Open Letter in Response to the American Psychological Association Board

The APA letter follows years of reports that psychologists designed,
helped conduct, disseminated, and legitimated the use of abusive
interrogation techniques carried out under the Bush administration.
While other health professional organizations adopted policies
prohibiting their members participation in interrogations at
Guantanamo, CIA "black sites," and elsewhere, the APA stood alone in
claiming, against evidence, that psychologists' presence at the
detention sites was necessary "to protect" detainees. In fact, the APA
went further, allowing psychologists involved in these very
interrogations to design APA ethical policy on interrogations.

Although recent revelations, including a Senate Armed Services
Report, have debunked the claim that psychologists were preventing
torture, the APA leadership still refuses to acknowledge the extent of
the harm psychologists have done. Nor does it propose adequate steps to
address past abuses by psychologists or to prevent psychologists from
contributing to future abuse. The organization's statement calls for
the APA to take five immediate steps to begin this process of
corrective action. Among these steps are a call for an independent body
to pursue accountability for psychologists found to be involved in
torture or abusive interrogation practices, and further, for an
independent investigation of possible collusion between the APA and the
military/intelligence establishment that may have contributed to the
APA's polices in this area.

***********

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 29. 2009

CONTACT:

Stephen Soldz

ssoldz@bgsp.edu

Open Letter in Response to

the American Psychological Association Board

On June 18, 2009, the American Psychological Association [APA] Board
issued an Open Letter on the subject of psychologists' involvement in
abusive national security interrogations. The letter is among the first
formal acknowledgements from APA leadership that psychologists were
involved in torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. We
welcome this progress.

Similarly, the letter acknowledges APA's member-initiated referendum
prohibiting psychologist participation in detention centers that are in
violation of international law and overturning APA Council's repeated
refusals to do so. This is an improvement over very recent messages
from APA officials that characterized press descriptions of APA policy
as supporting psychologist participation in such interrogations as
"fair and balanced."

Nevertheless, the letter is profoundly disappointing. It continues
the long tradition of APA leaders minimizing the extent of
psychologists' involvement in state-sanctioned abuse as well as APA's
own defense of such involvement. The authors speak as though the
information about psychologist's involvement in torture is fresh news
even though it has been available for a long time. Even now, the Board
relies on the Bush Administration tactic, employed in the Abu Ghraib
debacle, of blaming the abuse on a "few bad apples." This minimization
of the greatest ethical crisis in our profession's history by those who
claim to lead the profession is unacceptable. Similarly the APA Board
continues to take no responsibility for its own grievous mismanagement
of this issue. Instead, the tone of the letter suggests we should all
come together and "reflect and learn," because this has been difficult
for all of us, collectively. The Board also presumes the authority to
continue to speak for psychologists in the future with neither redress
nor evidence of remediation for what they have done:

This has been a painful time for the association and one that offers
an opportunity to reflect and learn from our experiences over the last
five years. APA will continue to speak forcefully in further
communicating our policies against torture and other cruel, inhuman, or
degrading treatment or punishment to our members, the Obama
administration, Congress, and the general public. [Board letter, June
18, 2009.]

Any meaningful approach to this issue must start by acknowledging
the fact that psychologists were absolutely integral to our
government's systematic program of torture. When the Bush
administration decided to engage in torture, they turned to
psychologists from the military's SERE [Survival, Evasion, resistance,
and Escape] program for help in designing and implementing the torture
tactics. This fact was first reported in 2005, within days of the
release of the APA's PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security]
report and was officially acknowledged by the Defense Department in its
Inspector General's Report, declassified in May 2007. Other
psychologists monitored torture to calibrate how much abuse a detainee
could tolerate without dying. Nonetheless, APA leaders continued, and
still continue, to pretend that psychologists' participation in abuse
was the behavior of rogue members of the profession.

 1  |  2  |  3