American Psychological Association helped Bush justify torture

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APA helped justify tortureThe American Psychological Association is accused of secretly collaborating with former President George W. Bush's administration to justify torture.

The All the President's Psychologists report, written by doctors, professors and human rights activists, accuses the APA of working to keep psychologists involved with interrogation programs after the public saw the graphic photos of prisoner abuse in the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prison by U.S. military personnel.

The APA's actions coincided with efforts by senior Bush administration officials to keep the programs alive.

"The APA secretly coordinated with officials from the CIA, White House and the Department of Defense to create an APA ethics policy on national security interrogations, which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the CIA torture program," the report states.

The lead authors of the report are psychologist Dr. Stephen Soldz, an anti-torture adviser for the Physicians for Human Rights organization, Nathaniel Raymond, a director at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and Dr. Steven Reisner, a psychological ethics adviser for Physicians for Human Rights.

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