Rendition fallout

The American Psychological Association argued to the Texas licensing board that one of its members, James Mitchell, should be stripped of his license for “patently unethical behavior” in violation of the organization’s ethical guidelines, The Washington Post reports. In 2002, Mitchell, then retired from the Air Force, reportedly assisted the CIA’s interrogation of a terrorist detainee, Abu Zubaydah, in Thailand. Zubaydah was alleged to be a top al Qaeda official. A Senate report stated that interrogators including Mitchell used extreme measures to question Zubaydah, including waterboarding. Mitchell called the complaint libelous, distorted and inaccurate, though he added he was not permitted “to discuss any work that I may have done for the CIA.”

The Texas complaint filed stated that “a psychologist who helps inflict such
cruel and shocking abuse on a defenseless human being would appear to have
violated basic standards of conduct of the profession.” Similar cases were
successful against participating psychologists in Ohio and New York, the press
report noted, but California, Louisiana and New York boards have rejected
similar charges in other cases.

In a comparable situation, my blog on May 8, 2009, pointed out that Justice
Department attorneys who condoned these extreme interrogation measures also
might be censured. An internal Justice Department review of the lawyers’ work
(one, Jay Bybee, is now a federal judge) concluded that the lawyers had
committed no crime in this regard, but noted that their roles might be reviewed
by state bar disciplinary authorities to determine if they violated standards
of professional conduct by their condonations. In the case of the federal
judge, might there be a basis for impeachment?

When professionals aid practices that are in violation of prevailing standards
of human rights, they should be held accountable, the United States argued
during the Nazi war criminal trials involving lawyers, judges and doctors who
lent legitimacy to Nazi cruelties. Whether professionals, however provoked and
patriotically motivated, should be charged as criminals in American courts is a
question whose answer depends on the wordings and jurisprudence of relevant
American laws. That these individuals exercising public powers should be judged
by their professional peers and by the public whose powers they exercised seems
clear.

Ronald Goldfarb, Washington attorney and author, was a Justice
Department official in the Kennedy administration.