Fearing a Trump Return to Torture, Psychologists Keep Ban at Guantanamo
Even America’s psychologists — the people tasked with knitting people’s psyches back together — are fighting over politics. And the battlefield is their role in the nation’s war on terrorism.
By Joe Garofoli
Even America’s psychologists — the people tasked with knitting people’s psyches back together — are fighting over politics. And the battlefield is their role in the nation’s war on terrorism.
Meeting in San Francisco on Wednesday, a leadership group of the American Psychological Association, the industry’s largest professional organization, voted 105 to 57 to continue to ban military psychologists from treating prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, where the U.S. is holding foreigners it suspects of being terrorists.
The organization imposed the ban in 2015 to prevent military psychologists from working in “settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either international law…or the U.S. Constitution.”
The association imposed the ban on military psychologists after a report it commissioned found that some had helped torture detainees to try to obtain…
