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Guest authored by Alice LoCicero, PhD
At this year’s American Psychological Association (APA) meeting in Denver, I observed about 10 hours of the semi-annual meeting of the governing body of APA: The Council of Representatives. Here’s what APA says about the Council:
The Council of Representatives is the legislative body of APA and has full power and authority over the affairs and funds of the association within the limitations set by the certificate of incorporation and the Bylaws, including the power to review, upon its own initiative, the actions of any board, committee, division or affiliated organization.
The Council is composed of representatives of divisions, representatives of state, provincial and territorial psychological associations (SPTAs) and the members of the Board of Directors.
During the ten hours I observed, the Council avoided considering a proposal that the organization apologize to the victims of torture. During the Bush administration’s war on terror, torture was made possible by the presence of military psychologists where so-called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques were used.
Is an apology necessary? Absolutely.
For most of the last decade, APA had specifically endorsed the presence of psychologists at Guantanamo and similar sites, even though it was clear from the “torture memos” of the Department of Justice, that such presence would enable interrogators to apply techniques that amounted to torture. (The memos noted that actions could not be considered torture if a health professional was consulted.) This is in opposition to a variety of international treaties that deal with questions of torture, treaties to which the US is a signatory.
Despite the fact that other health and social science organizations demanded that their members honor the essential ethical principle of “Do no harm,” and despite the fact that the members of APA voted to get psychologists out of Guantanamo in 2008, the organization stalled, delayed, stalled some more, denied that it could do that, and so on. The stalling and avoiding didn’t end until, in 2014, APA leadership took the courageous decision to have an independent review of possible collusion with the DOD in relation to this issue and other actions. Upon release of the report that resulted from that review, the APA could no longer deny the harm done, nor could it justify keeping psychologists in those sites. In August 2015, the Council voted, after seven years, to implement the member supported referendum of 2008. This momentous decision finally saw APA having a policy consistent with other health care organizations.
But the powerful military psychologists in the APA, along with some supporters, did not like that at all. During the year following the August 2015 decision, there was a blizzard of letters and postings complaining, accusing, and denigrating the Hoffman report. This August, psychologists who did not like the Independent Review or the decision to implement the referendum voted on by membership, proposed compromising on the August 2015 decision (to my surprise, the Council can actually amend a decision already made by members!) and the Council, shockingly, did not vote it down. Rather, after discussing the subject, they delayed making a decision until the next semi-annual meeting in February, leaving members to wonder why their organization cannot agree, once and for all, to accept responsibility for the harm done, and follow the simple dictum to do no harm in the future.
To be specific, the proposal suggested that military psychologists should be back in Guantanamo and similar sites in order to provide treatment for detainees. (Note that neither the 2008 referendum, nor the 2015 decision, said that psychologists could not provide treatment for detainees. It said that treatment could be provided if the detainee was the client. In doing that, APA was protecting military psychologists from pressures that might arise based on their dual loyalties. It appears that this 2016 proposal is a first step in a larger plan whose goals is less to get treatment or detainees and more to roll back the entire referendum—indeed one only has to look at the web page of complaints about the Independent Review to see how badly some psychologists want the referendum rolled back.
In another show of support for the military at this convention, APA again hosted quite a few booths in the Exhibit Hall that were military or veteran-related, including the following organizations.
Defense Centers of Excellence
Department of Veterans Affairs
Department of Veterans’ Affairs/ VA/DOD Evidence Based Clinical Practice Guidelines
National Center for Telehealth and Technology(DOD)
US Air Force Recruiting
US Army Medical Recruiting
US Army Medicine Civilian Corps
US Navy Recruiting Command
Veterans’ Evaluation Services
I, for one, am appalled that the organization to which I have belonged for decades, and the profession I love, are so compromised by their affection for and the support psychologists receive from the military.
It appears to me that the DOD and VA have a disproportionate amount of power at APA, and that it is past time that their power be challenged. Has anyone noticed that the goals of APA and the US military are essentially incompatible? I have, and I know that APA can and should do a better job of resolving this incompatibility in ways that support its own Ethical Principle: Beneficence and Non Maleficence.
Alice LoCicero, Ph.D., is a board certified clinical psychologist and researcher. Co-founder and first president of the Society for Terrorism Research, she has written two books on youth recruited to terrorism and nine articles and chapters on terrorism. For the upcoming academic year, she will be Visiting Scholar at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA.
