The American Psychological Association is not just another professional association so caught up in the excitement of its own advancements in research that it has become disconnected from our current social reality. Some of its respected members have been actively aiding and abetting torture at illegal detention sites set up by the Bush administration, and the leadership of the APA has actively blocked attempts by its members to ban any and all engagement with interrogation proceedings at sites like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and the secret detention centers set up through the Administration’s policy of “extraordinary rendition” ( i.e., outsourcing torture to countries that have no laws against it).

In his book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Alfred McCoy documents the CIA’s decades-long exploitation of psychological research for the purpose of developing effective methods of psychological torture, which, it was hoped, would render detainees incapable of withholding information. This knowledge was also used to inform elements of the U.S. Military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) program, which trains service members and civilians in the art of surviving captivity.

The SERE program’s chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks (who later served on the APA’s PENS Ethics Task Force), was involved in training BSCT (or “Biscuit”) teams in Guantanamo and served at the Bagram detention center in Afghanistan. According to Human Rights First, the interrogation that led to the death of Iraqi Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush involved the use of techniques learned in the SERE training program. Internal FBI memos and press reports have pointed to SERE training as the basis for some of the harshest techniques authorized for use on detainees by the Pentagon in 2002 and 2003.