{"id":49021,"date":"2014-10-27T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2014-10-27T12:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=49021"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:36","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:36","slug":"james-risen-vs-the-american-psychological-association","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/10\/james-risen-vs-the-american-psychological-association\/","title":{"rendered":"James Risen vs. the American Psychological Association"},"content":{"rendered":"

Place your bets everyone. In one corner stands James Risen, the distinguished\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>investigative reporter with two Pulitzer Prizes under his belt. In the opposite corner stands the Board of the American Psychological Association, ever ready to protect APA\u2019s reputation from assault.<\/p>\n

What brings these two into the ring is Risen\u2019s new bestseller\u00a0Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War<\/em><\/a>. Relying on never-before-disclosed emails involving senior officials from the APA and the CIA, Risen makes the case that the two organizations secretly colluded to craft the APA\u2019s ethics policies for psychologists, policies that provided support and cover for the Bush Administration\u2019s \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d torture program.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0response<\/a>\u00a0to the book\u2019s publication last week, the APA Board accused Risen of \u201cinnuendo and one-sided reporting\u201d but offered no defense against his actual\u00a0claims and evidence<\/a>. The APA instead resorted to a feeble three-punch combination of misdirection (deeming as \u201cabsurd\u201d the notion that any financial interests were at stake); Orwellian language tricks (describing secret meetings where the participants and topics were never publicly revealed as \u201cinvitation-only\u201d); and self-righteousness (emphasizing \u201cAPA\u2019s long-standing efforts to safeguard against the use of torture\u201d). Flailing jabs like these are unlikely to prove effective; in a recent\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0Risen accurately described them as a \u201cnon-denial denial.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually the APA leadership\u2019s habitual duck-and-slip strategy will also falter. They can\u2019t indefinitely elude the blunt force of an email trail revealing that the CIA played a central role in developing and selecting members for the APA\u2019s Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). Most of those\u00a0task force members<\/a>\u00a0worked for the military or intelligence agencies, and several were in chains of command where detainee abuses were reported to have taken place. Not surprisingly, the\u00a0PENS report<\/a>\u00a0asserted that psychologists play a valuable role in keeping detention and interrogation operations \u201csafe, legal, ethical, and effective.\u201d<\/p>\n

In responding to\u00a0Pay Any Price,\u00a0<\/em>the APA Board simply lacks a convincing counterpunch: for example, evidence that the Association has been resolute in pursuing ethics complaints filed against members alleged to have participated in torture or abuse. Indeed after seven years of delay, this past winter the APA\u2019s Ethics Office formally closed the\u00a0most thoroughly documented case<\/a>\u00a0to date \u2013 without even bringing the complaint to the full Ethics Committee for review and adjudication.<\/p>\n

This fight is not over, but the American Psychological Association may have finally met its match. Whatever the outcome, everyone should be hoping that the truth wins out.<\/p>\n

_________________________________<\/p>\n

Roy Eidelson is a member of the TRANSCEND Network. He is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson 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 Psychologists for Social Responsibility<\/a>, associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology<\/a>. Roy can be reached at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Relying on never-before-disclosed emails involving senior officials from the APA and the CIA, Risen makes the case that the two organizations secretly colluded to craft the APA\u2019s ethics policies for psychologists, policies that provided support and cover for the Bush Administration\u2019s \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d torture program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49021","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=49021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}