Some battles must be fought over and over

Erudite Partner recounts how last month members of an organized professional association stood up for ethical conduct within their discipline. Psychologists held out against expedient conformity with the wishes of leaders in authority, a tough choice too often demanded of all of us in these times.

Juan Cole published her story. She begins ...:

No one, not Psychologists or Supreme Court Justices, should be Helping with Gov’t TortureSometimes the good guys do win. That’s what happened on August 8th in San Francisco when the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) decided to extend a policy keeping its members out of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The APA’s decision is important — and not just symbolically. Today we have a president who has promised to bring back torture and “load up” Guantánamo “with some bad dudes.” When healing professionals refuse to work there, they are standing up for human rights and against torture.

It wasn’t always so. In the early days of Guantánamo, military psychologists contributed to detainee interrogations there. It was for Guantánamo that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved multiple torture methods, including among others excruciating stress positions, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, and enforced nudity. Military psychologists advised on which techniques would take advantage of the weaknesses of individual detainees. And it was two psychologists, one an APA member, who designed the CIA’s whole “enhanced interrogation program.” ...

Read it all at the link.

The photo is from 2007 when APA members demonstrated in San Francisco outside their association's annual meeting, demanding psychologists get out of Dick Cheney's gulag.