The journey to redemption is long and often tempest-tossed. But the American Psychological Association (APA) took another noteworthy step last week when CEO Arthur Evans Jr. sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressing concern over President Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Amid heated debate over …
Tag Archives: “Do No Harm”
Facing History: My Reply to APA CEO Arthur Evans
In a recent Washington Post commentary, I made four points. First, psychologists played essential roles in the government-authorized torture and abuse of “war on terror” detainees. Second, the American Psychological Association (APA) facilitated this involvement — by secretly accommodating CIA and Defense Department interests; by contesting evidence of wrongdoing with deceptive public statements; and by …
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How the American Psychological Association Lost Its Way
Written with my colleague Jean Maria Arrigo, this op-ed originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The American Psychological Association is in crisis. It began last December, when a Senate Intelligence Committee report laid bare the extensive involvement of individual psychologists in the CIA’s black-site torture program. Then in early July a devastating independent report by a …
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Protecting Psychologists Who Harm: The APA’s Latest Wrong Turn
Shortly after learning about the American Psychological Association’s (APA) new “Member-Initiated Task Force to Reconcile Policies Related to Psychologists’ Involvement in National Security Settings,” I found my thoughts turning to the School of the Americas, Blackwater and, perhaps even more surprisingly, the Patagonian toothfish. Those may seem like a strange threesome, but they share one …
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“Safe, Legal, Ethical, and Effective”?: It’s Time to Annul the PENS Report
Many viewers were outraged this past August watching NBC’s Today Show interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney. Promoting the release of his new memoir, Cheney nodded in agreement when Matt Lauer noted that the VP continues to support waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” (e.g., stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, fear induction). Lauer also …
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