The largest psychologist organization in the United States colluded with the CIA and the Pentagon to manipulate the association’s ethics guidelines in order to assist the government's “enhanced interrogation program,” which included torture, and also to fend off growing dissent from heath professionals at the agencies, a new sweeping report claimed.

The 542-page report, obtained by the New York Times, examined the close relationship between the American Psychological Association (APA), the CIA and the Pentagon and their illegal interrogation programs authorized by President George W. Bush’s after the 9/11 attacks.

The report says that the association’s ethics office “prioritized the protection of psychologists — even those who might have engaged in unethical behavior — above the protection of the public.”

Psychologists who aided in US torture deserve our condemnation and disgust. Doctors who injure people are evil https://t.co/yJL5hbhCCN

— Matthew Papakipos (@papakipos) July 10, 201

The new report is the result of a seven-month investigation conducted by a team led by David Hoffman, a Chicago lawyer with the firm Sidley Austin at the request of the psychology association’s board.

The report says that in 2005, a task force compiled a report that introduced 12 ethical guidelines that were included in the APA official ethic policy. The guidelines were adopted as part of the APA ethics policy in an APA emergency board meeting a week later.

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Those guidelines were the result of APA officials working closely with government officials at the CIA and the military. The new loose and high-level ethics policy aimed at making the association’s guidelines similar to those of the government's and thus gaining the ethical support against accusations of ethical misconduct.

In addition, two former presidents of the psychological association were members of a CIA advisory committee, the report found. One of them provided the agency with an opinion that sleep deprivation did not constitute torture.

The other held a small ownership stake in a consulting company founded by two men who oversaw the agency’s interrogation program, it also reported.

The: 'we think torturing works' people used status bias to introduce the use of torture by US soldiers http://t.co/8sgjAadeVy

— Carol Dunn (@caroldn) July 10, 201

The report found that the APA ethics director at the time, along with other officials in the association, worked secretly to shut down efforts by the APA Council of Representatives to pass resolutions prohibiting psychologists from participating in interrogations in Guantanamo Bay prison and other U.S. detention facilities.

In December last year, a U.S. Senate Committee issued a damning report that uncovered the nature of the CIA's enhanced interrogation, or torture, programs and how these practices violated international laws.

Hoffman's report, dated July 2, gives a detailed look into how the CIA and the U.S. military sought since the beginning of those notorious programs to work and conspire with other agencies in the country to justify and legitimize their actions.

The report said the APA's goal behind supporting the military and the CIA was to continue the cash flow of millions of dollars as the U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA are the largest employers of psychologists in the country. 

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