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Retired colonel puzzled by Guantanamo critics

WSU dean said he was sent to the detention center in Cuba to clean up the abuses there, which he feels he did

Larry C. James, dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University, recently published the book “Fixing Hell.”

Staff photo by Teesha McClam Larry C. James, dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University, recently published the book “Fixing Hell.”

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By Jim DeBrosse, Staff Writer Updated 10:34 AM Monday, September 21, 2009

During an interrogation at Guantanamo Bay in April 2003, an Army psychologist watched while MPs pinned a detainee to his knees and then repeatedly slammed his upper body and face to the floor up to 30 times. A contractor who also witnessed the abuse said “the floor was shaking” from the force of the blows, according to a 2008 investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee released in April.

The psychologist “believed that the technique was appropriate, approved, applied properly and was common practice in the teams.” The interrogator told the Senate investigator he agreed.

Col. Larry C. James, now retired from the Army, was the leader of the team of five psychologists assigned to Gitmo interrogators. James, who didn’t testify, says he never witnessed that incident nor any other abuse involving a health care professional during his deployments at Guantanamo from January to May 2003 and June 2007 to June 2008.

James, 52, 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 University, has been under fire for several years by psychologists and human rights advocates. They doubt the effectiveness of his reforms at Gitmo and question whether he may have turned a blind eye to abusive practices there or perhaps even helped set abusive policies.

In the colonel’s defense

By his own statements, including those in his book “Fixing Hell,” James said he was sent by the Army “to clean up the abuses” at Gitmo and later the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq.

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.”

Kathy Platoni, a Centerville psychologist and Army Reservist who counseled soldiers at Gitmo from 2003 to 2004, has been a defender of James. Although she didn’t meet him until he arrived at Wright State, she said, “I will back him to the hilt.”

To suggest that James or any psychologist was involved in torture or inhumane treatment of detainees is “absurd and offensive,” Platoni said. On the contrary, she said, military personnel at Gitmo were often subject to abuse from prisoners, who frequently hurled bodily fluids, excrement and insults from their cells.

Complaints against James

Trudy Bond, a Toledo psychologist who has taken legal action against James, said documents and media reports show that “torture and abuse of detainees never stopped at Guantanamo.” Bond has filed complaints against James with the state psychological boards in Ohio and Louisiana where James holds licenses. Both boards have declined to investigate, saying there is not enough evidence.

Bond went to court in Louisiana to force the state board to investigate James. The court dismissed the case in August, saying Bond had not exhausted the board’s administrative process. Bond and her attorney have appealed in federal court.

For several years, members of the American Psychological Association have been embroiled in debate over the role James and other military psychologists may have played in detainee interrogations under the Bush administration. Bush critics in the APA charge that the White House used the supervision of psychologists and other health care professionals to legitimize interrogation techniques outlawed by the U.S. Constitution and the international Geneva Conventions. Their presence was supposed to prevent permanent physical or psychological harm.

In June 2007, 350 members of the APA signed an open letter to then-APA President Sharon Brehm asking the association to investigate James and other members of the APA who served at Guantanamo Bay. The letter alleges that “psychologists played an integral role in the development, justification and implementation of abusive interrogation techniques.” Brehm declined, but the association later changed its ethics code to ban involvement in specific forms of torture.

One claim: To support their claims, APA activists point to a July 13, 2003, e-mail from the Gitmo commander to Army superiors, a weekly update that also was forwarded to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at his request. The e-mail said that Lt. Col. Luie “Morgan” Banks, a Ft. Bragg psychologist who trained U.S. soldiers in how to resist torture, had been brought to Gitmo to offer advice to interrogators on how “to fracture... detainee resistance to cooperation.”

The commander’s e-mail, cited by Senate investigators, said Banks provided “very valuable insights.”

James’ response: Having known Banks for more than 20 years, James said his colleague has been unfairly blamed by critics who allege he developed ways to turn around Army torture survival techniques and use them for breaking down detainees. “We were both adamant that torture and abuse were the wrong way to go” for effective interrogations, James said.

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'Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib'

Excerpts from the book by Col. (Ret.) Larry C. James, Ph.D., with Gregory A. Freeman (Grand Central, 2008)

Pages 5-6: The American (interrogator) was slumped in her chair and had tears in her eyes as the prisoner yelled at her ferociously in Arabic... “In my country a b--- like you would be beheaded for looking in the eyes of a man like me!”... I felt sorry for this young soldier. As I watched her, I realized the reports of prisoner abuse, as bad as they were, did not tell the full story of Abu Ghraib. This, too, was Abu Ghraib.

Page 55: The technique I taught Luther (an Army interrogator) was just one way we got prisoners to talk without anything remotely abusive. Much of the culture at Gitmo in 2002 and 2003, perhaps due to the anger over 9/11, involved projecting one’s rage onto the detainees. My role was to teach rapport and relationship-building approaches between the detainee and interrogator without the abuse. Simple things like kindness, sweets, pizza, cigarettes, movies, tea and magazines went a long way in fostering these relationships.

Page 69: At that precise moment (in April 2004), TV images (from Agu Ghraib) of naked dog piles, an Iraqi prisoner standing with a hangman’s noose around his neck, and K-9 dogs terrorizing detainees were forever etched in my memory... I felt both sick and furious. As I lay back down on the sofa (at my home), I wondered how this could have happened after everything we did at Gitmo.

Larry C. James, Ph.D.

Age: 52

Residences: Beavercreek, New Orleans and Honolulu

Military Rank: Army Colonel, retired 2008

Previous Positions: Chair, Dept. of Psychology, Tripler Medical Center, Honolulu, 2004 to 2008; Chair, Dept. of Psychology, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C., 1999-2004

Military Deployments: Senior Psychologist to Joint Intelligence Group, Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, January 2003 to May 2003 and June 2007 to June 2008 and at Agu Ghraib Detention Center, June 2004 to November 2004.

Honors: Bronze Star Medal, 2004, for military service in Iraq; Defense Superior Service Medal, 2008, for distinguished service during 22 years in the Army; Presidential Citation, American Psychological Association, for distinguished service to the field of military psychology and the global war on terrorism.

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These comments are so typical. I worked in law enforcement for many years, and the K9 officers torture the K9's behind the scenes (they used to do it out in the open when it was easier for them to get away with it) and they brag about it, joke and laugh about what they do to the dogs, and nicknamed their K9 unit the "Hang 'Em High Club." Their first response to any criticism is to DENY that it occurs. If that fails, then they go to Plan 2, JUSTIFICATION. Military and paramilitary - the same

Sue
9:41 AM, 9/22/2009

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Where were all these people filing suit when our soldiers' bodies were being burned and drug through the streets of Afghanistan and Iraq for all the world to see? I don't remember any of them condemning the terrorists for their actions.

don
7:34 PM, 9/21/2009

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"Critics also have noted that James was the chief psychologist at Gitmo when a 16-year-old Canadian detainee, Omar Khadr, alleged he had been abused. In a court affidavit, Khadr said interrogators threatened to send him to Egypt so he would be raped ..."

Thr critics are taking the word of a 16-year-old detainee with no other evidence to back up the claim. What, did they think a detainee would openly admit to being a terrorist?

don
7:31 PM, 9/21/2009

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How Dare those that judge, Put on the uniform, walk the blocks that house these people for 12 hours, 5 days a week and endure the abuse that the guards that proudly serve our country endure every day, or better yet sit and counsel the guard that is mentally broken because of what they endure and think of YOUR child or loved one serving our country and willing to carry that burden for those of you that cant or wont!!!!!

fletch
5:28 PM, 9/21/2009

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The self-proclaimed “Fixer of Hell,” Colonel James claims here that he spent almost all of his time at Guantanamo tending to three juvenile detainees. Whatever might have gone wrong there, he was not responsible for it. And rather than supporting an investigation to resolve clear inconsistencies between his own statements and other reports of what unfolded under his watch, James instead takes comfort that nobody has come forward as an eyewitness to wrongdoing on his part. This is leadership?

Roy Eidelson
3:24 PM, 9/20/2009

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