Shortly after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the American Psychological Association (APA) made high-level efforts to nurture relationships with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and other government agencies. As
Truthout reported earlier this year, the APA aimed “to position psychology and behavioral scientists as key players in U.S. counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities.”
The APA, for several years, not only condoned but actually applauded psychologists’ assistance in interrogation/torture in Guantánamo and elsewhere. When it was discovered that psychologists were working with the U.S. military and the CIA to develop brutal interrogation methods, an APA task force in 2005 concluded that psychologists were playing a “valuable and ethical role” in assisting the military; and in 2007, an APA Council of Representatives retained this policy. It took until 2008 for APA members to vote for prohibiting consultations in interrogations (reported by
Project Censored in 2010).
U.S. psychologists and psychiatrists have also met the needs of the power structure by subverting resistance of U.S. soldiers in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the Vietnam War, the GI Anti-War Movement — in which soldiers refused to cooperate with the U.S. military — was one of the decisive factors in ending U.S. military involvement in Vietnam (see
Sir! No Sir! ). However, today, psychologists and psychiatrists’ “treatments” of soldiers with behavioral manipulations and psychiatric drugs make such a resistance by soldiers more difficult.
One of the most famous psychologists in the United States, Martin Seligman, a former president of the APA, has consulted with the U.S. Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program (as I reported in
AlterNet in 2010). Seligman achieved not only “social position and rank” for himself but several million dollars for his University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center, according to the
Philadelphia Inquirer, which quoted Seligman saying, “We’re after creating an indomitable military.” In one role play utilized in this Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, reported by the
New York Times, a sergeant is asked to take his exhausted men on one more difficult mission, and the sergeant is initially angry saying that “It’s not fair”; but in the role play, he’s “rehabilitated” to reframe the order as a compliment.