Why Torture Made Me Leave the APA

By Jeffrey S. Kaye, Ph.D., Invictus. Posted March 6, 2008.

After two years of working to reform the position of the American Psychological Association, which supports psychologist participation in the interrogations of detainees at Guantanamo, CIA "black site" prisons, and elsewhere, I realized that I had been pursuing a utopian objective. On January 27th, I penned my resignation to APA. The rationale for my choice is outlined in the resignation letter, which is reproduced here.

--Jeffrey S. Kaye, Ph.D


January 27, 2008

Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.,
President, American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4232

Dear Dr. Kazdin,

I hereby resign my membership in the American Psychological Association (APA). I have up until now been working with Psychologists for an Ethical APA for an overturn in APA policy on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations, and I greatly respect those who are fighting via a dues boycott to influence APA policy on this matter. I hope to still work with these principled and dedicated professionals, but I cannot do it anymore from a position within APA.

Unlike some others who have left APA, my resignation is not based solely on the stance APA has taken regarding the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations. Rather, I view APA's shifting position on interrogations to spring from a decades-long commitment to serve uncritically the national security apparatus of the United States. Recent publications and both public and closed professional events sponsored by APA have made it clear that this organization is dedicated to serving the national security interests of the American government and military, to the extent of ignoring basic human rights practice and law. The influence of the Pentagon and the CIA in APA activities is overt and pervasive, if often hidden. The revelations over the Constitution and behavior of the 2005 Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) panel are a case in point. While charged with investigating the dilemmas for psychologists involved in military interrogations in the light of the scandals surrounding Guantanamo's Camp Delta and Abu Ghraib prison, it was stacked with military and governmental personnel, and closely monitored and pressured by APA staff.

I strongly disagree with APA's current position on interrogations and am unimpressed with recent clarifications of that position that allow for voluntary non-participation in specifically defined cases where torture and abuse of prisoners is proven to exist. I have discussed my reasoning for this elsewhere, both in public and blogging on the Internet. In 2007, I was a panelist in a "mini-convention" held at the APA Convention in San Francisco, which examined the dispute over interrogations, presenting my findings on secret and non-secret psychologist research into isolation, sensory deprivation and sensory overload.

The following is a review of my objections to APA policy and practices:

1) APA's position on non-involvement in torture allows psychologists to work in settings that do not allow the basic right of habeas corpus, in addition to practices of humane confinement as delineated in the Conventions of the Geneva Protocols and various international documents and treaties.

2) APA maintains, in private communications, that relegating various modes of psychological torture (sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, isolation) and the use of drugs in interrogations to something less than outright prohibition in recent APA position papers does not mean APA had any intention of providing a "loophole" for interrogators in the practice of coercive interrogations. APA also promises to clarify its position on these matters in an "ethics casebook." When it has found it exigent, as with the PENS resolution, to step outside normal procedure to clarify its position, it has done so. I find it noteworthy that recent APA clarifications of its position are treated as something requiring less than direct organizational expression.

3) APA continues to propagate a position that it knows is false: that psychologists operate in interrogation settings to prevent abusive interrogations. While sometimes citing the compelling conclusions about context and behavior outlined by Zimbardo, and stemming from his famous Prisoner Experiment, it twists the representation of this research by making psychologists a quasi-police force monitoring abusive interrogations. On the contrary, the Zimbardo research leads to a more unsettling conclusion, i.e., that human beings in general are susceptible to participation in abusive behavior based upon contextual factors. In fact, the Zimbardo research argues, as Dr. Zimbardo himself has done, against participation in these kinds of interrogations.

4) APA has shown little interest in the many revelations regarding psychologist participation in torture, or in psychologist research into abusive or coercive interrogations. Excepting only a brief period in the late 1970s, when widespread and public exposure of CIA mind-control programs raised considerable scandal, APA has shown little inclination to confront the history of psychologist participation in such research, nor of its own institutional role in this research.

5) Finally, recent APA activities, such as the joint CIA/Rand Corporation/APA July 2003 workshop in the "Science of Deception," point to questionable current participation in unethical practices and illegal governmental activities. I queried relevant actors and APA leaders as to what actually occurred at this workshop, which the APA Science Directorate described as discussing how to use "pharmacological agents to effect apparent truth-telling behavior." Also considered was the study of "sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors." Workshop participants were asked, "How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?" I never received any answer from relevant APA personnel, including the current director of ethics, about what went on at this workshop.

The latter episode captures the terrible trap into which APA has fallen. When making agreements with state intelligence and military agencies, it is customary to sign secrecy agreements. This makes it impossible to reasonably assess and monitor the activities of psychologists in national security settings. Furthermore, the subordination of military psychologists to the chain of command of the armed forces allows for ineffective, if not impossible, oversight of psychologist activities. But the problem with secrecy does not end there. Major researchers -- including a former APA president -- who have contracted with the government or had their work utilized by the military … have told me they are unable to discuss matters beyond a certain point, or else have tried to restrict discussion of these matters, no doubt due in part to secrecy restrictions.

In the book Psychology in the Service of National Security, published by the APA in 2006, A. David Mangelsdorff, the editor, writes, "As the military adjusts to its changing roles in the new national security environment, psychologists have much to offer." He notes the recent forward military deployment of psychologists, their use in so-called anti-terrorism research, and assistance in influencing public opinion about "national security problems facing the nation." L. Morgan Banks, Chief of the Psychological Applications Directorate of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, and a member of the controversial PENS panel, wrote elsewhere in the same book about the "bright future" for psychologists working with Special Operations Forces. Never mind that SOPs have been implicated in torture in Afghanistan -- including receiving instructions in coercive procedures from some of the same psychologists who attended the APA/CIA workshop noted above. Nowhere in the book could I find a discussion of ethical problems surrounding these issues, nor of the political and social questions implicit in such outright support of governmental initiatives and military policy. In fact, curiously, there is no discussion of psychologist participation in military interrogations anywhere in the book.

Despite otherwise notable and positive stances and activities of the APA on other social issues -- such as combating prejudice against gays and lesbians, or against racial prejudice -- it is an unfortunate but urgent fact that APA has become subordinated to the state when it comes to military matters. APA acts as an arm of the Pentagon and a support agency for the CIA. Those differences that exist between the APA and the Bush Administration on interrogation policies mirror differences within the administration itself, and within different governmental departments. In these cases, APA acts as the instrument of a faction within government, rather than as an independent actor and representative of the profession and its ideals and goals.

I would suggest the following remedies, if any are still possible, to reverse the degeneration of the APA into a willing instrument of U.S. military and intelligence interests:

1) A full opening of all APA archives related to research and participation in activities with the military, including its intelligence arms, and a call for the government to declassify all documents related to the same;

2) The disestablishment of Division 19, the Society for Military Psychology, from the APA;

3) The immediate rescission of APA's Ethics Code 1.02, which was changed in 2002 to permit adherence "to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority" when there is otherwise a conflict between the law and psychologists' ethical practice. Opponents of 1.02 have rightly compared it to the Nazi defense of "following orders" at Nuremberg;

4) A call for the formation of a civilian cross-disciplinary investigatory panel to examine the past history and current collaboration of scientific and medical professionals with the government, especially its military and intelligence agencies, to encompass fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, with a goal of producing recommendations on interactions between government and the scientific and medical communities;

5) A moratorium on research into interrogations;

6) Sever the link that ties APA's definition of "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment" in its various resolutions from the Reagan-era Reservations to the UN Convention Against Torture, which seeks to weaken that definition by relying on suspect interpretations of U.S. law rather than international definitions;

7) The immediate cessation of all support for involvement of psychological personnel in participation in any activity that supports national security interrogations.

The sordid history of American psychology when it comes to collaboration with governmental agencies in the research and implementation of techniques of psychological torture is one that our field will have to confront sooner or later. In a larger sense, the problems presented here are inherent in a larger societal dilemma regarding the uses of knowledge. This problem was recognized by the first critics of untrammeled scientific advance, and represented powerfully by Goethe's Faust, and Mary Shelley's Doctor Frankenstein. Human knowledge is capable of producing both good and evil. The scientist, the scholar, and the doctor hold tremendous responsibility in their hands. That they have not shown themselves, in a tragic number of instances, to ethically wield or control this responsibility has meant that the 21st century opens under the awful prospect of worldwide nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, while a sinister, behaviorally-designed torture apparatus operates as the servant of nation-states wielding these awful weapons of mass destruction.

It's appropriate to close with a statement about the problem of serving powerful national interests from a former president of the APA, a leading and important pioneer in our field, and also, for awhile, a member with top secret clearance in the CIA's MKULTRA mind control program, Carl Rogers. One wonders if Rogers' exposure to the world of secret government military projects didn't inform his feelings about psychologists and government, as expressed in his famous debate with another seminal psychologist, B. F. Skinner:

"To hope that the power which is being made available by the behavioral sciences will be exercised by the scientists, or by a benevolent group, seems to me a hope little supported by either recent or distant history. It seems far more likely that behavioral scientists, holding their present attitudes, will be in the position of the German rocket scientists specializing in guided missiles. First they worked devotedly for Hitler to destroy the U.S.S.R. and the United States. Now, depending on who captured them, they work devotedly for the U.S.S.R. in the interest of destroying the United States, or devotedly for the United States in the interest of destroying the U.S.S.R. If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science, it seems most probably that they will serve the purposes of whatever individual or group has the power."

See more stories tagged with: cia, torture, psychology, ethics

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist active in the anti-torture movement. He works clinically with torture victims at Survivors International in San Francisco, CA. As "Valtin," he regularly blogs at Daily Kos, Docudharma, American Torture, Progressive Historians, and elsewhere.

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