While condemning critics as "opportunistic commentators", President Koocher touts, rather, the Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS), in which a hand-picked membership, including six (out of nine) voting members from the military and intelligence establishment, were carefully guided by the APA leadership to the predetermined conclusion that psychologist participation in interrogations at Guantanamo and the numerous other U.S. detention facilities around the world was ethically permissible, indeed, President Koocher gives the sense, even admirable.

While condemning "torture" in the abstract, the APA has systematically refused to deal with the reality of what occurs at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base (see also Papers reveal Bagram abuse), or any of the numerous other places around the world where tens of thousands are detained by American forces and abused, with no rights, legal protections, or sense of when, or if, they will ever be released.

Thus, through this subterfuge, psychology has become one of those professions accepting the deliberate infliction of human suffering and the systematic destruction of human beings. If the APA policy allowing participation in interrogations is not reversed soon, the phrase "American psychologist" will start being uttered in sentences that also include phrases like "Soviet psychiatrists" or "Nazi doctors"

As occurred in response to Soviet psychiatry, which contributed to the maintenance of "state security" by locking up  dissidents in mental hospitals, perhaps it is time for psychological and other professional associations around the world to cease collaborating with the torture-accepting American Psychological Association.
 

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