Ten years ago, after reading a series of disturbing articles, most notably by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker and reporters for The New York Times, I wrote a commentary for the Los Angeles/San Francisco Daily Journal, California's primary legal newspaper. As an affiliate member of the American Psychological Association (APA) with experience both as a psychology teacher and a California attorney, I was concerned with these reports about the possible involvement of psychologists in the torture taking place at Guantanamo Bay ("Mental Torture: Behavioral scientists at Gitmo may cross line").

In 2005, it was unclear the extent to which psychologists, acting as behavioral scientists, were participating in, and overseeing events related to the torture taking place. I concluded my commentary by suggesting that Americans were due a full accountability as to the actions of both their government and the psychologists.

According to an April 30 report in The New York Times by James Risen, that accountability is just around the bend. Risen writes that APA "secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners."

Risen cites a 61-page report alleging the APA secretly coordinated with officials from the CIA, White House and the Pentagon to change the APA ethics policy to align it with the operational needs of the CIA's torture program.

For those who are interested, the report, "All The President's Psychologists," can be accessed here. https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2069718/report.pdf.

In 2005, the APA's Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, or PENS, determined that it was appropriate for psychologists to remain involved with interrogations, to make sure they remained safe, legal, ethical and effective.

Both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association refused to sanction member participation. APA's policy was later abrogated, but it is only now, with the discovery of the emails of Scott Gerwehr, a researcher who worked at the RAND Corporation and who had close ties with behavioral scientists at APA, that the extent to which APA allowed government to dictate its policy is becoming known.

After the publication of Risen's book "Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 14, 2014)," uncovered numerous documents implicating key psychologists in torture, APA ordered an independent review of the organization's role in the interrogation program, and that review is now underway and will be completed shortly.

But criticism of APA is already pouring in. Writing for Forbes, Todd Essig suggests that the involved leadership of APA should resign in part because in "2005 and 2006 APA officials changed the traditional ethic of 'do no harm' into 'assess the harm being done'."

Essig accuses leadership of engineering "a years-long cover-up of what might have been seen at the time as situationally understandable, though terrible, errors in judgment." APA's cover-up is part and parcel of the organization's failure to take responsibility for its actions, a strategy Essig avers which has been "planted" throughout APA.

In a blog commentary written for the Huffington Post last December, clinical psychologist Bryant Welch said that APA had evolved into an "actual instrument of torture."

One of the co-authors of the 61-page report, Nathaniel Raymond, believes that APA's role in the torture program was so vital that without APA involvement "it is highly likely that the interrogation program itself would have disintegrated."

It now appears that psychological science, through the auspices of its primary organization, was subverted in a way that casts the entire field of psychology into disrepute.

Patrick Mattimore writes a psychology column for the Phuket Gazette, a weekly newspaper in Thailand, and formerly taught AP psychology in the Bay Area.