The single vote against the Resolution passed last week in Toronto was cast by retired Col. Larry James. Perhaps this is only fitting. James was a member of the sham PENS Task Force. He was also the chief psychologist at Guantanamo when, according to a comprehensive complaint filed against him, "abusive interrogation and detention [was] used to exploit prisoners' mental and physical vulnerabilities, maximize their feelings of disorientation and helplessness, and render them dependent upon their interrogators."
Eight years ago James flew in from Cuba to speak to Council members at the 2007 APA convention in San Francisco. As APA officials had planned, he helped to defeat a proposed moratorium on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations by ominously warning, "If we lose psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die." But by last weekend, James' persuasive powers had apparently evaporated entirely. Immediately before the vote, he cautioned that passage of the Resolution would lead to "dire negative consequences for all federal employees." His claim was dismissed by every one of his Council colleagues, a measure of just how far his star has fallen.
At the same time, there is little doubt that James' opposition to the new prohibitions is shared by other APA members who view participating in the debilitation of detainees -- within limits -- as ethically appropriate behavior for psychologists. Not surprisingly, James and some of his fellow operational psychologists implicated in the Hoffman Report -- including Morgan Banks and Debra Dunivin -- are now trying to discredit the report, without offering any meaningful evidence pointing to errors in the key findings. Meanwhile, we should not forget that the APA's military psychology division (Division 19) is comprised of many more members whose primary work is very different in its focus: providing critical mental health care for our country's soldiers, veterans, and their families.
The Pentagon, the CIA, and Adversarial Operational Psychology
More broadly, beyond the specifics of the current Resolution, it remains unclear whether and how the APA's relationship with the Department of Defense, the CIA, and related agencies will change. Undo deference to government preferences and priorities led directly to the collusion that sacrificed professional ethics for political expediency. What institutional safeguards can now be put in place to prevent similar channels of influence, opportunities for strategic deception, and enticements of power and privilege from carrying the day in the future?
One bulwark against such backsliding would be a thorough and unbiased examination of psychological ethics in national security settings -- exactly what the PENS Task Force failed to do. Along with colleagues, Jean Maria Arrigo and I have proposed a tentative framework for this purpose. It identifies the types of activities, which we call "adversarial operational psychology," that we believe should be ethically off-limits for psychologists in these settings. These activities primarily involve participation in operations that involve coercion, manipulation, deception, humiliation, or assault. As we recently wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times:
Substantial areas of military and intelligence work are at odds with psychologists' commitment to do no harm. Our profession has yet to address profound ethical challenges posed by national security operations and research where the intent is to cause injury, or where the targets of intervention have not consented, or where actions are beyond the reach of oversight by outside ethics panels. Without imposing ethical constraints in these contexts, psychologists risk the further loss of the public trust and the erosion of psychological science.
Who Can Lead the APA Forward?
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