Torture Supported by American Psychological Association
This must stop, wrote psychoanalyst Stephen Soldz in a Sunday Boston Globe
Op-Ed, Ending
the psychological mind games on detainees:
Psychologists have been identified as key figures in the design and conduct
of abuses against detainees in US
custody at Guantanamo, the CIA's secret
"black sites," and in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Psychologists should not be taking part in such practices.
Yet a steady stream of revelations from government documents, journalistic
reports, and congressional hearings has revealed that psychologists designed
the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" techniques – which included
locking prisoners in tiny cages in the fetal position, throwing them against
the wall head first, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, and
waterboarding.
Jane Mayer ... reports that the central idea was the psychological concept
of "learned helplessness." Individuals are denied all control over
their world, lose their will and become totally dependent upon their captors.