US psychology group collaborated with Washington’s torture program: report

[yuiyoshida]

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.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2015/07/12/2003622827

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. More from the NYT.

The torturers, their bosses, and the enablers should be in prison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us/psychologists-shielded-us-torture-program-report-finds.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency’s health professionals repeatedly criticized the agency’s post-Sept. 11 interrogation program, but their protests were rebuffed by prominent outside psychologists who lent credibility to the program, according to a new report.

The 542-page report, which examines the involvement of the nation’s psychologists and their largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association, with the harsh interrogation programs of the Bush era, raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.
Continue reading the main story
Related in Opinion

Psychologists were paid to give the Central Intelligence Agency's torture program a veneer of legitimacy. Here, a detainee held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2009.
Editorial: Psychologists Who Greenlighted TortureJULY 10, 2015

The report, completed this month, concludes that some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director, sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the Defense Department’s interrogation policies, while several prominent outside psychologists took actions that aided the C.I.A.’s interrogation program and helped protect it from growing dissent inside the agency.

[eShirl]

2. shame on them