The leading American professional group for psychologists secretly worked with the Bush administration to help justify the post-9/11 US detainee torture program, according to a watchdog analysis [PDF] released on Thursday.
The report, written by six leading health professionals and human rights activists, is the first to examine the alleged complicity of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the “enhanced interrogation” program.
Based on an analysis of more than 600 newly disclosed emails, the report found that the APA coordinated with Bush-era government officials – namely in the CIA, White House and Department of Defense – to help ethically justify the interrogation policy in 2004 and 2005, when the program came under increased scrutiny for prisoner abuse by US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
A series of clandestine meetings with US officials led to the creation of “an APA ethics policy in national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the CIA torture program,” the report’s authors found.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/30/psychologists-bush-officials-torture-program
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @10:43PM
Are psychologists not governed by a code of ethics?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @11:04PM
Are psychologists not governed by a code of ethics?
Your generic academic professional ethics, and probably the International Conventions on Human experimentation, the International Convention Against Torture, things like that. But as many have been pointing out, psychology is an academic discipline, not a profession like psychiatry.