Report: American Psychological Association secretly helped justify torture under George W. Bush
The report alleges that the APA violated its own policies when, in 2005, a task force comprised of AMA professionals and CIA and Department of Defense personnel published a joint report endorsing the continued participation of psychologists in national security interrogations.
Basically, the task force recommended that a psychologist oversee harsh interrogations and determine what could be considered 'cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment." It turned out that the APA task force recommendations coincided with the CIA's existing definitions.
James Risen of The New York Times first reported the new examination.
Bush's interrogation program came under intense scrutiny after it was revealed that Iraqi prisoners were being tortured at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Baghdad, leading then-director of the CIA George Tenet to resign and suspend the use of interrogation techniques indefinitely.Public and congressional criticism of the interrogation program prompted Tenet to write a memo to senior Bush officials pressing them to review their "previous legal and policy positions with respect to detainees to assure that we all speak in a united and unambiguous voice about the continued wisdom and efficacy of those positions."
Shortly thereafter, Stephen Behnke, Director of the APA Ethics Office, requested a meeting with top national security psychologists from the CIA to discuss the APA's "appreciation of the important work mental health professionals are doing in the national security arena, and in a supportive way offer our assistance in helping them navigate through thorny ethical dilemmas, if they feel that need," according to an email obtained by the authors of the report.
Behnke assured CIA personnel that the content of the meeting - and participants' identities - would remain confidential. This meeting, the report claims, prompted Behnke and two other APA officials to propose the creation of a "task force to explore the ethical aspects of psychologists' involvement and the use of psychology in national security-related investigations."The members of the task force (dubbed the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, or PENS) are still not publicly known, according to the report.Associated PressProtestors rally against the use of torture in prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo Bay.It is clear from the following email exchange, however, that CIA and Department of Defense personnel played an integral role in the development of the PENS policy allowing for direct psychologist involvement in national security interrogations:"I wanted to semi-publicly acknowledge your personal contribution as well as those of K2 [Kirk Kennedy] and Andy Morgan in getting this effort off the ground over a year ago," Dr. Geoffrey Mumford, thenAPA Director of Science Policy, wrote to a group of CIA psychologists in a 2005 email. "Your views were well represented by very carefully selected Task Force members (Scott Shumate among them)," Mumford continued, referring to the CIA's then-Chief Operational Psychologist Scott Shumate.After the PENS report was released, the Bush administration started relying more on psychologists than any other health professionals to monitor prisoner interrogations."Involvement of psychologists enabled the Justice Department to argue in secret opinions that the program was legal and did not constitute torture since the interrogations were being monitored by health professionals to make sure they were safe," James Risen writes in the New York Times. In other words, having APA psychologists oversee interrogations was an easy way for a disesteemed program to reclaim some legitimacy.An independent APA investigation was launched in November to review the association's role in detainee interrogations. For its part, the AMA continues to deny any secret complicity between senior APA and US government personnel.