When Psychologists Torture

According to reporting in Vanity Fair, both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association pre-emptively "determined that it would violate their members’ oaths to patients to participate in interrogations." So the C.I.A. hired a company owned and run by two psychologists to design and oversee its torture program instead. Apparently, the American Psychological Association had nothing to say about psychologists' collusion in human rights abuses. Now, suddenly, they are shocked, shocked I say, to learn what these two psychologists have been up to.

“If these allegations are true," said Rhea Farberman, the director of communications for the APA, "they are clear violations of all of our professional ethics and all of what the discipline stands for.” The "allegations," mind you, have been public knowledge for years and are not disputed, even by the C.I.A.

According to reporting by Vice, "The association spent years denying and evading these accusations, but finally agreed last month to hire an external attorney—Chicago lawyer David Hoffman—to conduct an investigation into the APA’s actions and determine whether or not it enabled the government to torture its war prisoners."

This is enough to make you wonder if late really is better than never.

Psychologists James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were paid more than $80 million to provide cover for the C.I.A., which could now claim that there were "medical professionals" involved in the program—despite the fact that psychologists typically receive no medical training whatsoever.

Jessen, who was briefly a Mormon bishop and is licensed to practice psychology in Idaho, helped design a program that was used to dehumanize and "break" human beings—many of whom had nothing at all to do with terrorism. Any psychologist will tell you that broken human beings rarely, if ever, get truly whole again.

This is a dark time for America and for the American Psychological Association.