Fixing Hell (29 page)

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.