Today ProPublica and Salon.com have posted online emails from the list-serve of the 2005 APA ethics task force on national security interrogations (PDF). The internal APA documents indicate that the APA developed its ethics policy to conform with Pentagon guidelines governing psychologist participation in interrogations.
Physicians for Human Rights is calling for an independent, outside investigation of the American Psychological Association (APA). PHR also calls on the Pentagon’s Inspector General to investigate whether any federal employees exerted influence over the APA’s Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS).
Steven Reisner, PhD, PHR’s Advisor for Psychologogical Ethics said:
These serious allegations require an independent investigation to determine whether APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct. The American public deserves to know if there were inappropriate contacts or conflicts of interest between APA officials and the Pentagon. In 2005 PHR first called for the APA’s ethics policy on interrogations to be rescinded. Now is the time for the APA to replace those flawed guidelines with standards that put a psychologist’s ethical obligations to human rights principles ahead of following orders.
PHR has long been critical of the APA’s PENS policy on psychologist involvement in interrogations. There needs to be, instead, a “bright line” prohibition against health professional participation in interrogations.
Following the Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse by the Department of Defense, we have confirmation that psychologists rationalized, designed, supervised and implemented the Bush Administration’s torture program. Nathaniel Raymond, Director of PHR’s Campaign Against Torture, said:
The Senate Armed Services Committee report confirms that psychologists were central to the Bush Administration’s use of torture. 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.
I feel very strongly that a psychologist’s ethical obligations to human rights principles must come before the act of following orders. I have followed closely the revelations that are unfolding in the press concerning the planning and practicing of torture on American troops as well as enemy combatants. Please revise the Ethical Standards of the APA to reflect the opposition that psychologist have to abuse in all forms. First and foremost: Do no harm.
Thanks for your comment, Betty. It encourages and inspires us each time a health professional stands up for professional ethics and an end to these abuses.
For the first time in my 50-year career, I am ashamed to be a psychologist. My profession has been degraded and debased by these military and government colleagues of mine who collaborated in the torture of innocent people, including children. The scientific evidence is patently clear that these horrible acts caused severe and permanent harm to these individuals under their care and custody.
Now we learn that officials of the American Psychological Association aided and abetted this horror. The APA created a puppet task force, the so-called Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) for the sole purpose of ensuring that military and government psychologists could continue to torture. The emails from the PENS secret list-serve reveal that they ruthlessly set about this task and did not hesitate to use threat and intimidation against its few civilian members.
We must call on Attorney General Holder to establish a non-partisan commission to examine and report publicly on psychologists’ involvement in torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody since September 11, 2001. We must identify these psychologists who orchestrated torture so we may remove them from practice and ensure that they never harm anyone ever again. Further, we psychologists must call for an independent, outside investigation of the American Psychological Association to ascertain the full extent that its leaders collaborated with the military in violating human rights.
I have resigned from the APA. I have refused invitations to rejoin and will continue to do so, until I can be certain that its leadership places the ethic of “do no harm” above all else.
John M. Stewart, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Northland College