{"id":27965,"date":"2013-04-22T12:00:32","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T11:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=27965"},"modified":"2015-05-06T12:53:12","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T11:53:12","slug":"responding-to-the-constitution-project-report-on-detainee-treatment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/04\/responding-to-the-constitution-project-report-on-detainee-treatment\/","title":{"rendered":"Responding to the Constitution Project Report on Detainee Treatment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday [16 Apr 2013] the independent and nonpartisan Constitution Project released its Task Force Report on Detainee Treatment<\/a>. The comprehensive report was developed over a period of more than two years, in order to \u201cprovide an accurate and authoritative account of how the United States treated people its forces held in custody as the nation mobilized to deal with a global terrorist theat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chapter 6 of the report \u2013 \u201cThe Role of Medical Professionals in Detention and Interrogation Operations\u201d \u2013 includes a review of the role of psychologists. The Report documents \u2013 in no uncertain terms \u2013 that psychologists \u201chelped create interrogation techniques for use in questioning detainees\u201d and that many of these techniques \u201cconstituted torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.\u201d The Report also confirms that psychologists \u201cparticipated variously in interrogations by monitoring certain interrogations, providing or allowing to be provided medical information on detainees to interrogators, and not reporting abuses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Included as well is a critical appraisal of the American Psychological Association\u2019s 2005 \u201cPENS Report\u201d<\/a> on psychological ethics and national security. The Report on Detainee Treatment notes that the PENS Task Force, while asserting that it is ethical for psychologists to consult to national security interrogations, declined to \u201crender any judgment concerning events that may or may not have occurred in national security-related settings.\u201d The new Report also makes it clear that the PENS Task Force was dominated by members actively engaged with military\/intelligence agencies and that several of these members had prior knowledge of psychologists\u2019 involvement in abusive and torturous interrogations.\u00a0 This crucial knowledge was withheld from those members of the PENS Task Force not involved in national security operations or research, and it did not inform the PENS deliberations. Michael Wessells, who ultimately resigned from the PENS Task Force, is cited in the Report on Detainee Treatment as stating that he came to regard PENS as \u201cpredominantly a national security establishment operation\u201d rather than a \u201crepresentative dialogue\u201d of psychologists.<\/p>\n

As members of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology<\/a>, we believe that the release of the Constitution Project\u2019s Report on Detainee Treatment is an appropriate opportunity to reiterate our call for annulment and repudiation of the APA\u2019s PENS Report. We have previously detailed the flawed and illegitimate nature of the PENS process and Report in both a Background Statement<\/a> and a Draft Resolution<\/a>. Our online PENS Annulment Petition<\/b><\/a> has already garnered endorsement from over thirty organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights, the ACLU, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, several divisions of the APA, and over 2,200 individuals including U.S. and international health professionals, social scientists, human rights scholars and activists, habeas attorneys, and concerned military and intelligence professionals.<\/p>\n

Almost eight years have now passed since the highly consequential PENS Report was produced, over the course of a single weekend. A serious and thorough accounting is long overdue and indispensable in order to restore the ethical foundations of the profession we hold dear. The consolidation of current APA policy into a single document, as recently recommended by the APA\u2019s \u201cMember-Initiated Task Force,\u201d is wholly inadequate, in part because it fails to acknowledge, examine, or redress the misguided priorities and flawed decision-making of APA\u2019s leadership.<\/p>\n

The Coalition for an Ethical Psychology therefore again calls for annulment of the PENS Report. At the same time, we renew our invitation for APA divisions and other concerned organizations and groups to endorse our online PENS Annulment Petition<\/b><\/a>, and we encourage you to join us in publicizing the opportunity for individuals to add their signatures as well. If you have already signed on, we thank you for your support.<\/p>\n

Thank you for your time and consideration.<\/p>\n

Sincerely,<\/p>\n

Roy Eidelson
\nJean Maria Arrigo
\nTrudy Bond
\nBrad Olson
\nSteven Reisner
\nStephen Soldz
\n\u2026<\/p>\n

Sign the PENS Annulment Petition Here: <\/i><\/b>www.ethicalpsychology.org\/pens<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

______________________<\/p>\n

Roy Eidelson is a<\/i> member of the TRANSCEND network. He is a clinical psychologist and the president of\u00a0Eidelson Consulting<\/a>, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of\u00a0Psychologists for Social Responsibility<\/a><\/strong>, associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a member of the\u00a0Coalition for an Ethical Psychology<\/a><\/strong>. Roy can be reached at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday [16 Apr 2013] the independent and nonpartisan Constitution Project released its Task Force Report on Detainee Treatment. The Report documents \u2013 in no uncertain terms \u2013 that psychologists \u201chelped create interrogation techniques for use in questioning detainees\u201d and that many of these techniques \u201cconstituted torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[197,65,57,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-special-feature","category-anglo-america","category-militarism","category-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27965\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}