With 148,000 members, the American Psychological Association is the largest body of psychologists in the world. The Pentagon then began using only psychologists to train its CIA and military interrogators.

Responding to evidence that their own mental health professionals helped design torture tactics used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the American Psychological Association has finally taken a position on torture, but, many members of the profession believe that the APA has not gone far enough.

Last weekend, the annual APA convention held in San Francisco was the setting for protests and spirited debate about what role - if any - psychologists should continue to play in the interrogations of government detainees and combatants. In conjunction with the annual convention, a 165-member legislative council met and passed a measure that reaffirms the organization's position against torture.

But, the council also rejected a measure that would have in effect banned its members from attending, supervising or advising the military interrogations. This was the measure that many members had hoped the APA would adopt.

Supporters of this failed measure, which called for members not to cooperate with interrogations connected to prescribed practices, argued that psychologists' presence at these interrogations rubber-stamps various practices that are tantamount to torture.

Many APA members now believe that the APA's response has been slow and remains woefully inadequate.

The APA's anti-torture resolution follows a string of revelations in recent months of the key role played by psychologists in the development of brutal interrogation regimes for the CIA and the military. And it comes just weeks after news that the White House may be calling on psychologists once again: On July 20, President Bush signed an executive order restarting a coercive CIA interrogation program at the agency's "black sites."

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has indicated that psychological techniques will be part of the revamped program, but that the interrogations would be subject to careful medical oversight. That oversight is likely to be performed by psychologists. (Mark Benjamin, Salon.com)

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union also called on the APA to prohibit its members from participating in coercive interrogations:

We have found troubling evidence of the collusion of medical psychologists in the development and implementation of procedures intended to inflict psychological harm on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other facilities...

The history of torture is inexorably linked to the misuse of scientific and medical knowledge. As we move fully into the 21st century, it is no longer enough to denounce or to speak out against torture; rather, we must sever the connection between healers and tormentors once and for all. As guardians of the mind, psychologists are duty bound to promote the humane treatment of all people. We strongly urge the APA to adopt the strongest possible stance and issue a moratorium on the participation of its members in abusive treatment. (ACLU Press Release, August 17th, 2007)

APA representatives argue that the presence of psychologists keeps interrogations safe and prevents abuse. But in recent months, a string of exposes in Salon.com, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker have revealed that psychologists have played a key role in designing the CIA's torture tactics.

From Vanity Fair's excellent article, Rorschach and Awe, we have these excerpts:

At the direction of an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they'd get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death...

Two psychologists in particular played a central role: James Elmer Mitchell, who was attached to the C.I.A. team that eventually arrived in Thailand, and his colleague Bruce Jessen...

The reversed sere tactics they originated have come to shatter various American communities, putting law enforcement and intelligence gathering on a collision course, fostering dissent within the C.I.A., and sparking a war among psychologists over professional identity that has even led to a threat of physical violence at a normally staid A.P.A. meeting. The spread of the tactics - and the photographs of their wild misuse at Abu Ghraib - devastated America's reputation in the Muslim world. All the while, Mitchell and Jessen have remained more or less behind the curtain, their almost messianic belief in the value of breaking down detainees permeating interrogations throughout the war effort...

During a typical three-week training course, participants endure waterboarding, forced nudity, extreme temperatures, sexual and religious ridicule, agonizing stress positions, and starvation-level rations. Some lose up to 15 pounds...

The use of "scientific credentials in the service of cruel and unlawful practices" harkens back to the Cold War, according to Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights. Back then, mental-health professionals working with the C.I.A. used hallucinogenic drugs, hypnosis, and extreme sensory deprivation on unwitting subjects to develop mind-control techniques. "We really thought we learned this lesson--that ambition to help national security is no excuse for throwing out ethics and science," Rubenstein says.

The document is divided into four categories: "Degradation," "Physical Debilitation," "Isolation and Monopoliztion [sic] of Perception," and "Demonstrated Omnipotence." The tactics include "slaps," "forceful removal of detainees' clothing," "stress positions," "hooding," "manhandling," and "walling," which entails grabbing the detainee by his shirt and hoisting him against a specially constructed wall.

In a bizarre mixture of solicitude and sadism, the memo details how to calibrate the infliction of harm. It dictates that the "[insult] slap will be initiated no more than 12-14 inches (or one shoulder width) from the detainee's face ... to preclude any tendency to wind up or uppercut." And interrogators are advised that, when stripping off a prisoner's clothes, "tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance." In short, the sere-inspired interrogations would be violent. And therefore, psychologists were needed to help make these more dangerous interrogations safer...

Soon, the reverse-engineered sere tactics that had been designed by Mitchell and Jessen, road-tested in the C.I.A.'s black sites, and adopted in Guantánamo were being used in Iraq as well. One intelligence officer recalled witnessing a live demonstration of the tactics. The detainee was on his knees in a room painted black and forced to hold an iron bar in his extended hands while interrogators slapped him repeatedly. The man was then taken into a bunker, where he was stripped naked, blindfolded, and shackled. He was ordered to be left that way for 12 hours...

The principals of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates are raking in money. According to people familiar with their compensation, they get paid more than $1,000 per day plus expenses, tax free, for their overseas work. It beats military pay. Mitchell has built his dream house in Florida. He also purchased a BMW through one of his companies. (Katherine Eban, Vanity Fair)

"This is a very sad chapter in our field's and in our country's history," said Dr. Steven Reisner, a consultant to the United Nations on torture's effects. "(The tactics) come from a psychologically developed program (SERE) and then transferred. It spread to Afghanistan. It spread to Iraq. And it is spread by psychologists."

Some APA members are profoundly disturbed by their organization's policy allowing
psychologists to participate in U.S. military interrogations at Guantanamo and other
military and C.I.A. facilities where suspected terrorists are detained without due process.

They believe that APA, their own professional organization, should follow suit and adopt policies like the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association.

Last year the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association declared unequivocally that there is no legitimate role for psychiatrists or physicians in such interrogations; they insisted that participation violates basic international human rights and the ethical imperative to do no harm.

APA members have staged protests, withheld their dues, and attempted unsuccessfully to get the APA to adopt the measure banning their members from attending interrogations.

A group called Psychologists for an Ethical APA has hoped that this amendment would be passed this past weekend at the APA convention:

BE IT RESOLVED that the objectives of the APA shall be to advance psychology as a science and profession and as a means of promoting health, education and welfare ... (Bylaws of the APA: Article 1) and, therefore, the roles of psychologists in settings in which detainees are deprived of adequate protection of their human rights, should be limited as health personnel to the provision of psychological treatment.

"Our first ethical principle is that psychologists should do no harm," said Ruth Fallenbaum, a Berkeley clinical psychologist who works with torture victims.

"We should not contribute our expertise, our training to breaking down people in these environments where there's no respect for human rights."

I've shared this story on my blog because I'm proud of these psychologists for standing up for what they believe in.

I hope that these brave dissident psychologists continue to protest, continue not paying their dues - and continue to stand up for humanity - in whatever way that their consciences call them.

As Martin Luther King once cautioned all of us,

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."