Facing My Critics
October 2005–August 2007
I was still having periods of restless sleep as I debated the doctor versus soldier conflict deep within my psyche each night. When I was a young child, my mother would always tell me, “Don’t worry ’bout nothin’, son. Just when you can’t find your way, the good Lord will always send an angel to help you along the way. All you gotta do is just be patient with it.” I tried to follow her advice on those nights when I couldn’t sleep because of the images and concerns racing through my mind.
On one bright and sunny day in October 2005, I was sitting by myself in the hospital cafeteria and must have looked like ten miles of bad road. My old fried Chaplain Peter Boudreaux from Opelousas, Louisiana, just came and sat with me. Pete was an Army colonel as well as the head chaplain at our hospital. After being a minister for over thirty years, Pete could sense when things were amiss in anyone. Plus, Pete and I had a special bond because years earlier we had served together in the 25th Infantry Division. He and I crafted a program to reduce the incredibly high suicide rate at the division post. His grace, peacefulness, and calmness had often soothed my disquiet. Chaplain Pete in many ways reminded me of Father Francis Mulcahy, the chaplain on the TV show M*A*S*H—a gentle, kind, peaceful, and pleasant human being.
Pete sat down and said, “Larry, how was it in Iraq? I have been thinking and worrying about you, son.”
I didn’t really answer his question. Instead, I asked him about something I had been wondering about. “Pete, why don’t chaplains carry weapons in combat?”
“Well, we can’t, not ever. How can I serve God and kill another? Us chaplains have to choose, Larry—be a minister or not,” he said, immediately sensing why I had asked the question. “Larry, you’re a doctor. You guys take an oath to ‘do no harm,’ and I never understood how a doctor, a healer, could take such an oath and carry a gun at the same time.”
My world stopped in time at that instant. Chaplain Pete had reached into my soul and placed his right index finger on pause, stop, just hold right here for a moment. My eyes began to tear up right there in the chow hall. Chaplain Pete knew what he was doing when he asked me that question. He already knew I was having a hard time resolving how to be a doctor and a soldier, and he helped me bring it out into the open.
“Larry, that’s a real burden for you to carry, trying to be faithful to both roles,” he said. “I know you have to be struggling.”
He reached over the table, gently placed both of his hands on top of mine, and began to pray. If was as though the hundred other people in the chow hall were motionless, silent, and part of a distant background. He said in his gentle voice, “Heavenly Father, please place your arms around your son as he struggles to find the right road, the right path on his difficult journey. Keep him safe in either a combat zone or at home. Oh Lord, guide him to always have a good heart and a clear mind. In Jesus’s name, amen.”
The chaplain stood up, patted me on the shoulder, and walked away. I never saw him again. He retired shortly after that but his words are still with me to this day. It was a simple gesture that told me he knew the pain I was hiding, and praying with my friend helped me take another major step forward in resolving this debate deep within me.
The debate raging within me was bad enough, but the evolution of the doctor’s role on the battlefield became a hotly debated public issue during the global war on terror, and I became a primary target for the critics. Sometimes hateful attacks upon my character began to heat up in the latter part of 2005. By the time I returned to the States from my Abu Ghraib deployment, many journalists from around the country, in an effort to sell newspapers rather than present the truth, began to attack the notion of a psychologist working to help interrogators in any way. Several misguided psychologists and psychiatrists from around the country jumped into the melee and accused Department of Defense psychologists like myself of being diabolical devils, basing their charges on no data whatsoever. The facts were clear for me: I was not even in Cuba when the abuses occurred in 2002. I arrived there in January 2003. Likewise, I didn’t get to Abu Ghraib until June 2004, six to eight months after the dirty pictures of the abuses showed up on TV. Moreover, there were no psychologists at Abu Ghraib during the abuses. But for some reason the attacks raged on.
At the beginning, it was difficult for me to understand this criticism and remain silent. My orders had been clear: help these young interrogators gather intelligence in a safe, ethical, legal, and effective manner without any abuse whatsoever. Sadly, while in Cuba and Abu Ghraib I had done many media interviews and very few got any traction at all in the general media. Apparently having me explain all the good things we were doing and all the improvements that had been made already just wasn’t interesting enough to be publicized. What did get all the traction and attention was this notion, without any clear data, that Army psychologists were torturing people. On June 20, 2005, Time magazine had published an article that some interpreted as accusing Major John Leso of torture. The article soon took on a life of its own, with antiwar activists and torture opponents claiming it as evidence that Army psychologists were assisting in the torture of detainees.
The Time article didn’t even say that. The closest it came was in reprinting an excerpt of an interrogation log—an interrogator’s record of multiple sessions with Detainee 063—that the magazine obtained. The detainee was Mohammed al-Qahtani, a follower of Osama bin Laden’s and the man believed to be the twentieth hijacker on September 11, 2001. That excerpt starts with this entry:
23 November 2002
0225: The detainee arrives at the interrogation booth at Camp X-Ray. His hood is removed and he is bolted to the floor. SGT A and SGT R are the interrogators. A DOD linguist and MAJ L (BSCT) are present.
0235: Session begins. The detainee refuses to look at SGT A “due to his religion.” This is a rapport building session.
The full session log covers interrogations conducted with the same detainee between November 23 and December 21, 2002.
“MAJ L” was Major Leso, but Time’s excerpt from the session log only contains one reference to him, indicating that he was present on November 23, 2002, for what was called “a rapport building session.” He is mentioned only in the excerpt from the interrogation log. The main Time article made no mention of Major Leso or BSCT, and the anti-Gitmo tone of the article suggests that they would have gladly mentioned any other evidence that Major Leso was participating in the abuse of detainees. The actual interrogation log for Detainee 063 (once classified secret but now widely available on the Internet) contains these five other references to “MAJ L” or “BSCT”:
Control puts detainee in swivel chair at MAJ L’s suggestion to keep him awake and stop him from fixing his eyes on one spot in booth.
BSCT observation indicated that detainee was lying during entire exchange.
The BSCT observed that the detainee was only trying to run an approach on the control and gain sympathy.
Interrogator began to play cards with MP to ignore the detainee due to a BSCT assessment that the interrogators may be becoming the family figures of the detainee, and the interrogator wanted to see if the detainee would try to seek attention.
BSCT observed that detainee does not like it when the interrogator points out his nonverbal responses.
That hardly amounts to evidence that Major Leso was torturing detainees. Not even close. Nevertheless, many members of the Divisions for Social Justice and Peace Psychology of the American Psychological Association took the Time article as conclusive evidence that Leso had tortured people. Most of his accusers had never read the article, much less the actual interrogation notes, and they just blindly accepted the claims of antiwar activists that Major Leso had violated his duty as a psychologist by helping to torture a detainee. Because his name was in the record of an interrogation, and because he was an Army psychologist, critics of our work at Gitmo seized on those facts as a way to score points. He was demonized for abusing detainees, instead of the two CIA contract psychologists who actually conducted abusive interrogations prior to Major Leso’s arrival on the island.
I sincerely believe that the allegations against Major Leso are not only false, they are also in direct opposition to what he did at Gitmo. I never saw any data and never received any information to document that he, a doctor, was teaching interrogators how to torture detainees at Gitmo, and I just can’t imagine Major Leso in that role. Unlike me and how I welcome taking charge all the time, Major Leso was uncomfortable telling others what to do. He felt that his role was only an advisory one. And as such, he had no legal authority to tell other soldiers what to do. Despite being uncomfortable with his new role at Gitmo, Major Leso made a positive impact on the Intelligence Control Element and the Joint Task Force and it is a damn shame that anyone thought otherwise.
Because of the debate and attention on this subject, the American Psychological Association put together what is now known as the PENS (Psychological Ethics and National Security) Task Force, of which I was a member. This task force was directed to come up with special guidelines for psychologists working within the intel community. The results of this blue-ribbon panel were controversial. The panel issued twelve statements concerning psychologists’ ethical obligation in national security–related work, making it clear that torture was wrong and also that all psychologists, regardless of the setting, have an obligation to protect the welfare of those who cannot protect themselves. These were the twelve statements of the PENS Task Force:
1. Psychologists do not engage in, direct, support, facilitate, or offer training in torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
2. Psychologists are alert to acts of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment and have an ethical responsibility to report these acts to the appropriate authorities.
3. Psychologists who serve in the role of supporting an interrogation do not use health care related information from an individual’s medical record to the detriment of the individual’s safety and well-being.
4. Psychologists do not engage in behaviors that violate the laws of the United States, although psychologists may refuse for ethical reasons to follow laws or orders that are unjust or that violate basic principles of human rights.
5. Psychologists are aware of and clarify their role in situations where the nature of their professional identity and professional function may be ambiguous.
6. Psychologists are sensitive to the problems inherent in mixing potentially inconsistent roles such as health care provider and consultant to an interrogation, and refrain from engaging in such multiple relationships.
7. Psychologists may serve in various national security– related roles, such as a consultant to an interrogation, in a manner that is consistent with the Ethics Code, and when doing so psychologists are mindful of factors unique to these roles and contexts that require special ethical consideration.
8. Psychologists who consult on interrogation techniques are mindful that the individual being interrogated may not have engaged in untoward behavior and may not have information of interest to the interrogator.
9. Psychologists make clear the limits of confidentiality.
10. Psychologists are aware of and do not act beyond their competencies, except in unusual circumstances, such as set forth in the Ethics Code.
11. Psychologists clarify for themselves the identity of their client and retain ethical obligations to individuals who are not their clients.
12. Psychologists consult when they are facing difficult ethical dilemmas.
I thought the panel’s conclusions were all no brainers. What decent, moral psychologist could disagree? The blue-ribbon task force was also asked to answer, “Is it okay for a psychologist to conduct an interrogation?” and “Is it proper for a doctor psychologist to aid and consult with interrogators?” The panel concluded that a psychologist should not conduct interrogations but that it was okay to consult with interrogators. Well, I knew that very often these interrogators were nineteen- to twenty-five-year-olds who had not yet fully developed their own interpersonal skills. We had lots to offer as psychologists.
But this was not enough for many of the radical left-wing members of the American Psychological Association and other human rights and physician societies around the country. Somehow these organizations saw the PENS Task Force report as an endorsement for DOD psychologists to torture people. They disregarded the facts and created their own. In June 2007, a group of forty psychologists crafted a letter attacking myself and other members of the blue-ribbon task force. In essence, they accused me and the other DOD members of the panel of “reverse engineering” the principals of behavioral science for interrogators so they could torture detainees in a better way. The physicians at Gitmo faced similar challenges from some medical groups around the country. We had about twenty detainees who were on starvation diets in 2006 and 2007. Our choice was simple: we would not allow anyone to die by starving themselves to death. It was no different from a psych patient telling me, “Dr. James, I’m going to hang myself tonight.” My response would not be, “Okay, that’s your choice.” Under no circumstances would any reasonable doctor do such a thing. So I could not understand why some physicians wanted us to just stand by and watch detainees starve themselves to death.
The psychologists’ “evidence” was drawn from an August 2006 DOD inspector general report that had some inaccurate information in it. This August 2006 report said that Colonel Morgan Banks conspired to teach psychologists and interrogators from Cuba how to reverse engineer SERE school to torture detainees. SERE stands for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape” and it is a special school designed to teach U.S. soldiers how to survive being a POW. In addition to teaching various survival and escape skills, the school puts trainees through some of the more common forms of abuse they are likely to suffer at the hands of their captors. The idea is that the captured soldier will be better able to withstand the real thing if he has been exposed to the abuse in a controlled way during training. The training that Colonel Banks developed for Leso was to teach him how to perform the biscuit role safely, ethically, and humanely. For the first time in my military career, I read a report where the DOD inspector had gotten the story about the SERE psychology training at Fort Bragg all wrong. Morgan Banks did not teach torture. The big problem is that the DOD inspector who did this investigation never, ever talked to Colonel Banks, his staff, or me about any of this. Thus Colonel Banks would be falsely attacked in the press by other psychologists as a doctor who teaches torture. It was either one hell of a lie, flat-out bullshit, or a factual error—it didn’t happen the way the August 2006 DOD inspector said it happened.
In July 2007, Katherine Eban published an article in Vanity Fair titled “Rorschach and Awe.” In this article, Eban chronicled how the leadership in Cuba in 2002 brought in two contract CIA psychologist operatives to reverse engineer SERE tactics. She got the story and the facts right. I was happy to see this article, frankly, because in a way it vindicated my colleagues and me on the PENS Task Force, and it put the blame on the CIA, where it belonged. In particular, the story cleared the name of Colonel Morgan Banks. He had nothing to do with the abuse of detainees at either Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. But in a way, it was too late. My character and his had already been attacked, tarnished, and I could hear the quiet whispers behind my back that Colonel James was torturing people. I had put so much of myself into fixing the hell I found in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and here I was accused of torturing people, of using my skills as a psychologist to harm the people I was supposed to protect. That hurt.
Other articles got some of the information correct but not enough. For example, the New Yorker published a story about how psychologists from Fort Bragg’s SERE school were reverse engineering SERE and teaching interrogators how to torture people. Well, my colleagues at Fort Bragg had nothing to do with this. As the Vanity Fair article correctly explained, it was contract psychologists from the CIA. Army psychologists and I got blamed for this and the damage was already done by the time the Vanity Fair article had been published. The facts were irrelevant to our critics; people just passed on the “truth” they heard about how my colleagues and I were torturing prisoners.
This was especially painful and hurtful when people who called themselves doctors and health care professionals crafted a letter and published it on the Web, attacking my integrity, my person, and most importantly my sense of humanity without any hard evidence that I had ever done anything wrong. Their plan was to discredit all of the military officers who served on the PENS Task Force and use this to pressure the American Psychological Association to withdraw its support of military psychologists.
The amazing thing was that the people who wrote the slanderous letter about me tried to indict me without any evidence that I had ever been at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib during the abuses. Their plan backfired. Their attacks pissed off psychologists from across the country. Anyone who knew me or had ever worked with me knew that I could never strip and sodomize a prisoner. And after being through hell in Abu Ghraib, this soldier wasn’t going to stand by and let people accuse him of such atrocities. At a meeting of the American Psychological Association in 2006, I confronted one of my critics and threatened to shut his mouth for him if he didn’t do it himself. I’m told it was the most excitement at an APA meeting in about twenty years.
I also responded publicly to the assault on my character with a letter to the APA president:
The authors of this letter—who do not know me, my values or my work—have seen fit to besmirch my reputation by associating me with the perpetration of torture. Let me provide just a few facts for the authors’ information. I have never been through “SERE” training. I do not teach “SERE” techniques. I do not use nor have I ever used “SERE” techniques in any aspect of my work related to interrogations. Dr. Morgan Banks has emphasized repeatedly that in addition to being unethical, using a “SERE” approach in an interrogation would be counterproductive to obtaining useful information. I strongly suspect that using a “SERE” approach to an interrogation would yield data worthless for investigative and destructive for adjudicatory purposes.
I will be as clear as I possibly can: I strongly object to, have never used, and will never use torture, cruel, or abusive treatment or punishment of any kind, for any reason, in any setting. They are antithetical to who I am as a person and as an officer in the United States military. Had any of the individuals who signed the open letter saw fit to ask me, I would have provided this information to them directly. Apparently none believed it worthwhile to give me that opportunity before using my name in a letter that they then distributed widely, including to the media.
Throughout my career, in all my work, I have done my best to adhere to the highest standards of ethical conduct. For me, that has meant treating every individual whom I have encountered—from generals in the United States Army, to custodians at military bases around the globe, to detainees in United States custody—with dignity and with respect. Never has anyone in my chain of command ordered me to do anything inconsistent with this code of behavior. Having custody and control over an individual is an awesome responsibility. When I was sent to Abu Ghraib, following the well-publicized abuses, I relied upon psychology and well-known psychologists to help me fulfill my mission—to develop training and implement systems designed to prevent further acts of abuse. The support of these colleagues, whose research and materials I took with me to Iraq, was invaluable—not only in terms of their expertise, but also because of the values that imbue their approach to psychology. I will be forever grateful to them for being with me in spirit on that difficult mission.
I will likewise be grateful to other colleagues, such as Dr. Mike Gelles, who took concrete action that has been made public, to stop detainee abuses. It is my understanding that a United States Senate committee will hold hearings on the issue of interrogation practices. I welcome this development.
Please let me be clear: Letters such as the one sent to you do harm. APA’s continuing work has given psychologists an invaluable resource to fight against ill-informed and misguided promoters of harsh and abusive interrogation techniques. We are making excellent progress in that fight. Letters that name and that associate individuals with torture through innuendo have no place in an informed and responsible discussion. They are deeply painful. They are also extremely discouraging to psychologists in the military seeking to do the right thing, many of whom are early in their careers and often in dangerous settings far from family and from loved ones.
A groundswell of support began for military psychologists around late June 2007. A group of over one hundred nationally recognized psychologists wrote a letter in support of my character and the work of military psychologists to the president of the American Psychological Association. People got downright pissed that I, a decorated military officer and psychologist, was ever attacked in this way. Fifty-five psychologists signed a letter sent to the APA president in my defense:
We want to respond to your open letter to APA President Sharon Brehm, in which you strongly object to the implication that you have ever, in any setting, been involved in the use of torture, cruel and abusive treatment or punishment. We appreciate the need for you to speak out in honor of your dignity and integrity.
We want you to know that we believe that this unfortunate portrayal is antithetical to who you are as a person and as an officer in the United States military. The portrayal is certainly antithetical to what we know about you.
We believe that throughout your career you have done your best to adhere to the highest standards of ethical conduct. We are pleased to hear that no one in your chain of command ordered you to do anything inconsistent with this code of behavior.
We are aware that you are a person of color who has taken a unique leadership role among psychologists in the military. We perceive you to be a hero in your work at Abu Ghraib to develop training and to implement systems to prevent further acts of abuse. We are proud of your application of psychological research, materials and principles in doing so.
We are very pleased to hear that you perceive that APA’s continuing work has given psychologists an invaluable resource to fight against promoters of harsh and abusive interrogation techniques, and that we are making progress in that arena.
We regret that well-meaning psychologists have engaged in the listing of your and others’ names associated with torture, directly and through innuendo. We can only imagine the demoralizing impact on you and others. We strongly regret this, and want you to know that many others of us see things differently.
In August 2007, the American Psychological Association held its national convention in San Francisco. The more extreme anti-Bush, antiwar APA members made a motion to have all military psychologists withdrawn from DOD detention facilities around the world. They had no data that I, nor any military psychologists, had ever done anything wrong. It became clear to me that their misguided efforts were really an attempt to express their hate and outrage over the Republican Party, President Bush, and their opposition to the war. The motion failed miserably. One colleague said, “Larry, now let me get this straight. Twenty prisoners at Gitmo are on a hunger strike, three or four of them committed suicide, there was a massive riot at the prison at Camp Bucca, Iraq . . . and somehow pulling out all the psychologists will improve the situation. That’s what they want us to believe? This does not make any sense whatsoever.”
The motion that passed was a strong statement saying that the organization was firmly against torture. Fine with me, I thought at the time. So am I. It also listed a set of harsh techniques that psychologists were prohibited from ever advising in a consultation with interrogators. I had no hesitation about supporting that statement. Those techniques were not used under my watch at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib and I would never recommend them as an ethical, moral way to obtain intel.
The debate did help answer some of the questions raised about the role of the psychologist in this war. Psychologists should not do interrogations. They should stay out of the interrogation booth. I always knew that if I were ever to be court-martialed while at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib, it would have been because I lost my objectivity and did something stupid while trying to be an interrogator. I knew that I had to stay out of that room and not be an active participant in the interrogation. My job was to help interrogators avoid behavioral drift. In other words, I helped them stay within the boundaries of the SOP and stay away from abusive behaviors.
Throughout all of this debate I had many conversations with well-respected military psychologists from around the country. I remember talking with Colonel Tim Watson from the Army’s Intel Command at Fort Meade, Maryland. Tom was a senior, highly regarded Army psychologist. I debated the issue of combatant versus doctor with him and Colonel Banks on many occasions. The question that I had struggled with for so long—How can I be a psychologist and a combatant at the same time?—kept coming up over and over as we talked.
“You can’t, Larry,” Colonel Watson told me during one of these talks. “You have to keep your role as a psychologist and as a doctor separate and never shall the two cross. It would be like being someone’s defense attorney while also serving as their prosecuting attorney at the same time. It ain’t gonna work.”
From these many conversations with Colonel Banks, Lieutenant Colonel Dobson—my deputy in the Department of Psychology when we were at Walter Reed who was involved with Major Leso’s assignment to Gitmo—and I began to shape the national DOD policy for the biscuit. Now, what has evolved is that the biscuit psychologist provides no actual medical care and serves as a military officer in intel units. Others provide mental health care, but the biscuit psychologist stays firmly in the role of soldier, not doctor.