American Torture and Institutional Corruption: Psychology, Law, and the Power of Professional Complicity and Resistance.

Please join Harvard Law School’s Deborah Popowski and Georgetown University Law Center’s David Luban as they discuss the results of a recent independent investigation that found collusion between the American Psychological Association (APA) and the U.S. government in relation to interrogation policies that enabled the torture of Muslims by American officials.

The investigation was conducted by a team of lawyers at Sidley Austin and led by former prosecutor David Hoffman. The resulting report, known as the Hoffman Report, lays out in stunning detail the corruption of a renowned professional organization through various means, including by refusing to act on ethics complaints against military and CIA psychologists so as to shield them from sanction.

Panelists will discuss the report’s findings and its implications for psychologists and also for the legal profession.

Deborah Alejandra Popowski teaches in the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, where she focuses on the United States and Latin America. For the last decade, she has been working at the intersection of human rights and professional ethics in the context of U.S. counterterrorism law and policy. Most recently, she and her clinical students co-authored a report to the U.N. Committee Against Torture on the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute senior government officials, including lawyers, for their complicity in torture.