Written by Jeannette de Beauvoir   

There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that one of the American professional anthropology associations was asked, on the eve of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whether the United States should target Japan or Germany with this fearful new weapon. In other words, the anthropologists were asked to decide which country would suffer the most—where the bomb would have the bigger impact. They chose Japan, and the first thing that happened after the end of World War II was the forging of a new code of ethics that precluded giving professional advice that would lead to so much death and destruction.

I was reminded of that this week when The Intercept published an article about psychologists “rethinking their cozy relationship with (the) Bush torture program.”

One year into the Bush administration, Cora Currier reports, the APA revised its code of ethics to include a “just following orders” clause, and three years later explicitly maintained that the clause enabled psychologists to participate in “national security interrogations”—in other words, torture.

Like the anthropologists who scrambled to “never again” help wreak destruction, psychologists look on that clause and the resulting horrors with distaste. The APA said it would look into “whether there is any factual support for the assertion that APA engaged in activity that would constitute collusion with the Bush administration to promote, support or facilitate the use of ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques.”

It’s nothing new that professional organizations or individuals deviate from their avowed codes of conduct. The Allan Memorial Institute in Montréal is an example, known for its past role in the CIA’s MK-Ultra project, the code name for a CIA mind-control research program lasting from the 1950s through the 1970s. The agency's initiative to develop drug-induced mind-control techniques was implemented in the Institute by its then-director, Donald Ewen Cameron, who commuted daily from his home in Vermont. Ultimately the project sought to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and generally to explore any other useful possibilities of mind control.
Codes of conduct? Ethics?

The sad truth is that professional associations are composed of people. Perhaps, in some cases, people who should know better; but people all the same, who respond to the same stimuli of fear and threat as the rest of the population. The conclusions of Nuremberg notwithstanding, the childhood mantra that “all the kids are doing it” appears to be a universal excuse for any kind of behavior.
So whose responsibility is it? Where does the buck stop when the ivory tower condones, participates in, and then distances itself from actions open to criticism and revulsion?

In the political arena, persons and groups whose unethical behavior comes to light are often protected—by influence, by legalities, by money. Yes, in many cases, these persons should go to jail; but they will not. We’ve become used to that.

Outside the political arena, however, it seems that the people in whose name atrocities are committed should be able to have a voice. This weekend is the annual march and protest at Georgia’s Fort Benning, home of the infamous “School of the Americas” that taught the Latin American military death squads the torture techniques resulting in the bloodbath of the 1970s. Some of us are still trying to have a voice.

Because, ultimately, the responsibility is ours. Ultimately we are the ones who need to say that this cannot happen in our name. No Hiroshimas. No Dresden fire-bombings. No Vietnams, no El Salvadors, no Afghanistans. Unless we want to spend our lives distancing ourselves from something that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, we need to be the change.