This time, we mean it -- American psychologists on torture

Nov. 6, 2007 | Editor's note: The world's largest association of psychologists, the American Psychological Association, is coming out against torture.000 Again.

The new statement, in a letter from APA president Sharon Stephens Brehm to President Bush, is an apparent effort to make it clear that psychologists really can't be involved in abuse. Really.

What psychologists say about torture matters, particularly since revelations this summer showed that two psychologists helped establish the CIA's notorious "enhanced" interrogation system at the agency's network of secret prisons.

The psychologists' position on interrogations has been famously muddled and evolving during the Bush administration. While the associations of American medical doctors and psychiatrists banned their members from the interrogation of terror suspects altogether, the APA in 2005 drafted interrogation guidelines that said psychologists helping interrogators were "protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm." Those guidelines contained a relatively generic ban on torture that critics said White House attorneys would turn into Swiss cheese.

This past August, the APA formally adopted a new resolution containing a more articulate ban on abuse and barring psychologists from 19 specific interrogation techniques, including some reportedly employed by the CIA. But again, critics saw wiggle room: The August resolution denounces isolation and sleep deprivation only when "used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm." Isolation and sleep deprivation are hallmark interrogation techniques reportedly used by the CIA. And the Military Commissions Act, signed by President Bush in October 2006, only criminalizes "serious and non-transitory" mental abuse. It looked like a hand-in-glove exception.

APA officials have said they did not mean to create another loophole. If that is so, the new letter from Brehm to Bush doesn't seem to clarify much, since it just reiterates that psychologists cannot use the "techniques delineated in APA's 2007 resolution." Leonard Rubenstein, a lawyer and the president of Physicians for Human Rights, said Brehm's new letter "just refers back" to that same August resolution.

In an e-mail to Salon, Stephen Behnke, the APA's ethics director, went farther. Behnke said the APA's August resolution on the 19 interrogation techniques "should not be interpreted in a manner that leaves any ambiguity whatsoever in APA's position," Behnke wrote. "'Enhanced' interrogation techniques, also known as 'no-touch' torture and 'torture light,' are unethical and prohibited."

Rubenstein said if that is so, it needs to become official APA policy and not just appear in an e-mail from Behnke. "The ethics director has taken a position," Rubenstein said of Behnke's e-mail to Salon. "And we think it is essential that the organization adopt this as official policy."

Brehm's letter is below. It continues on the following page.