Throughout history in times of crisis people can either rise to the occasion and use their best judgement or they can descend into irrationality and fear and make atrocious mistakes. Nazi Germany and the people in that country come to mind in the latter category.
Our government in the hands of the already paranoid and ill informed CIA [WMD anyone?] also made atrocious decisions. In 2001 they hired two psychologists, James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen and over six or so years paid them a total of $81 million dollars because they knew how to create "learned helplessness" in the Guantanamo captives. They convinced the Bush/Cheney administration that "it would be irresponsible not to hire them." In fact these psychologists had "no experience as interrogators and no special knowledge of al-Qaida, no background in counter terrorism."** The CIA was smitten by their claim that learned helplessness could be created in the detainees and they believed the captives would readily spill their guts.
What they failed to discover, all of these supposedly smart men, was that the study on learned helplessness was done by Martin Seligman in the 80's. Yes, the Martin Seligman who has spent his career studying "positive psychology". The irony: his learned helplessness study was one of the seminal studies proving the exact opposite conclusion: people can recover from it. I wrote about this study in my post of 11/14/2011:
Long ago, I read a pivotal study by Dr. Martin Seligman that positively influenced me. In the 1980’s his group of scientists performed an unkind experiment with dogs on “learned helplessness.” They constructed a huge cage with an electrified metal floor and shocked the dogs randomly until they just gave up, lay down in their cages and awaited the next jolt. They had induced despair. The story could have ended there, with a pack of highly neurotic dogs. However, these were scientists who had hearts as well as brains and they decided to see if they could help these dogs recover.
So, using sausages as rewards, they coaxed the dogs out of their pens. With some of the dogs it took as few as 10 times dragging them by the collar to the sausages, with others as many as 50 times, but ultimately all of the dogs recovered. I said to myself, "I think perhaps I could help clients find the particular “sausage” that could coax them out of their own cages."
I used this study and positive psychology continually in my career to great satisfaction. I watched and aided people recover from trauma and as I mentioned, it sometimes did take quite a long time. To recover you need to use your heart as well as your brain.
The saddest fact in all of this is that the CIA, the greedy psychologists, and our government at the time, the Cheney/Bush administration, used this seminal study for evil instead of it's intended purpose---to aide in depressed people's recovery from the grim pit of depression. In other words they used the animal part of their brain, fight and fear instead of a more grounded rational, reasonable approach. No heart working there. In fact James Mitchell didn't object to the findings other than to defend his expertise even suggesting that the torture was better than using drones. How's that for scantimonious obsfuscation.
Didn't the CIA or anyone in the government at that time bother to read the Seligman's learned helplessness study? Didn't they note somewhere in their investigation that Seligman was using dogs and not people? John McCain is a perfect example on how and why torture doesn't work. He was caged for six years and bravely never gave good information to his abusers. Another example is the remarkable dear hero of Unbroken, Louis Zamperini who remained unbroken in the face of excruciating torture while a prisoner of war. Torture is disgusting and beneath our dignity as human beings. To condone it defies my comprehension. It is the lowest form of abuse and needs to be called out and eradicated.
I liked what Obama said back when he was running for office in 2008, "we [the US] do not used torture." He has been heartily backed up in this report [and all of the studies I've ever read] that proves over and over again, torture does not work. Just ask John McCain.
Today is a new day. We are better, finer than the dark period when Cheney/Bush were at the helm and the CIA had run amok. Let's today honor the John McCains, the Louis Zamperinis and all of the service personnel who have ever been in captivity and eradicate these hate crimes against humanity.
*This quote was taken from a very good article in todays Seattle Times by Hal Bernton and Kyung M. Song
susansmagicfeather copyright 2014 Susan R. Grout all rights reserved
