The 9/11 attacks on the United States have motivated psychologists to advance counterterrorism and related operations through psychological principles and skills. These operational psychologists seek to legitimize adversarial interventions against targets by prioritizing societal welfare over traditional, individual-focused principles of psychological ethics. In this essay, we distinguish adversarial operational psychology, which facilitates deceptive and coercive operations, from collaborative operational psychology, which optimizes personnel performance in high-risk operations. Our analysis finds that adversarial operational psychology is largely unsupported by the American Psychological Association Ethics Code, that its potential benefits are exceeded by the likelihood of irreversible harms, and that its military necessity is undemonstrated. We offer a three-factor framework for distinguishing between adversarial and collaborative operational psychology, and we recommend institutional separation of these roles so that professional psychologists do not serve in adversarial capacities.
This article addresses the following conundrum: How do abusive interrogations persist in the "War on Terror" over the practical objections of senior interrogators? Although the behavior of interrogator and interrogatee and the conditions of detention occupy the limelight in public controversies, every defense-related interrogation is deeply embedded in a web of organizational precedents and procedures. This article examines three major elements, providing organizational and psychological insights: (a) interrogation experts are positioned too low in the military hierarchy to govern interrogation protocols; (b) with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, sudden demand for interrogators exceeded the supply, resulting in low standards for selection, training, and placement of new interrogators; and (c) political and military authorities have promoted unwarranted exemptions to successful non-abusive interrogation protocols.We address the following conundrum: How do abusive interrogations persist in the "War on Terror" over the practical objections of senior interrogators? Although the behavior of interrogator and interrogatee and the conditions of detention occupy the limelight in public controversies, every defense-related interrogation is deeply embedded in a web of organizational precedents and procedures. Decades of social psychological research have confirmed the power of organizational process generally to prevail over individual autonomy and shape behavior, and thus to set the stage for the potential use of abusive techniques in interrogation.To illuminate the web of precedents and procedures that support abusive interrogations, we examine three major organizational factors:
The issue of torture as an interrogation tool is a hot-button topic, from barrooms to the highest seats of power in the U.S. government. What has largely been missing from the discussion is the voice of seasoned professionals trained in interrogation. That is who we are; that is what we hope to contribute to the conversation.We are all retired military interrogators, with a combined service experience of over 100 years and deployments including Vietnam, Grenada, Desert Storm, Bosnia, and the current Operation Iraqi Freedom.As professionals, we want to produce the most accurate and complete information possible, and we are always striving to perfect our questioning skills. Our perspective is that, beyond being morally reprehensible, torture does not satisfy the professional interrogator's need for a reliable technique that produces a verifiable truth. Much like a gambler who only needs 1 win in 1,000 to believe he has worked out a system, a person who coerces information through torture will believe that it is an effective interrogation technique. We hold that those advocating torture are not competent interrogators, and those serving as interrogators who resort to torture were never properly trained in interrogation, but are amateurs engaging in the worst behavior our profession has exhibited.We seized the opportunity to work with psychologists for multiple reasons. One, certainly, is that we frequently observed commentary on interrogation in the media, without the commentator having spoken with a person trained in interrogation. We sought to rectify this and strengthen the workgroup by making ourselves available to the participating psychologists. The other reason was to get our voices-the voices of trained, experienced interrogators-into the discussion among professionals seeking to end the use of torture as an interrogation tool.
Interrogation refers to the process of state agents questioning captive, often unwilling individuals for state purposes. Historically, state‐recognized experts on mind–body relations have often provided the rationales for state methods of interrogation. Aristotle, for example, described the ancient Greek practice of juridical torture from the naturalistic perspective and maintained that slaves, lacking reason, tell the truth to stop the pain, whereas free men can reason to their long‐term advantage and give false testimony under torture. European juridical torture in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries was grounded in the ascetic principle that bodily pain drives out self‐will in favor of God's will, thus resulting in true testimony. In the Korean War (1950–1953), Chinese “brainwashing” of United Nations prisoners proceeded as Maoist re‐education, wherein prisoners of war confessed their political crimes.
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