Critics accuse American Psychological Association of collaborating with Bush administration on torture

By June 2004, the Bush administration’s torture program was in trouble.

The public disclosure of the images of prisoners being abused at the Abu
Ghraib prison earlier that year prompted an intense debate about the way the
United States was treating detainees in the global war on terror, leading to new
scrutiny of the C.I.A.’s so­called enhanced interrogation program. Congress
and the news media were starting to ask questions, and there were new doubts
about whether the program was legal.

On June 4, 2004, the C.I.A. director, George J. Tenet, signed a secret
order suspending the agency’s use of the enhanced interrogation techniques,
while asking for a policy review to make sure the program still had the Bush
administration’s backing.

“I strongly believe that the administration needs to now review its
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 in light of the current controversy,” Mr. Tenet wrote
in a memo that has since been declassified.

At that critical moment, the American Psychological Association took
action that its critics now say helped the troubled interrogation program.
In early June 2004, a senior official with the association, the nation’s
largest professional organization for psychologists, issued an invitation to a
carefully selected group of psychologists and behavioral scientists inside the
government to a private meeting to discuss the crisis and the role of
psychologists in the interrogation program.

Psychologists from the C.I.A. and other agencies met with association
officials in July, and by the next year the association issued guidelines that
reaffirmed that it was acceptable for its members to be involved in the
interrogation program.

To emphasize their argument that the association grew too close to the
interrogation program, the critics’ new report cites a 2003 email from a senior
psychologist at the C.I.A. to a senior official at the psychological association. In
the email, the C.I.A. psychologist appears to be confiding in the association
official about the work of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the private
contractors who developed and helped run the enhanced interrogation
program at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons around the world.

In the email, written years before the involvement of the two contractors
in the interrogation program was made public, the C.I.A. psychologist explains
to the association official that the contractors “are doing special things to
special people in special places.”

risingsun wrote:So a group that is supposed to help people uses their knowledge to help a government illegally torture people.  Lower and lower!