A dust-up in academia concerning torture and the role of psychologists has failed to make a dent in the reportage of either the establishment media or the blogosphere. Nevertheless, the issue has fired up e-mail listservs over at the American Psychological Association, and among opponents of APA's long-time pro-military interrogations policy.
It all started when the May 21 edition of the prominent scientific journal Nature carried an unsigned editorial entitled "Responsible Interrogation." The editorial makes some unequivocally strong statements against the Bush policy of "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Despite plausible-sounding talk about ‘states of induced dependency' and the like, there is no scientific basis for asserting that techniques such as waterboarding, or slamming people against a wall, are fast or effective ways of getting at the truth (see Nature 445, 349; 2007). Indeed, it is hard to imagine any ethical way a controlled study on that question could be carried out....
And even if physical or mental torture could be shown to be effective in some immediate, tactical sense, that would be beside the point: torture is a violation of human rights and of international law, and is a threat to the long-term health of democracy. It is not to be tolerated.
But then, noting "there are no easy answers," the editorial launched into a discussion of the controversies that beset the American Psychological Association (APA) when it tried to reconcile professional ethics with the job of assisting military and intelligence interrogations. Even worse, especially for those APA activists who worked so hard to pass a referendum-inspired change in APA policy on interrogations, the Nature article returned to a line of argumentation that APA had supposedly now rejected.
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