Associated Press
WASHINGTON
– The leading U.S. psychologists’ association has voted to ban its
members from taking part in interrogations at the prison at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, and other military detention sites where it believes
international law is being violated.
The ban means those
who are American Psychological Association members can’t assist the
U.S. military at these sites. They can only work there for humanitarian
purposes or with non-governmental groups, according to Stephen Soldz, a
Boston psychologist. Soldz is founder of an ethics coalition that has
long supported the ban.
“This is a repudiation
by the membership of a policy that has been doggedly pursued by APA
leadership for year after year,” Soldz said Thursday. “The membership
has now spoken and it’s now incumbent upon APA to immediately implement
this.”
The new policy should
take effect at the association’s next annual meeting in August 2009.
However, its council likely will discuss whether to act sooner, said
spokeswoman Rhea Farberman.
The interrogation ban
brings the psychologists more in line with the American Medical
Association and American Psychiatric Association. In 2005, the
psychologists association adopted a position that said, for national
security purposes, it was ethical to act as consultants for
interrogation and information-gathering.
Psychologists have
been involved in decisions that approve of coercion methods, including
“taking away comfort items like clothes and toilet paper from
detainees” to help extract information from them, Soldz said.
He said that some even
declined to diagnose post-traumatic stress in detainees because that
would suggest detainees had been abused or harmed while in custody.
The group has no real
power to enforce its new policy, although its council is expected to
discuss whether to recommend the ban become part of its ethics code.
That would mean a violator’s membership could be revoked, Farberman
said,
Yale University psychologist Alan Kazdin, the group’s president, said the policy “will have teeth.”
“The organization will
be disseminating our position to Congress and to other leaders and make
it very clear what psychologists cannot do as part of our policy,” he
said.
This is imperative that the APA finally take a stand against torture, against hiding the facts behind an illegal, immoral occupation. Torture is illegal. Why professionals would be discouraged from speaking out against such practices is alarming and disgusting.
Violence is not a value I hold, nor is torture of prisoners action I tolerate. I am familiar with the APA code of ethics which appear in our textbooks. I expect to see APA leaders supporting this code of ethics.