Jean Maria Arrigo, exposed US torture ties

Jean Maria Arrigo, a psychologist who exposed efforts by the American Psychological Association to obscure the role of psychologists in coercive interrogations of terror suspects in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, died on Feb. 24 at her home in Alpine, Calif. She was 79.

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

A headline about her as a whistleblower in The Guardian in 2015 put it succinctly: “‘A National Hero’: Psychologist Who Warned of Torture Collusion Gets Her Due.”

A decade earlier, Dr. Arrigo had been named to a task force by the American Psychological Association, the largest professional group of psychologists, to examine the role of trained psychologists in national security interrogations.

The 10-member panel was formed in response to news reports in 2004 about abuse at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, which included details about psychologists aiding in interrogations that, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, were “tantamount to torture.”

Dr. Arrigo later asserted that the APA task force was a sham — a public relations effort “to put out the fires of controversy right away,” as she told fellow psychologists in a wave-making speech in 2007.

The task force met and deliberated for just three days in 2005, she revealed. It was stacked with members who had ties to the Pentagon and conflicts of interest. Its conclusion, written by the top ethics official at the APA, was that psychologists had an important role to play in interrogations, keeping them “safe, legal, ethical and effective” — intentionally broad language supplied by an official at the Defense Department.

Although the proceedings of the task force, formally known as the APA’s Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, were meant to be secret, Dr. Arrigo spoke to journalists, and turned over emails and records to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

She argued that the Geneva Conventions, which strictly ban torture, should guide psychologists, not the looser standards of then-President George W. Bush’s administration, whose lawyers had written secret memos indicating that “enhanced interrogation techniques” meant to break the will of detainees — including waterboarding, or simulated drowning — were permissible.

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

“Without her participation as a whistle-blower,” Roy J. Eidelson, a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, said in an interview, “the APA in all likelihood would have continued to collaborate covertly with the Department of Defense and the CIA in support of psychologists’ involvement in operations that we now know are abusive and torturous toward war-on-terror detainees.”

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

The pre-9/11 military employed hundreds of clinical psychologists and made large research grants. The APA’s critics said that it was motivated in the Bush years by a desire for career opportunities and lucrative contracts in military intelligence during the so-called war on terror. Defenders of the APA said the advice of psychologists in interrogations ensured that they were safe and ethical.

As reporting during and after the Bush years revealed, two psychologists developed the harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA after 9/11, adapting a US Air Force program to steel pilots in case of capture, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. SERE, in turn, which included waterboarding and sleep deprivation, was based on Chinese techniques of the 1950s that had led to false confessions by American prisoners.

In 2015, an independent investigation of the APA’s work with the Pentagon vindicated most of Dr. Arrigo’s criticisms, documenting what it called “collusion” between the psychologists’ group and the Department of Defense. The APA had sought to “curry favor” with the CIA and the Pentagon, the report found, which had the effect of giving cover to abusive interrogations.

The explosive report, commissioned by the APA’s board, found that its ethics office “prioritized the protection of psychologists — even those who might have engaged in unethical behavior — above the protection of the public.”

The objections of Dr. Arrigo, who is mentioned more than 150 times in the 542-page report, were suppressed in an “intentional effort to curb dissent,” the report added.

The investigation produced an upheaval at the APA, including the departure of the ethics director and other top officials. In 2015, the APA banned psychologists from assisting in interrogations of prisoners held by any military or intelligence body.

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

Besides Crigler, Arrigo leaves two sisters, Sue Arrigo Clear and Linda Gail Arrigo.

Dr. Arrigo’s first career was in mathematics; she earned a bachelor’s degree in the subject in 1966 and a master’s in 1969, both from the University of California. For 11 years, she taught math as an adjunct college professor, including at San Diego State University.

She returned to school to train as a social psychologist, earning a master’s in 1995 and a doctorate in 1999, both from Claremont Graduate University. Her doctoral research, she wrote in a résumé, explored the “ethics of military and political intelligence, a theme I inherited as daughter of an undercover intelligence officer.”

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 persistence in advocating for ethical behavior among her fellow psychologists and the importance of international human rights standards and against torture.”