Pentagon says it has no plans to remove five psychologists, who are said to participate in forced tube feedings, even as APA signals desire to end relationship

The Pentagon has said it has no plans to divest Guantánamo Bay of its psychologists even as the American Psychological Association signals a desire to end its decade-long association with US military and intelligence interrogations and detentions.



Those psychologists are said to participate in Guantánamo’s highly controversial forced tube feedings.

The APA, the premiere professional association for psychologists, is embroiled in a crisis after an independent report found it to be complicit in US torture, with responsible officials motivated in part by a desire for lucrative US military contracts. At least four senior officials have resigned or been sacked as a result.

Now the APA is signaling a desire to reverse a decade-old policy central to the crisis. Nadine Kaslow, a former APA president who chairs the special committee that aided the report, told the Guardian that the group “needs to adopt a policy to prohibit psychologists from being involved in interrogation, people being held in military custody at Gitmo and other sites”.

The APA board, in an official response to the report by former federal prosecutor David Hoffman, is urging the broader APA to adopt precisely such a policy at its annual conference, slated to begin 6 August in Toronto. Banning psychologist participation in US military or intelligence operations carries implications beyond moral rhetoric: state licensing boards would take the ban into consideration.

Joint Task Force-Guantánamo, which runs the detention center, is not there yet.

“We are not aware of any changes concerning the use of mental health professionals in support of detention operations at the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” said Henrietta Levin, a Pentagon spokesperson.

“As I think APA leaders now recognize, aiding Guantánamo detentions violates the profession’s fundamental ‘do no harm’ ethic,” said Stephen Soldz of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, who is one of the APA’s longtime torture critics.

There are currently five psychologists working for the Guantánamo detentions taskforce, Levin confirmed. They are said to be involved at the facility’s behavioral-health unit and participate in some capacity in the controversial forced feedings administered to detainees on hunger strike.

“It wouldn’t be in every feeding, but the psychologists were in the mix of the ‘treatment’ of hunger strikers,” said Cori Crider, attorney for Abu Wael Dhiab, who in December was released from Guantánamo without charge after 12 years.

Dhiab, a longtime hunger striker, challenged the forced feedings he was repeatedly administered as both torturous and punitive. While he did not succeed in federal court last year in ending them, his case revealed the existence of force-feeding videos from Guantánamo that the Guardian, along with other news organizations, have sought to obtain. A judge last week disregarded US justice department objections and ordered substantial portions of them released by 31 August.

Crider, who had access to Dhiab’s Guantánamo medical records, said “there would be signs that the so-called behavioral health unit would roll by and try to speak to him periodically during the hunger strike”.

While few interrogations are believed to occur at Guantánamo anymore, there is at least one psychologist involved with Barack Obama’s High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), an FBI-led entity created to interrogate senior terror suspects while eschewing torture.

As of last October, Susan Brandon was the chief of research for the HIG. A former White House official in the Bush administration and an APA official, Brandon is cited in Hoffman’s report as participating in early discussions with the APA about aiding interrogations. Although Brandon has come in for criticism from human-rights critics of the APA, Hoffman wrote that he found “no evidence supporting the contention that she was a significant player”.

The FBI has yet to respond to questions about any continued role for psychologists with the HIG.

Soldz said the Defense Department’s continued use of psychologists at Guantánamo raised the stakes for the APA at its upcoming conference.

“The Defense Department response poses a challenge to APA, not only to adopt fine-sounding policies, but to make them binding on members of the profession,” said Soldz.

“The APA ban, if passed, must be built into the ethics code used by states that license the military’s psychologists.”