Dr. Robert Jay Lifton: American Psychological Association Should “Prohibit

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton: American Psychological Association Should “Prohibit Any Involvement” of Psychologists in Interrogations

DR. ROBERT JAY LIFTON: I find it very sad because Richard Faulk and I, together then with Gabriel Coco, wrote a book that really derived from the Nuremberg obligation to oppose the war crimes of one's own government. We did that thirty-five years ago in relation to Vietnam, and now we find ourselves doing the same thing. This book is modeled after the first book in relation to Iraq, and that's a very unhappy sequence, but we felt it should be done.

DR. ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Well, for instance, when I did my work in Vietnam with Vietnam veterans, I found that the military policies of free fire zones and body counts, along with the angry grief of soldiers when buddies were killed and they couldn't find the enemy -- the enemy was everywhere and nowhere -- created an atrocity-producing situation in which ordinary young people, who weren't bad in any basic way, could be psychologically drawn into atrocities.

I found now, in studying the Iraq situation, that there's a parallel situation. It's another counter-insurgency war with a non-white population in a place where we're resented, and with an enemy that is very elusive and difficult to identify, and that creates both a military and psychological situation in which ordinary young men and women, no better or worse than you or me, are capable of committing atrocities.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/12/1320246