Roy Eidelson’s Doing Harm: How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the War on Terror is essential reading for understanding the cultural and political world we now inhabit. Eidelson writes from the perspective of an outraged psychologist, who expected much better from his profession than support for a detention and interrogation program that had torture at its core. He provides detailed documentation of the efforts of his fellow psychologist “dissidents” to bring accountability to the American Psychological Association (APA). Full disclosure: As a former president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, I am one of these dissidents. The APA cultivates a benevolent image in general yet is obliged to please the military and intelligence community to maintain much of its power, influence, prestige and wealth relative to other social sciences (and even some natural sciences).
Eidelson provides a comprehensive and highly readable background story to APA’s accommodative stance toward the priorities of the Department of Defense and the CIA at a time when both agencies were clearly reconciled to indefinitely detaining and abusing—and often torturing—hundreds of detainees. And almost all of these detainees were detained in the first place thanks to highly dubious evidence—or no evidence at all—linking them to Al Qaeda.