Comment: No defense to torture

In a recent letter to its 150,000 members, the American Psychological Association (APA) took its strongest stand ever against psychologist involvement in torture or other illegal forms of interrogation.

“Torture in any form, at any time, in any place, and for any reason, is unethical for psychologists and wholly inconsistent with membership in the American Psychological Association,” the association wrote. “The APA Ethics Committee will not accept any defense to torture in its adjudication of ethics complaints.”

This unequivocal stance was not achieved easily. It took years of divisive private and public debate, which culminated in a September, 2008 vote by the entire membership on a resolution forbidding psychologists from working in settings where “persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution.”

Responding to that nearly 60 percent vote in support of the resolution, the APA leadership, which for years had argued that psychologists could play valuable roles in interrogations in support of national security and even as protectors of detainees, has made a decisive about-face.

“Let’s set the record straight,” wrote APA president James H. Bray in April of this year. “It is a clear violation of professional ethics for a psychologist to have played a role in the torture of CIA detainees, as described in the recently released Bush administration memos.”

Among other revelations about the Bush-era torture practices and how the Bush administration tried to justify them, those memos, made public by the Obama administration, documented what anti-torture advocates had said for years, that some psychologists were implicated in torture.

American psychologists contributed substantially—and ethically--to the US military’s SERE (for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) program. SERE, which started in the 1950s following the Korean War and expanded during the Vietnam War, tried to prepare potential captives to cope with the kinds of abuse and torture that US military personnel had been subjected to during those conflicts.

However, under the Bush administration, SERE was “reversed engineered” to devise “softening up” and “enhanced interrogation” techniques that were inflicted on US-designated “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, and CIA-operated “black sites” in Afghanistan and several Eastern European countries.

A number of media reports have documented that psychologists advocated or were involved in adapting and transferring SERE techniques to Guantanamo and other US-controlled sites.

In other words, the US turned the torture techniques that had been used against their soldiers—decried at the time as brainwashing—on its own captives, and psychologists were involved.

In New Scientist of September 29, 2007, I argued that psychologists ought to find involvement in such activities particularly abhorrent. Psychologists define themselves as practitioners of a healing profession, and decades of their own research has shown how easily ordinary people can be influenced to hurt others and be corrupted by involvement in abuse seemingly sanctioned by authorities.

APA President Bray now strongly condemns such misuse of psychological expertise. “These techniques, when applied in this manner, are tantamount to torture as defined by APA and international law,” he writes. “APA stands ready to adjudicate reports that any APA member has engaged in prohibited techniques.”

Even the argument that military psychologists were simply obeying orders will not stand. “There is one ethical response to an order to torture,” Bray writes. “Disobey the order” (emphasis his).

The APA deserves praise for the exceptionally clear stance it has now taken. With an estimated 500,000 torture victims in the US alone, APA members now have the chance, if not the obligation, to try to ease the lifelong emotional pain carried by torture victims.

And, hopefully, never again will psychologists help create more victims.

President Obama likewise deserves credit for his reversal of many of the Bush-era practices and attempts to legitimize torture, announced on Obama’s second day in office.

However, the battle against torture is by no means over.

As has been widely reported, ex-Vice President Cheney continues to advocate torture—or rather, “enhanced interrogation" by the US as both necessary and useful.

New Scientist recently reported that 104 out of 150 nations studied by Amnesty International continue to practice torture. There are millions of torture victims worldwide.

It is likely that the US continueS to outsource torture—that is play an active role in abusive interrogations carried out in countries with fewer scruples about torture such as Bangladesh or Pakistan.

Despite calls for accountability from many sources, most recently the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the US is not showing any significant willingness to investigate, much less prosecute officials who instigated, developed, justified and utilized torture.

If government-sponsored torture is ever to be stopped, not only psychologists and practitioners of other healing professions, but everyone who agrees that torture is indefensible, needs to press for an end to thIS abhorrent practice and accountability for those who ordered and carried it out.

Robert Adler

for the institute

Bush and Cheney--lame ducks or dangerous dinosaurs?

Here’s a real-life scene worthy of a Hollywood thriller:

Three U.S. senators huddle over a document, closely watched by a team of White House lawyers. The senators have been granted a quick view of a zealously guarded report. They’re allowed to scribble a few notes before the papers are whisked away.

What could this eyes-only document be? A warning of an impending terror attack? The discovery of a killer asteroid plummeting towards Earth? The truth about UFOs?

None of the above. This scene, which took place in the U.S. Senate on 25 July, was just a skirmish in one of many battles that the Bush administration continues to wage as their final five months in power tick away--in this case furthering their program to derail any meaningful action on climate change.

For the lame ducks that they supposedly are, Bush et al. continue to show a lot of teeth and claws.

The much-fought-over document is a report on the impacts of greenhouse-gas-driven climate change on the U.S. It was grudgingly prepared by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) only after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the agency to determine if greenhouse gas emissions threaten public health or the environment.

The study reportedly corroborates what most of the world has long accepted—that the world’s climate is changing in response to greenhouse gas emissions, that future emissions will exacerbate climate change, and that those changes will impact the U.S.—not to mention the rest of the world—to such a degree that unchecked emissions are likely to endanger public welfare.

Those conclusions are far from radical today, but remain anathema to President Bush and especially Vice President Cheney—who has strenuously pushed the agenda of the most reactionary of the petrochemical and coal behemoths on energy and climate issues.

If the EPA findings were to become official policy, the agency could be mandated to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. To an administration that has done everything in its power to block public awareness of climate change in the U.S., and, a fortiori, official studies, recognition of the problem, or—heaven forebid—national or international action, the report had to be derailed.

So, when the EPA emailed the report to the White House in December of 2007, Bush et al. finessed the potential threat by the remarkable ploy of simply refusing to open the email. Remember those hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys?

That report is not the only casualty in the administration’s climate-and-energy war. Last October, for example, John Marburger, the President’s chief science advisor, reportedly gutted a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on the health effects of climate change. In December, Stephen Johnson, who heads the EPA, overrode his own staff recommendation, and scuttled California’s attempt to regulate its own greenhouse gas emissions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA have also run into the administration’s climate-change firewall.

On the international front, this administration has consistently sabotaged attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions and other meaningful steps to head off potentially catastrophic climate change at meetings of the G8 and at the UN climate summit at Bali, Indonesia, in December, 2007. As the world tries to craft a successor to the Kyoto accord, the U.S. continues to push any numerical caps to carbon dioxide production into the distant future.

The conventional wisdom in the U.S. and much of Europe right now has it that Bush and Cheney are lame ducks waddling towards the door, and that the world should look past them to a hopefully more enlightened administration.

That would be fine if action on climate change were not so urgent. A series of recent studies in leading science journals has made it clear that the pace of climate change is accelerating to a degree that is surprising and alarming to many climatologists. Runaway ice melt, carbon-dioxide-bubbling permafrost, methane-belching seafloors, and changing ocean currents are just a few of the dangerous tipping points that Earth's climate could soon cross.

Testifying before Congress on 23 June, 2008, NASA climatologist Jim Hansen redlined six “tipping elements” that Earth’s climate is likely to crash through unless we cut atmospheric carbon dioxide from the current 385 parts per million to 350 or less. This is crucial, Hansen writes, “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”

Even economists have started to sense the same urgency. Rajendra Pachauri, an IPCC economist says—"If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

The community of nations is now preparing to negotiate the agreement that will replace Kyoto. That new accord, which needs to be in place by December of 2009, looks to be our last best chance to head off catastrophic climate change.

If this is in fact “the defining moment” for Earth’s climate, then the Bush administration’s continued determination to block or delay any meaningful domestic or international action until they are ushered from the White House makes them look a lot more like velociraptors than lame ducks.

The U.S. Congress needs to be encouraged to redouble its efforts to reign in this still dangerous administration and act forcefully on climate change, and the international community needs to do everything it can to ensure that the next president is committed to getting the U.S. up and running on this vital issue from his first day in the oval office.

If instead we let the dinosaurs continue to run the world, we should not complain when we find ourselves back in the Cretaceous.

Robert Adler

Stand up to Bush

According to NASA researchers, the arctic is melting faster than even the most outspoken scientists predicted just a year ago. Climate researchers warn that the Earth is on the cusp of a tipping point, beyond which a vast release of greenhouse gasses from melting permafrost and warming seabeds could irreversibly multiply the impact of human greenhouse gas emissions. Likely impacts include rapidly rising sea levels, coastal flooding, more frequent and powerful hurricanes striking heavily populated regions, more frequent and intense droughts and floods, devastation of the Amazonian rainforest, the extinction of corals and many other species, the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people, and increased threats to the stability and security of many nations, including the U.S.

With this catastrophe fast approaching, the continued intransigence of the United States with respect to negotiating meaningful international emissions goals has become not just an embarrassment but a clear and present danger.

The Bush administration has shown a remarkable indifference to any restraints, whether from scientific research, the U.S. Constitution, the American public, or world opinion. Their behavior in a variety of areas from climate change to war can best be characterized as, “We’ll do exactly what we want, and push our agenda as far as we can, as long as we can get away with it.”

Someone, somewhere, needs to set limits, call Bush’s bluff, point out that this would-be emperor has no clothes.

How remarkable, then, to find that courageous stance coming not from the cowed and cowardly U.S. Congress, nor even from other great nations, but from Papua, New Guinea, a nation of just six million people, most of whom make their living by subsistence farming.

At the just-ended climate talks in Bali, Indonesia, it was Kevin Conrad, the representative of New Guinea, who stood up to the recalcitrant U.S. delegation in a tumultuous public session and demanded, “If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.”

Bravo for New Guinea. Perhaps, as small and poor as they are, they have little to lose by standing up to the U.S. Certainly, as an island nation in the tropics, they have a great deal to fear from global warming. Whatever their reasons, they did the right thing.

It’s time for the rest of the world to stand with them.

And it’s long past time for the U.S. to take their advice and get the hell out of the way.

Robert Adler

for the institute

Has Bush seen the light on climate change?

Robert Adler

If we take President Bush at his word, the United States is ready, even determined to move to the front of the international community when it comes to climate change. “The United States is taking the lead,” the President announced on May 31, “and that’s the message I’m taking to the G8.”

Given the Bush administration’s long history of obstructing international action on climate change, starting with his rejection of the Kyoto accord months after taking office, I felt the need to ask one of his spokespersons on climate policy, Kristin Hellmer at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, if President Bush was serious about this.

“The President doesn’t’ announce things and not follow through with them,” she said.

Encouraged, I checked the details. It turns out that there is at least some substance behind the President’s bold statement. Jim Connaughton, Bush’s chief environmental policy advisor, followed Bush’s speech with a press conference at which he presented a well-articulated plan. The U.S. wants to work with other nations to create a new framework for international climate negotiations that would have agreements in place and working when the Kyoto accord ends in 2012. “It’s our going-forward strategy on the issue of energy security and climate change,” Connaughton said.

Rather than trying to negotiate a global consensus on greenhouse gas emissions right now, the U.S. believes it would be more productive to bring together smaller groups of countries in negotiations that would lead to “the statement of a long-term goal for reducing greenhouse gases” by the end of 2008. “What the President is trying to do here is find that consensus that will allow for forward progress,” says Connaughton.

It’s worth noting that this is the first time that the Bush administration has indicated any willingness to set specific goals for reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. It’s perhaps a mark of how desperate other world leaders are for the U.S. to play a positive role with respect to the climate that both Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the Bush initiative, at least in public. It’s an “important step on the road,” according to Merkel, and “for the first time . . . the opportunity for a proper global deal,” said Blair.

The meetings are to start this fall with the 15 biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, which would include the U.S., several European nations, plus rapidly developing economies such as India and China. The aim will be to forge agreements on “mid-term goals”, to be realized through nation-by-nation targets and strategies to reach them within a decade or two. They would also involve industry leaders from sectors such as transportation, power generation and agriculture in order to encourage technological innovation and rapid dissemination of best practices and new technologies, the latter aided by reducing tariffs and other trade barriers.

Connaughton points out that a focus on speeding technology transfer and encouraging individualized national targets and strategies may be a more effective way to encourage developing nations such as China, India, and Brazil to accept that they too need to rein in their greenhouse gas emissions, than the current cap-and-trade paradigm, which they, along with the United States and Australia, continue to reject.

Each nation’s unique recipe for reducing its climactic impact would be legislated and, in that sense, binding. “It’s the mechanisms that become binding,” says Connaughton. As an example of the kind of mid-term goals he envisions, Connaughton offered President Bush’s call during his January 2007 State of the Union address for the U.S. to reduce gasoline usage by 20% within ten years.

Has the Bush administration seen the light? Can Blair, Merkel, and other world leaders expect to hear “It’s a deal,” rather than “Dead on arrival,” (then U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s infamous reaction to the Kyoto protocol) in response to the next rounds of climate negotiations? Is the U.S. truly ready to take the lead on this vital issue?

One clue lies in the U.S. proposal itself. Its real focus is on getting other countries to lower trade barriers to U.S. technology and services. “We want to drive to agreement on a schedule of eliminating these tariffs in the Doha round by the end of next year,” Connaughton said. (The Doha round is a series of negotiations sponsored by the World Trade Organization that started in Doha, Qatar in 2001, aimed at a worldwide reduction of tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers.)

Unfortunatly, the President’s plan is not nearly as strong on lowering greenhouse gas emissions. According to Connaughton, any greenhouse gas or temperature targets would be “aspirational” rather than binding.

A second clue lies in the timing of Bush’s climate-change initiative, just a week before the start of the G8 meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany. Chancellor Merkel has staked her credibility on getting the G8 to set concrete goals on greenhouse gases and global warming now, not at some indefinite date in the future. This in turn has turned up the heat on the U.S. to do something positive about climate change. Bush’s response—to create a whole new framework for climate change negotiations—undermines Merkel’s initiative.

But the clearest indication of what the U.S. really intends to can be found in a heavily blue-penciled draft of the proposed G8 climate agreement leaked from a U.S. government source to the environmental group Greenpeace and published on 26 May. At the top of the draft, the U.S. declares that the G8 plan and language “runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple ‘red lines’ in terms of what we simply cannot agree to.”

A few of the hundreds of statements the U.S. found unacceptable and blue-lined out:

“ . . . tackling climate change is an imperative not a choice.”

“ . . . resolute and concerted international action is urgently needed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and sustain our common basis of living.”

“We will strive to reach a necessary global agreement by 2009.”

So no, Bush did not hear the voice of Gaia on the road to Heligendamm, and we are not going to witness an epiphany at this time. At the G8 and beyond, the new Bush climate program is far more likely to muddy the waters than clear the air.

From our point of view, the sooner Bush and his cronies leave office, the better for America and the rest of the world. To help move him along, we're including this helpful countdown to when the U.S. will be out of the bushes and into the fresh air and sunshine once again.