Resolution to exclude American psychologists role in foreign prisons

Faculty members of the Psychology Department at the University of Rhode Island, by majority vote, have signed a resolution stating that “direct or indirect participation by psychologists in interrogations of prisoners incarcerated in foreign detention centers that do not afford prisoners internationally recognized due process of law is unethical.”

URI’s resolution is part of a growing grassroots effort to urge the American Psychological Association to move beyond its current position, which allows psychologists working in foreign prisons to assist teams in certain kinds of interrogations.

The association’s failure to rule out all participation has been the subject of protest among some of its members, some of whom are withholding dues while others are resigning. Psychologists at six colleges and universities, URI among them, have passed resolutions in hopes that the APA will reconsider its stance.

APA’s policy regarding the ethics of psychologists working as behavioral science consultants to the military or CIA as it interrogates “enemy combatants” in foreign prisons has evolved from a taskforce report in 2005 that was never adopted or approved by the Council of Representatives to resolutions in 2006 and 2007 that were debated and approved.

The 2007 resolution reaffirms APA’s condemnation of torture and other cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment or punishment under any conditions. But the APA Council did not approve an amendment asking psychologists to refrain from participating in any way in the interrogation of foreign detainees, but to limit their role “as health personnel to the provision of psychological treatment.” This amendment was not approved despite the fact that the 2007 resolution expresses concern over the conditions of detainment in settings where detainees are deprived of international and human rights. In public statements, APA leaders maintain the wisdom of continuing to be “engaged” in the interrogation process.

Providence Journal - Read Full Text

The executive board of the American Anthropology Association (AAA) has officially expressed
"its disapproval of the HTS program," a military effort that embeds social scientists in the military. The decision to condemn HTS cannot stop academics from signing on, but it will undoubtedly make it harder for the military to recruit qualified anthropologists to the program, and likely will escalate an already heated war of words between supporters and critics of the work.

Excerpt:
The AAA Executive Board’s Assessment of the HTS Project

The U.S. military’s HTS project places anthropologists, as contractors with the U.S. military, in settings of war, for the purpose of collecting cultural and social data for use by the U.S. military. The ethical concerns raised by these activities include the following:

As military contractors working in settings of war, HTS anthropologists work in situations where it will not always be possible for them to distinguish themselves from military personnel and identify themselves as anthropologists. This places a significant constraint on their ability to fulfill their ethical responsibility as anthropologists to disclose who they are and what they are doing.

1. HTS anthropologists are charged with responsibility for negotiating relations among a number of groups, including both local populations and the U.S. military units that employ them and in which they are embedded. Consequently, HTS anthropologists may have responsibilities to their U.S. military units in war zones that conflict with their obligations to the persons they study or consult, specifically the obligation, stipulated in the AAA Code of Ethics, to do no harm to those they study (section III, A, 1).
   
2. HTS anthropologists work in a war zone under conditions that make it difficult for those they communicate with to give “informed consent” without coercion, or for this consent to be taken at face value or freely refused. As a result, “voluntary informed consent” (as stipulated by the AAA Code of Ethics, section III, A, 4) is compromised.
   
3. As members of HTS teams, anthropologists provide information and counsel to U.S. military field commanders. This poses a risk that information provided by HTS anthropologists could be used to make decisions about identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations either in the short or long term. Any such use of fieldwork-derived information would violate the stipulations in the AAA Code of Ethics that those studied not be harmed (section III A, 1).