To the Editor

Frank Summers's piece entitled “The Credibility of the Ethics Committee and the Change in Standard 1.02” raises serious allegations that the Ethics Committee of the APA itself acted unethically in delaying consideration of the Council's request to amend the code's infamous “Nuremberg defense” for four and a half years. Summers praises the changes that finally were implemented, in that the standard that permitted following law and military regulations over ethics was deleted and a clause that, in Summers's description, “requires unequivocal adherence to human rights” was inserted in its place. However, he is rightly perplexed by the EC's behavior, particularly in the endgame, where the EC issued a report opposing any change in June 2009, and then reversed itself and supported the very language the opposition had been proposing all along.

I believe I might be able to shed light on these events, by drawing on a document from the Department of Defense that has recently been brought to my attention by Len Rubenstein (formerly Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights). Unfortunately, the conclusions I draw bring into question the victory that we all believed we had achieved in pressuring the APA into changing Ethics Standard 1.02.

But first, a bit of history is in order.

The Council of Representatives first expressed its dismay over 1.02 in 2005 after it received the report of the Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) Task Force. Unlike the conclusions drawn from similar committees reviewing the ethical standards of physicians, psychiatrists, and nurses, the PENS Task Force determined that participation in scandalous Bush administration national security interrogations was appropriate for psychologists, and worse, the report appeared to mandate that psychologists follow interrogation protocols even when they conflicted with ethics. The report specifically cited 1.02 in support of its recommendation that “psychologists have an ethical responsibility to be