Psychological Torture?

By DOUGLAS WALLER

Military interrogators often have to play mind games with their Iraqi and Afghan prisoners in an effort to extract information. But how far should mental-health experts go in helping play those games? A report on detainee abuse, delivered to Congress on March 7 by Vice Admiral Albert Church, noted that there is "a growing trend in the global war on terror" for military psychiatrists and psychologists to take part in interrogations. Now some mental-health professionals, even within the military, are growing concerned that colleagues who have helped interrogators may have broken the first rule of medical ethics: Do no harm. The American Psychological Association has organized a task force to investigate the work--much of which is shrouded in secrecy--and to craft ethical guidelines for it.

The role most psychologists and psychiatrists play in these interrogations may be relatively benign. One military psychologist described for TIME the help he gave intelligence officers in Afghanistan in getting an unruly Taliban prisoner to cooperate--coaxing information from the prisoner by starting "very gently" with innocuous questions about his family history, until the prisoner "talked and talked."

But the Army Surgeon General is investigating whether some doctors helped direct what amounts to psychological torture. Though no evidence has surfaced that mental-health professionals sanctioned the beatings and sexual humiliation that guards at Abu Ghraib are accused of inflicting, Army investigators did find that military-intelligence officers at the prison had psychiatrists review their "interrogation plans" for Iraqi detainees. If any mental-health professionals supervised such pressure tactics as sleep deprivation or the use of military dogs to threaten prisoners during interrogations, that would cross an ethical line, says an Army psychiatrist. "We should not be using our abilities to make things difficult for a person," the psychiatrist told TIME. "I'd like to think that no mental-health people were involved in that, but there may have been some blurring of the boundaries." --By Douglas Waller