By William Fisher
A leading human rights organization is charging that an American Psychological Association (APA) task force formed to advise the U.S. military on prisoner interrogations was “stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials” and “rushed to conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
In the wake of newly released internal APA documents indicating that the organization’s 2005 ethics task force on national security interrogations developed its policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines governing psychologist participation in interrogations, said Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
The organization is calling for an independent, outside investigation of the APA and a probe by the Defense Department’s Inspector General into whether any federal employees exerted influence over the APA's Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS).
The director of PHR's Campaign Against Torture, Nathaniel Raymond told us, “The APA’s ethics task force on national security interrogations produced a report that was rushed, secret, and being driven to already-reached conclusions – conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
“The APA made ethics subservient to law by following guidelines set out by the Pentagon. Members of the task force had long-standing ties to the Pentagon, and the task force was stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials. There were clear conflicts of interest,” he said, adding, “The APA needs to explain how that happened. And the Pentagon’s Inspector General needs to look into how this was allowed to happen.”
The charges of APA conflicts of interest came after a series of task force emails were posted online by Salon.com and ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative journalism organization.
PHR said the emails indicate that the APA's ethics task force developed its ethics policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines.
"These serious allegations require an independent investigation to determine whether APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct," said Steven Reisner, Ph.D., PHR Advisor for Psychological Ethics. "The American public deserves to know if there were inappropriate contacts or conflicts of interest between APA officials and the Pentagon," he said.
The task force found it to be "consistent with the APA Ethics Code" for psychologists to consult with interrogators in the interests of national security. While noting that psychologists do not participate in torture and have a responsibility to report it, and should be committed to the APA ethics code whenever they "encounter conflicts between ethics and law," the task force
decided that "if the conflict cannot be resolved ... psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law."
PHR has been a longstanding and outspoken critic of the APA's PENS policy governing psychologist involvement in interrogations, calling for a "bright line" prohibition against health professional participation in interrogations. Though the APA membership passed a 2008 referendum banning psychologists from facilities that violate US and international human rights law, PHR believes that the PENS policy must be immediately revoked.
Riesner said it was time to “put a psychologist's ethical obligations to human rights principles ahead of following orders."
The recently released Senate Armed Services Committee report detailing detainee abuse by the Department of Defense confirms that psychologists rationalized, designed, supervised, and implemented the Bush Administration's torture program.
"The Senate Armed Services Committee report confirms that psychologists were central to the Bush Administration's use of torture," said PHR’s Raymond.
"In the context of these revelations, the American public needs to know why a supposedly independent ethics policy was written by some of the very personnel allegedly implicated in detainee abuse," he said.
Stephen Soldz, a board member and spokesman for another advocacy group, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, said, "These emails show that several of the military psychologists formulating APA ethics policy were giving themselves get-out-of-jail-free cards.”
He charged that their report concluded that it was ethical to follow military policy while the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos allowing torture were still in effect.".
The memoranda prepared by OLC lawyers provided the rationale for the Bush Administration’s assertion that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were legal.
PHR has repeatedly called for an end to the use of the SERE tactics by U.S. personnel, the dismantling of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) teams, and a full Congressional investigation of the use of psychological torture by the U.S. Government.
SERE, the military's “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program” was developed to train American soldiers to cope with torture if captured by the enemy. Its developers warned officials as early as 2002 that “reverse-engineering” SERE techniques for use on detainees could be ineffective and dangerous, a recent Senate Armed Services Committee report revealed,
The report also noted that the same psychologists who helped develop the SERE program were complicit in the very interrogation policies and practices they warned against.
Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, a San-Francisco-based psychologist who has written extensively on the role played by medical professionals in prisoner treatment, told us, “APA's ties to the Pentagon are of long-standing, going back at least to the Cold War.”
He said, “Any inquiry should make the historical connection between the work of CIA and SERE psychologists and the role of coercive interrogation used in psychologically ‘breaking down’ a human being.”
He said that there is a long history of collaboration between psychologists and the military, which includes several former APA presidents. These men were the “institutional godfathers” for a later generation of psychologists who continue to be deeply involved in interrogation techniques, he said.
In an article accompanying ProPublica’s publication of the APA task force’s extensive email exchanges, Sheri Fink of ProPublica posed the question, “Is it possible for psychologists to uphold the ethical tenets of their profession while working within a system of interrogation that violates those tenets? Does it matter if they raised objections to the system of interrogation but cooperated with it anyway?”
The Senate report said that in 2002, a psychiatrist and a psychologist who worked at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prepared a list of harsh interrogation techniques that ended up influencing interrogation policy not only at Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the same memo, they warned that these methods were likely to result in inaccurate tips and could harm detainees. Those warnings disappeared as the memo moved up the chain of command.
The board of the APA, the largest membership organization for psychologists, who are employed in great numbers by the Department of Defense, quickly adopted the task force's report as the organization's official policy.
But last year, members of the APA successfully petitioned for a vote on whether to ban psychologists from working in detention settings where international law or the U.S. Constitution are violated. The membership passed the proposal.
Some psychologists have filed complaints with the APA and state licensing boards against colleagues who were allegedly involved in abusive interrogations.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
WATCHLIST HITS A MILLION PLUS
By William Fisher
Hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified because of the government’s wasteful and inefficient management of the nation’s one million-strong terrorist watchlist, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The organization cited a recent report by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which found that the part of the watchlist maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may contain a 35 percent error rate.
The OIG audit also revealed that large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records.
The ACLU says the audit “confirms that the nation’s watchlist system is massively broken.”
The audit confirmed estimates that the terror watchlist contains 1.1 million names as of December 2008, and that many of them are out of date.
OIG auditors reviewed 68,669 of those identities and found 24,000 out of date. In a closer inspection of the out of date records, the auditors found a majority of this sample did not belong on a watchlist.
Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department oversees the FBI, told a Senate subcommittee this morning that he has not yet read the IG report, but has been told by the FBI that all of the concerns and problems raised in the report have been addressed.
“I am a bit skeptical about claims the FBI addressed all of the concerns and problems raised in the FBI Inspector General’s audit report on the terrorist watchlist,” Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project, told us.
“Are they saying that the FBI has reviewed 24,000 watchlist records to determine how many (likely a majority) need to be removed from the watchlist? Has the FBI completely streamlined a process for reviewing records so that people are removed from the watchlist within 10 days? The audit reports the average amount of time to remove an identity from the list is 60 days. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
The OIG report documents a widespread failure to scrub the lists by removing names after cases have been closed. For example, one subject stayed on the watchlist for almost five years after the case was resolved; two people on the list were dead. The FBI attempted to place one individual on the watchlist by reclassifying that person as an international terrorist after already having been cleared of wrongdoing by an FBI investigation.
It identified more than 50,000 records with no explanation of why they were on the list, making it impossible to remove them. It described the controls for placing many names on the list as “weak or nonexistent.”
The watchlist has existed since 2003, when then President George W. Bush issued a presidential directive mandating the development of a consolidated terrorist watchlist and required all federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies with terrorism information to share such information. The consolidated terrorist watchlist is known as the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
The Terrorist Screening Center, which also began operations in 2003 and is managed by the FBI, was established to serve as the U.S. government’s consolidation point for information about known or suspected international and domestic terrorists.
“This IG report reveals just what a comedy of errors the watchlist is,” said Chris Calabrese, attorney with the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. “But we did not need this report to know there is a problem with the effectiveness of any terrorist watchlist that includes over a million names. It certainly explains why Congressman John Lewis and Senator Edward Kennedy have problems when they try to fly.”
And Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape."
"Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon, " she urged, adding,
“This report strongly suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified as terrorists,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This is yet more confirmation of what we’ve been saying for years – that the watchlist is not only unfair for travelers, but it is also a waste of scarce resources. It is time for Congress to haul the watchlist policymakers up to Capitol Hill to answer some tough questions.”
The ACLU is recommending a series of controls on the watch lists. These include due process, a right to access and challenge data upon which listing is based, tight criteria for adding names to the lists, and rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names from the lists.
The group also called on the president to issue an executive order requiring the lists to be reviewed and limited to only those for whom there is credible evidence of terrorist ties or activities. The review should be concluded within 3 months, the group said.
The OIG report also found that putting people on the watchlist was as problematic as getting them off. The Inspector General’s recommendations included establishing timeframe requirements for headquarters units to process watchlist nominations, modifications, and removals; reevaluation of watchlist records that are not sourced to a current terrorism case, and creation of a process to modify and remove known or suspected terrorists placed on the watchlist.
“We believe that the FBI’s failure to consistently nominate subjects of international and domestic terrorism investigations to the terrorist watchlist could pose a risk to national security,” the OIG report said, adding that “FBI field offices’ frequent failure to modify watchlist records indicates a problem with training on and understanding of the importance of the watchlist process.”
Hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified because of the government’s wasteful and inefficient management of the nation’s one million-strong terrorist watchlist, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The organization cited a recent report by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which found that the part of the watchlist maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may contain a 35 percent error rate.
The OIG audit also revealed that large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records.
The ACLU says the audit “confirms that the nation’s watchlist system is massively broken.”
The audit confirmed estimates that the terror watchlist contains 1.1 million names as of December 2008, and that many of them are out of date.
OIG auditors reviewed 68,669 of those identities and found 24,000 out of date. In a closer inspection of the out of date records, the auditors found a majority of this sample did not belong on a watchlist.
Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department oversees the FBI, told a Senate subcommittee this morning that he has not yet read the IG report, but has been told by the FBI that all of the concerns and problems raised in the report have been addressed.
“I am a bit skeptical about claims the FBI addressed all of the concerns and problems raised in the FBI Inspector General’s audit report on the terrorist watchlist,” Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project, told us.
“Are they saying that the FBI has reviewed 24,000 watchlist records to determine how many (likely a majority) need to be removed from the watchlist? Has the FBI completely streamlined a process for reviewing records so that people are removed from the watchlist within 10 days? The audit reports the average amount of time to remove an identity from the list is 60 days. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
The OIG report documents a widespread failure to scrub the lists by removing names after cases have been closed. For example, one subject stayed on the watchlist for almost five years after the case was resolved; two people on the list were dead. The FBI attempted to place one individual on the watchlist by reclassifying that person as an international terrorist after already having been cleared of wrongdoing by an FBI investigation.
It identified more than 50,000 records with no explanation of why they were on the list, making it impossible to remove them. It described the controls for placing many names on the list as “weak or nonexistent.”
The watchlist has existed since 2003, when then President George W. Bush issued a presidential directive mandating the development of a consolidated terrorist watchlist and required all federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies with terrorism information to share such information. The consolidated terrorist watchlist is known as the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
The Terrorist Screening Center, which also began operations in 2003 and is managed by the FBI, was established to serve as the U.S. government’s consolidation point for information about known or suspected international and domestic terrorists.
“This IG report reveals just what a comedy of errors the watchlist is,” said Chris Calabrese, attorney with the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. “But we did not need this report to know there is a problem with the effectiveness of any terrorist watchlist that includes over a million names. It certainly explains why Congressman John Lewis and Senator Edward Kennedy have problems when they try to fly.”
And Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape."
"Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon, " she urged, adding,
“This report strongly suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified as terrorists,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This is yet more confirmation of what we’ve been saying for years – that the watchlist is not only unfair for travelers, but it is also a waste of scarce resources. It is time for Congress to haul the watchlist policymakers up to Capitol Hill to answer some tough questions.”
The ACLU is recommending a series of controls on the watch lists. These include due process, a right to access and challenge data upon which listing is based, tight criteria for adding names to the lists, and rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names from the lists.
The group also called on the president to issue an executive order requiring the lists to be reviewed and limited to only those for whom there is credible evidence of terrorist ties or activities. The review should be concluded within 3 months, the group said.
The OIG report also found that putting people on the watchlist was as problematic as getting them off. The Inspector General’s recommendations included establishing timeframe requirements for headquarters units to process watchlist nominations, modifications, and removals; reevaluation of watchlist records that are not sourced to a current terrorism case, and creation of a process to modify and remove known or suspected terrorists placed on the watchlist.
“We believe that the FBI’s failure to consistently nominate subjects of international and domestic terrorism investigations to the terrorist watchlist could pose a risk to national security,” the OIG report said, adding that “FBI field offices’ frequent failure to modify watchlist records indicates a problem with training on and understanding of the importance of the watchlist process.”
Psychologists Complicit in Torture, Physicians’ Group Charges
By William Fisher
A leading human rights organization is charging that an American Psychological Association (APA) task force formed to advise the U.S. military on prisoner interrogations was “stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials” and “rushed to conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
In the wake of newly released internal APA documents indicating that the organization’s 2005 ethics task force on national security interrogations developed its policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines governing psychologist participation in interrogations, said Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
The organization is calling for an independent, outside investigation of the APA and a probe by the Defense Department’s Inspector General into whether any federal employees exerted influence over the APA's Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS).
PHR Director Nathaniel Raymond told us, “The APA’s ethics task force on national security interrogations produced a report that was rushed, secret, and being driven to already-reached conclusions – conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
“The APA made ethics subservient to law by following guidelines set out by the Pentagon. Members of the task force had long-standing ties to the Pentagon, and the task force was stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials. There were clear conflicts of interest,” he said, adding, “The APA needs to explain how that happened. And the Pentagon’s Inspector General needs to look into how this was allowed to happen.”
The charges of APA conflicts of interest came after a series of task force emails were posted online by Salon.com and ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative journalism organization.
PHR said the emails indicate that the APA's ethics task force developed its ethics policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines.
"These serious allegations require an independent investigation to determine whether APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct," said Steven Reisner, Ph.D., PHR Advisor for Psychological Ethics. "The American public deserves to know if there were inappropriate contacts or conflicts of interest between APA officials and the Pentagon," he said.
The task force found it to be "consistent with the APA Ethics Code" for psychologists to consult with interrogators in the interests of national security. While noting that psychologists do not participate in torture and have a responsibility to report it, and should be committed to the APA ethics code whenever they "encounter conflicts between ethics and law," the task force decided that "if the conflict cannot be resolved ... psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law."
PHR has been a longstanding and outspoken critic of the APA's PENS policy governing psychologist involvement in interrogations, calling for a "bright line" prohibition against health professional participation in interrogations. Though the APA membership passed a 2008 referendum banning psychologists from facilities that violate US and international human rights law, PHR believes that the PENS policy must be immediately revoked.
Riesner said it was time to “put a psychologist's ethical obligations to human rights principles ahead of following orders."
The recently released Senate Armed Services Committee report detailing detainee abuse by the Department of Defense confirms that psychologists rationalized, designed, supervised, and implemented the Bush Administration's torture program.
"The Senate Armed Services Committee report confirms that psychologists were central to the Bush Administration's use of torture," said PHR’s Raymond.
"In the context of these revelations, the American public needs to know why a supposedly independent ethics policy was written by some of the very personnel allegedly implicated in detainee abuse," he said.
Stephen Soldz, a board member and spokesman for another advocacy group, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, said, "These emails show that several of the military psychologists formulating APA ethics policy were giving themselves get-out-of-jail-free cards.”
He charged that their report concluded that it was ethical to follow military policy while the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos allowing torture were still in effect.".
The memoranda prepared by OLC lawyers provided the rationale for the Bush Administration’s assertion that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were legal.
PHR has repeatedly called for an end to the use of the SERE tactics by U.S. personnel, the dismantling of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) teams, and a full Congressional investigation of the use of psychological torture by the U.S. Government.
SERE, the military's “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program” was developed to train American soldiers to cope with torture if captured by the enemy. Its developers warned officials as early as 2002 that “reverse-engineering” SERE techniques for use on detainees could be ineffective and dangerous, a recent Senate Armed Services Committee report revealed,
The report also noted that the same psychologists who helped develop the SERE program were complicit in the very interrogation policies and practices they warned against.
Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, a San-Francisco-based psychologist who has written extensively on the role played by medical professionals in prisoner treatment, told us, “APA's ties to the Pentagon are of long-standing, going back at least to the Cold War.”
He said, “Any inquiry should make the historical connection between the work of CIA and SERE psychologists and the role of coercive interrogation used in psychologically ‘breaking down’ a human being.”
He said that there is a long history of collaboration between psychologists and the military, which includes several former APA presidents. These men were the “institutional godfathers” for a later generation of psychologists who continue to be deeply involved in interrogation techniques, he said.
In an article accompanying ProPublica’s publication of the APA task force’s extensive email exchanges, Sheri Fink of ProPublica posed the question, “Is it possible for psychologists to uphold the ethical tenets of their profession while working within a system of interrogation that violates those tenets? Does it matter if they raised objections to the system of interrogation but cooperated with it anyway?”
The Senate report said that in 2002, a psychiatrist and a psychologist who worked at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prepared a list of harsh interrogation techniques that ended up influencing interrogation policy not only at Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the same memo, they warned that these methods were likely to result in inaccurate tips and could harm detainees. Those warnings disappeared as the memo moved up the chain of command.
The board of the APA, the largest membership organization for psychologists, who are employed in great numbers by the Department of Defense, quickly adopted the task force's report as the organization's official policy.
But last year, members of the APA successfully petitioned for a vote on whether to ban psychologists from working in detention settings where international law or the U.S. Constitution are violated. The membership passed the proposal.
Some psychologists have filed complaints with the APA and state licensing boards against colleagues who were allegedly involved in abusive interrogations.
A leading human rights organization is charging that an American Psychological Association (APA) task force formed to advise the U.S. military on prisoner interrogations was “stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials” and “rushed to conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
In the wake of newly released internal APA documents indicating that the organization’s 2005 ethics task force on national security interrogations developed its policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines governing psychologist participation in interrogations, said Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
The organization is calling for an independent, outside investigation of the APA and a probe by the Defense Department’s Inspector General into whether any federal employees exerted influence over the APA's Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS).
PHR Director Nathaniel Raymond told us, “The APA’s ethics task force on national security interrogations produced a report that was rushed, secret, and being driven to already-reached conclusions – conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
“The APA made ethics subservient to law by following guidelines set out by the Pentagon. Members of the task force had long-standing ties to the Pentagon, and the task force was stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials. There were clear conflicts of interest,” he said, adding, “The APA needs to explain how that happened. And the Pentagon’s Inspector General needs to look into how this was allowed to happen.”
The charges of APA conflicts of interest came after a series of task force emails were posted online by Salon.com and ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative journalism organization.
PHR said the emails indicate that the APA's ethics task force developed its ethics policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines.
"These serious allegations require an independent investigation to determine whether APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct," said Steven Reisner, Ph.D., PHR Advisor for Psychological Ethics. "The American public deserves to know if there were inappropriate contacts or conflicts of interest between APA officials and the Pentagon," he said.
The task force found it to be "consistent with the APA Ethics Code" for psychologists to consult with interrogators in the interests of national security. While noting that psychologists do not participate in torture and have a responsibility to report it, and should be committed to the APA ethics code whenever they "encounter conflicts between ethics and law," the task force decided that "if the conflict cannot be resolved ... psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law."
PHR has been a longstanding and outspoken critic of the APA's PENS policy governing psychologist involvement in interrogations, calling for a "bright line" prohibition against health professional participation in interrogations. Though the APA membership passed a 2008 referendum banning psychologists from facilities that violate US and international human rights law, PHR believes that the PENS policy must be immediately revoked.
Riesner said it was time to “put a psychologist's ethical obligations to human rights principles ahead of following orders."
The recently released Senate Armed Services Committee report detailing detainee abuse by the Department of Defense confirms that psychologists rationalized, designed, supervised, and implemented the Bush Administration's torture program.
"The Senate Armed Services Committee report confirms that psychologists were central to the Bush Administration's use of torture," said PHR’s Raymond.
"In the context of these revelations, the American public needs to know why a supposedly independent ethics policy was written by some of the very personnel allegedly implicated in detainee abuse," he said.
Stephen Soldz, a board member and spokesman for another advocacy group, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, said, "These emails show that several of the military psychologists formulating APA ethics policy were giving themselves get-out-of-jail-free cards.”
He charged that their report concluded that it was ethical to follow military policy while the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos allowing torture were still in effect.".
The memoranda prepared by OLC lawyers provided the rationale for the Bush Administration’s assertion that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were legal.
PHR has repeatedly called for an end to the use of the SERE tactics by U.S. personnel, the dismantling of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) teams, and a full Congressional investigation of the use of psychological torture by the U.S. Government.
SERE, the military's “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program” was developed to train American soldiers to cope with torture if captured by the enemy. Its developers warned officials as early as 2002 that “reverse-engineering” SERE techniques for use on detainees could be ineffective and dangerous, a recent Senate Armed Services Committee report revealed,
The report also noted that the same psychologists who helped develop the SERE program were complicit in the very interrogation policies and practices they warned against.
Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, a San-Francisco-based psychologist who has written extensively on the role played by medical professionals in prisoner treatment, told us, “APA's ties to the Pentagon are of long-standing, going back at least to the Cold War.”
He said, “Any inquiry should make the historical connection between the work of CIA and SERE psychologists and the role of coercive interrogation used in psychologically ‘breaking down’ a human being.”
He said that there is a long history of collaboration between psychologists and the military, which includes several former APA presidents. These men were the “institutional godfathers” for a later generation of psychologists who continue to be deeply involved in interrogation techniques, he said.
In an article accompanying ProPublica’s publication of the APA task force’s extensive email exchanges, Sheri Fink of ProPublica posed the question, “Is it possible for psychologists to uphold the ethical tenets of their profession while working within a system of interrogation that violates those tenets? Does it matter if they raised objections to the system of interrogation but cooperated with it anyway?”
The Senate report said that in 2002, a psychiatrist and a psychologist who worked at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prepared a list of harsh interrogation techniques that ended up influencing interrogation policy not only at Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the same memo, they warned that these methods were likely to result in inaccurate tips and could harm detainees. Those warnings disappeared as the memo moved up the chain of command.
The board of the APA, the largest membership organization for psychologists, who are employed in great numbers by the Department of Defense, quickly adopted the task force's report as the organization's official policy.
But last year, members of the APA successfully petitioned for a vote on whether to ban psychologists from working in detention settings where international law or the U.S. Constitution are violated. The membership passed the proposal.
Some psychologists have filed complaints with the APA and state licensing boards against colleagues who were allegedly involved in abusive interrogations.
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