Dhaka: The largest professional organisation of the United States psychologists faces a crisis after a damning independent review alleging post-9/11 ‘collusion.’

The 542-page report examines the involvement of the American Psychological Association (APA) with the harsh interrogation programs under the George W Bush presidency, raising questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at the CIA and the Pentagon, reported several international media.

According to The Guardian, ‘the revelation, puncturing years of denials, creates the potential for leadership firings, loss of licenses and even prosecutions.’

The report, completed this month, concludes that some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director, sought to curry favour with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the Defence Department’s interrogation policies, while several prominent outside psychologists took actions that aided the CIA’s interrogation programme and helped protect it from growing dissent inside the agency.

‘Several officials are likely to be sacked. Already out, a past APA president confirmed to the Guardian, is Stephen Behnke, the APA’s ethics chief and a leading figure in recasting its ethics guidelines in a manner conducive to interrogations that, from the start, relied heavily on psychologists to design and implement techniques like waterboarding,’ the Guardian reported.

‘But the reckoning with psychologists’ institutional complicity in torture may not stop there.

Evidence in the Hoffman report, sources believe, may merit referral to the FBI over potential criminal wrongdoing by the APA involvement in torture. The findings could reopen something human rights groups have urged for years: the potential for prosecutions of people involved in torture’.

‘The actions, policies and the lack of independence from government influence described in the Hoffman report represented a failure to live up to our core values,’ said former APA president Nadine Kaslow, reported the Washington Post.

The paper added that its sources believed that evidence disclosed in the Hoffman report may merit referral to the FBI over potential criminal wrongdoing by the APA involvement in torture. Individual psychologists may also face professional ethics charges, which could see them stripped of their licenses, the Guardian reported.