In wake of damning post-9/11 ‘collusion’ report, association says psychologists should not be a part of interrogations at Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere

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A representative of the US’s largest professional association of psychologists, which is in the throes of crisis after an independent review found it to be complicit in torture, has said psychologists should no longer participate in US detentions and interrogations.

Nadine Kaslow, a former president of the beleaguered American Psychological Association, told the Guardian that psychologists should no longer aid the military at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere – in effect reversing more than a decade of institutional insistence that such participation was responsible and ethical.

“I personally think the council needs to adopt a policy to prohibit psychologists from being involved in interrogation, people being held in military custody at Gitmo and other sites,” said Kaslow.

The APA made Kaslow available to the Guardian to discuss a damning independent report into what it called the APA’s “collusion” with the US Department of Defense and its aid to the CIA for torture. Psychologists still operate at Guantánamo, as part of the detention facility’s behavioral-health unit.

That 542-page report, by former federal prosecutor David Hoffman, found that numerous senior officials within the APA aided torture by changing internal rules – and collaborated with defense personnel in doing so – to permit psychologists’ assistance. The APA further spent more than a decade denying it had opened the door to abuses; aggressively misrepresenting its collusion to the media and the public; and stifling internal dissent.

Hoffman found that APA officials were motivated to collaborate with the Defense Department by “the very substantial benefits that DoD had conferred and continued to confer on psychology as a profession”. Collaboration was “enhanced by personal relationships between APA staff and DoD personnel”, including a marriage between an APA executive and “one of the military’s lead psychologists who supported interrogations at Guantánamo Bay”.

Among the leading officials implicated was the APA’s ethics chief, Stephen Behnke. After the APA received the Hoffman report, Behnke departed his post on 8 July. Kaslow would not say if Behnke was fired or resigned. She indicated that “multiple personnel actions” were likely in the near future.

The APA said that it would also undertake institutional reforms, including changes to its ethics and complaint-review policies, and Kaslow said the APA would need to be “open and transparent” with the media.

On 6 August, the 130,000-member APA will meet in Toronto for its annual conference. The Hoffman report is expected to be the central topic of discussion.

Beyond Toronto, Kaslow said the APA would deliver the Hoffman report to the Senate armed services and intelligence committees and the inspectors general of the Pentagon and the CIA. But she stopped short of committing to referring it to the FBI for potential criminal inquiry, saying Hoffman drew a line short of that in internal discussions.

“The issue with the FBI is something we’re continuing to discuss,” she said.

Stephen Soldz, a longtime critic of the APA’s involvement with torture, urged the APA to make such a referral in a meeting the APA held with its dissidents on 2 July in Washington.

“We must refer this report and its findings to the FBI and we must cooperate fully in any ensuing investigation,” Soldz urged, according to a presentation acquired by the Guardian.

Kaslow said the APA would begin embracing the anti-torture critics the organization had spent years marginalizing – particularly Jean Maria Arrigo, one of its leading internal reformers, whom the report says was repeatedly rebuffed in an “intentional effort to curb dissent”.

“I’m going to personally thank her when I see her,” Kaslow said. “I’m going to personally apologize to her for the fact that other people mistreated her.”

Kaslow indicated that the APA recognized it had much work to do to restore public confidence.

“Certainly, this is a hit to our integrity, the organization’s integrity and, unfortunately, psychologists’ integrity, too,” she said.