The American Psychological Association (A.P.A.) secretly helped the Bush administration strengthen its legal and ethical justifications for continuing to torture prisoners detained after the Sept. 11, 2011 attacks, according to a new report released by a group of dissident health professionals and human rights advocates.
As the Bush administration's torture program was on the verge of being shut down following the public disclosure in 2004 of pictures showing U.S. soldiers torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the A.P.A. began placing psychologists in interrogation rooms to justify the interrogations as being safe, the report alleges.
The presence of mental health professionals in the room allowed the Justice Department to argue in secret opinions that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques was legal and did not constitute torture since health professionals were involved and monitoring the prisoners, according to James Risen of The New York Times, who first reported the story.
The report concludes that the A.P.A. "secretly coordinated with officials from the C.I.A., White House, and the Department of Defense to create an A.P.A. ethics policy on national security interrogations that comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the C.I.A. torture program."
Its findings are based on an analysis of 638 emails from the accounts of Scott Gerwehr, a deceased RAND Corporation researcher who had close ties to psychologists at the national security agencies.
Based on the report, it appears that the relationship was formed shortly after then-C.I.A. Director George Tenet resigned and suspended the use of the interrogation techniques indefinitely following the revelation of torture in Iraq.
Stephen Behnke, director of the A.P.A. Ethics Office, then requested a meeting with top C.I.A. national security psychologists to talk about the A.P.A.'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 report authors.
Shortly after the meeting, Behnke and two other A.P.A. officials pitched 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 report says the A.P.A., the largest association of professional psychologists in the world, violated its fundamental codes of ethics, which in turn set questionable standards for health professionals around the world.
"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.
An A.P.A. spokesperson denied the allegations, telling the Times that there "has never been any coordination between A.P.A. and the Bush administration on how A.P.A. responded to the controversies about the role of psychologists in the interrogations program."
