What steps would APA take if it learned that a psychologist participated in or had knowledge of others designing or implementing cruel, degrading or inhuman interrogation techniques?

A. APA members have a responsibility to intervene to stop abuse and to report abusive incidents to appropriate authorities. The APA Ethics Committee will investigate, under well-established procedures, any allegation that a member has violated APA’s strict prohibition against engaging in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or reporting relevant information. The chair of the Ethics Committee has made clear that any member found to have engaged in unethical behavior will face committee sanction, up to and including expulsion from APA. Such an action could also lead to revocation by the relevant state agency of the psychologist’s license to practice. Q. Has APA disciplined the psychologists who, according to media reports, reverse-engineered the SERE (Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion) training techniques that were used by the CIA as the basis for interrogation procedures? A . Two psychologists have been identified by the media as developers of these interrogation ...  more