The Torture Trainers and the APA

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.com/soldz06252008.html

The Torture Trainers and the American Psychological Association

By STEPHEN SOLDZ



The CIA’s Torture Teachers, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen [see Eban and Mayer for a reminder of their work], are in the news again. In a front page New York Times article on the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, it is mentioned that the subject of the story, Deuce Martinez is now employed by the dynamic torture firm:

His life today is quiet by comparison with the secret interrogations of 2002 and 2003. But Mr. Martinez has not turned away entirely from his old world. He now works for Mitchell & Jessen Associates, a consulting company run by former military psychologists who advised the C.I.A. on the use of harsh tactics in the secret program.

His new employer sent Mr. Martinez right back to the agency. For now, the unlikely interrogator of the man perhaps most responsible for the horrors of 9/11 teaches other C.I.A. analysts the arcane art of tracking terrorists.

As Katherine Eban explaines what was so distinctive about this firm:

Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on sere trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror, according to psychologists and others with direct knowledge of their activities. The C.I.A. put them in charge of training interrogators in the brutal techniques, including “waterboarding,” at its network of “black sites.”

They exemplified the CIA’s humane treatment of detainees:

Mitchell had a tougher approach in mind. The C.I.A. interrogators explained that they were going to become Zubaydah’s “God.” If he refused to cooperate, he would lose his clothes and his comforts one by one. At the safe house, the interrogators isolated him. They would enter his room just once a day to say, “You know what I want,” then leave again.

As Zubaydah clammed up, Mitchell seemed to conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he had been reduced to complete helplessness and dependence. With that goal in mind, the C.I.A. team began building a coffin in which they planned to bury the detainee alive.

It seems that the coffin may not in the end have been used.

So Deuce Martinez, so according to the Times followed torture sessions with “rapport-based” session, getting KSM to talk. They report that he turned down a CIA offer of specialized training in the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” aka torture, not because he objected but because he believed his talents lay elsewhere. As Eban explains, that training would have been with the torture duo:

Interrogators who were sent for classified training inevitably wound up in a Mitchell-Jessen “shop,” and some balked at their methods. Instead of the careful training touted by President Bush, some recruits allegedly received on-the-job training during brutal interrogations that effectively unfolded as live demonstrations.

The very fact that he accepted employment with the nation’s premier torture firm indicates that he had no ethical qualms about the Mitchell-Jessen approach.

The American Psychological Association has a long relationship with Mitchell and Jessen. Their firm was authorized to give APA Continuing Education credits, though rumor indicates that may no longer be the case:

Mitchell, Jessen, and Associates, LLC (MJA) is an executive consulting firm specializing in the area of understanding, predicting, and improving performance in high-risk and extreme situations. MJA develops specialized assessment and selection programs for high-risk occupations, devises and conducts tailored training for related, high-risk programs, and is additionally approved by the American Psychological Association to offer continuing professional education for psychologists.

After the Mitchell-Jessen directed torture of Abu Zubaydah resulted in numerous false leads that wasted thousands of hours of law enforcement time, the CIA together with the APA and the Rand Corporation conducted an invitation-only workshop on the Science of Deception, Mitchell, Jessen, and their likely CIA supervisor, Kirk Hubbard, were invited. Many APA leaders were likely also there, so it strains credulity that they are not intimately aware of Mitchell and Jessen’s work. Interestingly, the APA leadership has conveniently “lost” the attendance list.

As a further indication of APA’s connection to the CIA’s torture firm, one of the five “governing people” on the torture firm’s Board is former American Psychological Association President, Joseph Matarazzo. The APA is intensely disturbed by President Matzrazzo’s possible involvement in torture as can be gleamed from these ethically-principled quotes from APA leadership when Matzrazzo’s involvement was revealed last summer.

Then APA President Sharon Brehm: “No comment.”

APA Director of the Ethics Office and APA point man on torture and interrogations: “No comment.”

But one official did have a comment, which says everything one needs to knopw about the ethics of APA leadership.

“Dr. Matarazzo was president of APA 18 years ago,” Rhea Farberman, the organization’s director of public affairs, said in a prepared statement.

“Since that time, he has had no active role in APA governance but has been actively involved in the American Psychological Foundation (APF), the charitable giving arm of APA. Dr. Matarazzo currently holds no governance positions in either APA or APF,” the statement said.

Matarazzo’s “professional activities are outside and independent of any role he has played within APA and APF,” the statement said. “We have no direct knowledge about the business dealing of Mitchell’s and Jessen’s company; however, APA’s position is clear – torture or other forms of cruel or inhuman treatment are always unethical.”

Notice the deep concern for Mitchell and Jessen’s and, potentially, Matarazzo’s, actions expressed in this statement. Notice the (missing) promise to investigate and, if confirmed, discipline this former APA President. After all, while “torture is unethical", this former President's “professional activities” are no concern of the APA.

Meanwhile, the Times article informs us that Mitchell & Jessen Associates is still in the CIA’s good graces. Most likely they still have the torture contract. And as for the APA, they will most likely continue to forget about the firm’s connection to them. Coincidentally, the morning before the new New York Times article appeared, a member of the APA’s Board sent out to various listserv’s an odd statement:

Colleagues,

I wanted to share the fact that APA is aware of the concerns that two Washington state psychologists were employed by the Department of Defense to reverse-engineer survival and resistance training (which is designed to help U.S. military personnel in the event they are captured) for use in interrogations. These two psychologists are not APA members so are out of the reach of the APA’s ethics enforcement process but, nevertheless, APA’s position on inappropriate interrogations techniques is very clear.

In August of 2007, the APA Council of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the use of 19 interrogation techniques because they were unethical, abusive and constituted torture. These condemned techniques included waterboarding, forced nakedness, sexual humiliation, stress positions and the use of dogs to intimidate.

In terms of active duty military psychologists being used as trainers of harsh interrogation techniques, the media reports that I have seen suggest this was not the case. Rather, these reports have singled out military psychologists as raising concerns about aggressive interrogation techniques including waterboarding, forced nakedness and sleep depravation.

Notice that this esteemed APA board member cannot distinguish between the Defense Department, the subject of this week’s Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) hearings, and the CIA that employed Mitchell and Jessen. Notice too that she conveniently ignores former APA President Matarazzo’s possible involvement in Mitchell and Jessens's activities and also ignores the fact that APA invited Mitchell and Jessen to the APA-CIA-Rand conference.

One also may wonder what “media reports” this Board member read which featured military psychologists protesting abuse as the main story. After all, the Associated Press began its first story on the SASC investigation by stating:

"Military psychologists were enlisted to help develop more aggressive interrogation methods, including snarling dogs, forced nudity and long periods of standing, against terrorism suspects, according to a Senate investigation."

Further, SASC Chair Carl Levin described in his opening statement how:

"a… senior CIA lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center, went to GTMO, attended a meeting of GTMO staff and discussed a memo proposing the use of aggressive interrogation techniques. That memo had been drafted by a psychologist and psychiatrist from GTMO who, a couple of weeks earlier, had attended the training given at Fort Bragg by instructors from the JPRA SERE school.

While the memo remains classified, minutes from the meeting where it was discussed are not. Those minutes (TAB 7) clearly show that the focus of the discussion was aggressive techniques for use against detainees."

If this esteemed Board member had paid greater attention to these SASC hearings she would have discovered that they revealed the direct involvement of several psychologists in planning Guantanamo torture. Col. Morgan Banks, who had been appointed a member of the APA’s PENS (Psychological Ethics and National Security ethics task force) was described by one of the SASC witnesses as requesting training in “exploitation… of detainees” from the military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, resistance, an Escape) program, which administered torture to US military personnel in case they were captured by a force that doesn’t respect the Geneva Conventions.

But, most chillingly, at the SASC hearings, 63 pages of documents were released, including the minutes of an October 2, 2002 meeting at Guantanamo to develop torture strategy and techniques. Psychologist Maj. John Leso, a member of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, and the psychologist described by Levin in the quote above, attended the meeting.

According to these minutes, the BSCT proposed an approach to detainees based upon the following principles:

What’s more effective than fear based strategies are camp-wide environmental strategies designed to disrupt cohesion and communication among detainees

The environment should foster dependence and compliance

Psychological stress = extremely effective (i.e., sleep deprivation, withholding food, isolation, loss of time)…

Disrupting the normal camp operations is vital, We need to create an environment of “controlled chaos”

Evidently, according to this esteemed APA Board member, creating an environment of “controlled chaos” designed to “foster dependence and compliance” and utilizing “sleep deprivation, withholding food, isolation, loss of time” constitutes objecting to torture. I’m sure most who paid attention to the evidence might conclude otherwise.

Unfortunately, to this date the APA has ignored multiple ethics complaints extending back several years against Maj. Leso based upon his documented participation in the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani, Guantanamo prisoner 063. Perhaps this esteemed colleague, rather than making unsubstantiated claims about supposed anti-torture activities, will push the organization to discipline this military psychologist who is documented to have participated in abuse.



Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He maintains the Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice web site and the Psyche, Science, and Society blog. He is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, one of the organizations leading the struggle to change American Psychological Association policy on participation in abusive interrogations.

[American Dream]

http://www.salon.com/news/torture/?stor ... 3/25/james

FRIDAY, MAR 25, 2011

Top Bush-era GITMO and Abu Ghraib psychologist is WH's newest appointment
BY GLENN GREENWALD


Dr. Larry James


One of the most intense scandals the field of psychology has faced over the last decade is the involvement of several of its members in enabling Bush's worldwide torture regime. Numerous health professionals worked for the U.S. government to help understand how best to mentally degrade and break down detainees. At the center of that controversy was -- and is -- Dr. Larry James. James, a retired Army colonel, was the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo in 2003, at the height of the abuses at that camp, and then served in the same position at Abu Ghraib during 2004.

Today, Dr. James circulated an excited email announcing, "with great pride," that he has now been selected to serve on the "White House Task Force entitled Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family." In his new position, he will be meeting at the White House with Michelle Obama and other White House officials on Tuesday.

For his work at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Dr. James was the subject of two formal ethics complaints in the two states where he is licensed to practice: Louisiana and Ohio. Those complaints -- 50 pages long and full of detailed and well-documented allegations -- were filed by the International Human Rights Clinic of Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program, on behalf of veterans, mental health professionals and others. The complaints detailed how James "was the senior psychologist of the Guantánamo BSCT, a small but influential group of mental health professionals whose job it was to advise on and participate in the interrogations, and to help create an environment designed to break down prisoners." Specifically:

During his tenure at the prison, boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted. The evidence indicates that abuse of this kind was systemic, that BSCT health professionals played an integral role in its planning and practice. . . .

Writing in 2009, Law Professor Bill Quigley and Deborah Popowski, a Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, described James' role in this particularly notorious incident:

In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired Col. Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a US prison camp while an interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming, near-naked man on the floor.

The prisoner had been forced into pink women's panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort "to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown." As he recounts in his memoir, "Fixing Hell," Dr. James initially chose not to respond. He "opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason ..."

Although he claims to eventually find "good reason" to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.

James treated numerous detainees who were abused, degraded, and tortured, yet never took any steps to stop or even report these incidents. Last year, Steven Reisner -- senior faculty member and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, who also teaches at New York University Medical School and Columbia University -- told Democracy Now: "there is a lot of evidence that has been made public showing that the torture programs in the CIA and at Guantánamo, the Department of Defense, were created and overseen by health professionals, particularly psychologists" and that psychologists were at these facilities "to use their professional expertise to break down the detainees." James, argued Dr. Reisner, was directly implicated because:

Larry James was the chief BSCT starting in January 2003. And when you read the standard operating procedures for mental health, for how to -- behavior protocols for detainees during the time that Larry James was the chief psychologist, you find institutionalized abuse and torture -- isolation for thirty 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 Qur’an, unless they cooperate with interrogations, not to mention frequent interrogation.

For his part, Dr. James claims he attempted to protect the detainees under his care from abuse and psychological injury. Meanwhile, the Louisiana psychology board refused to review the merits of the complaint against James on the grounds that the alleged acts were too old (outside the statute of limitations), while the Ohio board issued a three-sentence, cursory letter which decreed, without any explanation whatsoever, that "it has been determined that we are unable to proceed to formal action in this matter." So while the charges against him have not been formally sustained by either board, neither have they been evaluated or rejected by any apparent consideration of the merits. Judicial review of the Ohio board's decision is still possible (a Louisiana federal court ruled it lacked jurisdiction to review the board's Statute of Limitations findings).

Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, James should not be deemed guilty in the absence of a formal adjudication. But the White House's conduct in selecting him is nonetheless baffling, at best. Of all the psychologists to choose from, why would they possibly choose to honor and elevate the former chief psychologist of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib at the height of the Bush abuses? More disturbing still, among those most damaged by detainee abuse are the service members forced to participate in it; why would the White House possibly want to put on a task force about the health of military families someone, such as Dr. James, who at the very least is directly associated with policies that so profoundly harmed numerous members of the military and their families?

This isn't exactly a powerful Task Force, but what this appointment does is have the White House -- yet again -- signal that it does not really take very seriously the Bush torture regime. On appearance grounds alone, the Obama administration should not be embracing and legitimizing the Bush-era Chief Psychologist of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Is there really nobody in the White House who was able to come to that realization on their own, or is this part of some twisted "reaching out" effort to show that they view bygones as bygones when it comes to the war crimes our leaders committed and whom the Obama administration continues to protect? Whatever the explanation, the symbolism here is as ugly as the mindset underlying it.

[American Dream]

http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2011/04 ... ition.html

TUESDAY, APRIL 19, 2011

Guantanamo Psychologist Led Rendition and Imprisonment of Afghan Boys, Complaint Charges

Originally posted at Truthout

Four Ohio residents filed court papers last week seeking to compel the Ohio State Psychology Board to investigate Dr. Larry James, a retired Army colonel and former chief psychologist for the intelligence command at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, who oversaw the brutal torture of detainees, including children.

The motion was filed by Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas on behalf of the four residents, which includes a psychologist, a veteran, a minister and a long-time mental health advocate.

Earlier this year, the psychology board had dismissed a complaint first filed by the same Ohio residents last July, stating, "It has been determined that we are unable to proceed to formal action in this matter."

The original complaint, filed with the Ohio Board of Psychology, was supported by over a thousand pages of documentation, including reports from the US military, the Department of Justice, the Central Intelligence Agency and statements from survivors and witnesses. But the board did not provide a rationale as to why it was unable to probe the allegations leveled against James.

James was head of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), which was made up of psychologists and other mental health professionals who assisted interrogators at the prison facility during the first half of 2003. From 2004 to 2006, he served as chief of psychology at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, and in 2007 he returned to Guantanamo. He retired in 2008.

James is currently dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He was licensed to practice psychology in Ohio in 2008.

According to the complaint, during James' tenure at Guantanamo, "boys and men were systematically abused" and were subjected to "rape and death threats" and torture techniques such as "forced nudity; sleep deprivation; extreme isolation; short-shackling into stress positions; and physical assault."

Moreover, the complaint states that James supervised the forceful and arbitrary detention of three Afghan boys, "transported thousands of miles away from their families and denied them access to counsel."

James did not return an email request for comment.

In their verified complaint filed with the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, seeking a writ to compel the Ohio Board of Psychology "to proceed to 'formal action' against Dr. Larry C. James," the complainants quote an affidavit by former American Psychological Association (APA) Practice Directorate Chief, Dr. Bryant Welch, that the allegations in the complaint, "if true, represent the most serious ethical breaches I have seen in my thirty-five years as a psychologist. They also have the most far reaching implications for the profession of psychology of any ethical or licensing issue I have yet encountered."

IHRC's earlier complaint (PDF link) was damning.

He was accused of numerous instances of professional misconduct and violations of the law, including failure to protect his clients from harm, exploitation of those with whom he worked, failure to protect detainees' confidentiality and failure "to represent honestly his own conduct, experience and the results of his services."

Indeed, in "Fixing Hell," a book James published in 2008 about his experiences at Guantanamo and at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, he claimed that he was "righting the wrongs" at both prisons and that there "have been no incidents of abuse at Guantanamo Bay by either an interrogator or psychologist reported since my arrival in Cuba in January 2003."

Ironically, in his book, James wrote of at least two incidents of such abuse during his 2003 tenure, which as the IHRC complaint explains, he failed to report to proper authorities.

A fair amount of James' narrative about his time at Guantanamo concerns his actions after his commander, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, put him in charge of three young teenage prisoners, all younger than age 16 and one perhaps as young as 12 years old, in February 2003. James was in charge of rendering the boys from Bagram, Afghanistan, where they were then held, arranging their Guantanamo housing and attending and supervising their interrogations. James wrote that the boys were "very traumatized" upon arrival at Guantanamo. While he presents his treatment of these children as a "case study" for his "softer" style of interrogation - "exactly the kind of prisoners I needed to test my philosophy on interrogation" - a closer, more nuanced look presents a very different picture.

"Teenage Terrorists"

The story of these young detainees had previously been documented in news reports and is also retold in the IHRC complaint, which redacts the boys' personal information, something James failed to do in his book.

While James doesn't mention the fact in his book, there were at least a dozen underage, minor children or teenagers held at Guantanamo. US authorities in Iraq and Afghanistan have allegedly held thousands of other juveniles. The IHRC complaint refers to torture and abuse suffered by two of the Guantanamo minors, Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, during the period James was chief psychologist. These teens, as well as all the others but the three held at Camp Iguana, the special camp built to hold them at the Guantanamo base, were kept with the adult prisoners at Camp Delta and other sites at the prison.

According to James, when he arrived at Bagram to pick up his new prisoners, he found them looking "not only terrified but also disheveled and lost." Nevertheless, he believed them to be "far from innocent," "teenage terrorists." "These juveniles were not sweet kids," James wrote.

Yet, he also found that the trauma they endured was very real. James wrote that the boys were "victims of rape, illiterate, one certainly had PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]"; they were, according to James, "the most fragile - psychologically, medically and academically - children I had ever met."

James glosses over in his book the circumstances of the 20-hour flight from Bagram that brought the children to Guantanamo. But news reports published after the children were released in January 2004 provides more detail about their time held by US forces in Afghanistan and their subsequent transport to Guantanamo.

In his book, James states that all three children "had been captured while fighting in a combatant role against US forces in Afghanistan." But James failed to provide any evidence to support such an assertion, which is contrary to reports the boys made themselves. According to a report published a Guardian UK article, two of the boys were caught while US forces were "looking for a local commander, Mansoor Rahman Saiful, who had fought against the Taliban for years, but joined the radical Islamists when America attacked Afghanistan."

Naqibullah, age 13, "a local imam's son, said he stumbled into the raid while cycling from a friend's house," and was interrogated daily about his knowledge of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

"I told them, 'I don't know these people and I am too young to give anything to anyone without my father's authority.'" After two weeks, Naqibullah said, he was asked whether he had any objection to being taken to "another place."

"I said, 'What can I do? You will take me wherever you want to.'" That night, bound, blindfolded and fitted into orange overalls, he was loaded on to a cargo plane and flown non-stop to Cuba. Naqibullah's first 10 days in Guantanamo were the worst of his life, he said.

According to a March 2004 story by The New York Times, another child prisoner, Asadullah, age 12 or 13, believed to be the youngest of the prisoners, said he was interrogated daily for several months while held in Afghanistan. The beatings he endured in the first five days of his captivity still bothered him when he arrived in Guantanamo.

As with Naqibullah, the third child prisoner, Mohammed Ismail Agha, age 13, told a foreign journalist, as reported in The Washington Post in February 2004, that he had been arrested because a friend with whom he was looking for work was supposedly identified as a Taliban. He spent a month and a half at Bagram before being "warned that if he did not confess he would be sent to a terrible and distant place called Guantanamo."

Agha was subjected to sleep deprivation and stress positions during his time at Bagram in an effort to get him to make a confession.

"It was a very bad place. Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick on my door and yell at me to wake up," he said. "When they were trying to get me to confess, they made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours. Sometimes I couldn't bear it any more and I fell down, but they made me stand that way some more."

Agha's story of his rendition is similar to that of Naqibullah. He was "put on a plane with other prisoners, chained by the wrists and ankles, with a hood placed over his head."

"It was hard to breathe," he said.

Supervising the transport back to Guantanamo on the large C-17 transport plane, complete with medical team, military police and Air Force Special Forces shooters, was Col. Larry James. The former chief psychologist never states whether he reported the treatment received by these child prisoners at Bagram to any authority.

"I Prayed to God, I Asked, 'Where Is My Son?'"

While James and the Guantanamo authorities apparently did try to make the boys' treatment much improved over that of prisoners in the rest of the camp, including at least eight or nine other teens held at roughly the same time, the young prisoners were not entirely grateful.

According to the Guardian report, "The boys played football every day and sometimes basketball and volleyball with their guards." But Asadullah told his interviewer, "I was very sad because I missed my family so much.... I was always asking, 'When can I go home? What day? What month?' They said, 'You'll go home soon,' but they never said when."

According to a February 2004 story in the UK Telegraph, Ismail Agha (who is reported as 15 in this article) said, "At first I was unhappy ... For two or three days [after I arrived in Cuba] I was confused but later the Americans were so nice to me. They gave me good food with fruit and water for ablutions and prayer."