US psychology group colluded with govt ‘torture’ program

WASHINGTON: The US’s top psychology association colluded with the Pentagon and the CIA to devise ethical guidelines to support post-9/11 interrogation techniques that have since been labeled as torture, a report said Friday.
Some members of the American Psychological Association (APA), including senior staff, sought to “curry favor” with defense officials, according to the 542-page probe commissioned by APA’s board.
These individuals issued an ethics policy that aligned with government interrogation techniques after the September 11 2001 terror attacks, such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
The association colluded with several government agencies, including the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to devise ethical guidelines for the interrogation program under former president George W. Bush, according to the review.
The government 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 September 11 attacks,” the report said.
“APA’s principal motive in doing so was to align APA and curry favor with DoD (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 come after Democrats on the US Senate Intelligence Committee in December released a damning report detailing brutal and previously unknown interrogation techniques, including beatings and rectal rehydration, used by the CIA on Al-Qaeda suspects post 9/11.
According to Friday’s report, APA’s 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 APA board about his involvement in training defense department staff.