A Call for Annulment of APA’s PENS Report
Over the decade since the horrendous attacks of 9/11, the world has been shocked by the specter of abusive interrogations and the torture of national security prisoners by agents of the United States government. Although psychologists in the U.S. have made significant contributions to societal welfare on many fronts during this period, the profession tragically has also witnessed psychologists acting as planners, consultants, researchers, and overseers to these abusive interrogations. Moreover, in the guise of keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical and effective," psychologists were used to provide legal protection for otherwise illegal treatment of prisoners.
The American Psychological Association’s (APA) 2005 Report of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (the PENS Report) is the defining document endorsing psychologists’ engagement in detainee interrogations. Despite evidence that psychologists were involved in abusive interrogations, the PENS Task Force concluded that psychologists play a critical role in keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical and effective.” With this stance, the APA, the largest association of psychologists worldwide, became the sole major professional healthcare organization to support practices contrary to the international human rights standards that ought to be the benchmark against which professional codes of ethics are judged.
The PENS Report remains highly influential today. Negating efforts by APA members to limit the damages – including passage of an unprecedented member-initiated referendum in 2008 – the Department of Defense continues to disseminate the PENS Report in its instructions to psychologists involved in intelligence operations. The Report also has been adopted, at least informally, as the foundational ethics document for “operational psychology” as an area of specialization involving psychologists in counterintelligence and counterterrorism operations. And the PENS Report is repeatedly cited as a resource for ethical decision-making in the APA Ethics Committee’s new National Security Commentary, a “casebook” for which the APA is currently soliciting feedback.
Equally troubling, the PENS Report was the result of institutional processes that were illegitimate, inconsistent with APA’s own standards, and far outside the norms of transparency, independence, diversity, and deliberation for similar task forces established by professional associations. Deeply problematic aspects include the inherent bias in the Task Force membership (e.g., six of the nine voting members were on the payroll of the U.S. military and/or intelligence agencies, with five having served in chains of command accused of prisoner abuses); significant conflicts of interest (e.g., unacknowledged participants included the spouse of a Guantánamo intelligence psychologist and several high-level lobbyists for Department of Defense and CIA funding for psychologists); irregularities in the report approval process (e.g., the Board’s use of emergency powers that preempted standard review mechanisms); and unwarranted secrecy associated with the Report (e.g., unusual prohibitions on Task Force members’ freedom to discuss the Report). These realities point to the impossibility and inadequacy of merely updating or correcting deficiencies in the PENS Report.
We the undersigned organizations and individuals – health professionals, social scientists, social justice and human rights scholars and activists, and concerned military and intelligence professionals – therefore declare that the PENS Report is illegitimate. We call upon the American Psychological Association to take immediate steps to annul the PENS Report. At the same time, in our own efforts, we aim to make the illegitimacy of the PENS Report more broadly known within our communities.
Organizational Signers
Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Center for Constitutional Rights
Center for Justice and Accountability
Defence for Children International – Palestine Section
Division 32, Society for Humanistic Psychology, American Psychological Association
Executive Committee of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (APA Division 24)
International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School
Massachusetts Campaign Against Torture
National Religious Campaign Against Torture
Network of Spiritual Progressives
New York Campaign Against Torture
Physicians for Human Rights
Program for Torture Victims
Psychoactive – Mental Health Professionals for Human Rights, Israel
Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Veterans for Peace
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Individual Signers
Note: Affiliations that appear below are for identification purposes only
Roy Eidelson, PhD, Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility; Associate Director, Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, Bryn Mawr College
Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD, APA PENS Task Force Member, Project on Ethics and Art in Testimony
Michael Wessells, PhD, APA PENS Task Force Member, Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health, Columbia University
Stephen Soldz, PhD, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Steven Reisner, PhD, Candidate for APA President; Clinical Assistant Professor, NYU Medical School; Faculty and Supervisor, International Trauma Studies Program, New York City
Brad Olson, PhD, President-Elect, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, National Louis University, Chicago, IL
Bryant Welch, PhD, Program Director and Professor of Psychology, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA
Trudy Bond, PhD, Independent Psychologist; Steering Committee, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Philip Zimbardo, President, American Psychological Association (2002); Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Stanford University
Stephen N. Xenakis, MD, Brigadier General (Ret), U.S. Army
Nathaniel A. Raymond, Former Director of the Campaign Against Torture at Physicians for Human Rights
Leonard Rubenstein, Senior Scholar, Center for Public Health and Human Rights, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor (ret.), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Robert Jay Lifton, Lecturer in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance; Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Psychology, The City University of New York
Manfred Nowak, Professor for International Law and Human Rights, University of Vienna; Director, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights
David Remes, Appeal for Justice; Guantánamo habeas attorney since 2004
Gerald Gray, LCSW, Co-Director, Institute for Redress & Recovery, Santa Clara University School of Law
Morton Deutsch, Past President, APA Divisions 8 (Society for Personality and Social Psychology), 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues), and 48 (Peace Psychology); Professor Emeritus, Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Nora Sveaass, UN Committee Against Torture; Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway
Daniel Ellsberg, PhD, Economics (Harvard 1962), Senior Fellow, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Director Truth-Telling Project, Kensington CA
Herbert C. Kelman, PhD, Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Emeritus, Harvard University; Past President, APA Divisions 8 (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) and 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues); past member, APA Board of Directors, Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility, and Ethics Committee; Cambridge, Massachusetts
Steven H. Miles, MD, Professor of Medicine and Bioethics, University of Minnesota
Udo Schuklenk, PhD Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada
George Hunsinger, Professor of Systematic Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary
Vincent Iacopino, MD, PhD, Senior Medical Advisor, Physicians for Human Rights; Adjunct Professor of Medicine, University of Minnesota Medical School; Senior Research Fellow, Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley
David DeBatto, former US Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and Iraq war veteran
Buz Eisenberg, Chair, International Justice Network; Attorney for Guantánamo detainees since 2005
Michael Ratner, President Emeritus, Center for Constitutional Rights
Vince Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights
Susan Opotow, Past President, APA Division 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues); Professor, City University of New York
Richard Wagner, Past President, APA Division 48 (Peace Psychology); Professor Emeritus, Bates College
Marc Pilisuk, Past President, APA Division 48 (Peace Psychology); Professor Emeritus, University of California; Professor, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center
Ethel Tobach, PhD, Past President, APA Division 48 (Peace Psychology); American Museum of Natural History, New York
Joseph de Rivera, Past President, APA Division 48 (Peace Psychology); Research Professor, Clark University
Marybeth Shinn, PhD, Professor, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN
James Coyne, PhD, Director, Behavioral Oncology Program, Abramson Cancer Center and Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
Luisa Saffiotti, PhD, President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Jancis Long, PhD, Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Frank Summers, PhD, President-Elect (as of January 2012), APA Division 39 (Psychoanalysis); Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University
Alice Shaw, PhD, President, Section IX, APA Division 39 (Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility)
Jules Lobel, President, Center for Constitutional Rights; Bessie McKee Walthour Endowed Chair Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh Law School
Bernice Lott, Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women’s Studies, University of Rhode Island
Ruth Fallenbaum, WithholdAPADues Steering Committee
Dan Aalbers, WithholdAPADues Steering Committee
Anthony Marsella, Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility; Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii
Ghislaine Boulanger, PhD, WithholdAPADues Steering Committee
Jean L. Hill, PhD, President-Elect, APA Division 27 (Society for Community Research and Action); Professor of Psychology, New Mexico Highlands University
Joseph Margulies, Attorney, MacArthur Justice Center, Clinical Professor, Northwestern Law School
Martha Davis, PhD, Visiting Scholar (ret.), John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
Kristine Huskey, Director, Anti-Torture Program, Physicians for Human Rights; Guantanamo detainee habeas counsel (2002-2011)
Scott Horton, Columbia University School of Law
William P. Quigley, Professor of Law, Loyola University New Orleans
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun Magazine; Executive Director, The Institute for Labor and Mental Health
Scott Allen, MD, Clinical Associate Professor, School of Medicine, University of California, Riverside
M. Brinton Lykes, PhD, Professor of Community-Cultural Psychology, Boston College; Co-Founder, Ignacio Martin-Baro Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights
David Luban, University Professor in Law and Philosophy, Georgetown University
Jeffrey S. Kaye, PhD, Clinician, Survivors International, San Francisco
Sibel Edmonds, Founder & Director, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC)
David Sloan-Rossiter, Boston Institute for Psychotherapy; Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis
Stephen R. Shalom, Department of Political Science, William Paterson University
Andrea Cousins, PhD, PsyD, Massachusetts Campaign Against Torture (MACAT), Northampton, MA
Lynne Layton, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Deborah Popowski, Clinical Instructor, International Human Rights Clinic; Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School
Shara Sand, PsyD, Assistant Professor, LaGuardia Community College; Past Chair, Divisions for Social Justice, American Psychological Association; Past President, Division of Social Justice, New York State Psychological Association
Jose Quiroga, MD, Co-founder and Medical Director, Program for Torture Victims
Ana Deutsch, MFT, Co-founder and Clinical Director, Program for Torture Victims
Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis FBI Legal Counsel
Donald Bersoff, PhD, J.D., Earle Mack School of Law, Candidate for APA President, Radnor
Michelle Fine, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, The Graduate Center, Montclair
Dan Christie, PhD, Past President, Div 48 (peace psychology); Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility; Prof Emeritus, Ohio State University, USA, Delaware, Ohio
Paul Kimmel, PhD, Past President of APA Division 48 (Peace Psychology) and Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Saybrook University, Panama City Panama
Lisa Hajjar, Associate Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA
Uwe Jacobs, PhD, CA
Tom Hayden, Peace and Justice Resource Center, Culver City, CA
Eduardo Diaz, PhD, Past President-APA Division 48 (Peace Psychology), Miami-Dade County Florida
Dan Mayton, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Lewis-Clark State College, Lewiston Idaho
Karen Hollis, PhD, President, APA Division 3 (Experimental Psychology); Past President, APA Division 6 (Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology), Granby MA
Kwang-Kuo Hwang, Ph.D., Psychology, National Chair Professor, National Taiwan University; President, International Association of Indigenous and Cultural, Taipei Taiwan
Maureen O'Connor, PhD Psychology; JD, Professor, City University of New York, Brooklyn NY
Corann Okorodudu, Professor of Psychology & Africana Studies, West Deptford New Jersey
Hector Betancourt, PhD, Past President, APA Division 48, Peace Psychology, Professor of Psychology, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda California
James Lamiell, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Dept. of Psychology, Georgetown University, Oakton Virginia
Joan Chrisler, PhD, Connecticut College, Milford CT
Jonathan Hafetz, JD, Seton Hall University School of Law, Brooklyn, New York
