Amid ongoing revelations that the American Psychological Association (APA) aided the U.S. government’s secret torture program, several APA officials on Tuesday announced their resignation from the organization, including its chief executive officer.
Dr. Norman Anderson, who became CEO of the APA in 2003, said he was leaving in order to “allow the association to take another step in the important process of organizational healing,” according to a press release.
Also stepping down from their posts are deputy CEO Dr. Michael Honaker, who will leave on August 15, and communications director Rhea K. Farberman.
Those three officials, along with several other senior APA members, were named in a 542-page report released last month by law firm Sidley Austin examining the APA’s role in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s torture program.
Honaker supervised the APA’s ethics director, lawyer and psychologist Stephen Behnke. Behnke left his post last week.
As David Luban, founding editor of Just Security and Georgetown University Law Center professor, wrote in an op-ed on Monday, the report—known as the Hoffman report for Sidley Austin’s lead investigator, David Hoffman—portrayed Behnke as “the impresario of the organization’s campaign to depict itself as a human rights champion, while quietly permitting its members to engage in coercive interrogations and shielding them from ethics complaints.”
“If the APA is taking steps to right this ship, the departure of the people who were implicated [in the Hoffman report] is essential,” Luban told Common Dreams.
In one instance outlined in the report (pdf), Behnke told Honaker that he had done contract work for the Department of Defense (DOD), giving paid ethics lectures to agents participating in interrogation training at a U.S. Army base.
“Honaker did not provide this information to CEO Norman Anderson or the Board,” the report states. “Honaker said that it did not occur to him that the Board would need to know or discuss this information, because he saw it as a standard example of Behnke providing ethics training to an important group of psychologists, as he does in a variety of settings.”
“If the APA is taking steps to right this ship, the departure of the people who were implicated [in the Hoffman report] is essential.”
—David Luban, Just Security
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