The [American Psychological] association’s ethics office “prioritized the protection of psychologists — even those who might have engaged in unethical behavior — above the protection of the public,” the report said.
Two former presidents of the psychological association were on a C.I.A. advisory committee, the report found. One of them gave the agency an opinion that sleep deprivation did not constitute torture, and later held a small ownership stake in a consulting company founded by two men who oversaw the agency’s interrogation program, it said.
The association’s ethics director, Stephen Behnke, coordinated the group’s public policy statements on interrogations with a top military psychologist, the report said, and then received a Pentagon contract to help train interrogators while he was working at the association, without the knowledge of the association’s board...
The report found that while some prominent psychologists collaborated with C.I.A. officials in ways that aided the agency’s interrogation program, the American Psychological Association and its staff members focused more on working with the Pentagon, with which the association has long had strong ties.
Indeed, the report said that senior officials of the association had “colluded” with senior Defense Department officials to make certain that the association’s ethics rules did not hinder the ability of psychologists to remain involved with the interrogation program.
....
In about late 2002, the head of the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services, Terrence DeMay, started to complain about the involvement in the program of James Mitchell, a psychologist and instructor at the Air Force’s SERE (survival, evasion, rescue and escape) program, in which United States military personnel are subjected to simulated torture to gird them for possible capture...
Mr. DeMay’s complaints “led to a substantial dispute within the C.I.A.,” according to the report, and prompted the head of the agency’s counterterrorism center to seek an opinion from a prominent outside psychologist on whether it was ethical for psychologists to continue to participate in the C.I.A.’s interrogations.
The C.I.A. chose Mel Gravitz, a prominent psychologist who was also a member of the agency’s advisory committee...Mr. Gravitz’s opinion, which the Hoffman report quotes, noted that “the psychologist has an obligation to (a) group of individuals, such as the nation,” and that the ethics code “must be flexible [sic] applied to the circumstances at hand.”
....
Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen were later hired as contractors for the counterterrorism center, where they helped create the interrogation program by adapting the simulated torture techniques from the SERE program, using them against detainees.
Separately, Joseph Matarazzo, a former president of the psychological association who was a member of the C.I.A. advisory committee, was asked by Mr. Hubbard to provide an opinion about whether sleep deprivation constituted torture. Mr. Matarazzo concluded that it was not torture, according to the report.
Later, Mr. Matarazzo became a 1 percent owner of a unit of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the contracting company Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen created to handle their work with the C.I.A.’s interrogation program. Mr. Matarazzo was also listed as a partner of the company in a 2008 annual report, according to the Hoffman report.
...
“The evidence supports the conclusion that A.P.A. officials colluded with D.O.D. officials to, at the least, adopt and maintain A.P.A. ethics policies that were not more restrictive than the guidelines that key D.O.D. officials wanted,” the report says, adding, “A.P.A. chose its ethics policy based on its goals of helping D.O.D., managing its P.R., and maximizing the growth of the profession.”---New York Times.
It is known that health professionals and lawyers have been complicit in U.S. torture programs, and have been amply rewarded (and welcomed back) by our institutions of higher learning. Even so, it is shocking to read how a civilian, professional association -- the American Psychological Association -- is so corrupted that it cannot even provide support to those with an ethical conscience and calls for help from its very own members that work for the CIA and military. Undoubtedly the financial incentives for privileged insiders, institutional co-option, and, perhaps, the feverish atmosphere of fear and nationalism post 9/11/2001, all conspired to generate such institutional and individual moral failure. (Feel free to suggest your own reasons.)
Lawyers and psychologists have a code of ethics. We should not be surprised -- Man's inhumanity to man, after all -- that such codes fail to prevent the worst abuses; again, here's a case where the most privileged, association's insiders facilitated the corrosion of the association's own code (which, one presumes, has rules against both conflicts of interests and harming people in one's care). A cynic might conclude, even, that such codes do not function as aspirational guidelines rather than, say, means to create some kind of cover in the context of lawsuits.
I have long been open to the idea that economists and philosophers, too, need a code of ethics (recall this post, which originates in concern over the use of philosophical defenses of torture.) While once I used to think that professional philosophy was a place where it would be easy to do no social harm, I have come to recognize that not only do professional philosophers harm each other distressingly often, but also in our social role as, say, expert-ethicists (not just in medical and professional contexts), we can, in fact, generate and facilitate non-trivial harms to humans and animals (see this post by Lori Gruen; and also my post about related issues in philosophy).
I suspect that the most insidious philosophy-inflicted-social harms in our time are, in fact, a consequence of the fact that some professional philosophers reap considerable rewards (financial, status, access to elite media, foundation money, institutional recognition, etc.) from articulating their moral vision (e.g., in humanitarian interventions, poverty relief, etc.) to fellow global elites, while, say, the downs-side risk of implementation of that vision are all to be found among those least able to influence the reception of philosophy.
So, should we philosophers not even bother with a (professional) code of ethics if the folk that brought us Milgram's experiment are so easily corrupted?
The quoted New York times article about the sordid episode of the American Psychological Association, reminds us that the existence of a code of ethics for professional associations can do some, modest good even in real-world-non-optimal-circumstances. In this case, the professional code functioned as a useful means to those with a conscience to generate much needed institutional discussion about the role of psychologists in torture. That's not much, but it is a start.
Excellent--thank you for (re)introducing this topic for discussion. I, too, have been following the investigation into the policies of the American Psychological Association with respect to torture with interest, and have long wondered why our own APA has been so silent on such matters. I would say that not only do some (in my opinion disingenuous and self-serving, if "subconsciously" so) arguments "generate and facilitate non-trivial harms to humans and animals," but the continual diversion of attention away from serious considerations of morality, truth, justice, and reality insofar as these concepts apply to actual human (and nonhuman) lives and toward fantasies of logic and wordplay serves a confabulatory role in our global human society. No, certain topics should not be made "taboo" in our discourse (as proposed in comments on your discussion of 2012), they should be discussed thoroughly and serious moral judgments rendered.
Posted by: Ronnie Hawkins | 07/13/2015 at 05:15 PM