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Human rights group wants Wright State psychology dean’s license revoked

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By Jim DeBrosse, Staff Writer Updated 1:09 AM Thursday, July 8, 2010

COLUMBUS — Josie Setzler, a long-time advocate for the mentally ill in northwest Ohio, said she joined the ethics complaint filed Wednesday, July 7, against Wright State University dean and psychologist Larry James “because I’ve come to learn how important the trust is between therapist and patient.”

Setzler is one of four complainants who, in a 54-page filing, asked the Ohio Board of Psychology to revoke James’ license for his alleged role in the abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. In 2003 and again in 2007-2008, James was the team commander for a group of up to five psychologists at Guantanamo who assisted in intelligence gathering.

James, a recipient of a Bronze Star Medal for his military service in Iraq and now dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State, has been under fire for several years by psychologists and human rights advocates. They allege he turned a blind eye to abusive practices at Guantanamo and perhaps even helped set abusive policies there.

During James’ tenure as senior intelligence psychologist at Guantanamo, the complaint alleges, “boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally and religiously humiliated; forced (to be) naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours, and physically assaulted.”

More broadly, human rights activists say the Bush administration used Army psychologists to hone in on detainees’ physical and mental vulnerabilities and to give the appearance of legitimacy to “enhanced interrogation” techniques that included waterboarding, stripping, isolation, sleep deprivation, humiliation and emotional dependency.

Similar licensing complaints have been filed recently against two other Army psychologists who served at Guantanamo — James Mitchell in Texas and John Leso in New York.

James declined comment on Wednesday’s complaint, but by his own statements, including those in his book published last year, <i>Fixing Hell</i>, James said he was sent by the Army “to clean up the abuses” at Guantanamo and later the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq.

In an interview with the <i>Dayton Daily News</i> last year, James said the worst abuses at Guantanamo occurred in 2002, before he arrived, when interrogators terrorized prisoners with guard dogs, resorted to waterboarding and withheld medications. “You have to understand the context” following 9/11, he said. “The nation had been attacked 6 to 8 months before, and the pressure from (the Bush administration) was to get intelligence, get intelligence, get intelligence.”

The complaint filed in Columbus is the third attempt to revoke James’ license in two years. A complaint in 2008 in Ohio was dismissed as was a second complaint filed a year later in Louisiana, where James also is licensed.

Toledo psychologist Trudy Bond was the chief complainant in the two earlier complaints and is one of the four complainants in the latest filing. “As a psychologist, I’m appalled that the licensing boards are not recognizing that our ethics have been violated and are not holding psychologists responsible,” she said.

The other complainants are Michael Reese, a disabled veteran and civil rights activist in Cleveland, and the Rev. Colin Bossen, a Unitarian minister in Cleveland. Deborah Popowski, an attorney for the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, filed the case for the group.

Unlike the previous complaints against James, Popowski said this one “is certainly hard to ignore. There is a large amount of information.”

Popowski said it included new evidence from declassified documents recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, from the 2009 report of the Senate Armed Services Committee and from James’ own book, which was published after James had received his license in Ohio and was hired by Wright State.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2437 or jdebrosse@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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