APA Insists Dissent = Consent for Torture

After Mark Benjamin's exposé last week of the American Psychological Association's troubling collusion with US torture of detainees, the organization issued a point by point rebuttal of his Salon.com article. In turn Benjamin has written a follow-up piece which reveals embarrassing untruths in the APA's rebuttals.

APA:

[Mark Benjamin's] article opens by suggesting that the APA is facing an "internal revolt" against the Association's current policy on the role of psychologists in military interrogations. The reality is that APA's Council of Representatives endorsed the current policy at its last meeting. (February 2006)

Mark Benjamin:

That raised some eyebrows among some members, who pointed out the claim was incorrect. In a relatively unusual move, they said, the interrogation report bypassed the council (described on the APA Web site as the "most important governance body of the association") and became policy through the imprimatur of APA's smaller 12-person board of directors. "Council was not asked to endorse or approve the PENS task force report," said council member Bernice Lott.

[Rhea] Farberman, the APA spokeswoman, acknowledged that the original APA statement on the council's endorsement was technically incorrect. She said that members of the council had made "laudatory" statements about the report at a council meeting last February. When called on this issue last week by her own members, Farberman admitted to the council in an e-mail, obtained by Salon, that "Council took no official action on the report." Still, Farberman said in a telephone call to Salon that the APA leadership was not facing an internal revolt. She said that an Associated Press article was more accurate in describing the APA leadership as "under fire."

At best the APA assertion that "APA's Council of Representatives endorsed the current policy at its last meeting" is an unsupported half truth. Other possibilities are that the assertion is either a) delusional thinking or b) a lie.

The APA's back room decision making and secrecy have been of great concern to the many members who oppose its policy. In his article, Benjamin explained:

Last summer, the APA adopted new ethical principles drafted by a task force of 10 psychologists, who were selected by the organization's leadership. That controversial task-force report, which is now official APA policy, stated that psychologists participating in terror-related interrogations are fulfilling "a valuable and ethical role to assist in protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm."

But Salon has learned that six of the 10 psychologists on the task force have close ties to the military. The names and backgrounds of the task force participants were not made public by the APA . . .

The APA countered:

This is totally false. In reality, the names and composition of the Task Force is public information. The names and biographical statements of each of the Task Force members are, and have been for some time, available through the APA website.

In reality:

[A] link to the biographies of those task force members appeared on the APA Web site only after the publication of Salon's article. Farberman acknowledged that the APA did put the link to the bios of the task force members on its site after Salon published its story.

Still, for psychologists, there is always room for interpretation, especially when your meaning is conveyed in prepositions rather than facts:

But she added that one could have previously navigated to the Web site of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence through the APA Web site. "We said that the bio statements have been available through the Web site for some time," she wrote in an e-mail.

Here is how one would have gotten to the bio statements of the Task Force before the APA added the link to the front page of its site:

1. Go to www.apa.org.
2. Click on "About APA" (http://www.apa.org/about/) in the left sidebar.
3. Scroll about 2/3 of the way down the About page to the section heading "APA's Professional Divisions."
4. Click on link, http://www.apa.org/about/division.html.
5. Scroll about 2/3 of the way down the Divisions page to Division 48, Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace Psychology Division.
6. Click on Division 48 link to go to Division 48 web page on the APA site, http://www.apa.org/about/division/div48.html.
7. Click on the link to go off the APA website to the Division 48 website, http://www.peacepsych.org/.
8. Scroll about 1/2 way down the busy, two column page to the section on the right, headed "APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security."
9. In the middle of the paragraph, click on the link to the "complete list of Task Force members," http://www.webster.edu/peacepsychology/tfpens.html.

Voilà! It's that simple to get to the list "through" the APA website.

Linda M. Woolf, president of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence, told Mark Benjamin that Division 48 published the Task Force names because current APA interrogation policy "does not provide clear enough guidelines to keep psychologists out of situations involving abuse in the name of the war on terror."