We spoke to Nadine Weidman (Harvard University) about the Special Section she edited on ‘The Hoffman Report in historical context’, published in the December 2022 issue of History of the Human Sciences.

History of the Human Sciences: Could you briefly introduce the 2015 Hoffman Report and explain its historical background?

Nadine Weidman: In the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration began what it called the Global War on Terror. As part of that war his administration introduced ‘enhanced interrogations’ of political detainees, who were held as prisoners of the war on terror in places like the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. The administration had a great hunger for information about the possible location of future terrorist attacks and so they detained people who they didn’t charge with any specific crime and who were often held in extremely inhumane conditions in these military prisons. Many observers and international organizations said that these enhanced interrogation techniques were actually tantamount to torture. They would involve things like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions – all kinds of really inhumane techniques.

Psychologists got involved in assisting in these interrogations. The APA [American Psychological Association] got into it in 2005 by issuing high-level ethical guidelines that permitted psychologists to assist with and engage in these so-called interrogations. In 2005 the APA convened a committee and put out a report called ‘Psychological Ethics and National Security’, which gave ethical sanction to psychologists participating in these interrogations. As you might imagine, this created a huge firestorm of controversy within the profession. For 10 years – from 2005 to 2015 – the APA faced a great deal of criticism including from psychologists within the APA. Many people left the APA in response to this issue. Then towards the end of 2014 a journalist made public an email correspondence between APA authorities and national security officials showing that the APA had drawn up those high-level ethical guidelines in 2005 in collusion with members of the military, in collusion with the Department of Defense [DoD].

In the wake of this revelation, which showed that the APA was working with the military to produce the high-level guidelines sanctioning psychologists’ involvement in torture, the APA decided it was finally time for some self critique. They appointed an independent legal investigator, David Hoffman, to conduct an investigation of what had gone on with that 2005 report. The Hoffman Report came out in the summer of 2015 exploring what had happened and showing that the APA had colluded with the Department of Defense to come up with these guidelines. Since then the Hoffman report has itself become a target of controversy. People who are named in the Hoffman report as part of this collusion effort have been suing the APA. So the APA is under litigation right now about the report and some people have been trying to vilify Hoffman and his efforts. It’s a huge ongoing controversy and, of course, Guantanamo Bay is still open. I understand that there are still possibly psychologists involved there. It’s an ethical problem that the American Psychological Association has got itself into and doesn’t seem like it has any clear way forward.

HHS: What were you hoping to achieve with this Special Section?

NW: When the Hoffman Report came out in 2015 and I saw the explosion in the field that it had created, I thought that it was necessary to provide some historical perspective on it. The Hoffmann Report itself does contain some history but only a small section out of 500 pages is devoted to history and historians didn’t put it together so it’s kind of sketchy and brief. I thought it would be interesting for historians of psychology who have done a tremendous amount of work on the relationship between psychology and the US military over the past century or more to lend some perspective on this. I felt that there was an idea that what happened with the APA and torture was just a matter of a few bad apples. I kept hearing that expression: “Oh, it’s just a few bad apples. It’s not really anything to do with the profession or with the APA.” It was as if it was just these renegade psychologists who were making sure that these torture interrogations were, as they put it, safe, legal, and effective.

But how could they be safe and also effective? The whole point was to garner some kind of information out of these detainees, who might not have had any involvement in anything at all.

I thought that we needed some more explanation for how psychologists could have turned in this way to cooperating with the military. It made a very striking contrast to psychiatrists. The American Psychiatric Association specifically distanced itself from having anything to do with the War on Terror, whereas the psychologists didn’t. I thought that needed some explanation and I thought that looking at the longer history of psychology and the military starting in World War I and throughout the Cold War would really lend a context and a historical explanation that I felt was missing from other commentary on this issue. So I got together these authors who are experts in this field to give us insight into this relationship.

The first two articles by Joy Rohde and Dan Aalbers are past-oriented and discuss the history, while the latter two articles are more future-directed, they think about what the profession can do now that we know that this has happened.

HHS: In her article ‘Beyond torture: Knowledge and power at the nexus of social science and national security’, Joy Rohde demonstrates that far from originating in the War on Terror, psychology has long-standing connections with the national security services.  What is the significance of these historical entanglements and what ‘cautionary lessons’ do they offer for those responding to the Hoffman Report in the present?

NW: She argues that there has been this ‘psychological-national security nexus’ and that it has benefited both partners. I think that’s key – there have been professional benefits and economic benefits on both sides. The APA itself has benefited in certain ways and I think she shows that. That offers a cautionary lesson in itself because if those benefits are flowing in both directions then we need to know that.

HHS: In ‘The Hoffman Report in historical context: A study in denial’, Dan Aalbers claims that the Hoffman Report can be viewed as a ‘study in denial’ or as an example of ‘motivated blindness’ – what does he mean by this?

NW: He’s arguing that during the Cold War the APA looked away from what might have really been going on. There were these Cold War precedents for involvement of social scientists in interrogation and torture techniques. He says that the DoD and the CIA were using social scientists for their expertise and that professional organizations like the APA were refusing to acknowledge it or refusing to look at the real implications of that. They didn’t want to know what was going on, so they never really faced up to it. They never really opened up about it. I think it’s a little bit of a different argument from saying they gave sanction to it, which I think is what we saw in that 2005 report. This is a little bit more nuanced.

HHS: And he discusses how the use of euphemistic terms like ‘enhanced interrogation’ also facilitates this kind of denial…

NW: Yes. I got these articles together when I was the editor of History of Psychology, which is an APA journal. I was putting together this Hoffman Report special section for that journal. I got all these authors together, they wrote their articles, they went through round after round of peer review and then they went through round after round of legal review. The APA lawyers looked at these articles and censored them. We had to change words. My authors had to insert things like, “in my opinion” or “in my view” or, as you say, use some euphemisms. The APA cited their own legal concerns and their own ongoing involvement in litigation. And then, at the very last minute, when the section was about to appear in the journal the APA called me up and said they declined to publish the special section. The whole thing got stopped right at the very end. They refused publication.

That’s when I turned to Sarah Marks at History of the Human Sciences and asked if we could publish it with you instead. The APA said we could publish it in a non-APA journal but this was after their legal counsel had supposedly approved the articles. That really I did it for me as it seemed like they were preventing this history from being known or trying to use this ongoing legal battle over the Hoffman Report to censor their own history and to legislate what academic historians can and cannot say. That disturbed me. I was very glad that HHS could pick it up and it could finally see the light of day.

HHS: What was specific about the ‘weaponization of psychology post-9/11’ (according to the co-authored article by Jean Maria Arrigo, Lawrence P Rockwood, Jack O’Brien, Dutch France, David DeBatto and John Kitiakou)?

NW: The authors (who are both psychologists and military/intelligence professionals) argue that military sector objectives and academic science objectives are very different. They include charts in the article that show that their [respective] aims and methods are just completely different. And yet, they argue, academic organizations like the APA are prime targets for infiltration from military sector objectives. I think they mean that studying what happened with the APA and within psychology can act as a warning for other social science organizations who might be tempted to line up with the military. They show that this is not a good partnership because the goals are so fundamentally incompatible.

HHS: Elissa N. Rodkey, Michael Buttrey and Krista L. Rodkey’s article ‘Beyond following rules: Teaching research ethics in the age of the Hoffman Report’ argues that the findings of the Hoffman Report ‘illustrate how ethics codes are not objective and ahistorical, but always products of a particular time and place’ – what is the significance of this insight for how ethics codes are understood and taught?

NW: This article asks what the revelations in the report mean for the profession, for psychologists. The authors also ask what it means for us as teachers of psychology and of ethics. They ask how we can teach ethics knowing that one of the major professional academic organizations in the US compromised its ethics in this way. The authors see ethics codes as historically situated, products of time and place. They’re not universal or trans historical or trans cultural. They give some historical background of the APA ethics code, which was one of the earliest in the profession. They also trace how it changed over time. They then talk about the outcomes of the Hoffman Report for the APA ethics code and ask what remains to be done to ensure that such military collusion does not recur. In the end they propose a wholly different view of ethics from what we might be accustomed to. They suggest that we take up ‘virtue ethics’ as an alternative to a more cost-benefit analysis which is the way ethics is usually taught and practiced. I think they’re saying that kind of cost-benefit analysis can lead us into situations like the collusion that the Hoffman Report uncovered.

I think the APA would like this whole issue to go away and for us to move past it, to say that it’s in the past so let’s forget it. The whole point of the special section is to show that the historical roots of the connection between psychology and the military are very deep.

The links are very longstanding and they have had and continue to have tremendous significance for the profession. Division 19 of the APA, which is military psychology, is one of the largest and most powerful of the divisions. Those interests are still very potent in this discipline. I don’t think that there’s a place for psychologists – who are supposed to be in the helping professions – in an arena that involves torturing people. I think the whitewashing and euphemisms that the APA has used in describing these connections are problematic.

I don’t think we can understand how the ethics report got issued in 2005 without looking at the longer history. I don’t think we can understand where we should go from now on, how we should act from now on, without understanding how we got to that point. This is a place for historians to make a contribution. That’s what I was hoping to do with this section. Someone at the APA must recognize that there is a threatening issue here, that there’s something really serious going on, or the special section would not have been pulled from the History of Psychology journal.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.