According to a new report by a group of health professional and human rights activists, the American Psychological Association (APA) collaborated in secret with the White House under George Bush’s administration. What were they secretly collaborating on? CIA scare tactics and torture, that’s what. According to Gawker they bolstered legal and ethical justifications for CIA’s torture of prisoners swept in the post 9-11 war on terror.

The report is the first to examine the association’s role in the interrogation program. It contends, using newly disclosed emails, that the group’s actions to keep psychologists involved in the interrogation program coincided closely with efforts by senior Bush administration officials to salvage the program after the public disclosure in 2004 of graphic photos of prisoner abuse by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The authors of the report are three long-standing critics, Stephen Soldz, Steven Reisner, and Nathanial Raymond. The conclude in the report that, “The A.P.A. secretly coordinated with officials from the C.I.A., White House and the Department of Defense to create an A.P.A. ethics policy on national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the C.I.A. torture program.”