American Psychological Association colluded with US officials to bolster CIA torture program, report alleges.

During the administration of President George W Bush, senior personnel of the American Psychological Association (APA) secretly colluded with US officials in the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency to support the ethical justification of the spy agency’s “enhanced” interrogation program, while the APA misled the public about its involvement, says a report by human rights activists and critics of the association released on 30 April. After the terrorist attacks in the United States on 9 September 2001, the US government ruled that suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere were “unlawful combatants” who did not qualify for the protection afforded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions and could be subject to “enhanced” interrogation techniques that included stress positions, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and other techniques generally viewed as torture. “The APA’s complicity in the CIA torture program, by allowing psychologists to administer and calibrate permitted harm, undermines the fundamental ethical standards of the profession. If not carefully understood and rejected by the profession, this may portend a fundamental shift in the profession’s relationship with the people it serves,” the report said. The lead authors of the paper were Stephen Soldz, professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, Nathaniel Raymond, human rights investigator with Harvard Chan School of Public Health’s Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and Steven Reisner, founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and an adviser on psychology and ethics for Physicians for Human Rights. The report was based on an analysis of 638 messages from the email account of a deceased RAND Corporation researcher, Scott Gerwehr, which had been obtained by theNew York Times reporter James Risen, and from publicly available information from the APA, government documents, and news reports. The emails were sent and received between 2003 and 2006. During this time the CIA interrogation program came under intense scrutiny from the public and Congress after it had been revealed that US Army and CIA personnel had systematically abused prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The report concluded that the APA secretly coordinated with government officials to create an APA ethics policy on interrogations that supported the Bush administration’s legal and ethical justifications for the CIA interrogation program, even allowing a government research scientist to insert language into APA ethics statements that aligned its position with the government’s. The report said, “The complicity between APA and government entities appears to have directly influenced the APA ethics policy changes, codified into the June 2005 report of the APA’s Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). The PENS report, in combination with associated, past APA ethics code changes, permitted psychologists to take on the roles of monitoring and evaluating the safety and efficacy of the ‘enhanced’ interrogation program.” Such monitoring was mandated in classified memos drawn up by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in order for the techniques to be considered legal and appears “intended to shield those involved in the torture, including senior Bush Administration officials, from potential future criminal liability,” the report said. The report said the APA’s board expedited the adoption of the PENS report as official policy and went on to successfully press for the adoption of a resolution by the APA Council of Representatives permitting research on people involved in the interrogation process. This position “went against decades of medical ethics prohibitions regarding research on prisoners without their consent,” the report said. The emails show that the APA had numerous contacts with two CIA contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who helped implement the CIA interrogation program and often oversaw interrogations personally, the report said, although APA officials had publicly asserted that they had had no contact with the two men. The report alleged that the association did not disclose Mitchell’s past membership of the APA in 2007 in response to news reports describing his role in abusive interrogations nor in a letter to the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, which was looking into ethics charges against Mitchell, and that APA staff actively sought to conceal Mitchell and Jessen’s relationship with the association. The report alleged that the APA, in fact, had a longstanding relationship with Mitchell and Jessen, including inviting them to attend an invitation only meeting co-sponsored by the association, the CIA, and the RAND Corporation where “enhanced” interrogation practices and research were discussed. After the conference, a senior APA staff member noted in an email that it was unlikely that the two would be giving their feedback because “they are doing special things to special people in special places, and generally are not available.”