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Like a modern-day Ministry of Truth, the American Psychological Association (APA) has scrubbed the webpage describing "deception scenarios" workshops that were part of a conference it conducted with the CIA and Rand Corporation on July 17-18, 2003. In addition, the APA erased the link to the page, and even all mention of its existence, from another story at its July 2003 Science Policy Insider News website that briefly described the conference.
In May 2007, in an article at Daily Kos, I noted that the workshops were describing "new ways to utilize drugs and sensory bombardment techniques to break down interrogatees." Quoting from the APA’s description (and note, the link is to an archived version of the webpage; emphasis is added):
- How do we find out if the informant has knowledge of which s/he is not aware?
- How important are differential power and status between witness and officer?
- What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?….
- What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?
In August 2007, in a landmark article at Vanity Fair, journalist Katherine Eban revealed that SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were participants at the APA/CIA/Rand affair. Mitchell and Jessen have since been linked with the implementation of the CIA’s "enhanced interrogation techniques" in 2001-2002.
Just last November, in an article at Firedoglake, I recalled the issue of the 2003 conference and asked Who Will Investigate CIA/RAND/APA Torture “Workshop”? I wrote at that time:
The APA and CIA have a very long history of working together on interrogation techniques, in particular on sensory deprivation and use of drugs like LSD and mescaline in interrogations, and other methods of breaking down the mind and the body of prisoners.
Use of drugs to influence interrogations, in addition to sensory deprivation, distortion and overload or bombardment were signal techniques in a decades-long interrogation research program that came to be known by its most famous moniker, MKULTRA (although these torture techniques were studied and tested by the CIA even earlier, in its 1950s projects Bluebird and Artichoke). Such techniques were codified by the early 1960s in a CIA Counterinsurgency Interrogation Manual, also known by its codename, KUBARK.
The story on the APA/CIA/Rand workshop received a good deal of dissemination on the Internet, and one can imagine that the description of the abusive techniques explored there were an embarrassment to the honchos of the APA, who strive to maintain an organizational aura of liberalism and scientific respectability, while at the same time selling its wares to the Defense Department and intelligence agencies in promoting the "war on terror" and "homeland security."
The URL for the former webpage — www.apa.org/ppo/issues/deceptscenarios.html — now brings up a message that "the page is not available." A search of the APA site and a Google search does not retrieve a link to the original page, which can now be accessed, thankfully, only through a web archive search engine.
The same is true for the webpage for the APA’s July 2003 "Spin" newsletter, which has a story entitled "APA Works with CIA and RAND to Hold Science of Deception Workshop". Listed at the end of the story is a link telling readers to "View the thematic scenarios from the workshop." (See archived version.) The old URL — www.apa.org/ppo/spin/703.html– brings up another "page not available" message. However, the bulk of the webpage now resides at a new address — www.apa.org/about/gr/science/spin/2003/07/also-issue.aspx — with the former link now missing from the story.
While the scrubbing of the page describing truth drugs and sensory overload could be attributed to some normal archiving decision, or the victim of a web do-over (and APA does appear to have redesigned their site), the excision of the text and link to the site on the referring page cannot be an accident.
What is APA up to?
Recently, APA has made some noises about finally respecting the decision of its membership in a September 2008 referendum that decisively repudiated "the APA leadership’s long-standing policy encouraging psychologist participation in interrogations and other activities in military and CIA detention facilities that have repeatedly been found to violate international law and the Constitution." The referendum voted to prohibit psychologist participation in settings where human rights violations take place. This policy took dead aim against use of psychologists in the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (or BSCTs) used at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
To date, however, the referendum has had no effect, although the Public Interest Task Force for the APA recently has told APA members involved in passage of the referendum that it is gathering information on offending sites in order to implement the new policy, over a year and a half since the vote on the referendum took place. I will hope, though I have little trust, that APA will take the necessary steps.
But APA has a history of bad faith on such issues. Recently, they rewrote a problematic section of their ethical code, dubbed the Nuremberg loophole by some, which allowed psychologists to violate their ethical rules if done to comply with "law, regulations, or other governing legal authority." As Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) described it, "The new language restores the 1992 version of the code, which prohibits use of the standard ‘to justify or defend violating human rights.’"
But PHR also noted:
Section 1.02 was inserted into the APA ethics code in August 2002, and was used by both the APA and the Bush Administration to allow the participation of psychologists in the "enhanced interrogation" program, in which detainees were systematically abused and tortured under the supervision of health professionals. PHR is calling for the APA to also reform section 8.05 of the 2002 ethics code, which allows research on human subjects without their consent if such research comports with law or regulations.
Section 8.05 allows psychologists to dispense with the use of informed consent in research experiments where "permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations." The use of informed consent guarantees the voluntary participation of human subjects in research done upon them, and is considered a bedrock of ethical research.
The gyrations of the APA remind one of the razzle-dazzle misdirection of the Obama administration, which trumpets "transparency," but recently told the Supreme Court to turn down Maher Arar’s appeal of his rendition-torture lawsuit. In addition, President Obama’s own secret black site prisons have now been revealed, over a year since Obama made a big deal out of closing down the CIA black sites. When it comes to hiding the crime of torture, the U.S. government and its contracting agencies have made a fetish out of secrecy, and the promise of an end to torture after the hideous Bush/Cheney years is revealed to be a chimera.
59 Comments
Given that I broke this story initially, I take this kind of historical falsification kind of personally. But the import of the story goes far beyond the effects upon my sensibility, as I hope the story makes clear.
It’s a great read and helps to continue to detail how they are all psyching us out by reinventing our past, present and yes, even our future.
Thanks for all your work . . . . always appreciate reading and learning from it.
Did you check to see if a Google cache still exists for the missing material? That how the Dubya White house kept screwing up when the tried to scrub info from the White House website. Google spiders would have already been to the site and archived them in-between the time the time the info was put on the site and later scrubbed. The Goggle cache of the site shows the old version of the site with the scrubbed info still intact.
It’s kind of a sore point with me, but the Obama White House site is actually much more difficult to use and less informative than the Bush White House site.
Yes. I’ve been told, for instance, that the Obama people made it much harder to find his presidential signing statement info than it was under Bush, for instance.
I’m telling you, I think I’ve hit on the right characterization for Obama — he’s like the Billy Flynn character in the musical Chicago: he tells you what he thinks you want to hear, he’s without morals, and he’s slick. He may not have started out this way (I don’t think he did), but it’s what he’s become.
http://www.youtube.com/v/c-zEtAuKuUY&hl
This’ll knock your socks off:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7886780711843120756#
The guy’s a corporate salesman
No Google cache is available. If you Google any of the text from the deceptscenarios.html page above (the one with “overwhelm the senses”) you will not find any APA pages. I looked through the hundreds of results one can retrieve… they’re all from my original articles on the subject, or from those who picked them up. None go to the original APA page, or a cache of it.
Thank you, Jeff.
Through it actions, the APA has lost credibility with most thoughtful members and observers of the profession. Should the hierarchy of the organization persist in willfully aligning the association with the deliberate misuse and abuse of the discipline they will lose, as is just and appropriate, ANY and ALL legitimacy.
Frankly, as far as I am concerned, they passed that point long ago.
Keep pushing Jeff, APA is looking more and more like a “front” organization and a shill for practices that are fundamentally destructive to the genuine aims and basic principles, as I understand them, of the profession.
They bring shame, and disrepute, to decency and honor, as well as to all of us who care.
David W. Bartoo
I have thought of APA as a front organization, but its history and current full constitution and actions argue for something more nuanced. Still, if it has become essentially at its higher levels a front organization for the CIA and Pentagon, it is due to actions of those higher levels (as Bryant Welch has argued) and to social pressures bending upon the organization.
In this sense, I have not made clear enough that APA is not that different in essence from a number of American institutions and enterprises, which has been distorted in function through their subservience to the needs of the military-industrial complex. This was inherent in institutional psychology’s first forays out into the world (testing Army recruits, working for advertising, school psychology) where psychology as a science and a profession interacted with certain social needs. When those needs turned toxic (maintenance of empire), the institution followed the trail of money and status off the cliff, if you will.
I think that exactly correct,Jeff. The “culture” of what I term “easy acquiescence”, and which you so-well describe, arose during the ending months of the Second World War, owing to seismic power shifts in government (stemming from issues surrounding the use of atomic weapons during the war)and equally fundamental shifts in intellectual “philosophy”, particularly between academia and government, and the “role” academia was willing to “play”. From my consideration, the effect upon higher education, despite the large and positive effect of GI-financed education for so many, has been nothing less than devastating.
DW
Loved the whole comment but this part, I’d all that INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY and it’s OWNERSHIP begin to fall by the way about this time, too, beginning to be corrupted by corporate encroachment . . . .
Of course, there’s the whole corrupted means by which mankind ‘harnessed’ or bought and controlled the entire output of other humans, be it intellectual or manual labors to argue about, but might as well contend the egg n chicken thang.
The ownership of intellectual property is a great loss, among all the others . . again, nice comment htere @11.
(the other one’s up there by you and others are just too deep for my grokking . . . ) *G*
Thanks for highlighting this, Jeff, very much obliged.
I second your appraisal of APA. I see a deliberate turning of APA into a defense contractor in the 50s, most notably with the 1956 convention.
That goes hand-in-hand with Cold War mythology, as described by Chomsky (and detailed in my recent diary here).
What a convenient way to define humans, if you’re a “modern war-fighter:” nothing more than targets on a firing line. Words are reduced to quantum energy packets, to be fired at targets with the intention of changing the target’s behavior irregardless of its internal state. “War of words” is a perfectly apt phrase for the Pentagon’s “influence operations.”
Leading the political elite, Kissinger adopted the absolute Newtonian reduction, turning the living world, most notably us, into automata the behavior of which, ever and always, is determined by outside forces. Got a problem, any problem under the sun or sea, including interrogations? Apply more leverage.
Note that that assumption removes humanity from nature qua humans. If the world is external to the observer, where is the observer now? Obviously, the reflexive nature of psychological inquiry has been neglected, in favor of pretending people aren’t people, we’re just Newtonian voodoo dolls.
If the cosmos, and us along with it, really is as Kissinger assumed, then there are no truly human values, just blind kinetic forces. And as we all know, that’s how they’ve been acting.
Does political power really grow from the barrel of a gun? Is it not also present in the psyche of the soldier? Isn’t that the point of boot camp?
My point is, we’re organisms who’ve come to believe in themselves as mechanisms, by the power of the Newtonian myth, making war and torture only “natural.” Not until we reclaim our inalienable humanity, especially in the social sciences, will we humanize our affairs.
David W. Parker (seriously, DW, that’s really my name)
I appreciate, most seriously, that you and I shall have many conversations which will, beyond any doubt, touch upon much common thought-ground, as well as those things which we clearly understand as necessary in debunking myth and encouraging society to embrace its humanity as the fundamental means to a just and sustainable future, David.
Your writing inspires my thoughts and considerations.
In these interesting times, the efforts, the work, of Jeff Kaye, Laura Doty, Kirk Murphy, yourself and many others (who ALL deserve the mention I apologize for not providing) here, at FDL and other places in the human world, are, truly, golden, and the foundation of the future
DW
That was a nice mini-essay, David. I am totally in agreement. I would note that the control and predict school of psychology, the behaviorist, stimulus-response emphasis is not the totality of the field, and the profession still bears within it the stamp of its origins in philosophy.
No one manifested the tensions between the turn to physiology and the old emphasis on “soul,” than Sigmund Freud, and then later his followers. This did not keep Freud’s American adherents from trying their best to serve the American security state after WWII. In the end, those who chose to do so suffered an ignominious fate, as the state apparatus threw them aside in the 1970s and onward for a reliance upon physiological psychology and neuropsychology. As a result, you couldn’t be a psychologist and say you were primarily psychodynamically oriented and be taken seriously by academic faculty anymore. You had to learn to play the game, or you joined the club.
Erik Erikson gave his own kind of warning about the efforts of psychoanalysts and psychologists in general turning their skills and insights towards serving the aims of the U.S. cold warriors in the final chapter of his Childhood and Society. Written in the early 1950s, he could, after the tremendous marriage of clinical psychology with the national security state during WWII, and the birth of MKULTRA, see clearly even then what was at stake.
That perfectly summarizes my grad school experience (at Western Washington U., Bellingham, WA). I couldn’t understand why faculty members refused to address, in my case, the sociopsychology of white supremacy, and the role of the discriminatory powers of our sensory apparatus in such things as the filtering effects, on our empathic altruism, of pejorative stereotyping. Always I was asked, why do you want to politicize psychology? To which I replied, what makes you think ignoring politics isn’t already politicizing it? (I don’t think it’ll surprise you, JK, to learn I remain all-but-thesis.)
As an undergrad, I could recognize the implicit myth-making in even peer-reviewed journals. I understood, having been raised as first a Protestant, then a Catholic (and now, Zen Buddhist), how to couch my reports in the “proper” mythological context. But then I asked precisely the wrong question for advancing a career: where’s this all coming from?
Before I could finish the diagram of the human psyche I was working on (at UW back in the late 80s), I had to answer epistemological questions like, how do I know what I know? I wanted to diagram every last level of being human, from the quantum mechanical to the cosmological, to include subjective experience.
Also, I want to thank you for pointing out that not all of psychology is effed in the head from the git go. Before I knew what I was doing, I ended up at UW by default (having successfully sandbagged two nominations to the service academies), a very mechanistic school of thought on being human.
I find, today, I’m much more of a Jungian/Ericksonian psychologist. (In fact, moving from ego diffusion to consolidation, you might say, has been my life’s project of late.)
I bow in your phenomenological direction.
Try having all these complex lines of thought … and looking for therapy. It’s an exquisitely damaging process.
Phenomenology rocks. But I have been told it’s a career-killer in psychology circles.
I haven’t been around such academic speak since I was an undergrad . . . late 80′s early 90′s. I was a Jr. College aspirant in the 70 and early 80′s. But the academe means of study, and speaking, never heated up my learning skills.
I love the Jr. College stuff in radio/tv/journalism . . . still do. Loved studying SOME Com Studies but mostly the PR and Journalism stuff . . . . they lost me on com theory shortly after the BEST line I ever heard . . . “Man cannot ‘not communicate’. Ever since the first banging of sticks on hollow logs . . ”
Oh, my point to reply to your #14? It’s nice to know you psych guys have a sense of humor, too . . . cuz I SWEAR I detected one in there . . . ;-)
Always seeking the advantage. Why do we not study the effects of psychological nourishment of humans with equal fervor? The Corporate Paradigm (Industrial Age Shop Floor Efficiencies erroneously applied)must be disposed, or should I say, deposed.
Agree totally with your closing sentence. It’s unsustainable as is.
Best was the second-to-the-last sentence:
All this insatiable need to spy and control and break more and more and more. They know so much, they control so much, yet they always use their power for the dark side. Wouldn’t you like to think they’d want to be more tooth fairy or Batman about it? Look at that person who needs help. And then send out stealth special op good fairies to help that person. Think of all the help they could have given with those monster budgets. Instead they are monsters.
They were setting it up for the return of Jesus.
Yes. Also. :-D
Replay to DWP @ 3
Really:
Are you sure?
Oh yes, I’m quite sure. Thanks for that quote, got a link? I’d like to use it. (You haven’t given me much to go on. Pardon me if I’m going off on a tangent.)
What you’ve referred to, in that second block, is the reality-materializing, cosmogenetic power of myth made explicit. In Newton’s myth, the sleight-of-hand consists of insisting that it isn’t a myth. But if the cosmos actually is a lifeless mechanism which we can master with our science and weapons, then so, too, are we, and the war-mongers and torturers are fully justified in treating us like god-forsaken dirt.
Note that Kissinger’s assumption of the absolute Newtonian reduction, of organisms to mechanisms, removes humanity from nature. It divorces the human observer from the observed world in which the human is embedded. It’s false and flawed from here on out.
So the second quote is, indeed, accurate. We are, in fact, embedded in the fanciful, illusory, “objective” reality, assumed by the likes of Kissinger to be “external” to the observer. It’s like standing in a swimming pool and asserting the water is external to you. Where is the line at which ‘you’ start and ‘not-you’ stops? Our inalienable humanity seems lost in an infinite regression.
So while objectivists, realists, and others under the influence of the Newtonian reduction discuss observable events, as if there was no human will shaping them (such as the flash crash of Wall Street on May 6, described expertly by Jon Stewart as a “perfect storm” that has occurred for the umpteenth time), people who are willing, with their unobservable beliefs and intentions, to shape the world according to their unobservable desires, definitely will remain a step ahead.
Are we seeing the evolution of the predators amongst us, mental disorder/illness, or simply the modern alpha male unchecked?
Too academic, what we’re seeing is history repeating itself again.
The Elites dominate and control too much, and it’s unsustainable.
Keep it simple, sister . . .
knowbuddhau ~ that citation from Synoia is going to blow your mind so tie your thinking cap on extra secure …. it’s far from an obscure reference. You could probably find it in der googles.
And what authority is Henry Kissinger on sociology, psychology, and culture??????? Aiyeeee.
Thanks Jeff. Can’t trust these people. Won’t. It’s a travesty. I appreciate your exposing them.
This one? Author Ron Suskind, and I don’t know who he’s quoting–Rove?
It’s even got its own wikipedia page. (What? No mention of Kos’s proclamation the following year that Daily Kos was a reality-based community as he mass purged and banned all discussion and evidence of 9/11? “This is a reality-based community. Those who wish to live outside it should find a new home. This isn’t it.” And then he smote them all. When I first kept hearing “reality-based” I thought it was a reference to Kos. Doh! it was Bush…)
Yup, that’s it! NYT. 2002 reported in 2004 (during the election). Widely thought to be Rove, speaking “off the record.” Gah.
And KOS using this frame to ban the 9/11 truthers: that’s SO twisted. I hadn’t heard that part.
That is why someone like me was so darn fascinating to them that they had to illegally spy on me.
Oh yeah, and note that the dealings of Kissinger and Assoc. are vewy vewy secwet. So while they’re assuming the world is a mechanism, theirs for the dominating, they’re acting behind the scenes in ways that materialize the reality they intend.
We can assume, study, and act in the world as if it were a mechanism, but that doesn’t make it (and us) into a machine. We, Western scientists, have adopted the Newtonian reduction as a given. What happens when we let it go? Having done so, now what world are we in?
They only think they’re external to the hellscape they’re creating. And as long as they live within the state-within-the-state, absolutely shielded from the return effects (to borrow a phrase from sociobiology) of their reality-manifesting intentions, they’ll be right. Thus the importance, for example, of citizen arrests.
If the nation is thought of as a cell (bounded by a semi-permeable membrane: where is the self-other divide now? not simply discovered, it’s asserted, rcight?), they’re method is to dominate the nucleus, thereby infecting other cells like a retrovirus.
And/or by having us think they are acting with great knowledge that is priveleged and secret they create power for themselves based on ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The “great knowledge” does not exist ~ that’s why it HAS to be secret, or the illusion would be broken. Like Madoff’s super-secret second-floor accounting department with the out of date computer equipment.
In fact, their knowledge and intelligence is below par. While the rest of us try to become more knowledgeable and intelligent in order to understand and measure up to the higher standards!!!!
And the APA (and other social institutions) CHANGE THE GAME as soon as a critical mass of doubt and questioning start to bog down the marketing of the current fad. Thus, transactional analysis replaces freudian psychoanalysis which is in turn replaced eventually by “positive psychology.” The promises of wealth, health, and happiness remain the same for each iteration, of course.
L. Frank Baum is not the FIRST person to expose the Wizards for what they are.
And he wasn’t writing no children’s story in that book, either . . . ;-)
As I’ve made comment elsewhere today, my only vestige left (I’m near bereft of any hope of the human condition improving for me or most of us in the next 20 years) of caring mostly comes from knowing, in the most FATALISTIC of ways, that the reality the elites create and hide behind is completely and utterly unsustainable.
The social masses will revolt, the planet will die, nature will take its course, and then there’s the whole comet or asteroid hits us thing if we survive the rest . . . but the elites cannot sustain their reality, it’s impossible.
History, and science and nature tell us that.
Yep, I got that going for me to sustain a reason to wake up any given day . . . ;-)
Fatalism, I embrace it fully. History proves it!
Yes, they know that, too, even if they must repress that, or act out upon such knowledge. Their romance with torture and omnipotent forms of power demonstrates their inner security, much as the bully in the schoolyard demonstrates his inner fear of weakness and dependency by lording it over projected objects of his own devalued self.
Do not despair. This crowd has overplayed their hand, and there are many who are ready to hold them accountable, and it will happen.
Jeff, you should get screenshots of those pages because they can be removed from visibility at archive.org at the APA’s request. They would still be there but would take a court order to have them produced for court cases and such.
Will do. I didn’t realize APA could do what you’re suggesting.
Not to distract from the thrust of your article, but is there evidence that Jessen and Mitchell’s techniques have been used to create more deadly and compliant soldiers or operatives? A similar character was used in that role in the third Bourne film. Was that a creative fiction or fictionalization of possible governmental programs?
It’s a fictionalization of actual government programs. While there’s no evidence Mitchell and Jessen were even interested in creating the more deadly soldier or operative, the people who stood behind them — the ones who really created the experiment (and Mitchell and Jessen were technicians only, manual makers, not ones to see the “bigger picture”) — have long had the view of creating a master race of “warriors”. You can see this in the websites that exult in special operations matters. You can see it too in the military culture that talks about warfighters.
But you can also see it in the military research that is done, with one eye on DARPA technology, with the aim of building superior “warfighters”, immune to stress and trauma.
As an example, I invite readers to pursue this Bush-era sampling, sponsored by Ft. Detrick and the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola– The Warfighter’s Stress Response: Telemetric and Noninvasive Assessment.
Thanks, Jeff. My suspicion was that Damon’s team had ample real life examples from which to build their fictional characters.
Saw Bourne Ultamatim just last night.
Given how movies and reality and MIC have moved in the past, I’d guess there’s a TON of existent or on the testing blocks to be, programs and program ideas, both.
Sleeper agents? Who don’t even know they are? How far away is that? Or is it now?
Suspect the worst, hope for the best.
Know that it’s all gonna come crashing down because it’s fucking unsustainable as it is.
Love and screw like a bunny would be MY suggestion, given our times and climes.
There is certainly a lot of Hollywood in the Bourne films, improving on the sometimes plodding novels, but Damon and his colleagues have skillfully updated their political scenarios and attacked real life political excesses of post-9/11 America.
It reminds me of a film with George Clooney, Men Who Stare at Goats. In a late scene, Clooney’s character finds himself the guest of an old colleague in a privatized experimental/prison camp in a Middle Eastern war zone. Wandering in a secure wing of closed iron doors, he sees behind the one at the end of a dark hall constant flashes and hears the constant blaring of nightmare rock music. He flips open the viewing panel and quickly closes it; his companion asks what’s inside. He replies, “The dark side”.
What the APA is doing is Orwellian. It’s their version of declaring that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. It’s similar to those pictures of Kremlin leaders where those who had fallen out of favor were airbrushed out.
Interesting though that a psychology organization thinks it can hide things by engaging in denial. I know psychologists aren’t physicians but it seems like an analogous case of “physician, heal thyself.”
Sounds like an extension of what Ewen Cameron was doing in Canada in the 1950′s with Milton Friedman’s blank slate Shock Doctrine
Bloody psychs and their destructive drugs and “treatments”. Ever noticed that just about every crazy thing that goes on in the world has a psych associated with it (and their drugs). Pretty much every single kid that goes in and shoots up a school, or their parents is found to have been on mind altering drugs. These drugs are almost one for one not OKed for children, and some are labeled as causing depression, suicidal tendencies, and anger. HELLO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They need to be STOPPED from their destructive behaviour.
Thanks, all of you. Made my morning, again.
You are only as sick as your secrets. Invalidation is the core of all human “sickness” or dysfunction. This is the idea that our maps of reality and our humanity are so invalid as to create schizmogenic loops (Bateson)of denial and dysfunction. How do we get out of this? We must improve our map making skills…we must improve our ability to distinguish fact from judgment, truth from theory. Addiction, obsession and compulsion only reinforce the need to feed our emotional reaction instead of regulating them for a greater good. (our survival, and our effectiveness within the context of the universe). There is no mental illness without cognitive distortion. And our culture is founded with too many unresolved distortions. We have an addicted society in denial and reacting from emotion mind. We elect addicts, we worship greed and power. WE cannot see the forest for the trees. Cultivate willingness and acceptance of truth over desire and emotions. It takes a marriage between fact and feeling to guide. But feelings must be tempered with validity and that is the only way to fight invalidation of our race.(as in human race)
Seek truth.
Great article…posted on fb for my colleagues.
Fascinating discussion! Possibly related:
The “black prison,” Obama’s Afghan torture center and the APA; Stephen Soldz; 5/14/10
http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2010/05/14/the-black-prison-obamas-afghan-torture-center-and-the-apa/
Soldz links to a comment of yours at emptywheel, Jeff:
He also addresses “the money” [emphasis added]:
He quotes from the APA’s written testimony to the US Senate Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense regarding appropriations for the Fiscal Year 2010 budget.
It’s interesting to read their “lobbying”…well worth clicking on over there. I hope to be able to find the whole document at the subcommittee website.
Something really wierd happened with that last comment: when I previewed it, the date and time registered as
September 10th, 2007 10:32am
This happened twice, but I see that the actual final date/time are correct. I find that creepy.
Hey harpie! Good to see you. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature ;-} Wierded me out first time I noticed it, too.
And I second your appraisal, too: great discussion. Thanks to all for the many insights, links, and kind words. Maybe we’ve hit on a way to exclude trolls, simply by going way over their pointy little heads.
Is substantive discourse kryptonite to them?
Also: To Mechanize and Weaponize Humanity, or maybe To Predict and Control should be on the APA motto, seal, or logo, doncha think?
Larue, I’m glad my humor came through the academy-speak. Please “shove me into shallow water,” if I get too deep. Thanks, hoss.
@lucy2009: not all of psychology is effed in the head. Scapegoating, by any other name, still displaces responsibility to an illusory evil-doer, just like Bush/Cheney would do. When you feel like ranting against psychs again, please try changing out that noun for other groups, and see how similar it is to known preludes to violence.
Hi, and good to see you, too, knowbuddhau. Heh! about the date/time thing…shows how observant I am! Interesting…I wonder what it signifies. Thanks for cluing me in.
Yes, that was a very important article by Stephen. I think he inadvertently buried the lede. But you certainly found the key info, re the APA role as lobby for DIA domestic terrorism intel operations. They do the same thing with FBI. Given the turn towards — and we should frankly start saying this (and I know some of you already have) — totalitarian functioning in this country, I think there are some (and it’s a minority, but still…) psychologists are jonesing to be chief interrogators, with nice uniforms, shiny buttons, and lugers in their belt.
“We have scientific ways to make you talk!”
You know it, professor. All we need is the right fulcrum to apply the right leverage in the Right way, right?
I can hear “Onward, leveraged soldiers, marching off to war,” playing in the background, for them only to become fuel for the engine of their own oppression, as Pat Tillman so tragically did.
How many people were misled to their deaths by the scientific manipulation of just that particular media narrative, the myth-jacking of the US into an eternal bogus holy war to rid the world of “evil-doers”, that followed 9/11?
Just as Tillman was used, as a prop for scientific domestic psy-ops, just so, we have scientific ways of making the BP Gulf oil spill stop; making global climate disruption stop; making High Frequency Trading stop flash-crashing the “free” market; making coal stop polluting, from seam to sky; and our Predators to stop spilling buckets of blood with their drones, manned and “unmanned,” etc. Leading scientists say so.
I’m happy to note here that Scott Horton has some additional remarks to make on this issue at his No Comment column at Harper’s.
APA’s Unpredictable Past
The APA goes to Congress to drum up business and money…OY! [I must sound pretty naive, I guess.]
Well, I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find Bryant Welch’s June 2009 article “Torture, Psychology and Daniel Inouye”
And your article which mentions Bryant’s article:
“Torture Architects Mitchell & Jessen in Road to Maui”
And the APA’s “Advancing the Science: A Psychologist’s Guide to Participation in Federal Policymaking”
I see you’ve already noted that Scott Horton wrote about your article today [!] “APA’s Unpredictable Past”
And also mentions another “disappeared” article from “Spin” [why do they call it that?] about the July 17-18, 2003 meeting with RAND Corp called “Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory”.
That, and his conclusion
reminded me of the 2006 “Educing Infromation” report published by the “Intelligence Science Board” convened in 2002. There are 2 chapters about the state of the art of “deception” science.
They can’t possibly deceive themselves into believing that their involvement in these issues can just be deleted from the record…can they?
I meant this to be a reply to Jeff @50…also, the Intelligence Science Board did not mispell “Information” like I just did. :-/
Here’s one for you (or anyone)… try looking up the history and organizational links of the Intelligence Science Board. I’ve found the references to the CIA, for which link I’ve posted before, but that was quite chancy. Anyone else have a sense of where ISB originated? No more shadowy agency has ever published a public document, copiously reported in the mainstream press, and yet, no one can say where they exist, who funds them, or see any other piece of their work.
[Sending us on a wild goose chase? ;-)] OK. One interesting thing I did notice when I looked up the link yesterday is the names/affiliations of some of the members of the “Senior Advisory Group on Educing Information”: Randall Fort, a Goldman Sachs VP, and three people [out of seven] from Harvard.