The US’ top psychology association colluded with the Pentagon and the CIA to devise ethical guidelines to support post-Sept. 11, 2001, interrogation techniques that have since been labeled as torture, a report said on Friday.
Some members of the American Psychological Association (APA), including senior staff, sought to curry favor with defense officials, a 542-page probe commissioned by APA’s board found.
These individuals issued an ethics policy that aligned with government interrogation techniques after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the US, such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
The association colluded with several government agencies, including the Pentagon and the CIA, to devise ethical guidelines for the interrogation program under former US president George W. Bush, the review found.
The US agencies “purportedly wanted permissive ethical guidelines so that their psychologists could continue to participate in harsh and abusive interrogation techniques being used by these agencies after the Sept. 11 attacks,” the report said. “APA’s principal motive in doing so was to align APA and curry favor with DoD [US Department of Defense]. There were two other important motives: to create a good public relations response and to keep the growth of psychology unrestrained in this area.”
The findings came after Democrats on the US Senate Intelligence Committee in December last year released a report detailing brutal and previously unknown interrogation techniques, including beatings and so-called “rectal rehydration,” used by the CIA on al-Qaeda suspects.
According to Friday’s report, association ethics director Stephen Behnke worked with a military psychologist to draft the organization’s public policy statements and also received a Pentagon contract to train interrogators. The report said he did not tell the group’s board about his involvement in training Pentagon staff.
The association — the largest professional psychology organization in the nation — on Friday said in response that it would review its policies and work to bar its psychologists from participating directly in interrogations.
“The organization’s intent was not to enable abusive interrogation techniques or contribute to violations of human rights, but that may have been the result,” said Nadine Kaslow, who led a review committee that commissioned the report. “We profoundly regret and apologize for the behavior and the consequences that ensued.”
The review was led by lawyer David Hoffman of Sidley Austin, a law firm, and took seven months to complete.
In 2005, the association created a task force to review the ethical guidelines it used that determined when its psychologists could participate in interrogations, the report said.
A later report from the task force found no ethical violations of psychologists’ participation in the government’s “enhanced interrogation” program.
Behnke reportedly “collaborated behind the scenes about the eventual content of the task force’s report,” the review said.
Critics cited in the report said the APA chose “to help the government commit torture.”
The guidelines “prioritized the protection of psychologists — even those who might have engaged in unethical behavior — above the protection of the public,” the report said.
The review also found that two former APA presidents sat on CIA advisory committees, and one of them told the intelligence agency he did not think that sleep deprivation constituted torture.
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