Psyche, Science, and Society

students from his successful career: Campos: Valuable lessons from the torture prof, John Yoo

Law Professor Paul Campos argues in The Daily Beast that there are valuable lessons to be learned by John Yoo’s law students from his successful career as the torturer’s lawyer:

What the Torture Prof Teaches

By Paul Campos

Last year, the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that the authors of the Bush administration torture memos, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, violated the standards of ethical conduct required of attorneys so egregiously that they should be reported to their state bar associations for disciplinary action. At the time, many of us thought that this was the least that they deserved—I’d have preferred to see them take the stand at the Hague—but it turns out that professional, let alone criminal, discipline isn’t going to happen: This week, another DOJ lawyer, David Margolis, rejected his department’s earlier finding and concluded that, while the torture memos represent very poor legal work, they’re not actually bad enough to merit professional sanction. In the words of Yale law professor Jack Balkin, Margolis found that the relevant standards of professional responsibility are so low that they are only “violated by lawyers who are the scum of the earth. Lawyers barely above the scum of the earth are therefore excused.”

Yoo is a very skilled lawyer, and the torture memos are what might be called exquisitely elegant hack work, or perhaps high-rent intellectual prostitution.

Yoo is a very skilled lawyer, and the torture memos are what might be called exquisitely elegant hack work, or perhaps high-rent intellectual prostitution. Because the opinion his employers wanted flew in the face of the views of almost all scholars of the law of war, Yoo had to engage in the sort of highly selective and distorting arguments that an attorney being paid to advocate for a fundamentally weak position must use.

Now Yoo is now back at UC Berkeley, where he taught before joining the Bush administration. He is molding the minds of the next generation of lawyers. The school has no plans to do any inquiry of its own into Yoo’s behavior, or even to modify the professor’s teaching schedule, other than to keep the time and location of Yoo’s classes off the school’s Web site, in order to discourage protesters.

Yoo’s continuing and apparently permanent position on the faculty of one of the nation’s leading law schools does have some significant educational value for his students. For one thing, I am reliably informed that, when he’s not busy arguing that the president has the legal authority to massacre villages and crush the testicles of children, Professor Yoo teaches a very fine class in civil procedure.

Beyond that, having Yoo as one of their professors teaches Berkeley’s law students several valuable lessons.

First, if you’re a person of high social status and have good enough political connections, nothing will happen to you even if you commit the most serious crimes. (This applies even more obviously to Yoo’s former White House employers, but the fact that it’s impossible in this country to levy even the mildest professional sanctions against a mere law professor illustrates the absurdity of imagining it might be possible to actually prosecute the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.) Second, the legal profession’s system of self-regulation is largely dedicated to protecting lawyers at almost any cost rather than protecting the public from the consequences of incompetent or immoral lawyering.

Third, legal argument is a sufficiently flexible tool that, under the right circumstances, it’s possible to argue successfully that torture isn’t torture, that laws which explicitly make no exceptions for exceptional circumstances actually do make exceptions for exceptional circumstances, that in time of war America is essentially a dictatorship, and that we are always at war. These are all very valuable lessons, which American law schools generally do their best to avoid conveying to the students. John Yoo’s brilliant career makes these lessons easier for his students—and are we not all, in this matter at least, his students?—to learn.

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Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

February 28th, 2010

Torture psychologists wanted mock burial authorization. Yoo refused

Marcy Wheeler — emptywheel – has apparently figured out that the OPR report indicates that the CIA’s torture psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, wanted to use a mock burial, but that that was too much for John Yoo, unless he was given additional time to dream up a legal cover. Raw Story reports:

Bush’s torture psychologists wanted to use ‘mock burials’: report

By Raw Story

Two psychologists working on the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques pushed for the use of “mock burials” on terror suspects, according to documents released by the Department of Justice.Blogger Marcy Wheeler reports that the Department of Justice rejected a request from psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell to give the CIA the power to pretend to bury terror suspects during interrogations in the years after the 9/11 attacks.

A report (PDF, 289 pages) from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, released last Friday, documents ten interrogation techniques approved by Bush administration lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo.

But Wheeler notes that the psychologists had requested twelve techniques. One of those two techniques has already been revealed to be prolonged diapering. Wheeler uncovers evidence that the other one was mock burial.

“There must have been significant discussion about the decision to exclude mock burial from the [list of approved enhanced interrogation techniques], because the reference to its exclusion in the report itself (PDF page 60 in the Final Report) includes a page and a half of redactions following the discussion of leaving it out,” Wheeler reports.

Wheeler also suggests that the revelations about mock burial could be potentially incriminating for the CIA.

“Any legal discussion of why mock burial would be a problem would focus on how torture statutes prohibit the threat of imminent death,” Wheeler writes.

“Yet after mock burial was specifically excluded as a torture technique, CIA torturers went on to threaten detainees with a power drill and a gun. In other words, someone at that CIA had already been told, specifically, that they could not use the threat of imminent death on detainees. But on at least two occasions, they did so anyway.”

A CIA inspector general’s report, released last summer, documented cases of CIA interrogators using “mock executions” to intimidate suspects, including one instance in which a gun was fired in an adjoining room to make a suspect think another prisoner had been shot.

Jessen and Mitchell, the two psychologists reportedly behind the idea to carry out mock burials, came from SERE, or “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape,” a military program designed to teach soldiers how to resist torture when captured. They were contracted to work for the CIA after 9/11, and were tasked with teaching CIA interrogators some of the harsh methods they learned to defend against at SERE. The techniques covered by SERE appear to be the basis for the enhanced interrogation program run under the Bush administration.

In 2008, the Pentagon banned the use of SERE techniques in interrogations.

February 25th, 2010

NYT: The torture lawyers

The New York Times editorial board understands the absurdity of the OPR report:

Poor judgment is an absurdly dismissive way to describe giving the green light to policies that have badly soiled America’s reputation and made it less safe.

The complete editorial:

The Torture Lawyers

New York Times Editorial

Is this really the state of ethics in the American legal profession? Government lawyers who abused their offices to give the president license to get away with torture did nothing that merits a review by the bar?

A five-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s ethics watchdogs recommended a disciplinary review for the two lawyers who produced the infamous torture memos for former President George W. Bush, but they were overruled by a more senior Justice Department official.

The original investigation found that the lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, had committed “professional misconduct” in a series of memos starting in August 2002. First, they defined torture so narrowly as to make it almost impossible to accuse a jailer of torturing a prisoner, and they finally concluded that President Bush was free to ignore any law on the conduct of war.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility said appropriate bar associations should be asked to look at the actions of Mr. Yoo, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mr. Bybee, who was rewarded for his political loyalty with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. It was a credible accounting, especially since some former officials, like Attorney General John Ashcroft, refused to cooperate and e-mails from Mr. Yoo were mysteriously missing.

But the more senior official, David Margolis, decided that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee only had shown “poor judgment” and should not be disciplined. Mr. Margolis did not dispute that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee mangled legal reasoning and produced work that ultimately was repudiated by the Bush administration itself. He criticized the professional responsibility office’s investigation on procedural grounds and excused Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee by noting that everyone was frightened after Sept. 11, 2001, and that they were in a hurry.

Americans were indeed frightened after Sept. 11, and the Bush administration was in a great rush to torture prisoners. Responsible lawyers would have responded with extra vigilance, especially if, like Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee, they worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. When that office renders an opinion, it has the force of law within the executive branch. Poor judgment is an absurdly dismissive way to describe giving the green light to policies that have badly soiled America’s reputation and made it less safe.

As the dealings outlined in the original report underscore, the lawyers did not offer what most people think of as “legal advice.” Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee were not acting as fair-minded analysts of the law but as facilitators of a scheme to evade it. The White House decision to brutalize detainees already had been made. Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee provided legal cover.

We were glad that the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, Representative John Conyers Jr. and Senator Patrick Leahy, committed to holding hearings after the release of the Justice Department documents.

The attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., should expand the investigation into “rogue” interrogators he initiated last year to include officials responsible for facilitating torture. While he is at it, Mr. Holder should assign someone to look into the disappearance of Mr. Yoo’s e-mails.

The American Bar Association should decide whether its rules are adequate for deterring and punishing ethical failures by government lawyers.

The quest for real accountability must continue. The alternative is to leave torture open as a policy option for future administrations.

February 25th, 2010

Eidelson: Psychology for Progressive Purposes

Roy Eidelson explains, in a Psychology Today blog post, how psychology can contribute to solving our manifold social problems:

Psychology for Progressive Purposes
Psychology has a crucial role in promoting progressive social change.

By Roy Eidelson

For today’s engaged citizens, there’s no shortage of pressing concerns that demand attention: social and economic inequality, inadequate access to health care, persecution and violence on the basis of belief or group identity, assaults on civil rights and personal dignity, and profound environmental threats to the planet itself.

As president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), I work with fellow members — psychologists and non-psychologists alike — in a shared venture to confront many of these challenges. A central premise of our efforts is that psychology — the science of human behavior — offers a strong base of knowledge and practice for developing and implementing policies that promote peace, social justice, human rights, and an ecologically sustainable future. We pursue these goals through research, education, intervention, and advocacy.

Real-world application of psychological principles can be a valuable resource for positive social change in a surprisingly wide range of contexts. Such knowledge can:

* Help individuals and groups overcome “us-versus-them” mindsets and build bridges across perceived divides.
* Encourage us to focus on our future collective welfare and to prioritize the broader long-term consequences of our actions instead of short-term self-interest by engaging our pro-social tendencies and moral sentiments.
* Strengthen our capacity to use thoughtful analysis and empathy when evaluating alternatives, and to resist appeals to fear and anger that are designed to cloud our judgment.
* Address misunderstandings and miscommunication, thereby serving to prevent the escalation of conflict and bloodshed; heal the wounds of violence, trauma, and neglect; and avert the transmission of revenge and despair from one generation to the next.

Making meaningful strides in areas like these will require deep understandings of how psychology and politics are inter-related, as well as increased collaboration between psychologists and other social scientists. In this way, psychological knowledge can be used more effectively to identify key features of stubborn social problems and to illuminate potential pathways to progress. Here are several examples.

Over one billion people struggle to survive on less than $1 a day. To reduce chronic poverty, we must confront the prejudices, discrimination, and societal arrangements that promote inequality and limit opportunity for so many. Psychology also highlights the need to reduce the stigma associated with being poor. And since we tend to be most supportive of others when their concerns relate to our own, anti-poverty campaigns are more effective when they communicate how poverty affects us all.

Nuclear weapons could destroy all life on Earth, a horror so great that we bury it from awareness. To eliminate these weapons, it’s important to understand the psychology that motivates us to acquire and retain them. Paradoxically, the desire for greater security spurs countries to want weapons of mass destruction. Overcoming a common attribution error — “our weapons are for protection, but theirs are for aggression” — is therefore crucial for parties to negotiate in good faith toward a nuclear weapons-free world.

Mass killing, torture, gender-based violence, and other human rights violations are a worldwide tragedy. Perpetrators are often driven by psychological factors, including vengeance, blind obedience to authority, the intoxicating effects of power, and the dehumanization and demonization of those who are different. We can counter these abuses by confronting the psychological barriers that too often discourage individuals or nations from intervening. These include fear, apathy, denial, perceived helplessness, and the diffusion of responsibility.

Climate change, population growth, and rising consumption represent a looming ecological catastrophe that imperils all human life. Psychology offers key insights to confront this crisis. Policies can be made more effective by addressing our tendency to focus on the short-term and to disregard critical dangers that grow over time. Another promising strategy involves helping wealthier nations examine how their excessive consumption interferes with the pursuit of important goals and values. The behavioral sciences are directly relevant to the challenges of bringing about large-scale social change.

Poverty, nuclear weapons, human rights violations, and climate change are global problems. But psychologically informed strategies have also proven successful when used in local initiatives. For instance, conflict management training for leaders in deeply-divided communities has curtailed sectarian violence. Intergroup contact and dialogue strategies have also been used effectively to reduce prejudice among participants in community youth programs. Carefully framed public service messages targeting HIV/AIDS prevention in under-served areas have led to sizable decreases in risky behavior. Correcting student misperceptions about the prevalence of heavy drinking has substantially reduced alcohol consumption on college campuses. Programs that provide comparative feedback on residents’ home energy consumption have lessened overall neighborhood energy use. And efforts to foster trust and a sense of shared identity have helped activists and advocacy organizations build broader and more effective coalitions.

But while psychology offers great promise in these spheres and many others, we must also recognize that there are those who regrettably misuse their understanding of human behavior for selfish or destructive purposes. In particular, political, media, and corporate elites at times engage in manipulation to promote everything from unhealthy lifestyles to greater inequality to war. The consequences are often tragic. The members of Psychologists for Social Responsibility believe that bringing greater psychological knowledge to the widest possible audience — policymakers, activists, educators, students, news media, and the general public — is crucial for empowering all of us to pursue socially responsible solutions to the many challenges we face today.

February 25th, 2010

Student punished for refusing to recite the Pledge

When I was in 5th grade I caused a bit of a ruckus when I refused to say the school prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. I objected to the phrase “with liberty and justice for all” because, as it seemed to me, Sacco and Vanzetti had gotten neither liberty nor justice.  further, the word “indivisible” made no sense to me as the Civil War showed that it could, indeed, be divided, though hundreds of thousands of dead prevented it that time.

I could not understand why I should recite something that was obviously false. The school called my parents. when they supported me, the school agreed that, if I were to stand silently during the Pledge, it would be OK. That was in the 1960′s.

I thought those days were long gone. But a Maryland teacher recently yelled at, and called the police on, a middle school student who refused to say the Pledge. Fortunately, the ACLU was there and the school was forced to back down and follow its own rules.

However, the trauma to the student, who will be forever tormented by fellow students for being different, will continue. Raw Story has this account:

Police escort student out of class after refusal to recite Pledge of Allegiance

By Daniel Tencer

A middle school teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland, will have to apologize to a 13-year-old student after yelling at her and having her escorted out of class by school police when the student refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.According to the ACLU of Maryland, a 13-year-old female student at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance on Jan. 27. The teacher reportedly ordered the girl out into the hallway, where he threatened the girl with detention and then sent her to the school counselor’s office.

The next day, when the student again refused to stand for the pledge, the teacher called school officers to remove her from the classroom and take her to the counselor’s office once again.

“When the student’s mother reached out to an assistant principal for help in dealing with the teacher’s abusive and improper actions, the official said her daughter should instead apologize for her ‘defiance.’ The student did apologize, twice,” the ACLU states.

The right to sit silently during the Pledge of Allegiance has been held up by the US Supreme Court, and is enshrined in Maryland state law and Mongtomery County Public Schools’ own policies, reports the Washington Post.

“No one will be permitted to intentionally embarrass you if you choose not to participate,” says the school district’s handbook, according to TheGazette.net in Maryland.

The ACLU and the girl’s mother declined to identify the girl. They say the student, now 14, has been “traumatized” by the experience, including taunting from fellow students, and has not returned to the school since the incident.

Neither the ACLU nor the school district would identify the teacher involved.

The girl’s mother says the way the teacher “bellowed” at her daughter was inappropriate and the school should take disciplinary action against the teacher, reports TheGazette.net.

“It’s an even bigger problem because he did it to a child in front of a group of other children,” the mother said. “On top of that, the school didn’t protect her. I thought they would protect her, and that’s why I let her go to that school. I was disappointed.”

The turning point evidently came when the ACLU of Maryland sent a letter (PDF) to the school district asking for an apology.

“Expression of patriotism in unsettling times certainly is a worthy and understandable emotion,” the letter stated. “But, as the Supreme Court recognizes, that expression is best honored by venerating the civil liberties and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and not by losing patience with those whose views or actions do not conform to those of the majority.”

The teacher’s actions were “a violation of our regulations, and we’re in the process of rectifying the situation,” Montgomery Public Schools spokesperson Dana Tofig told TheGazette.net. Tofig said the teacher would apologize to the student, but would not say if any disciplinary action would be taken against the teacher.

The president of the county’s teachers’ union, Doug Prouty, told the Washington Examiner that he supports the move to have the teacher apologize.

“My initial thought is yes, but we would need to know all of the details,” Prouty said.

School officials say several conflicts involving the Pledge of Allegiance arise every year in Maryland, but most are resolved quietly.

1 comment February 25th, 2010

Justice Department protects the torture lawyers, persecutes the ethical

February 24th, 2010

Why Obama dropped the “public option”

Miles Mogulescu in Huffington Post explains The Real Reason Obama’s Plan Doesn’t Include a Public Option:

The real reason is that Obama made a backroom deal last summer with the for-profit hospital industry that there would be no meaningful public option….

s is one of the great under-reported stories of the health reform saga. Much has been written about the Obama administration’s deal with big Pharma to continue to block Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices or to allow consumers to buy cheaper drugs from Canada, in exchange for Pharma running pro-Democratic ads and giving campaign contributions to Democratic candidates. That’s the reason, under pressure from the White House, that Senate Democrats voted down an amendment that would have allowed consumers to buy cheaper drugs from overseas.But Obama’s deal with the for-profit hospital lobby to insure there would be no public option has, as best I can tell, only been reported in two articles in The New York Times. On August 13, The Times reported that while President Obama had presented himself as “aloof from the legislative fray,” particularly in connection with the public option, “Behind the scenes, however, Mr. Obama and advisors have been…negotiating deals with a degree of cold-eyed political realism potentially at odds with the president’s rhetoric.” One the deals reported in The Times article was the Pharma deal. The other was a deal with the for-profit hospital lobby to limit its cost reductions to $155 billion over 10 years in exchange for a White House promise that there would be no meaningful public option.

According to The Times:

“Several hospital lobbyists involved in the White House deals said it was understood as a condition of their support that the final legislation would not include a government-run health plan paying-Medicare rates…or controlled by the secretary of health and human services. ‘We have an agreement with the White House that I’m very confident will be seen all the way through conference’, one of the industry lobbyists, Chip Kahn, director of the Federation of American Hospitals, told a Capitol Hill newsletter…Industry lobbyists say they are not worried [about a public option.] ‘We trust the White House,’ Mr. Kahn said.”

Mr. Kahn’s lobbying group, with whom the White House made the deal, represents America’s investor-owned, hospitals whose profits could be diminished by a public option with the negotiating clout to negotiate lower prices. To say that the deal included ensuring that any public option would not be “controlled by the secretary of health and human services” is code for saying it would not be national in scope and would lack negotiating clout–In other words, the Obama administration made a deal that a national public option on day one comparable to Medicare was off the table.

On September 9, a few weeks after The Times reported Obama’s deal to gut the public option, President Obama gave his big health care speech to a Joint Session of Congress. In the speech, Obama said one of the programs he was considering was a “not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange.” Supporters of the public option took this as a sign that Obama was on their side.

But Washington insiders noticed that Obama parsed his words very carefully. The New York Times noted that:

“Mr. Obama’s call for a public plan, however, omitted any discussion of what rates it might pay or who might control it…’He worded it really carefully, because he said ‘not for profit’ and he didn’t say it had to be controlled by the government,’ Mr. Kahn [the hospital lobbyist] added. ‘The way he described it, we could support that!”

In other words, Obama signaled the private health care industry that his deal that there would be no meaningful public option still stood.

February 23rd, 2010

Remes on Obama’s head-in-the-sand approach to human rights abuses

David Remes, an attorney who gave up working in a major law firm in order to work full-time defending Guantanamo detainees, composed an analysis of the Bush administration’s response to Guantanamo and other Bush-era human rights abuses which he sent to a friend. David has kindly consented to having it posted here.

Remes’ analysis concludes that the damage is irreversible. We can only hope that, in the longer term, he will be proved wrong:

You’re so right that the Administration’s head-in-the-sand approach has been a disaster. Obama’s political advisers were reputed to be so shrewd. What could have been more naive than thinking the Administration could buy peace with Graham on these issues? What could have been more naive than thinking the Republicans would ignore the issue if the Democrats didn’t provoke them?

When I was a young associate, I drafted a piece of legislation to solve a client’s problem, and proudly showed it to the partner. The partner tore it up. “They don’t want to solve the problem, David,” he said. “They want to make the problem go away.” So the White House wanted to make Guantanamo and related problems go away, but look what happened. In this case, the problem had to be solved.

To solve the problem, Obama needed to act quickly and decisively, as soon as he took office, while he still had the initiative. The executive orders were a bold stroke, but the words were mistaken for actions. In signing the orders, Obama apparently thought he’d put the issue behind him and could move on to other things. Because of the orders, most people thought the issue was yesterday’s issue. The orders extinguished any sense of urgency.

Here’s what Obama should have done in his first weeks in office:

• He should have relocated the 17 Uighurs to northern Virginia despite the political opposition. Had he done so, he’d have had a far easier time finding third countries to accept other prisoners who could not return home.
• He should have told DOJ to stand down in the habeas cases. Had he done so, US diplomats wouldn’t have been hamstrung advocating for men the US was simultaneously insisting in court were justifiably held as terrorists.
• He should have quickly struck unconditional repatriation agreements with Yemen and other countries to which we could return men. Had he done so, a substantial number of men would have been home by March. (Under Bush, transfers were about bilateral relations, not individual detainees.)
• He should have immediately indicted the 9/11 suspects (by the way, he still hasn’t indicted them) and others linked to terrorist acts against the US. Had he done so, he’d have given himself added cover for the other stuff.

Instead, Obama outsmarted himself. He brought into being a government professor’s dream of task forces and deliberative processes that were supposed to resolve the issues rationally and responsibly but only left the Republicans the time they needed to turn the issue against him and mount a counterattack. Obama brushed aside calls for investigation and exposure of Bush crimes, and accountability, though these were issues that kept the Republicans on the defensive. He endorsed many appalling Bush anti-terrorism policies.

I don’t think Obama can salvage the situation. Anything he does now is too little, too late. He’d have to turn the public around. Not possible. He’d have to persuade the Democrats in Congress that they’d have more to gain than lose by backing him. No messaging strategy can make that happen now. Because of the Administration’s bungling, the Republicans have an irreversible lock on the issue, and the voters. Obama showed he didn’t have the stomach for a fight on these issues, and now he’s down for the count. He’s taken human rights and the men at Guantanamo down with him.

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David H. Remes
Appeal for Justice

February 20th, 2010

Torture enabler Yoo protested at Johns Hopkins

Text accompanying this on YouTube:

On Wed. evening, Feb. 17, 2010, John Yoo gave a talk on the campus of the Johns Hopkins U., in Baltimore, Md. Before the controversial law professor could get into his talk, however, it was interrupted by two activists. They stood to his right in front of the auditorium and held a banner, which read: “Try Yoo for Torture!” The protesters refused to sit down, but they were not arrested and remained in the same position during Yoo’s entire speech. Yoo had served in the administration of the Bush-Cheney Gang in the Justice Department. He authored two dubious legal memos which claimed sweeping presidential power to commit torture. The two memos are referred to by his critics–and there are many–as the “torture memos.” For background on Yoo, see: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/ and
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/ and http://www.codepinkalert.org/ and http://www.firejohnyoo.org/

1 comment February 18th, 2010

Larry James protsted at Wright State U.

As reported in the campus paper, The Guardian, there was recently a protest at Wright State University of its Dean of the School of Professional Psychology, Dr. Larry James. James, along with Col. Morgan Banks, was inside lecturing to a $2,000 a person workshop on the Psychology of Terrorism:

WSU dean still under fire three years after torture accusations
Wright State professional psychology dean target of protest on campus, failed lawsuits

By Andy Sedlak

A recent campus protest has dragged a Wright State University dean back into the headlines.

Larry C. James, dean of Wright State’s School of Professional Psychology, has been the subject of numerous news stories since arriving on campus, Aug. 1, 2008. A retired Army colonel and recipient of the Bronze Star, James was the chief psychologist at Guantanamo Bay in 2003 and 2007. He held the same title at Abu Ghraib in 2004.

At each of these two facilities, James’ task was to remedy the torture interrogations that dominated news coverage for much of the 2000s. His supervision was far reaching, and James insists the turnaround after his arrival was apparent.

“I was needed to demonstrate and teach interrogators how to go about proper questioning,” James said in a December interview with the Guardian.

He wrote a book, “Fixing Hell,” documenting his experiences. It was released in 2008, the same year he arrived at Wright State.

Since the release of his book, James has become an ongoing target for human rights activists.

Most recently, student demonstrators held a small protest outside the Student Union on Feb. 3. Inside, James led a seminar on the psychology of terrorism.

His critics allege that, while at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, James turned a blind eye toward rampant abuse of the detainees. Additionally, many assert that James abused the right to confidential medical records belonging to the detainees.

“(The protest) was intended to be a visual challenge to Larry James,” said demonstrator Dana Fleetham, a Wright State graduate student. She said the group was “questioning his credibility to host the event and also his credibility as a licensed psychologist.”

Wright State does not denote James’ experience at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib on James’ biography on the school of psychology’s webpage.

Dr. Trudy Bond, a psychologist out of Toledo has been linked to James for the past two years. Against him, Bond filed a complaint with the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists in February of 2008. She did so alleging professional misconduct for his roles at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The complaint was dismissed, saying there was no reason to investigate.

Bond filed her complaint in Louisiana because he was issued his license to practice psychology in Louisiana. Larry James is licensed in Louisiana, Ohio and Guam.

Bond filed a complaint in Ohio as well, but it too was closed shortly thereafter.

Bond has appealed three times. Thus far, the LSBEP has denied all of Bond’s attempts. Bond filed suit against the LSBEP for not investigating James. Her case against the board was dismissed as well.

“The code of ethics within the APA and the Ohio Board of Ohio states that as a psychologist, if I have knowledge or information about the unprofessional actions of a psychologist, I am required to report them,” Bond said.

The American Psychological Association’s website reads “The American Psychological Association’s (APA) position on torture is clear and unequivocal: Any direct or indirect participation in any act of torture or other forms of cruel, degrading or inhuman treatment or punishment by psychologists is strictly prohibited. There are no exceptions. Such acts as waterboarding, sexual humiliation, stress positions and exploitation of phobias are clear violations of APA’s no torture/no abuse policy.”

James has taken comfort in each ruling against Bond.

“No matter what third party, objective review board or person, they’ve all come to the same conclusion — there’s no probable cause,” James said in an interview with the Dayton Daily News last year. “There’s no detainee, there’s no guard, there’s no psychologist who’s come forward and said, ‘With my own eyes, I’ve seen Dr. James do X, Y or Z.’ ”

Bond agreed to an interview with The Guardian in January. After James’ initial interview in December, his office did not return phone calls seeking a follow-up interview.

Bond’s suit against the Board in Louisiana has now gone to the court of appeals and lawyers are disputing whether or not the trial court rightly dismissed her case against the LSBEP. Oral arguments for the appellate court are scheduled for February 25 in Baton Rouge.

Samantha Naves contributed to this report.

February 17th, 2010