Despite the Obama administration’s claim that they wanted to close Guantanamo, they are still fighting tooth and nail to retain people who should never have been in US custody in the first place. The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg reports on one prisoner who the Pentagon wanted released six years ago in 2004.Despite this, and despite his sever psychological symptoms, the Obama administration still refuses to release him:
U.S. still holds detainee Pentagon wanted freed in 2004
By Carol Rosenberg
An emotionally ill detainee still being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was first recommended for release by the Pentagon in 2004, according to a federal judge whose ruling ordering that the man be freed was made public this week.
Despite the Pentagon’s recommendation, it wasn’t until 2007 that the Bush administration adopted the military assessment and put Adnan Abdul Latif, now about 34, on an approved transfer list. By then, however, the issue of transferring prisoners to Yemen, Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland, was mired in a diplomatic standoff over whether the Arabian Peninsula nation could provide security assurances and rehabilitate suspected radicalized Guantanamo detainees.
U.S. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy disclosed the timeline in a heavily censored 28-page ruling made public on Monday night that ordered Latif set free. Latif is the 38th Guantanamo captive to be found by a federal judge to be illegally detained at the remote U.S. Navy base.
Kennedy first ordered the Obama administration to arrange for Latif’s release “forthwith” on July 21. But a Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said government lawyers were still deciding Tuesday night whether to appeal to a higher court.
“Why they continue to defend holding him is unfathomable,” said David Remes, Latif’s free-of-charge attorney. “Adnan’s case reflects the Obama administration’s complete failure to bring the Guantanamo litigation under control.”
Latif, held at Guantanamo since Jan. 18, 2002, has said for years that he had suffered a head injury in his teens and was in Pakistan and Afghanistan seeking Islamic charity medical care before his capture.
The U.S. Justice Department countered that Latif was seen at an al Qaida guest house and trained with the terror movement.
But in the portion of the judge’s ruling made public Kennedy noted that the Pentagon’s own military intelligence analysis found no eyewitness to back up the claim, only war-on-terror captives who had seen him in U.S. prison camps.
Kennedy quoted from a 2004 Defense Department report that recommended he be sent home and said Latif “is not known to have participated in combatant/terrorist training.”
The government had “not proven by a preponderance of the evidence that Latif was in Afghanistan to train and fight with” either the Taliban or Al Qaida, Kennedy wrote.
Latif’s lawyer said the Yemeni has spent long periods of his captivity in the Guantanamo psychiatric ward after repeated suicide attempts and reacted with despair to the judge’s ruling.
“He sees death as his only way out,” Remes said.
Latif has covered himself in excrement, thrown blood at the lawyer, swallowed shards of metal and tried to eat glass in dozens of self-harm episodes, Remes said.
Latif was brought to meet his lawyer last week in a padded green garment held together by Velcro called a “suicide smock,” according to Remes, who said he had been stripped of his underwear. Prison camp guards have put the smocks on display for reporters during camp tours and said in the past they also had acquired suicide-proof underwear.
Pentagon records show Latif was measured at 5-feet-4-inches and weighed 114 pounds on his arrival at the prison camps on Jan. 18, 2002. Remes said by last week he had been weighed at 93.
More than half of the 176 captives currently at Guantanamo are Yemeni citizens, a portion of whom an Obama Task Force has approved for transfer home.
But the White House has frozen most Yemeni transfers following the aborted Christmas Day bombing attempt on a Detroit-bound airliner by a Nigerian man who said he was trained in Yemen.
August 20th, 2010
The Coalition for an Ethical Psychology just issued the following press release announcing our letter to American Psychological Association President Carol Goodheart:
Coalition for an Ethical Psychology Charges APA with Complicity in Bush-Era Torture Interrogations
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, August 12, 2010
As the American Psychological Association (APA) meets this weekend in San Diego, CA, for its annual convention, the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology today released a letter to APA President Carol Goodheart detailing the APA’s complicity and failure to act in ethics scandals involving psychologists who aided the U.S. government’s torture program. [Letter to Goodheart attached.]
The Coalition charges that the APA has been directly complicit in supporting and empowering psychologists to develop, research, supervise and/or implement the Bush-era interrogation program with impunity. This complicity includes APA involvement in the cases of three psychologists – James Mitchell, John Leso, and Larry James – against whom ethics complaints have recently been filed with state licensing boards. APA complicity goes back to 2002 when the association amended its ethics code in a way that protected psychologists involved in government sponsored torture.
The Coalition is calling for an independent, impartial, outside investigation to study the APA’s collusion in the U.S. torture program. The Coalition also calls upon the APA to write letters in support of state ethics complaints against APA members Larry James and John Leso, and to initiate an APA ethics investigation of Larry James. The Coalition further insists that the association fully implement the member-passed referendum withdrawing psychologists from sites in violation of or outside of international law, specifically including Guantánamo and Bagram Air Base.
The Coalition letter details evidence of APA torture complicity:
- Former APA President Joseph Matarazzo was on the board of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, the firm that reportedly designed and implemented the CIA’s torture program.
- APA has failed to adjudicate an internal ethics complaint against member Larry James, president of the Military Psychology Division, and has failed to support state ethics complaints against James and Leso, both of whom are accused of participation in abuses at Guantánamo.
- The APA ethics complaint against Leso, filed in August 2006, is perhaps the longest-unadjudicated complaint in APA history.
- APA hosted confidential conferences together with the CIA and RAND Corporation in 2003 and 2004 at which James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, CIA consultants and torture psychologists, were among the attendees. The 2003 conference discussed such “enhanced interrogation” techniques as use of drugs and sensory overload.
- A former top APA official, Russ Newman, while married to a Guantánamo Behavioral Science Consultant, was allowed to exert major influence on an APA ethics task force implicitly determining whether his wife’s activities were ethical.
- That same task force was dominated by military-intelligence psychologists, a majority of whom had served in chains-of-command accused of participating in detainee abuse.
- APA has actively undermined the 59% of voting members who voted to withdraw psychologists from Guantánamo, Bagram, and other detention sites operating outside of or in violation of international law.
Since 2006, the Coalition and its allies have urged changes in APA policy through open letters (often joined by other psychological and human rights organizations), a campaign of withholding dues and mass resignations, an election campaign for APA President, and a member-passed referendum withdrawing psychologists from sites in violation of or outside of international law.
The Coalition for an Ethical Psychology is dedicated to putting psychology on a firm ethical foundation in support of social justice and human rights. The Coalition has been in the lead of efforts to remove psychologists from torture and abusive interrogations.
August 12th, 2010
The Coalition for an Ethical Psychology this morning sent the following letter to American Psychological Association President Carol Goodheart. [pdf available here]:
*************
August 11, 2010
Carol D. Goodheart, EdD, President
American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4242
Dear President Goodheart:
In our letter to you, dated July 26th, we responded to the APA’s letter to the Texas State Board of Examiners in support of a thorough investigation of the charges brought against Dr. James Mitchell. While we applauded the APA’s move to begin the process of holding at least one psychologist involved in interrogation abuses accountable, we explained that in addition to the case against Mitchell, there are two other similar cases that warrant APA attention. One, brought before the New York Office of the Professions, is against Major John Leso, and another, before the Ohio Psychology Board, is against Col. Larry James. We asked that, on behalf of the APA and its members, you call for full investigations and accountability in those two cases as well.
We are writing now because we believe there is an additional “case” as egregious as the cases of Mitchell, Leso, and James, in terms of the “scope of misperception and harm” (your words) to the reputation of professional psychology. That is the case of the American Psychological Association itself and its own complicity in supporting and empowering Mitchell, James, Leso and other psychologists to develop, research, supervise and/or implement such terrible methods with impunity.
For example, in your letter to the Texas State Board, you claim “APA has no knowledge beyond the information set forth in the Complaint and press reports regarding Dr. Mitchell’s actions. …Dr. Mitchell is not a member of the APA…” This very statement, this very disassociation of a relationship, ignores the long history of mutual engagement between the APA and Dr. Mitchell.
Beginning in 2002, Mitchell was part of an APA-sponsored effort to advance the role of psychologists in counter-terrorism activities. He and his partner, Bruce Jessen, were present at a number of “invitation-only” conferences co-sponsored by the APA, CIA and other intelligence organizations. These occurred during the very period that Mitchell’s firm, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, was developing, implementing and overseeing the “enhanced interrogation program” for the CIA.
At one such conference, “Detecting Deception,” co-sponsored by the APA, CIA and RAND in July 2003[1], members of the intelligence community, including Mitchell and Jessen, initiated discussions on patently unethical interrogation research questions such as: “How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?” In addition, as recently as 2007, Mitchell-Jessen Associates offered APA Continuing Education credits.[2] Former APA President Joseph Matarazzo was on the company’s Board of Directors, and Matarazzo was given an APA Presidential Citation after his involvement with Mitchell and Jessen’s firm became public[3].
Current ethics cases similar to the Mitchell case are even closer to the APA. Dr. Larry James is an APA member. In fact, he was chosen by the APA (along with five other psychologists directly involved in CIA or DOD detainee interrogations, training, or research) to determine APA ethical policy on these very practices, as part of the 2005 Psychological Ethics and National Security Task Force (PENS). While on the task force, James presented a picture of Guantánamo interrogations that grossly misrepresented the actual techniques and conditions on the ground, thereby helping to produce a final report that was biased and distorted. This report has been denounced by the three PENS members who were not employed in the security sector. Despite scandalous revelations regarding the PENS Task Force composition and process, the PENS Report remains APA policy and has been affixed to military instructions for psychologists involved in interrogations.
The APA has refused even to investigate an ethics complaint brought against Dr. James even though the evidence is clear that during his tenure as Chief Psychologist of the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantánamo, new “Behavioral Treatment” protocols were written and implemented mandating four weeks of absolute isolation for all new detainees.[4] Moreover, there is considerable evidence that techniques deemed to be torture by the APA were standard operating procedure at the time James was responsible for supervising Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) interrogators. In fact, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) described Guantánamo interrogation and detention practices at the time as “an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.” [5] James is currently President of an APA Division, and he has received several awards from APA divisions after questions were raised about his Guantánamo activities.
Dr. John Leso is also an APA member. Following the release of the torture log of Mohammed al Qahtani, ethics charges were filed against Leso with the APA Ethics Office first in August of 2006 and again in early fall of that year. After no action was taken, yet another ethics complaint was filed in April 2007. The Ethics office denied having received the latter complaint. That complaint was filed again in February 2008. Evidence provided against Leso included the torture log of prisoner 063 (al Qahtani), indicating that he was present during several sessions, and the memo Leso co-wrote detailing increasingly harsh techniques to be used in the “enhanced interrogation program” at Guantánamo. Leso’s memo calls for the use of techniques – including stress positions, manipulation of phobias, and sleep deprivation – unequivocally condemned by the APA as torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. No disciplinary action has been taken by the APA ethics committee to date. To our knowledge, this is the longest-unadjudicated case of alleged ethical misconduct in APA history.
We join you in your concern for the “scope of misperception and harm…regarding the public’s misunderstanding of the profession of psychology and its ethical principles.” However, we place responsibility, in part, with the APA itself. We hold APA responsible for willful misrepresentation of its role and the role of key members in furthering and protecting the government’s “enhanced interrogation” torture program and for its overt and covert support of psychologists within that program. That misrepresentation and lack of accountability continues to the present day.
Despite enormous pressure brought to bear on the Association by its members — in the face of continuing revelations about the role of psychologists in abuses — APA’s response invariably has served to permit psychologists to continue these activities. And while the APA asserts that it has issued a series of resolutions condemning torture and abuse, it has, in practice, twisted the language of these resolutions and policies to align them with U.S. interrogation policy. To date, APA has refused to hold any APA member accountable.
Consider:
- In 2008, the APA membership passed a petition referendum “to prohibit psychologists from any involvement in interrogations or any other operational procedures at detention sites that are in violation of the U.S. Constitution or international law.” That year, the UN Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, wrote a letter to the APA stating unequivocally that Guantánamo was in violation of the Geneva Conventions and international law. Since that time, the ICRC has confirmed that conditions in violation of international law persist at Bagram in Afghanistan to this very day.[6] Yet the APA leadership refuses to implement the organization’s own policy and call for psychologists involved in operations at these sites to be withdrawn and reassigned.
- In 2007, in response to revelations that the 2006 APA resolution against torture in fact supported Guantánamo and CIA interrogation tactics (see below), the membership and the Council of Representatives moved to pass resolutions to keep psychologists from participating in abusive detainee interrogations. The goal was to ban the specific techniques associated with such abuses, and simultaneously to prohibit psychologists from participating in abusive interrogations altogether. The Department of Defense and the APA leadership united to give Dr. James a platform to protest the resolution, and hours before the vote the leadership changed the language of one of the two resolutions. Instead of banning 19 detainee abuses outright, as the sponsors had called for, certain abuses, including “hooding, forced nakedness, stress positions, the use of dogs to threaten or intimidate, physical assault including slapping or shaking, exposure to extreme heat or cold, threats of harm or death,” were only prohibited if “used for the purposes of eliciting information in an interrogation process” (i.e., due to these last-minute revisions, these tactics were not prohibited if used as preparation for interrogation). Further, four of the most widely used psychological techniques – “isolation, sensory deprivation and over-stimulation and/or sleep deprivation” – were only prohibited if “used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.” [7] Here too the intention of the framers of the resolution was undone by APA staff inserting language eerily consistent with the Yoo/Bybee torture justification memos: “For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture under [the federal torture statute], it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration…”[8]
- In 2006, in response to the revelations that the PENS report was written by psychologists from the very commands involved in interrogation abuse, the membership and the APA Council of Representatives moved to pass a resolution condemning psychologists’ involvement in “torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” Just before the vote, however, and without any public discussion or acknowledgement, the document was rewritten such that the definition of “torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” was no longer derived from the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT). Instead, it was taken from the U.S. Reservations to the UNCAT – the same source used by Yoo and Bybee in their infamous “torture memos” to argue that the techniques used at Guantánamo and by the CIA were not torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.[9]
- In outright violation of the APA’s conflict of interest policy, the APA has placed psychologists whose careers and income are beholden to military and/or intelligence agency contracts on every committee and task force responsible for APA ethics policy on interrogations and detention practices since PENS. It allowed a senior staff member whose wife was a Behavioral Science Consultant to interrogations at Guantánamo to improperly influence the PENS task force that was deciding if his wife’s activities would be judged ethical.
- In your recent letter to the Texas State Board of Examiners, you appear to claim that certain techniques banned in recent APA resolutions can only be considered unethical if the abuses occurred after the resolutions were passed: “Some of the more recent APA policies regarding the unethical nature of coercive interrogation techniques were not in effect at the time of the actions described…” APA Ethics Office Director Stephen Behnke made a similar argument recently, stating that APA policies from 1985 and 1986 prohibited torture, and that only recent resolutions prohibited “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”[10] We find this reasoning unacceptable. Unethical behavior is unethical whether or not it was specifically proscribed by APA statute. This is especially so for obviously harmful procedures such as stress positions, sensory overload, and sleep deprivation. In any case, the reasoning is spurious, since the 1985 and 1986 resolutions opposing torture specifically “support the U.N. Declaration and Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.” This is acknowledged by the language of the 2006 and 2007 resolutions, which are entitled “reaffirmations” of the 1986 ban: “Be it resolved that the APA reaffirms its 1986 condemnation of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment wherever it occurs.”[11] We wonder what mischief is implied in what appears to be a new iteration of APA language manipulation. We fear that APA is attempting to create a rationale to protect psychologists involved in abuses, by arguing that certain acts deemed violations of APA ethics in 2007 might not be deemed violations prior to 2007.
In light of these facts, we urge you to free the APA from collusion and complicity in our nation’s policy of abusive interrogations and detention conditions by taking the following steps in all urgency:
1. Write letters to the New York Office of the Professions and the Ohio Psychology Board explaining that the charges against APA members Leso and James amount to serious violations of APA ethics under the 1986 resolution and, should they be proven, would be cause for expulsion from the Association and the recommendation of de-licensure.
2. Initiate an APA ethics investigation of James’ actions, based upon the information in the Ohio complaint, and request that the Ethics Committee explain its lack of action in both the Leso and James cases.
3. Inform the Department of Defense, the CIA, and other relevant entities that under APA policy psychologists may not work in settings that violate international law, the Geneva Conventions, or the Constitution, and specifically that this includes Bagram, Guantánamo, and other such sites that have been repeatedly cited by authoritative sources as in violation of these standards.
4. State unequivocally that the tactics condemned by the 2007 and 2008 resolutions apply both to interrogations and to conditions of detention and that psychologists who knowingly planned, designed, and assisted in the use of any of these tactics must be held accountable, wherever and whenever those violations took place.
5. Accept the 2009 demand by 13 health and human rights associations, including two Nobel Peace Prize recipients, that APA “retain an independent investigatory organization” selected by human rights organizations to study organizational behavior at APA. The study should (a) address “possible collusion between APA and military and intelligence interests in the PENS process and the 2003 APA-CIA-Rand Science of Deception conference,” (b) explore “how the system of APA governance permits the accumulation of power by a very small number of individuals” unresponsive to the general membership, and (c) propose measures to “return the APA to democratic principles, scientific integrity, and beneficence, including restructuring for greater transparency and the assimilation of diverse viewpoints.” [12]
Only when a full account is made of the role of psychologists and the APA in this shameful chapter in our history will the public have a fair and accurate perception of the profession and its ethics.
The American Psychological Association has the opportunity to regain its good name and moral leadership in international psychology, and the renewed loyalty of disaffected members, by quickly and fully carrying through these measures.
Sincerely,
Steven Reisner (Contact: drreisner@gmail.com)
Stephen Soldz
Brad Olson
Jean Maria Arrigo
Roy Eidelson
Bryant Welch
For the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
************
The Coalition for an Ethical Psychology is dedicated to putting psychology on a firm ethical foundation in support of social justice and human rights. The Coalition has been in the lead of efforts to remove psychologists from torture and abusive interrogations.
[1] “The goal of the meeting is to bring together individuals with a need to know and use deception in service of national defense/security, with those who investigate the phenomena and mechanisms of deception.” SPIN, April 2003. http://www.apa.org/about/gr/science/spin/2003/04/workshop.aspx
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/us/12psychs.html?pagewanted=all
[3] Convention by the bay: Leaders in the field. Monitor on Psychology, 2007, 38(9), p. 9. Accessed July 11, 2010 from http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct07/leaders.aspx
[4] Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). 28 March 2003 http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Guantanamo_document_confirms_psychological_torture
[5] “Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo,” Neil Lewis, New York Times, November 30, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics/30gitmo.html?scp=10&sq=neil%20lewis%20guantanamo&st=cse
[6] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8674179.stm
[7] http://www.apa.org/news/press/statements/senate-2007.pdf
[8] The 2008 amendment to the resolution, passed after another public outcry, banned the techniques outright, but again changed the language of the proposed resolution such that all techniques were banned only as “interrogation techniques” and not if used as conditions of detention.
[9] “As we explain in Part ill, U.S. obligations under international law are limited to the prevention of conduct that would constitute cruel, unusual or inhuman treatment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments” (Yoo, 2003, p.2f).
[10] Interview, ‘Mind, Body, Health & Politics’: http://www.mindbodyhealthpolitics.org/audio_player/AUG_3_SHOW_A.mp3
[11] http://www.apa.org/about/governance/council/policy/chapter-3.aspx. Emphasis added.
[12] The 13 organizations are: Coalition for an Ethical Psychology; Physicians for Human Rights; Psychologists for Social Responsibility; Center for Constitutional Rights; Bill of Rights Defense Committee; Network of Spiritual Progressives; National Lawyers Guild; Amnesty International USA; Program for Torture Victims, Los Angeles; American Friends Service Committee, Pacific Southwest Region; Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles; Massachusetts Campaign Against Torture (MACAT); New York Campaign Against Torture (NYCAT). http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/06/29-15 or pdf: http://tinyurl.com/ml6s9x
August 12th, 2010
Steven Reisner discusses new ethics complaints against Guantanamo intelligence psychologists on Democracy Now!
Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll move on then to our top story.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Two U.S. military psychologists are facing complaints with their state licensing boards over their actions at Guantanamo Bay. The psychologists Major John Leso and Colonel Larry James are accused of helping perpetrate the abuse and torture of prisoners in violation of standards of professional conduct. On Wednesday, Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic filed a complaint against Larry James in Ohio where he now serves as Dean of Wright State’s School of Professional Psychology. Meanwhile, the Center for Justice and Accountability filed a complaint against John Leso here in New York. But James and Leso played key roles in interrogations at Guantanamo. Leso served at Guantanamo from June 2002 to January 2003. He led the Behavioral Science Consultation Team involved in the interrogation and torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani. In 2003 James arrived at Guantanamo to head a group of up to five psychologists who assisted in intelligence gathering and interrogations. James would later serve in Iraq where he became the first psychologist stationed at the Abu Ghraib Prison.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined in New York by the psychologist Dr. Steven Reisner. He filed the complaint against Major John Leso here in New York with the assistance of the Center for Justice and Accountability. Steven Reisner is senior faculty and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program. He also teaches at New York University Medical School and Columbia University and is a founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. He also ran for president of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Steve Reisner, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you lay out your complaint?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, there is a lot of evidence that has been made public showing that the torture programs in the CIA and at Guantanamo, the Department of Defense, were created and overseen by health professionals, particularly psychologists. Since most of these programs were classified and most of the names are also classified, we have been focusing on the few psychologists whose names we know and whose roles have been made pretty clear. And two of them, Major John Leso and Colonel Larry James, were in charge of the behavioral science consultation teams, the advisers on interrogations and on the enhanced techniques at Guantanamo.
AMY GOODMAN: Known as BSCT teams.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Known as BSCT teams, yes. Those teams oversaw the implementation of a particular type of abusive interrogation techniques from the SERE Program and they were overseen at two different times by particular psychologists whose names we know. One is Major John Leso. He was the first BSCT psychologist, BSCT number one, at Guantanamo. He and a psychiatrist named Major Bernie created the protocols for the psychological abuse of detainees, to use psychological means to force or to coerce detainees into ostensibly revealing their information. But basically why we are bringing the cases against each of them, is that they’re using their psychological knowledge, their professional expertise, to do harm.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And how, specifically, since they were obviously in the employ of the military at the time, why are you going here in New York State to challenge their licensing by the state licensing board here in New York?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, there are two reasons. First,—neither the government nor the military has yet to hold anybody involved in the torture accountable. The government refuses to police itself, the military refuses to police itself, so there is no accountability, there is no guarantee that this would not happen again under similar circumstances. And, so, looking for a way to hold people accountable has been a difficult job.
Second, and even more important for us, health professionals are held to even higher standards than interrogators or military men and women. The health professional is held to an ethical code and the ethical code stems from the fact that people are more vulnerable to health professionals. Health professionals are privy to private information, to weaknesses, to psychological and physical compromises, and they are privy to that information because they take an oath not to abuse that information to cause harm. So when health professionals use that very information, their very knowledge to cause harm, we want to hold them to ethical responsibility and make sure that those people are held accountable and have the licenses revoked if necessary.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you exactly know that Dr. Leso did?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Dr. Leso, as I said, he was the first BSCT, but there—was no clear program to use these enhanced techniques with the with detainees yet at Guantanamo. It had been used in the CIA, but there was no clear program but there was a mandate from Washington as well as the higher-ups at Guantanamo to take the gloves off and use harsh techniques. Major Leso and the psychiatrist, Major Bernie, created a protocol to use these harsh techniques, three levels of increasingly aversive types of techniques starting with just lying to the detainee and ending with hypothermia, stress positions, sleep deprivation and all of the techniques we know as torture. So, Major Leso was responsible for creating the protocols, and then they used these protocols, first with Mohammed al-Qahtani who they interrogated for 49 days straight, 20 hours a day, using and implementing these very techniques, and Major Leso is known, because the log of that interrogation was released, to have been present certain for some, if not all, of that abusive interrogation and participated.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us what “Time” released and the significance of that.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Yes, well, there is a log that was kept. Very often in cases of abuse, interrogation and torture, the agency that does the abuse keeps very close logs of what they have done because they have an idea justified by, in our case, the Justice Department that there are laws that permit such things. So there was a log kept very close details of al-Qahtani’s torture and interrogation. It was leaked to “Time” magazine and published. Major Leso appears in the log as Major L and comes in and sometimes makes suggestions on how to better use the techniques.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And now with your complaint, what would be the next steps? Is there a hearing mandated or is that up to the licensing board to decide?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: It is always up to the licensing board to decide what they are going to do. Very often in the past licensing boards have tried to find some way not to look these cases, but The Center for Justice and Accountability has been extraordinarily thorough in laying out exactly which standards of New York licensing law Major Leso has violated. It is a long and detailed and quite well documented piece of work, and I do not think they have any recourse but to bring this case and to investigate.
AMY GOODMAN: In 2007, Colonel Larry James spoke at The American Psychological Association’s annual convention in San Francisco. We have been covering these controversies very closely and had gone out to cover the annual meeting of the APA. James said he had been flown in from Guantanamo to oppose an APA resolution that would have prohibited psychologists from participating in interrogations at Guantanamo and other U.S. prisons.
Colonel Larry James: “This is my second tour at GITMO, Cuba. I was also the first psychologist at Abu Ghraib. I am going to repeat what I said earlier. If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die. If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to get hurt. There is one other thing I want to add, we’ve had young, 27, 28, 29 year old psychologists on the battlefield right now. If you support this amendment, those young psychologists are going to feel as though we have abandoned them and they need our support right now. Thank you very much.”
AMY GOODMAN: So that was in 2007 and you heard him say, “people will die” and someone shouted, “people are dying.”
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, Colonel James was helping to disseminate the false view that psychologists in interrogations were there to keep the detainees safe. They were not there to keep the detainees safe. They were there first and foremost to use their professional expertise to break down the detainees and this whole idea of keeping them safe is really new speak for the fact that they were there to do that breaking down within the Justice Department’s legal definition of torture so that they could claim that they were keeping the detainees safe and in that way protect the interrogators. The whole idea here is a program of protection for the people doing the abusive interrogations. It had nothing to do with the protection of the detainees. And Larry James was the chief BSCT starting in January 2003. When you read the standard operating procedures for mental health, for behavior protocols for detainees, during the time that Larry James was the chief psychologist, you find institutionalized abuse and torture. Isolation for 30 days at a time with absolutely no contact. Prohibition of the International Committee of the Red Cross to see these detainees, no access even to religious articles, to the Quran, unless they cooperate with interrogations, not to mention frequent interrogations.
JUAN GONZALEZ: James is now the Dean of Wright’s State School of Professional Psychology. Where is Leso, do you know?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, it’s not known where Major Leso is. He was out of the country for a few years, as far as I know, as an attaché in an embassy, I think in Europe; but he hasn’t appeared in the United States to speak, for example, before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He hasn’t appeared to respond to these charges, so I can’t answer that question. I don’t know where he is.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the APA’s stance right now? The American Psychological Association stance?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, I wanted thank you for the coverage you’ve given to the American Psychological Association’s inaction on this issue. The APA continues to claim, just as the Bush administration did, that it is against torture, that psychologists have this role to play for the protection of the detainees, much like Larry James has said. But in fact, the APA continues to refuse to implement even its own policies to prohibit psychologists from being present at these sites that violate international law. The APA has a policy on the books that psychologists cannot be at places that violate international law and we know that Guantanamo is still in violation of international law. We know that Bagram is in violation of international law. This is plain, nobody is denying they violate the Geneva Conventions and the APA refuses to implement its own policies because, I believe, because of their long history of working closely with the military and the influence of the military psychology and the APA. Not that they’re shouldn’t be collaboration, but there should be to be ethical standards that the APA upholds universally.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, Dr. Steven Reisner, New York psychologist, senior faculty and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, teaches at both NYU and Columbia.
July 11th, 2010
Another religious leader against torture:
Can Christians Live with Torture?
By Rev. Richard Cizik
The findings are shocking: evidence of the involvement of U.S. military and intelligence health professionals in performing experiments, without consent, on detainees in the custody of the U.S. following September 2001.
A report released this month by Physicians for Human Rights details cruel and degrading treatment of detainees that every person of faith should find deeply disturbing. Religious leaders of many faiths, representing the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, have come together to urge the government to create a Commission of Inquiry to investigate these charges and all U.S. torture practices for the last decade and to recommend safeguards to assure that torture will never happen again.
To the Christian, torture is always wrong. The alarming acts of human experimentation alleged in the report clearly and egregiously violate the Christian tenet that every human life is sacred. The sanctity and value of human life is a core theological conviction, one that appears throughout the Scripture.
As Evangelical Christians, our recognition of this moral dignity is fundamental and non-negotiable, even in times of conflict and war. We simply cannot say we are for the sanctity of human life while simultaneously denying those God-given rights as we experiment on human beings through the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques.
But torture is not an abstract issue. To truly understand the gravity of these heinous offenses against the sanctity of human life and what response they require from people of faith, we sometimes need to hear the real-life stories.
Consider that of a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay who was deprived of sleep for more than 55 days, often doused with water or blasted with cold air to keep him awake. After weeks spent in delirious, shivering wakefulness, gravely ill from hypothermia, medical officers who had pledged to obey an ethical code that explicitly instructs them to “do no harm” strapped him to a chair, pumped him full of saline, brought him back from death — and then sent him back to his interrogators.
Stories like this one are just the tip of the iceberg, gleaned from hundreds of cases in which individual lives have been damaged in cruel efforts to get information. If true, they evidence government participation in illegal, immoral experimentation that not only violates our Christian values but also clearly breaches federal law, including the War Crimes Act and regulations governing human subject research known as the “Common Rule.” Such interrogation tactics also violate the legal and ethical protections afforded by international laws such as the Nuremburg Code and the Geneva Conventions, which govern research ethics principles for human experimentation and humanitarian treatment of prisoners. The act of turning detainees into research subjects in order to refine our torture techniques is so odious that it compels us to cry out for an investigation to determine whether war crimes or crimes against humanity have indeed been committed.
Yet another chilling story about the impact of torture hits even closer to home. Twenty-seven-year-old Alyssa Peterson, a devout Mormon, was one of the first female U.S. casualties in Iraq. Alyssa didn’t die from enemy fire — she committed suicide just days after refusing to continue to participate in the brutal interrogation techniques being used on naked detainees. The official probe of her death stated, “She did not know how to be two people; she … could not be one person in the cage and another outside the wire.”
Just as Alyssa Peterson couldn’t be two people, we can’t be two nations. We can’t be a nation of laws that respects human dignity and a nation that sanctions torture.
Our religious principles, as Evangelical Christians, oblige us to oppose policies and practices that violate our religious values and our national ideals. It is our sad but necessary duty to call upon President Obama and Congress to establish a Commission of Inquiry to undertake a comprehensive investigation into the government’s use of torture, including its use in medical experiments on detainees. Like all civilized countries, the U.S. is obligated to hold itself accountable under the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
All people of faith — but especially Evangelical Christians — understand there is such a thing as the spiritual health of a nation. If America is, as Alexis de Tocqueville once said, “a nation with the soul of a church,” then it is absolutely essential that we exorcise torture and other experimental abuse from our souls and make amends by pursuing the steps required to ensure that U.S.-sponsored torture will never, ever, again be sanctioned or practiced.
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Rev. Richard Cizik is President of The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good
July 10th, 2010
In the years since the roles of psychologists and other health professionals in U.S. torture and detainee abuse became public, other psychologists and human rights activists have been seeking accountability from the American Psychological Association and from state licensing boards. Yesterday, complaints were filed in two states against two psychologists who served on the Behavioral Science Consultation Team [BSCT] at Guantanamo in 2002 and 2003.
These complaints follow a complaint filed in Texas a few weeks ago against James Mitchell, reportedly one of the two designers and key implementers of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” torture program.
In all previous cases, the state boards have refused to even open cases. It is to be hoped that this time will be different, that these supposed guardians of professional ethics will actively investigate what are potentially some of the most egregious violations of professional ethics in our lifetime.
Will Gitmo Shrinks Lose Their Credentials?
Human rights groups target two military psychologists with ethics complaints for complicity in torture.
By Daniel Schulman
Wed Jul. 7, 2010 1:00 PM PDT, Mother Jones
If their aim was to break him, his interrogators apparently succeeded. By late November 2002, Mohammed al-Qahtani—a suspected Al Qaeda operative sometimes described as the 20th hijacker—was hearing voices, talking to imaginary people, and spending hours on end cowering in a corner of his Guantanamo cell with a sheet draped over him.
Qahtani had been subjected to months of extreme isolation in a cell that was floodlit 24-7. And that was before military officials approved an interrogation plan designed to wear down his resistance. The blueprint for his interrogation program—which included 20-hour daily sessions, sensory deprivation tactics, and a campaign of sexual humiliation—was drawn up by a pair of military mental health professionals who first arrived at Gitmo thinking they were going to counsel troubled US soldiers. Instead, the two men were corralled into service as members of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), developing strategies that pushed detainees to the psychological brink—and sometimes beyond.
The role of doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists in interrogations has been a source of considerable controversy, since it seemingly violates the medical professions’ central tenet: “Do no harm.”
Over the years, a handful of efforts to hold caregivers accountable for complicity in detainee abuse have come up empty. But human rights advocates are hoping this track record will soon change. On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic filed separate complaints against two former Gitmo shrinks with their state licensing boards.
CJA’s complaint targets Maj. John Francis Leso, an army psychologist who from June 2002 to January 2003 led the Gitmo BSCT involved in Qahtani’s interrogation. It accuses Leso, who is licensed in New York, of “gross incompetence,” “gross negligence,” and “conduct exhibiting a moral unfitness to practice the profession.” According to the document, Leso “used his training in psychology to design interrogation techniques that manipulate the psychological condition of a detainee, induce Stockholm syndrome in the detainee, and modify the detainee’s behavior.”
The complaint, a year in the making, was filed in conjunction with New York psychologist Steven Reisner—an outspoken critic of peers who have assisted in interrogations. CJA’s aim is to force an investigation by the state board, which could choose to strip Leso of his credentials.
Leso arrived at Gitmo in 2002 as a member of an Army Combat Stress Control Team. Soon after, he and two other members of his unit learned they would not, in fact, be caring for soldiers but rather consulting on interrogations—something they knew little about. “Nobody really knew what we were supposed to do,” Army psychiatrist and Leso team member Maj. Paul Burney acknowledged to the Senate Armed Services Committee during its later inquiry [PDF] into detainee treatment.
Burney has said that during his Gitmo stint, detainees were repeatedly grilled about links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein—the apparent result of pressure by top Bush administration officials in search of a smoking gun. When the interrogators were unable to produce any such evidence, pressure mounted to “resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
Ultimately, Leso and his team were dispatched to Fort Bragg to learn from the Army’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program, which teaches soldiers to withstand harsh physical and psychological interrogations if captured. One evening in October 2002, Leso and Burney took what they’d learned from SERE—plus tactics they just “made up,” according to Burney—and wrote a memo that would become the basis for Gitmo’s standard interrogation procedure.
They prefaced the memo with a cautionary note, writing that the “most effective interrogation strategy is a rapport-building approach” and that physical or fear-based methods were likely to produce inaccurate information. (Indeed, Qahtani would later claim that he lied during brutal interrogations.) They also warned that the some of the techniques they were outlining could cause “irreversible” emotional or physical harm.
The memo described three categories of tactics of escalating brutality, including isolation, stress positions, temperature extremes, daily 20-hour interrogations, exposure to nerve-shattering white noise, and devising scenarios to make a detainee believe he would be tortured or killed if he didn’t give up information. All of the above were applied copiously to Qahtani, who was hospitalized multiple times as a result. On one occasion, his interrogation recommenced while he was being transported by ambulance from the hospital.
In addition to Leso’s role in recommending some of the techniques applied to Qahtani, the CJA complaint charges that he also supervised and participated in some of the sessions. One of the most significant pieces of evidence, says CJA lawyer Kathy Roberts, is an entry in Qahtani’s interrogation log (leaked to Time magazine in 2005) that is “without question a moment of misconduct. He’s actively in the room, actively working on applying abusive tactics.”
During that session, Leso (referred to as “Maj. L” in the logs) instructed Qahtani’s interrogators to place him in a swivel chair “to keep him awake and stop him from fixing his eyes on one spot in the booth.” Leso was reportedly present for other sessions, too, including one in which a military dog was brought in to intimidate the detainee. “Dr. Leso’s personal participation in this interrogation not only indicates that he promoted the use of these methods, but also itself constitutes a clear violation of minimum standards of professional ethics,” the complaint charges. Adds Roberts: “He knew he was doing harm. And I think it’s really incredible if you think about the condition [Qahtani] was in and that he was overseeing that interrogation.”
The second complaint [PDF] filed Wednesday targets retired army Col. Larry James, Leso’s onetime boss at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, who succeeded him at Guantanamo Bay and went on to become the chief behavioral scientist at Abu Ghraib prison. The Harvard group, on behalf of four clients, is going after James’ license in Ohio—he is also credentialed in Louisiana, where the state psychology board’s refusal to investigate an ethics complaint sparked a legal battle. (This week’s actions follow a complaint last month in Texas. In that case, lawyers representing a Texas psychologist targeted James Elmer Mitchell, a CIA-contracted psychologist who took part in brutal interrogations—these included the questioning of Abu Zubaydah, a detainee who was waterboarded at least 83 times in a single month at a secret Thai prison.)
James, now dean of the Wright State University School of Professional Psychology in Dayton, Ohio, recalls his experiences at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib in his book Fixing Hell. Leso, he writes, told him he “had received increasing pressure to teach interrogators procedures and tactics that were a challenge to his ethics as a psychologist and moral fiber as a human being. He was devastated to have been a part of this.” For his part, James has strongly denied complicity in abusive tactics—his presence at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib was to ensure that detainees were treated humanely. “It was psychologists who fixed the problems and not caused it,” he has said. But his critics counter that brutal physical and psychological interrogation methods were in widespread use during James’ time at Guantanamo, where he served in 2003 and again in 2007.
“There is absolutely no question that men and boys were physically and psychologically abused as a matter of policy in Guantanamo during, between, and following his deployments,” notes the Harvard program’s 55-page complaint. It accuses James of complicity in “causing psychological devastation to people he was duty-bound to protect” and alleges that “Dr. James and/or the BSCT members allegedly under his command and supervision helped to develop interrogation plans designed to exploit detainees’ particular psychological weaknesses in order to ‘break’ them.”
The Harvard complaint also claims James has made a range of misrepresentations, including the contention that his Gitmo team was “concerned primarily with protecting detainees from harm.” Potentially more serious, it says he omitted his controversial deployments to Gitmo and Abu Ghraib when he applied for licensing in Ohio in 2008—and left this information off the curriculum vitae he submitted to Wright State University as well. (His bio on the school’s website makes no mention of his experience on the Army’s behavioral science teams.)
James declined to comment, but Wright State University spokesman George Heddleston said in a statement to Mother Jones: “A similar complaint filed in Ohio in 2008 was dismissed by the Ohio Board of Psychology. And in June of this year a complaint filed with the State Board of Examiners of Psychologists in Louisiana, in which Dr. James is also licensed, was adjudicated in appeals court after the Board declined to act following an investigation.”
Deborah Popowski, a legal fellow in Harvard’s human rights program involved in drafting the complaint, points out that past complaints have been compiled by individuals (including one of her oganization’s clients, Ohio psychologist Trudi Bond), not lawyers. “There’s plenty that should concern the board,” she says, describing the complaint as “a second wave of accountability on this issue.”
The human rights lawyers chose their targets carefully. They honed in on psychologists, says Roberts, because of the field’s ethical ambivalence around interrogation—the result of psychology’s historical ties to the military. By now, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have drawn a clear ethical line on interrogations, barring members from taking part. But the American Psychological Association—whose membership includes both therapist types and research-oriented behavioral scientists—has been reluctant to follow suit. In 2008, following a vote by a deeply divided membership, the association merely moved to bar members from participating in interrogations that are “in violation of international and U.S. laws.”
Holding individuals to account is just part of the plan. “The larger hope is to really change the role of psychologists in these kinds of interrogations,” says Roberts. “Psychologists are not supposed to be harming people.”
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Daniel Schulman is Mother Jones’ Washington-based news editor. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Email him at dschulman (at) motherjones.com.
July 8th, 2010