‘Psychological Torture Is Enshrined in U.S. Law’: Complicity in Abuses Began Long Before Bush
AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Larry James, at that meeting, who is now dean at Wayne State in Detroit [ sic], of the U.S. Army, chief psychologist at Guantánamo and a member of the APA governing board, said at the meeting, defending military psychologists, said they help make interrogations safe, ethical and legal, and cited instances where psychologists allegedly intervened to stop abuse. He said, “If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die.” But then Dr. Laurie Wagner got up, a Dallas psychologist and the past president of the APA Division of Psychoanalysis, “Why are people dying, if the U.S. military is in charge?” Let me put that question to Professor Al McCoy. This whole debate within the APA and the role of psychologists, as you see it?
ALFRED McCOY: Yeah, Amy, we can put this in a wider context. The psychologists are critical, but they’re critical because psychological torture is, in effect, enshrined within U.S. law. When the United States finally ratified the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, we did so subject to certain qualifications, known in diplomatic parlance as “reservations.” And basically, the four reservations that we introduced modified our approval, our ratification of that convention, everything in it except: We redefined the U.N. definition of what torture was—extreme pain—and we called it “prolonged mental harm,” that for an act to rise to the level of torture, it had to become, in U.S. parlance, in those reservations, prolonged mental harm.
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