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."

Means and Ends: Newly Published Notes of Bruce Jessen Reveal Real Purpose of Bush’s Torture Program

As part of a new investigative story, Truthout has published documents written by the former psychologist for SERE, and later CIA contract interrogator for the Bush torture program, Bruce Jessen. Before going to work for the CIA with his former SERE partner, psychologist James Mitchell, Jessen authored a 2002 "draft exploitation plan" for military use, based on his experiences as a SERE instructor. The newly-discovered documents, provided to Truthout by former SERE Air Force Captain Michael Kearns, were written back in 1989 when Jessen was transferred from his clinical role elsewhere in SERE to help staff a new survival training course for Special Mission Units undertaking dangerous assignments for Special Operations forces abroad.

Jason Leopold and I co-authored the new story, which includes a video interview with Captain Kearns, who helped hire Jessen back in 1989 for his new SERE role helping put together the class titled SV-91. The documents include notes for a portion of that class, known as "Psychological Aspects of Detention." The other document is a paper by Jessen, "Psychological Advances in Training to Survive Captivity, Interrogation and Torture," which was prepared for a symposium at that time: "Advances in Clinical Psychological Support of National Security Affairs, Operational Problems in the Behavioral Sciences Course."

Jessen's notes, in particular, demonstrate that this course material, which was "reverse-engineered" to provide a blueprint for the interrogation and detention policies of the Bush administration -- some of which remain in use today -- emphasized not just the ways to coercively interrogate an individual for intelligence purposes, but to "exploit" the detainee for a number of uses. As Jessen wrote (and those following the Bradley Manning torture case will find this quite chilling, I suspect):

"From the moment you are detained (if some kind of exploitation is your Detainer's goal) everything your Detainer does will be contrived to bring about these factors: CONTROL, DEPENDENCY, COMPLIANCE AND COOPERATION," Jessen wrote. "Your detainer will work to take away your sense of control. This will be done mostly by removing external control (i.e., sleep, food, communication, personal routines etc. )…Your detainer wants you to feel 'EVERYTHING' is dependent on him, from the smallest detail, (food, sleep, human interaction), to your release or your very life … Your detainer wants you to comply with everything he wishes. He will attempt to make everything from personal comfort to your release unavoidably connected to compliance in your mind."

Jessen wrote that cooperation is the "end goal" of the detainer, who wants the detainee "to see that [the detainer] has 'total' control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.)."

What is "Exploitation"?

If one were to search for the term "exploitation" in the Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse, published with numerous redactions in late 2009 (PDF), you would find numerous mentions of the term. While at times the word "exploitation" appears to be used as a synonym for the "breaking down" of prisoners, it doesn't usually explain for what purpose. Indeed, many have noted that such "breaking down" is antithetical to the production of information from an interrogation suspect. Jessen says as much in his notes. But there are other reasons to break someone down.

For instance, the SASC report notes that "The 'Al Qaeda Resistance Contingency Training' presentation described methods used by al Qaeda to resist interrogation and exploitation..." (p. 39 of the PDF). "The presentation on detainee "exploitation" described phases of exploitation and included instruction on initial capture and handling, conducting interrogations, and long-term exploitation." "Another slide describing captor motives states: establish absolute control, induce dependence to meet needs, elicit compliance, shape cooperation.... techniques designed to achieve these goals include isolation or solitary confinement, induced physical weakness and exhaustion, degradation, conditioning, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, disruption of sleep and biorhythms, and manipulation of diet" (p. 40 of the PDF). When intelligence is the aim of the "exploitation process", it is specifically called "intelligence exploitation" in the report.

One of the primary reasons exploitation is used on prisoners is to produce false confessions. Indeed, it was the torture of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi that was used to provide the false intelligence about Saddam Hussein seeking nuclear materials that was to provide a major casus belli for the United States for their war with Iraq.

Other examples of exploitation include the recruitment of prisoners as intelligence assets, i.e., as snitches and spies. Indeed, the Truthout article notes a number of cases of attempting just such recruitment of former Guantanamo detainees, while they were still incarcerated. Another long-standing example of such exploitation is the use of prisoners in show trials, which have been used in a number of countries as a means of squashing dissent and offering a faux-legitimate function to governmental security forces. This was the case in the famous 1949 show trial of Cardinal Mindzenty of Hungary by the Stalinist government there.

It was also the case more recently in the military commissions show trial of former "child soldier" Omar Khadr, who was tortured, held in solitary for years, then forced to sign a confession and endure a military show trial which sentenced him to 40 years in prison (while a backroom deal supposedly has reduced that to 8 years and release from Guantanamo to Canada sometime next year).

Show Trials, False Confessions, Spying, Medical Experimentation

In a little remarked aspect of the Khadr case, his brother, Abdurahman, who was also held as a prisoner at Guantanamo while also working as a spy for the CIA, trying to get intelligence from prisoners there, testified under oath in 2004 that Omar had agreed to collaborate with the FBI, but was returned to onerous torture conditions after he changed his mind. We don't know the kind of collaboration he was ready to provide, though it's noteworthy that his brother had already been working for a few years as a CIA asset.

A. My brother Omar cooperated with the FBI and he was ready, they were being ready to release him and then he was in his cellblock and people saw that he was being ready to be released so they told him: "Oh, you told everything. You are going to hell. So if you don't change you are going to go to hell." So the next time he went to interrogation he denied everything so they took away everything from him and he is still there till now.

Q. Because he decided not to continue the collaboration?

A. Not to continue the cooperation.

Perhaps one of the most heart-rending accounts of a prisoner being broken and used for false confessions is in the autobiography of David Hicks. Hicks also discussed his torture in an interview recently with Jason Leopold at Truthout, describing his experience of solitary confinement, beatings, stress positions, being drugged, and having "every aspect of our lives" controlled by the Guantanamo authorities. In particular, he describes another aspect of exploitation of prisoners I haven't mentioned thus far, medical experimentation, as he was constantly given different pills, injections, blood tests. His sense of being an experimental guinea pig has been echoed by a number of other former detainees, most recently the German-born ethnic Turk, Murat Kurnaz.

The following is from Mr. Hicks' book, Guantanamo: My Journey. It could be used as a teaching text on the meaning of "exploitation," and what the U.S. government implemented at Guantanamo. But we cannot forget that an innocent human being was the subject of this evil.

As time passed, the threat of ‘special treatment’ and psychological conditioning took its toll. The interrogators wore me down so that when they said, ‘So when you attended the al-Qaeda training camp...’ I would answer the question without denial or protest. I became too exhausted to argue. I allowed the interrogators to frame my words and say anything they wanted....

The interrogator’s associate, who had remained quiet until now, said they had a proposal for me: they would place me next to the various English-speaking detainees over a period of time, and I was to milk each one for information and report it back to the interrogators. If I agreed to do this, I would be allowed fifteen minutes with a lady from the Philippines. I instantly refused and requested to be sent back to my cage....

A goal of interrogation is to repeatedly break you and then put you back together until the parts can be manipulated. You become the interrogators’ creation.... The memory of what I have described depresses me deeply to this day. It does something to the soul; it felt like something had died inside me....

My end of the bargain was that I had to verbally repeat my story, agreeing with anything they added, even when they dictated my thoughts, beliefs and actions incorrectly. They also fed me things to say about other detainees as well. I did so obediently, even though I knew they were all lies. I struggled terribly with this and hated every minute of it, especially when they brought up other detainees. I searched desperately for the courage to resist and renege on the deal. I had no recourse. I had crumbled and was fully theirs.

Up until now, the primary narrative surrounding the torture scandal has been about the purported efficacy of using torture to produce intelligence in the "war on terror." But the new Jessen material demonstrates that the program used as the basis for the "reverse-engineering" of the SERE torture techniques was a full-blown exploitation program, whose aims went far beyond the mere elicitation of information, but included the physical and psychological pressures to produce absolute compliance in prisoners for the purpose of false confessions, show trials, recruitment of spies, and medical experimentation.

As Capt. Kearns is quoted in the Truthout article, "The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered - not just 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar."

It will be up to the press and the blogosphere to make the full reality of the Bush-era torture program fully understood to the population at large, to weave the kinds of information provided here into the narrative of events. Only when the full extent of this program is revealed, can we begin to take steps to end such heinous activities, and bring to justice those who sought a number of nefarious ends through means almost too awful to recount.

Originally posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL