ABSTRACT
The U.S. response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, initiated a seismic shift in national self-image. Driven by fear and a sense of vulnerability rarely felt on these protected shores, there evolved a sense of entitlement to take whatever action promised to protect the United States from further attacks, leading to support for preemptive war in Iraq and the opening of detention centers outside the framework of previously accepted international law. It was only in 2004, when reports of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, complete with pictures, hit the media that there arose a general public feeling that perhaps this had gone too far. Around the same time, there were reports in the media of possible involvement by psychologists in the development of abusive interrogation techniques (Lewis, 2006; Mayer, 2005) at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, accompanied by disavowal by Bush administration officials of the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the treatment of “illegal enemy combatants.” Those placed in this category were held outside the United States to avoid the constraints of the U.S. judicial system as well. Of particular interest to psychologists were reports, in the same articles, that psychologists had been involved in training interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in psychological methods of torture. For many psychologists, these reports brought into sharp focus the fact that psychologists had made central contributions to modern methods of torture in the form of research in sensory deprivation, sensory overload, the exploitation of psychological vulnerability, and so on, and that we were considered experts in interrogation, including abusive methods of interrogation, by those who organized and ran the new detention centers for illegal enemy combatants. Suddenly, for some of us, this was not just a question of taking a stand on a major social and political issue, such as the American Psychological Association (APA) had done previously in supporting gay rights in the military, for example. This issue of torture implicated psychologists, and our professional organization, as major players.
