Steven Reisner

• Dr. Steven Reisner is running for President of the American Psychological Association (APA).
• He is a leading activist calling for psychologists to be banned from participating in interrogations at U.S. military detention centers, like Guantanamo Bay, that violate human rights and function outside of the Geneva Conventions.
• The first Principle of the APA ethics code reads: “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.”
• Yet, since 2002, military and intelligence psychologists have helped design and implement new interrogation procedures, drawing from a military training program that teaches soldiers how to survive torture in POW camps. The military reverse-engineered torture survival training into abusive interrogation techniques, and implemented a reward/punishment program that withholds basic necessities to induce compliance with intelligence operations. Psychologists have been involved throughout. This violates the principle of “do no harm.”
• The APA has consistently supported psychologists’ role in these military and intelligence interrogations, has placed psychologists from commands implicated in the abuses in charge of APA policy on interrogations, and has made changes to its ethics code that have been used to support these practices.
• Steven Reisner’s first order of business as APA president will be to work to undo these ethical lapses and change APA policy to prohibit psychologists from participating in these practices.
• Watch the TV appearance below, sign up for our mailing list, read up, and tell your friends and colleagues about what is going on (there’s a link at the bottom to share this page).

Steven Reisner comments on the Senate Arms Services Committee’s hearings of June 17, as seen on Democracy Now, 06/19/2008.

I am running for President of the American Psychological Association for several reasons, but none more important than the fact that the APA’s support of psychologists’ participation in detainee interrogations and detention operations demonstrates that the association has lost its moral compass. APA interrogation policy is a part of a culture of unreflective support of military and intelligence counterterrorism operations that has led our country and our profession down a dangerous and disingenuous path. This policy and culture have undermined the APA’s independence, its scientific integrity, and its ability to lead us into the twenty-first century. The APA, and the field of psychology it represents, must stand unequivocally for human rights and human welfare. Otherwise, we are merely a guild, promoting only the interests of its well-connected members; otherwise, we are the tools of our government, pandering to programs that violate our own ethical values.

My foremost task as APA President will be to reclaim our first ethical principle of beneficence: “to benefit those with whom [we] work and take care to do no harm… to safeguard the welfare and rights of those with whom [we] interact professionally and other affected persons.”

At this point in our history, our Association stands alone among the health professions in supporting its members’ direct participation in military and CIA interrogations. Psychiatrists, physicians, and nurses, have all rejected such participation and aligned themselves with international standards of medical ethics. Recently, international associations of psychologists, too, have protested our Association’s unique position. The Nordic Psychological Associations stated in their June 25th, 2008 letter to the APA that “military psychologists cannot function in an ethically correct way in sites where basic human rights are systematically violated and where appropriate international bodies of control are denied access.”

New information steadily emerges on psychologists’ operational role in abusive detention conditions—from the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, the Defense Department’s Inspector General Report, and the press—directly implicating psychologists in the design or practice of abusive interrogations at Guantánamo, Bagram and at CIA black sites. When orders came directly from the White House to use waterboarding, sleep and sensory deprivation, and other abusive techniques on detainees, psychologists implemented the program; and when secret Justice Department memos asserted that health professionals’ oversight was required to render such techniques legal, psychologists provided that oversight. These revelations are not only morally damning but scientifically embarrassing, with psychological research and theory distorted for political maneuvers and abusive ends.

Let’s be clear – these abusive interrogation procedures and conditions were not exceptions, perpetrated by unsupervised individuals. These abuses were part of a carefully developed program of psychological pressure, abuse, and torture, supported by protocols from the CIA and the military and with legal justifications from the Justice Department. Psychologists helped to author and implement those protocols and to give legal cover to those involved in abuse. To this day, brutal systems of psychological reward and punishment are implemented and overseen by psychologists at Guantánamo.

While the APA has passed several anti-torture resolutions, APA policy continues to support psychologists’ presence at detention sites whose very conditions violate international law, and where psychologists have been consistently implicated in those violations. Against all evidence, it remains APA policy that psychologists’ presence at such sites is necessary to keep interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.”

As president, I will seek practical measures to prohibit such involvement and to restore APA’s reputation as an unequivocal voice for human welfare. Such measures would protect not only “those with whom we interact professionally,” as mandated by our Ethics Code, but our good name—and future!—as a profession. It would also offer safeguards for our military and CIA psychologists from moral compromise under pressure as well as from potential criminal liability.

Resolving our ethical conflicts will strengthen our profession as we confront healthcare reform and other significant challenges to our profession in the 21st Century. As APA President, I will advocate on behalf of these pressing issues, based upon the same guiding principles of improving human welfare, doing no harm, and upholding scientific integrity:

• to bring about universal health care, accompanied by full mental health parity.
• to raise awareness of the psychological dimension of environmental and ecological responsibility through research, practice and policy.
• to address the crisis in mental health care and private practice through public education and through combating managed care’s ever narrowing definition of mental illness and treatment.
• to advance the role of psychology in our transition into a diverse and global society.
• to work to resolve the crisis in psychology education and training, address the problems of student funding and debt, and help develop diverse internship opportunities relevant to our changing world.
• to build bridges between our research and practice communities by fostering a variety of research-practice partnerships.
• to restore and increase behavioral research funding, particularly in areas that further psychology’s time-honored commitment to human welfare and social justice.

Currently, the APA puts an extraordinary effort into supporting government funding for psychologists’ contributions to homeland security and counterterrorism. Such advocacy may have its place, in that it supports psychologists seeking government-funded contracts and academic grants. But, in a manner analogous to psychiatry’s dependence on pharmaceutical funding, our dependence on military-related contracts and appropriations can undermine our necessary independence. We must undertake a transparent, internal review of the allocation of APA resources and lobbying efforts so that APA members may decide together how to best advocate for the good of our members, our scientific discipline, and our society. But we cannot bring the best of our field to bear on these pressing issues unless we put our ethical house in order. With your vote for my presidency and with your assistance, we can transform the APA at this turning point in our history.