Diane Perlman of the Committee for the Republic introduced me to Jean Maria Arrigo, Ph.D., last August for the purpose of doing an oral history interview with her. Instead, Dr. Arrigo asked me to write something about the latest American Psychological Association’s “National Security” ethical violations, following their earlier conspiracy with the CIA, as described here, from The Guardian below:
"But in 2005, Arrigo found herself with an unexpected appointment. She was a member of an internal panel, known as the Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (Pens), that greenlit psychologist participation in national-security interrogations. Hoffman found that the taskforce was “intentionally weighted in favor” of the US department of defense, through stacking it with representatives from the military and CIA. It rejected efforts by Arrigo and two like-minded colleagues to include references to the Geneva Convention and specific interrogation techniques that psychologists could not be involved in."
Dr. Arrigo is one of those who influenced me due to her public resistance to torture to volunteer as a Guantanamo Defense Attorney. A task which I’m still on with an Appellate case in which our client (and my other two clients) was horrifically tortured. One far worse than the other two, Mustafa al-Hawsawi.
Today, the issue with “APA Operational Psychologists,” when reading the latest guidelines, is “Strategic Communication,” or what some may have seen me refer to, “Cognitive Warfare.” I prepared an incomplete draft for her; she reviewed it favorably, but before we could go further, her cancer grew much worse to the point where she is today in hospice care.
In tribute to her, I will finish it as I know she would approve. Both the lengthy paper I will put on SubStack, and a condensed one I will get published somewhere. Making me wish Bob Parry was still alive and Editor of ConsortiumNews who published anything I sent him. (See below for more of my tribute.)
But Roger Waters also paid tribute to her today, on his social media pages, and in a personal message he sent to her, as follows:
"I’m going to post it on all my social media, . . . by all means tell her and send my love and great respect.”
My “real” and further tribute to Dr. Arrigo is to do all I can to oppose Donald Trump, the pro-torture President, and the fascist fanatics who support him, and through him, constructively support torture! (Nor to support Biden.) To include “Libertarians” like the anti-Palestinian, pro-Israeli fascists, Charles Koch. And the same of “Conservative Peter Thiel, “Darling” of the New Right. Both of whom helped elect Trump in 2016, when he made no secret of his support for torture: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-torture-works-backs-waterboarding-and-much-worse/2016/02/17/4c9277be-d59c-11e5-b195-2e29a4e13425_story.html
And squeal all you want that it was the “NeoCons” responsible for torture, omitting how Trump (and the equally bad DeSantis; "New Right Traditional Conservatives” both, as claimed by our own Traditional Conservatives) and the equally bad, Traditional Conservative favorite Jeff Sessions, were all in for torture.
A recent book on Conservatism makes a point that there is much less difference between Traditional Conservatives, and the West Coast Straussians of Claremont Institute/Hillsdale College now. Meaning under Trump. Which I fully agree with, as seen in the pages of The American Conservative magazine which is now indistinguishable from the Claremont Institute publications, except for shorter articles! Even sharing some of the same “Scholars,” as can be seen here:
"Sessions has favored waterboarding, stating, “it worked” in extracting information. Waterboarding has long been considered torture, and leading FBI interrogators have debunked Sessions’ claim, saying a person will say anything to get it to stop. Sessions admitted in his testimony this week that waterboarding is now “absolutely improper and illegal” as Congress has outlawed it, although he voted against that legislation.
"Guantanamo should be kept open to incarcerate terrorism suspects, Sessions testified. “It’s designed for that purpose,” he said. “It fits that purpose marvelously well. It’s a safe place to keep prisoners. We’ve invested a lot of money” in it. He neglected to mention that detainees at Guantanamo have been illegally indefinitely detained, tortured and abused. And the prison has become a symbol of US hypocrisy on human rights and served as a recruiting tool for would-be terrorists.” STOP
So Conservatives like the war fanatic Kevin Roberts boast of themselves as “unhyphenated Conservatives?” So don’t complain when they’re called out as the torture/war fanatics that they are, without differentiation, as I do now. Allied as they are with Israeli fascism. That’s my tribute to Jean Maria Arrigo. And to my father as a victim of Japanese Fascism, and torture victim. With their ideology much like that adopted and propagated by Willmoore Kendall and his fellow Conservatives, if one reads what he wrote. Instead of just parroting the panegyrics to Kendall written by so many Trumpites/DeSantisites.
The people who promote the people who promote Torture/Trumpism, as they’re synonymous, should be ashamed of themselves, and scorned. As should the people who acquiesce to that by their silence! And they do no service for the Rule of Law, or the Constitution, or the Republic, by their shameful silence! Nor does the “Constitutional Morality” right-wing fanatics camouflage their lack of real morality with, do any service to actually moral people like Aaron Bushnell and Jean Maria Arrigo, who we should all pay tribute to. Though here, our “Conservatives” are probably whooping it up with their fellow Zionist Fascists, as “another one bites the dust.” Or ashes in Aaron’s case.
Can’t confirm this is authentic but I would guess it is, as the highly principled, moral Aaron Bushnell obviously was, would recognize his opposite in Fascist Zionists like Trump and DeSantis, and their fellow New Rightists.
Jean Maria Arrigo: ‘I think the effect on me, which has intensified, may be more like what happened to the people of East Germany when the Stasi records were opened.’ Photograph: Jean Maria Arrigo
Jean Maria Arrigo’s inbox is filling up with apologies.
For a decade, colleagues of the 71-year-old psychologist ignored, derided and in some cases attacked Arrigo for sounding alarms that the American Psychological Association was implicated in US torture. But now that a devastating report has exposed deep APA complicity with brutal CIA and US military interrogations – and a smear campaign against Arrigo herself – her colleagues are expressing contrition.
“I have been wanting to email you since reading the Hoffman report on Wednesday to let you know how ashamed I am about not believing what you and others had been saying about APA’s actions,” wrote a psychologist Arrigo wished to remain anonymous.
Arrigo estimates she has received perhaps a dozen such emails since David Hoffman, a former federal prosecutor, confirmed what she has crusaded against for a decade: the APA’s institutional involvement with torture led to a concerted effort to quash dissent, lie to the public, and silence people like her. In a story full of villains, Arrigo emerges from Hoffman’s report as a hero – and a martyr.
Arrigo herself is fearful that the APA will ride out the wave of bad publicity rather then remove the rot of torture from the root. More personally, she told the Guardian, it has been jarring to see what her colleagues were saying – and doing – about her behind closed doors.
“I think the effect on me, which has intensified, may be more like what happened to people in East Germany when the Stasi records were opened,” she told the Guardian.
Arrigo did not expect to spend her 60s at war with the APA over torture. The daughter of an intelligence operative, Arrigo focuses her work on the intersection of human rights and social psychology, “to give moral voice to intelligence professionals”.
But in 2005, Arrigo found herself with an unexpected appointment. She was a member of an internal panel, known as the Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (Pens), that greenlit psychologist participation in national-security interrogations. Hoffman found that the taskforce was “intentionally weighted in favor” of the US department of defense, through stacking it with representatives from the military and CIA. It rejected efforts by Arrigo and two like-minded colleagues to include references to the Geneva Convention and specific interrogation techniques that psychologists could not be involved in.
The discussions within the taskforce appear acrimonious. Hoffman writes that a member of the APA board, Gerald Koocher, “challenged each of Arrigo’s points” on a taskforce emailgroup when Arrigo expressed discomfort with the panel’s ties to the military.
But the acrimony intensified after Arrigo took her concerns public at APA conventions. One of those meetings, in 2007 in San Francisco, attracted the attention of journalist Amy Goodman, who used it for a story on her Democracy Now broadcast. In response, Koocher told Goodman in an open letter that Arrigo was improperly influenced by the supposed “suicide” of her father – a former operative for the CIA’s second world war predecessor, who was actually alive when Koocher wrote his letter – and her “troubled upbringing”.
Hoffman called the letter from Koocher, who served as APA president in 2006, “part of a highly personal attack on Arrigo” from prominent APA figures.
“Former president Koocher spread false gossip about her family to try to undermine her credibility,” said Stephen Soldz of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and Physicians for Human Rights. “No one in leadership stood up and protested.”
Arrigo said she was untroubled by Koocher’s “idiotic” broadside, and simply forwarded around a photograph of her with her very-much-alive father. What was more troubling to her, she said, were the well-meaning members of APA who did not challenge the attacks.
“Not only did they do nothing, but they allowed themselves to be used,” she said.
Some of the APA officials named in the Hoffman report have begun a counteroffensive against it. On Sunday, the former FBI director Louis Freeh issued a statement on behalf of ousted ethics chief Stephen Behnke, a critical figure in the “collusion” Hoffman identified, threatening legal action.
Over the weekend, Koocher emailed colleagues to complain that Hoffman had misrepresented him.
“The fact that APA consistently clearly came down against torture and against degrading or inhumane interrogation, is lost as they seem to weave a picture that we all conspired to simply rubber-stamp whatever the DoD and intelligence community wanted. The irony is that I was strongly opposed to the ‘enhanced interrogation’ advocacy of Dick Cheny [sic] and others. We mostly saw it as our job to help those serving our country to behave ethically,” Koocher wrote, according to an email obtained by the Guardian.
Koocher did not respond to requests for comment.
Still, the APA, in its moment of turmoil, has struck a tone of embracing the report – and, belatedly, Arrigo.
Now that she doesn’t have the specter of the APA’s obfuscation over her head, Arrigo intends to move forward with a project developing “a moral understanding [of] where the line should be drawn” between operational psychologists and military intelligence – “what the Pens taskforce should have done”, she said.
“Jean Maria Arrigo is a national hero. When many were fooled by the complicity now revealed in the Hoffman report, she penetrated the darkness and stood up and spoke the truth,” said Soldz.
