beliefs about torture are based on facts. Nevertheless, there are established facts. One of them is that psychologists secured enormous financial gains by collaborating in official torture, while also having clear evidence that it was ineffective.
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Secret Cold War Experiments Performed On Our Children and Other Innocent People (Carol Rutz)
http://www.wanttoknow.info/nationbetrayed10pg
K&R
Btw, the real DU reality-based community that posts about the history of evil medical professionals are not Scientoligists nor nuts.
