[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Why Did They Do It?

[Bill Totten]

Torture, Political Manipulation and the American Psychological Association

by Dr Bryant Welch

www.counterpunch.org (July 28 2008)


The regressive effects of current forms of political manipulation that I
describe in my new book, State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and
the Assault on the American Mind (Thomas Dunne Books, St Martin's Press,
2008) have not only affected American politics. They have also taken
their toll on psychologists' national organization, the American
Psychological Association. Many APA members were shocked last year when
APA twice refused to take an unequivocal stance against psychologists'
participation in the Bush detention centers.  The fact that other health
care organizations, typically more conservative than APA on humanitarian
issues, were very outspoken about the issue made it all the more puzzling.

In human rights groups and liberal organizations around the world the
arguments APA spokespersons advanced in support of APA's position did
not pass the red face test for credibility. Instead, their seemingly
transparent disingenuousness only made the APA sound embarrassingly like
the Bush Administration.

Banning psychologists' participation in reputed torture mills was
clearly unnecessary, it was argued.  To do so would be an insult to
military psychologists everywhere. Psychologists would never engage in
torture. Further, psychologists' participation in these detention
centers was really an antidote to torture since psychologists' presence
could protect the potential torture victims.  We psychologists were both
too good and too important to join our professional colleagues in taking
an absolutist moral position against one of the most shameful eras in
our country's history.

There are two questions that beg for answers. How did the APA form such
an obviously close connection to the military? And why did the APA
governance - the Board of Directors and the Council of Representatives -
go along with the military interests? How could an organization of such
bright and ethical people be rendered so incompetent to protect the
profession from the horrible black eye they have given us?

I have had ample opportunity to observe both the inner workings of the
APA and the personalities and organizational vicissitudes that have
affected it over the last two decades. With one interruption, for most
of the twenty year period from 1983 through 2003 I worked inside the APA
central office as the first Executive Director of the APA Practice
Directorate and served in several governance positions including Chair
of the APA Board of Professional Affairs and member of the APA Council
of Representatives.

When the torture issue broke last year, the answer to the first question
about APA's military connection seemed obvious to me. Since the early
1980's APA has had a unique relationship with Hawaii Senator Daniel
Inouye's office. Inouye, for much of that time, has served as Chair of
the Subcommittee on Defense for the Senate Appropriations Committee. The
Subcommittee has responsibility for all US defense spending. One of
Inouye's administrative assistants, psychologist Patrick DeLeon, has
long been active in the APA and served a term as APA president. For over
twenty-five years relationships between APA and the Department of
Defense (DOD) have been strongly encouraged and closely coordinated by
DeLeon. It was DeLeon acting on behalf of Inouye who initiated the DOD
psychologist prescription demonstration project in the late 1980's that
began psychology's efforts to secure prescriptive privileges.

For many APA governance members, most of whom have little Washington
political experience, Dr DeLeon is perceived as a canny politician and
political force on Capitol Hill. The two most visible APA presidents on
the torture issue, Ronald Levant and Gerald Koocher, based on personal
discussions I have had with them in recent years, clearly hold  DeLeon's
political savvy in high regard.

While I personally got along well with DeLeon and never doubted his
commitment to psychology, his view of psychology and his sense of
priorities were quite different from mine, and I did not share the
positive assessments of Dr DeLeon's political prowess. I felt his
priorities often had more to do with the status of psychology as
reflected in comparatively minor issues that were often unconnected to
issues that were of true importance to practitioners and patients.
Rightly or wrongly, I often felt that an accurate sense of context was
missing from his political analysis and objectives. It's the same
feeling I have now when I look aghast at what APA has done on the
torture issue. Except this time, it is not something relatively innocuous.

Some people attempt to explain APA's recent seemingly inexplicable
behavior by assuming that large sums of money changed hands on the
torture issue. I could certainly be wrong, but I think the more likely
(and more remarkable) explanation is that  those APA leaders making the
decisions simply exercised judgment that was both that bad and that
insensitive to the realities of the human suffering they were supporting..

Regardless, there is no question that APA had formed a strong
relationship with military psychologists and the DOD through its
connections with Inouye's office.

But it is the second question that is probably more difficult to
understand from afar. How could both the APA Board of Directors and the
APA Council of Representatives support the military on this issue and
subject the profession to such embarrassment by supporting a policy that
is anathema to the vast majority of psychologists?

The moral decay and functional regression of an organization does not
rise or fall with any single event any more than the fall of Rome truly
occurred in 476 AD. What is clear to me, instead, is that the
pluralistic and multi-faceted governing process that I witnessed when I
first entered the APA in the early 1980s was sharply curtailed during
the 1990s. Differences of opinion stopped and the APA suffered a
terrible regression. Increasingly inbred, under the administration of
Raymond Fowler, the association agenda was primarily and at times
exclusively financial, focusing on making money both through real estate
ventures and through what many of us felt was a an unwarranted,
financially harsh treatment of APA employees.

More peculiarly, Fowler's "agenda" for APA was encapsulated in the
phrase "working together" a noble idea that to the best of my knowledge
was never attached to any actual substantive agenda. Instead, it served
as a means of social control, a subtle injunction against raising any of
the conflictual issues, challenges, or ideas that need to be addressed
in any vital and accountable organization. The APA became placid and
increasingly detached.

The result was that much of the activity of the APA Council of
Representatives  turned away from substantive matters into an odd system
of fawning over one another. Many members appeared to me to simply bathe
in the good feeling that came from "working together". For some, the
bath was a narcissistic one and organizational regression became more
debilitating. In other instances during this period, isolated dissent
from rank and file members was stifled either with heavy handed letters
from the APA attorney threatening legal action or by communications from
prominent members of the APA governance threatening ethical action if
policy protests were not discontinued.

The inept ability to deliberate on the torture issue was but the
shocking denouement of an organizational process that was really set in
motion in the early 1990s largely to serve the convenience of a very
small number of individuals.

As a result of the lengthy era of regression, the governance of APA was
ill prepared for thoughtful deliberation on a matter as important as the
torture issue. As I have written in State of Confusion when people are
confused they are eager to be told what is real. The governance was
simply over its head in trying to effectively deliberate on such an
issue when there was organized support on the other side coming from the
military interests supported by Koocher and Levant and possibly DeLeon.

When the torture issue arose, the Council, despite the efforts of
several council members, fell victim to some of the very silly arguments
described above. Council members were told that to oppose psychologists
participation in the detention actions was to cruelly suggest that our
colleagues might engage in torture. In a fashion chillingly
characteristic of the gaslighter  it was implied that those who raised
concern about torture, were themselves torturing their colleagues who
were working in the military. One prominent member of the APA governance
gratuitously raised the ethnicity of one of the military psychologists
seemingly opening the possibility that the opponents to torture were
racist.

These arguments were then followed with the grandiose closing argument
that psychologists presence at the detention centers was critical to
make sure torture did not recur. We psychologists had a moral duty to
prevent immoral behavior. The piano player once aroused to the
possibility of what was going on upstairs was now necessary to prevent
it. Yes, these were the arguments that carried the day in APA
deliberations and enabled the military to have its way with the APA. In
the more discerning eyes of the world, they have very little credibility.

But the gaslighting is not over, even now. There is one more step in the
process. History will show this to be a despicable period of American
history. The people who have supported APA's position on this issue
obviously do not want their legacy at APA to include that they supported
a policy that failed to indict the detention centers. The recent history
must be revised.  In a seeming gesture of reconciliation the APA has
offered to continue negotiating the matter with the dissident groups. In
this fashion the historical revision has already begun. It may well be
the final policy APA adopts will ultimately read the way it should have
last summer and much, much earlier when it actually  mattered. APA will
"get it right" shortly before or shortly after George Bush leaves
office. In leaving a final written policy that is like our sister
organizations' original policies, APA's shocking failure at the critical
time will appear never to have happened.

Such is the work of a regressed and chronically manipulated
organization. Despite being an organization of psychologists, APA has
been subjected to very little analysis. Psychologists are amongst the
most moral and ethical people I know. They deserved better from their
national organization, just as Americans have deserved better from their
government.

_____

Dr Bryant Welch has been a nationally prominent psychologist for thirty
years. He currently resides on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina where
he provides psychotherapy to adolescents and adults and marriage
counseling to couples. In August of 2005, Dr Welch was awarded the
American Psychological Association's Presidential Citation for his
"seminal and unique contribution to professional psychological
practice". He is the author of State of Confusion: Political
Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind.

http://www.counterpunch.org/welch07282008.html


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