The Washington Post reports on the controversy among anthopologists and others about whether to cooperate with Pentagon funded research efforts. Complex issued are raised in this debate. But at least it’s happening. Alas, in psychology there is virtually no debate about the extent to which the profession, including many types of research, are intertwined with the defense establishment. It’s time that debate commence:
Military’s Social Science Grants Raise Alarm
By Maria Glod
Washington Post, Sunday, August 3, 2008
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is calling on “eggheads” to help the military unravel questions about the recruitment of terrorists, the resurgence of the Taliban and messages delivered in militant Muslim religious schools.
Many eggheads are wary.
The Pentagon’s $50 million Minerva Research Initiative, named after the Roman goddess of wisdom and warriors, will fund social science research deemed crucial to national security. Initial proposals were due July 25, and the first grants are expected to be awarded by year’s end.
But the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which includes professors from American and George Mason universities, said dependence on Pentagon funding could make universities an “instrument rather than a critic of war-making.”
In a May 28 letter to federal officials, the American Anthropological Association said that it was of “paramount importance . . . to study the roots of terrorism and other forms of violence” but that its members are “deeply concerned that funding such research through the Pentagon may pose a potential conflict of interest.”
Gates, a former president of Texas A&M University, described the Minerva program in an April speech to the Association of American Universities. The nation should devote more resources to “elements of national power beyond the guns and steel of the military,” he said.
“In Iraq and Afghanistan, the heroic efforts and best intentions of our men and women in uniform have at times been undercut by a lack of knowledge of the culture and people they are dealing with every day,” he said. Gates said the research would not be kept secret.
David Price, an anthropologist at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash., and the author of a book on anthropological intelligence in World War II, agreed that the military and policymakers should know more about world cultures. But, he said, the Pentagon effort is flawed.
(more…)
August 3rd, 2008
As most of my regular readers know, my friend and colleague Steven Reisner is running for President of the American Psychological Association as an attempt to change the association’s policies allowing psychologists to participate in US detainee abuse. Steven has released his candidate statement. For more information on the campaign, go to http://www.reisnerforpresident.org/. And please register to receive further information and to help the campaign.
Dr. Steven J. Reisner’s candidate statement
I am running for President of the American Psychological Association for several reasons, but none more important than the fact that the APA’s support of psychologists’ participation in detainee interrogations and detention operations demonstrates that the association has lost its moral compass. APA interrogation policy is a part of a culture of unreflective support of military and intelligence counterterrorism operations that has led our country and our profession down a dangerous and disingenuous path. This policy and culture have undermined the APA’s independence, its scientific integrity, and its ability to lead us into the twenty-first century. The APA, and the field of psychology it represents, must stand unequivocally for human rights and human welfare. Otherwise, we are merely a guild, promoting only the interests of its well-connected members; otherwise, we are the tools of our government, pandering to programs that violate our own ethical values.
My foremost task as APA President will be to reclaim our first ethical principle of beneficence: “to benefit those with whom [we] work and take care to do no harm… to safeguard the welfare and rights of those with whom [we] interact professionally and other affected persons.”
At this point in our history, our Association stands alone among the health professions in supporting its members’ direct participation in military and CIA interrogations. Psychiatrists, physicians, and nurses, have all rejected such participation and aligned themselves with international standards of medical ethics. Recently, international associations of psychologists, too, have protested our Association’s unique position. The Nordic Psychological Associations stated in their June 25th, 2008 letter to the APA that “military psychologists cannot function in an ethically correct way in sites where basic human rights are systematically violated and where appropriate international bodies of control are denied access.”
New information steadily emerges on psychologists’ operational role in abusive detention conditions—from the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, the Defense Department’s Inspector General Report, and the press—directly implicating psychologists in the design or practice of abusive interrogations at Guantánamo, Bagram and at CIA black sites. When orders came directly from the White House to use waterboarding, sleep and sensory deprivation, and other abusive techniques on detainees, psychologists implemented the program; and when secret Justice Department memos asserted that health professionals’ oversight was required to render such techniques legal, psychologists provided that oversight. These revelations are not only morally damning but scientifically embarrassing, with psychological research and theory distorted for political maneuvers and abusive ends.
Let’s be clear – these abusive interrogation procedures and conditions were not exceptions, perpetrated by unsupervised individuals. These abuses were part of a carefully developed program of psychological pressure, abuse, and torture, supported by protocols from the CIA and the military and with legal justifications from the Justice Department. Psychologists helped to author and implement those protocols and to give legal cover to those involved in abuse. To this day, brutal systems of psychological reward and punishment are implemented and overseen by psychologists at Guantánamo.
While the APA has passed several anti-torture resolutions, APA policy continues to support psychologists’ presence at detention sites whose very conditions violate international law, and where psychologists have been consistently implicated in those violations. Against all evidence, it remains APA policy that psychologists’ presence at such sites is necessary to keep interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.”
As president, I will seek practical measures to prohibit such involvement and to restore APA’s reputation as an unequivocal voice for human welfare. Such measures would protect not only “those with whom we interact professionally,” as mandated by our Ethics Code, but our good name—and future!—as a profession. It would also offer safeguards for our military and CIA psychologists from moral compromise under pressure as well as from potential criminal liability.
Resolving our ethical conflicts will strengthen our profession as we confront healthcare reform and other significant challenges to our profession in the 21st Century. As APA President, I will advocate on behalf of these pressing issues, based upon the same guiding principles of improving human welfare, doing no harm, and upholding scientific integrity:
- to bring about universal health care, accompanied by full mental health parity.
- to raise awareness of the psychological dimension of environmental and ecological responsibility through research, practice and policy.
- to address the crisis in mental health care and private practice through public education and through combating managed care’s ever narrowing definition of mental illness and treatment.
- to advance the role of psychology in our transition into a diverse and global society.
- to work to resolve the crisis in psychology education and training, address the problems of student funding and debt, and help develop diverse internship opportunities relevant to our changing world.
- to build bridges between our research and practice communities by fostering a variety of research-practice partnerships.
- to restore and increase behavioral research funding, particularly in areas that further psychology’s time-honored commitment to human welfare and social justice.
Currently, the APA puts an extraordinary effort into supporting government funding for psychologists’ contributions to homeland security and counterterrorism. Such advocacy may have its place, in that it supports psychologists seeking government-funded contracts and academic grants. But, in a manner analogous to psychiatry’s dependence on pharmaceutical funding, our dependence on military-related contracts and appropriations can undermine our necessary independence. We must undertake a transparent, internal review of the allocation of APA resources and lobbying efforts so that APA members may decide together how to best advocate for the good of our members, our scientific discipline, and our society. But we cannot bring the best of our field to bear on these pressing issues unless we put our ethical house in order. With your vote for my presidency and with your assistance, we can transform the APA at this turning point in our history.
August 2nd, 2008
In a few qwords Spencer Ackerman explains the true horrors of John McCain’s latest campaign antics. We as a country will pay for years:
My ex-boss explains the dark and awful road ahead:
Let’s see how this works. McCain runs his Britney/Paris ad on the alleged but improbable basis that they’re the #2 and #3 celebs in the world, according to Rick Davis. McCain camp seizes on Obama statement that Obama has made multiple times before, accuses him of playing “race card”. Now McCain repeats Race Card, Race Card, Race Card a hundred times.
McCain has made the strategic decision that he can only win the election on the basis of Obama as friend of terrorists, unpatriotic suspicious outsider and radical, black guy who’s really more a flashy showbiz star (call it playing the Diddy card) than someone with the heft to be president. He’s probably right. That’s his only chance. And it may work.
It’s important to remember that Race Card is a euphemism. It’s a device to scare white people into believing the Dark One is out past the fence, sending signals to his Dark allies that stoke their resentment. It’s meant to cause the political equivalent of the mental shudder that makes white women grip their purses tighter on the subway. To stoke an impulse that ugly is evil. I don’t believe John McCain can win the election. The hurdles — financial, electoral — are too great, the GOP base trusts him too little, and the narrative of his campaign is too solipsistic. But what he can do is prepare the country for four years of vile, small ugliness, in which new euphemisms are invented to allow white people to say This country’s gone to shit ever since they let Those People in charge… Is there something worse than Nixonland?
August 2nd, 2008
According to this report of abuse of a Mahdi Army commander, the British are fully equal to their “Coalition” partners, the Americans, in abusing detainees. So much for the “the British have learned from their long colonial history how to do it right” claims:
Iraq abuse claims: British troops ‘made Muslim commander hear porn videos’
· New abuse claims against soldiers in Iraq
· Detainee ’spent months in solitary confinement’
By Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian,
British soldiers forced a Shia militia commander to listen to pornographic videos, deprived him of sleep, repeatedly beat him, and kept him in solitary confinement for more than five months, according to fresh damning allegations against the conduct of UK troops in Basra.
A detailed account of the latest claims of unlawful treatment by British soldiers are contained in a 20-page witness statement, seen by the Guardian, of Ahmed Jawad al-Fartoosi, a leader of the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi army. The Ministry of Defence said yesterday that the military police were investigating the allegations. Fartoosi was detained for more than two years, including nearly six months in solitary confinement. He was arrested in his Basra home in September 2005 and released late last year after British forces agreed to an Iraqi-sponsored deal with the militia.
He says he was beaten with rifle butts and blindfolded before he was put in a tank. For 12 hours he and his fellow detainees given no food and were prevented from going to the toilet.
He says he was taken to the British base at Shaibah, on the outskirts of Basra, where he spent 72 days in solitary confinement in a small cell with no ventilation, though he says he was provided with three cooked meals a day. On the third or fourth night, he says, soldiers brought a laptop and placed it on a window sill just outside his cell.
“After a short period of conversation in English it became clear to me that the DVD was showing porn. It was playing at the loudest possible volume. Thereafter for the next month the porn movies were played all night.” He says soldiers left porn magazines for him to see by the sinks and toilets. “It was very humiliating for me to be treated in this way by the British army. If they expected me to give in to my basic instincts they did not realise that I am not that kind of man … I was determined not be sexually aroused by this but it made me physically sick.”
Fartoosi says he was deprived of sleep. When he was taken to be interrogated, he says, a blanket was thrown over his head. He adds: “I was spun about for between 15-30 minutes to disorientate me.”
(more…)
August 2nd, 2008
Physicians for Human Rights has issued a statement in response to last night’s repot that the US secretly housed prisoners at its base on the British island of Diego Garcia:
Covert CIA Detention Center on British Soil Revealed
PHR Demands Trans-Atlantic Investigation and International Red Cross Access to All Detainees in US Custody
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) calls for a full trans-Atlantic investigation by Congress and the Parliament of the United Kingdom in the wake of today’s revelation by TIME magazine that the US covertly used Diego Garcia, a British island off the coast of India, as a top secret CIA detention center. Further, PHR demands that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) be given immediate access to all detainees that may still be held at Diego Garcia and other “black” site locations.
“The US and the UK must at last come clean about the scope of extraordinary rendition and secret detention—a violation of American and British law, human rights standards, and the rules and regulations of NATO,” stated Frank Donaghue, Chief Executive Officer of PHR. “Both Congress and Parliament must set the record straight about what happened at Diego Garcia. PHR knows from our twenty-one year history of documenting torture around the world that secret detention opens the floodgates to torture and other gross human rights abuses.”
The disclosure that Diego Garcia held CIA “ghost” detainees, such as Riduan Isamuddin, commonly known as “Hambali”, shows that General Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, provided false information to senior members of the British Government. Director Hayden assured the Brown Government earlier this year that only two rendition flights had refueled at Diego Garcia. According to TIME, however, senior Bush Administration officials had been previously informed about the existence and use of the facility in highly classified briefings in the White House situation room.
“The Bush Administration’s detainee treatment and interrogation policies have damaged our nation’s reputation as human rights leader,” said Donaghue. “Seven years of secrets whispered in secret rooms must give way to on-the-record testimony and open hearings.”
PHR calls on the House and Senate committees on Intelligence and Armed Services to hold CIA Director Hayden and senior Bush Administration officials accountable. PHR also calls on Parliament to determine what current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, current Foreign Secretary David Miliband, former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and other members of the Privy Council knew about US detention activities at Diego Garcia and when they knew it.
Since the publication of its landmark report in 2005 documenting the use of torture against detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Break Them Down: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by US Forces, PHR has been a leading voice in the effort to end the use of abusive interrogation techniques during interrogations of detainees held by the US military and intelligence services. PHR published in June the report Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of US Torture and its Impact, an analysis of medical and psychological evaluations of detainees held at US detention facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
August 1st, 2008
Time magazine and the BBC are both reporting that the US detained prisoners at their base on the British island of Diego Garcia. This despite repeated assurances by the US to the British government that this was not occurring. The BBC has a video report. Here is the Time article:
Source: British Territory Used for US Terror Interrogation
By Adam Zagorin
Almost two years have passed since President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged the existence of a CIA program in which agency-leased aircraft fly terror suspects between secret prisons and interrogation sites around the world. “This program has helped us to take potential mass murderers off the streets before they have a chance to kill,” the President said on Sept. 6, 2006. Since that admission, the White House has declined to elaborate or comment further on the program’s specifics, although multiple reports have surfaced regarding the existence of secret facilities in Poland and Romania.
According to a former senior American official, it appears another locale can be added to the international roster of interrogation sites — one both more obscure and potentially more controversial than the alleged sites in Poland and Romania. The source tells TIME that, in 2002 and possibly 2003, the U.S. imprisoned and interrogated one or more terrorist suspects on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean controlled by the United Kingdom.
The official, a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings after Sept. 11 who has since left government, says a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being held and interrogated on the island. The identity of the captive or captives was not made clear. According to this account, the CIA officer surprised attendees by volunteering the information, apparently to demonstrate that the agency was doing its best to obtain valuable intelligence. According to this single source, who requested anonymity because of the classified nature of the discussions, the U.S. may also have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia’s territorial waters, a contention the U.S. has long denied. The White House meetings were also attended by a variety of other senior counter-terrorism officials.
(more…)
August 1st, 2008
Steven Miles has a new editorial in the British Medical Journal on medical complicity with torture and the spotty record of accountability:
Doctors’ complicity with torture: It is time for sanctions
By Steven H. Miles
It is an arresting thought. More doctors abet torture than treat the millions of victims. More than 100 countries condone the use of torture. A third to a half of torture survivors report that a doctor oversaw the abuse.1 Many prisoners never see the doctors who refined the techniques to minimise evidential scars, prolong pain, or cause psychological destruction.2 Estimates of the numbers of torture victims do not include people whose murders disappear when a doctor writes “natural causes” on a death certificate.
The medical profession ought to dissociate itself from torture-a practice that destroys institutions of civil society; that is used against colleagues of conscience, and that has far reaching adverse mental, physical, and social consequences. Instead, medical societies and licensing boards offer lofty condemnation, which is most ardently aimed at offenders abroad rather than accomplices at home.
Doctors who abet torture rarely face professional risks. Governments will not punish a doctor for helping them carry out their crimes. Few medical societies or licensing boards have the courage and constancy of vision to investigate or censure colleagues who carry out the law of the land. In principle, medical societies support ethics codes like the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Tokyo, which bars doctors from complying with torture. In practice, they sustain the policy of impunity.3
The exceptions are instructive. The Nuremberg trial of Nazi doctors for war crimes was the birth of bioethics. That admirable court was convened by victors over defendants from a vanquished nation. But it is the wrong place to look for solutions to the common problem of doctors complying with torture. The problem today is holding doctors accountable for abetting torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of their own citizens. Such cases have occurred after a torturing regime loses power. Brazilian medical licensing boards began investigating doctors for collaborating with torture during the last years of military rule. Initially, the government blocked sanctions against doctors; within a decade of civilian government sanctions against doctors took hold.4
In Greece, Dimitrios Kofas, a doctor stationed at the persecution section of a prison in Athens, was sentenced to prison within a year of the military junta being deposed.5 The Chilean Medical Society actively investigated complaints against doctors and expelled six doctors for overseeing torture during Pinochet’s rule.6 Three years after Argentina’s junta fell, Dr Jorge Berges was sentenced to prison for carrying out torture.7 A South African medical board tabled complaints against police doctors who failed to report or treat the fatal head injury inflicted by police on civil rights leader Steven Biko; two doctors were punished eight years after his death.8
A more secure foundation for this kind of accountability can and should be laid. The World Medical Association’s Declaration of Hamburg states that licensing boards should deny licences to doctors who are guilty of war crimes, including torture.9 Unfortunately, that declaration only applies to immigrating doctors who are accused of crimes in another country. For example, there was a successful campaign to deny a Belgian licence to an immigrant doctor who had been active in Rwanda’s genocide.10 The BMA is one of a few medical societies that support sanctions against doctors who torture, but it has not established a means to implement such sanctions.11
Countries wax and wane in their practice of torture. Foundations for making doctors accountable for this crime must be laid during periods of civil society. At such times, each national medical society and licensing agency should assert that medical complicity with torture and cruel inhuman or degrading treatment is a punishable breach of medical ethics that cannot be excused by law and for which there is no term limit. In the United States, California is considering a law that would ask its licensing agencies to inform health professionals that participating in coercive interrogation, torture, or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment may subject them to prosecution.12
The recruitment of the medical community in support of torture has far reaching effects. It harms prisoners. It deprives all prisoners of hope in the humanity of the medical staff. A civilian medical community that acquiesces to torture by its military members cannot credibly protest against foreign doctors who carry out torture. Such a community can hardly support doctors who are endangered for their resistance against torture. The prestige and values of medicine make it a crucial part of the campaign to abolish torture.
“I will guard my art and my life.” That pivotal promise of vigilance in the Hippocratic oath acknowledges that medical professionalism is not an easy virtue. Diverse enticements lure doctors from the core of medicine: “I will use regimens for the benefit of the ill but from what is to their harm or injustice, I will protect them.” Governments that practice torture need doctors. The medical accomplices of torture must not rest in the confidence that they can violate civil society and the ethics of medicine with impunity.
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a1088
Steven H Miles, professor of medicine and bioethics
1 Center for Bioethics, N504 Boynton, Minneapolis, MN 55414, USA
miles001@umn.edu
Competing interests: None declared. Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.
From the archive: Two recent news stories have dealt with torture. Doctors protest against surgeon held for six years at Guantanomo (news story; doi: 10.1136/bmj.a1071); Medical evidence exposes US use of torture-includes embedded video clip (news story; doi: 10.1136/bmj.a490)
References
- Rasmussen OV. Medical aspects of torture. Dan Med Bull 1990;37(suppl 1):1-88.[ISI][Medline]
- Stover E, Nightingale E. The breaking of bodies and minds. Washington DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1985.
- World Medical Association. Guidelines for medical doctors concerning torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in relation to detention and imprisonment (Declaration of Tokyo). 2006. www.wma.net/e/policy/c18.htm.
- Amnesty International. Brazil. Human rights violations and the health professions. 1996. http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR190251996?open&of=ENG-346.
- Amnesty International. Torture in Greece: the first torturers’ trial 1975. London: Amnesty International, 1977.
- BMA. Medicine betrayed. London: BMA, 1992.
- Human Rights Watch. Argentina. 2006. www.hrw.org/reports/2001/argentina/argen1201-02.htm.
- McLean GR, Jenkins T. The Steve Biko affair: a case study in medical ethics. Dev World Bioethics 2003;3:77-95.[CrossRef]
- World Medical Association. Statement on the licensing of physicians fleeing prosecution for serious criminal offences (Declaration of Hamburg). 1997. www.wma.net/e/policy/c16.htm.
- Hall P. Doctors and the war on terrorism. BMJ 2004;329:66.[Free Full Text]
- British Medical Association. The medical profession and human rights: handbook for a changing agenda. Torture. 2001. www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/MedProfhumanRightsRecommendations#Torture.
- California Senate 19. Health professionals: torture. 2008. www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_number=sjr_19&sess=CUR&house=B&author=ridley-thomas.
Steven Miles, MD
N504 Boynton, 410 Church St SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0346
612-624-9440
July 31st, 2008
Please join us. This is an issue for all concerned citizens, not just psychologists. All are welcome.
Come join Boston Psychologists for an Ethical APA
Rally at the American Psychological Association Annual Convention
Protest Psychologists’ Involvement in Abusive Interrogations and Illegal Detention
Where: Plaza at front entrance of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, 415 Summer St., Boston
When: Saturday, August 16th, 12:00-2:00
Voice your outrage at the APA’s continued acceptance of psychologists’ participation in Bush administration interrogations and detention centers where human rights and international law are continually violated. “There is no right way to do something wrong.”
This issue is of increasing concern to all citizens but of particular importance to us as psychologists because it violates our primary ethical obligation to “Do No Harm.” Our complicity in the current administration’s “privileged” war on terror is now well-documented.
Co-Sponsors:
Psychoanalysts for Social Responsibility (Div. 39 S9)
Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Withholdapadues.com
Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR)
Psychologists for an Ethical APA
Monterey Bay Psychological Association
Physicians for Human Rights
[More being added]
Speakers include:
Steven Reisner
Ghislaine Boulanger
Dan Aalbers
Brad Olson
Anthony Marsella
Nathaniel Raymond
Stephen Soldz
Bryant Welch
Entertainment by two Jazz-Blues performers:
Kathleen Kolman
Marlene del Rosario
We look forward to seeing you there on Saturday, the 16th.
OUR CALL:
Psychologists for an Ethical APA Calls for Protest Outside APA Convention
“A government is not the expression of the will of the people, but rather the expression of what the people will tolerate.”
Kurt Tucholsky
We as psychologists and American citizens have become aware that our government has adopted torture and the denial of human rights for detainees as official policy. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, rendition and CIA “black sites” have irrevocably entered our language and consciousness. Waterboarding, sexual and religious humiliation, and denial of habeas corpus have become symbolic of a climate of disdain for human rights and human decency that has infected our government and been absorbed into our social fabric.
During the last several years, we have also become aware that psychologists have played central roles in the Bush regime of torture and detainee abuse. As has been documented by numerous journalists and official government reports, psychologists helped develop, implement, standardize, and disseminate abusive interrogation techniques that have led to torture. Other psychologists responsible for treating detainees, along with other health professionals, failed to act against abuses being committed upon those they were ethically obliged to heal and protect. Given the central role of our profession in perpetrating and abetting these abuses, the rest of us who represent the field bear a special responsibility to do all we can to stop the abuses and voice our objection.
Our professional association, the American Psychological Association, has failed us. While we expectantly listened for a clear moral voice opposing complicity with our government’s abuses, the APA engaged in a pattern of denial, deceit and distraction in support of its policy keeping psychologists engaged in interrogations at detention centers where human rights and international laws have been grossly and systematically violated. When we needed an ethics policy that underscored the importance of ethical behavior, the APA created a revised code which allowed the following of unethical laws and regulations, and which removed protections for research participants when permitted by law or government regulation. When we needed deep ethical discussion, the APA appointed an ethics task force dominated by military-intelligence psychologists, most of whom served in precisely those interrogation settings under debate. When we needed clear statements condemning ongoing U.S, government abuses, the APA passed resolution after resolution condemning “torture” and “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” while failing ever to condemn, or even acknowledge, the ongoing abuses. When we needed action against those psychologists participating in abuses, we received denial after denial and delay after delay, making a continual mockery of ethics enforcement. And when we needed to indicate to the world that psychology was a profession with the highest ethical standards, the APA alone, of all the major health professions’ organizations, not only allowed continued participation in interrogations, violating the centuries-old “do no harm” ethical standards for health professions, but kept silent on known harms.
Last February, over six years after the first reports of US torture and abuse in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and later, Iraq, surfaced, the APA finally unambiguously condemned participation in 19 specific interrogation techniques. While this is a laudable, if long-delayed, first step, it is not enough.
Ø We must forever remove psychologists from detention centers where human rights and international law are violated; to do otherwise is to collude in those abuses.
Ø We must change our ethics code to no longer allow members to follow unethical laws or orders and to restore protections for all research participants.
Ø We must reevaluate the nature of the ties between the APA and the military-intelligence establishment to avoid participation in future unethical government activities.
Ø We must, in collaboration with other health professions, set up a Truth process to create a public record of the roles of psychologists and other health professionals in torture and other detainee abuse, and to recommend ethical, policy, and structural changes to reduce the likelihood that psychologists and other health professionals will collaborate with future abuses.
We call upon all APA members, psychologists, other health professionals, and citizens concerned with fundamental threats to human rights to let the Association know the time is long past due for real change. Please join us on the 16th of August to speak with a common voice against torture and for a return to an ethical psychology and an ethical American Psychological Association.
“A profession is not the expression of the will of its members, but rather the expression of what these members will tolerate.”
Psychologists for an Ethical APA
Let the APA leadership know that we will not tolerate collaboration with detainee abuse. Psychology must once again become a profession based upon fundamental ethical principles.
July 30th, 2008
