Jean Maria Arrigo, who exposed psychologists’ links to torture, dies at 79

Jean Maria Arrigo, a psychologist who led the American Psychological Association’s efforts to expose the role of psychologists in coercive interrogations of terror suspects in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, died on February 24 at her home in Alpine. California. She was 79.

The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer, said her husband, John Crigler.

a head about her as a whistleblower in The Guardian in 2015 it put it succinctly: “’A national hero’: a psychologist who warned against collusion in torture gets her due.”

Ten years earlier, Dr. Arrigo was appointed by the American Psychological Association, the largest professional group of psychologists, to a task force to investigate the role of trained psychologists in national security interrogations.

The 10-member panel was formed in response to 2004 news reports of abuses at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, which included details of psychologists who assisted in interrogations that the International Committee said of the Red Cross, ‘amounted to torture’.

Dr. Arrigo later claimed that the APA task force was a sham — a public relations effort “to immediately extinguish the fire of controversy,” as she told fellow psychologists in a sensational speech. speech from 2007.

The task force met and deliberated for just three days in 2005, she revealed. It was full of members with Pentagon ties and conflicts of interest. Are conclusionwritten by the APA’s top ethics official, was that psychologists had an important role to play in interrogations, keeping them “safe, legal, ethical and effective” – deliberately broad language delivered by a Defense Department official.

Although the work of the task force, formally known as the APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, was to be classified, Dr. Arrigo confessed what happened, spoke to journalists and handed over emails and documents to the armed Senate. Services committee.

She argued that the Geneva Convention, with its strict ban on torture, should guide psychologists, not the looser standards of the administration of President George W. Bush, whose lawyers had written secret memos indicating that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were intended to break the will of detainees. , including waterboarding or simulated drowning, were permitted.

After Dr. Arrigo had made her objections public, a former APA president attacked her in unusually personal terms, claiming that a “troubled upbringing” and her father’s alleged suicide explained her dissenting views. (Dr. Arrigo’s father was alive at the time).

“Without her participation as a whistleblower,” Roy J. Eidelson, former president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, said in an interview, “the APA would in all likelihood have continued to work covertly with the Department of Defense and the CIA. to support the involvement of psychologists in operations that we now know are abusive and torturous to detainees fighting terrorism.”

For years, Dr. Arrigo is part of a small group, the Coalition for an Ethical Psychologywhich criticized the APA’s close ties to military intelligence, dating back to World War I, when psychologists were hired to test and assess recruits.

The pre-September 11 military employed hundreds of clinical psychologists and provided large research grants. The APA’s critics said it was motivated in the Bush years by a desire for career advancement and lucrative contracts in military intelligence during the so-called war on terror. Defenders of the APA said psychologists’ advice during interrogations ensured they were conducted safely and ethically.

As reporting during the day and after the Bush years came to light, two psychologists developed the harsh interrogation techniques the CIA used in its black prisons after September 11, adapting a US Air Force program to steal pilots in case of capture, known as SERE , for survival, evasion, resistance and escape. SERE, which included waterboarding and sleep deprivation, was based on 1950s Chinese techniques that had led to false confessions by American prisoners.

Although the Bush administration claimed that harsh interrogations were justified, “there was a broad consensus among the professionals who knew best, who knew that SERE was torture,” according to the book “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War.” by James Risen. , a national security reporter for the New York Times.

In 2015, an independent investigation of the APA’s work with the Pentagon confirmed most of Dr.’s criticisms. Arrigo and documented what she called “collusion” between the psychologists group and the Department of Defense. The APA had tried to “ingratiate itself” with the CIA and the Pentagon, the report found, which resulted in providing cover for unlawful interrogations.

The explosive report, commissioned by the APA board, found that the ethics office “prioritized the protection of psychologists – even those who may have engaged in unethical behavior – over the protection of the public.”

Dr.’s objections Arrigo, who is mentioned more than 150 times in the 542-page report, were suppressed in a “deliberate effort to curb dissent,” the report added.

The investigation caused upheaval at the APA, including the departure of its ethics director and other top officials. In 2015, the APA banned psychologists from assisting in interrogations of detainees held by military or intelligence agencies. The group’s then-president, Nadine J. Kaslow, told The Guardian said that Dr. Arrigo owed an apology. “I’m going to thank her personally when I see her,” said Dr. Kaslow. “I am going to personally apologize to her for the fact that other people have mistreated her.”

Jean Maria Arrigo was born in Memphis on April 30, 1944, the son of Joseph Arrigo, an Army officer who spent part of his career in military intelligence, and Nellie (Gephardt) Arrigo, a schoolteacher.

In addition to Mr. Crigler, Dr. Arrigo is survived by two sisters, Sue Arrigo Clear and Linda Gail Arrigo.

Dr. Arrigo’s first career was in mathematics; she received a BA in the subject in 1966 and an MA in 1969, both from departments at the University of California. She taught mathematics as an adjunct college professor for eleven years, including at San Diego State University.

She returned to school to train as a social psychologist, earning an M.A. and a Ph.D. in 1995. in 1999, both out Claremont Graduate University. Her doctoral research, she wrote in a resume, examined the “ethics of military and political intelligence, a theme I inherited as the daughter of an undercover intelligence officer.”

In 2004 she published “A Utilitarian Argument Against the Interrogation of Terrorists by Torture” in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics.

In 2016, Dr. Arrigo received the Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which cited her “courage and perseverance in advocating ethical behavior among her fellow psychologists and the importance of international human rights standards and against torture.”

Dr. Eidelson, the author of “Doing Harm: How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the War on Terror” (2023) said in an interview that Dr. Arrigo was a quiet person, someone who few people would see as It is likely that she would oppose the national leadership of her profession.

She was “humble, gentle, careful, fact-oriented, no-nonsense,” he said. “Not everyone was happy with her, but the profession has benefited enormously from her commitment to the truth.”