Fixing Hell (30 page)
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.
Conclusions
September 2007–January 2008
I
spent much of my time after my stint in Abu Ghraib analyzing what I learned as Biscuit 1 and what can be done to prevent a repeat of the hell we faced there. The worst outcome of our experience in Abu Ghraib would be to learn nothing from what happened there, to blindly stumble into the next detainee operation without bringing with us the lessons we learned from fixing that hellhole. As I told those young captains at Tripler, the mess at Abu Ghraib happened because no one was in charge, no one knew what had to be done, and no one led the way.
So what can—and needs—to be done as we move into the future? Where are our shortfalls and our vulnerabilities in this war on terrorism? How can the United States fight a “new” enemy effectively, while remaining within the humane boundaries of the Geneva Conventions and presenting a good role model of democracy to the rest of the world? Are there very distinct things that need to be done immediately in order to achieve success, and prevent a future Abu Ghraib from occurring?
We have come a long way since the 9/11 attacks. At that time our nation was totally unprepared to deal with the rates of mental illness, behavioral problems, the number of juvenile terrorists, and the myriad cultural issues of our enemy, as well as the asymmetrical battlefield tactics, such as IEDs and urban warfare. We went to war without enough mental health staff in place to treat the soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the detainees—a moral tragedy of sorts. The shame of it all was that the leaders failed to plan for it or denied that it was a real need. Along the way, out of revenge, pathology, or just plain old stupidity, some few American soldiers chose to torture detainees at Abu Ghraib. Clearly, these acts were a combination of failed leadership, moral disengagement by the soldiers who committed the acts, and unchecked behavioral drift.
We now know that most of the abuses at Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with interrogations. Rather, the abuse was done by a few soldiers who had become combat ineffective under the cloak of darkness, abusing the detainees for their own pleasure and twisted needs. It is a fact that out of any large number of human beings, soldiers or otherwise, there will be some small percentage who will take advantage of others, particularly the weak and powerless, to indulge their own worst, most craven desires. Unfortunately, at Abu Ghraib their leaders were not there to ensure proper adherence to standards.
I was brought to Abu Ghraib to put procedures in place to prevent these atrocities from ever happening again. I’m proud to say I successfully completed that mission. I did it. I trained a biscuit staff and monitored the behavior, training, and job performance of interrogators. We did this not to teach abuse but rather to prevent it. By the time I left Abu Ghraib in October 2004, major milestones had been reached. We had videotaping capability for all interrogations and one-way mirrors in all interrogation rooms. We became important consultants to the intel commander as well as the military police who guarded the detainees. Slowly but surely, a hospital was built with inpatient psychiatric capabilities. Colonel Robert Thomas, Abu Ghraib’s post commander, spent $300 million improving the infrastructure there, building a hospital, upgrading the living facilities for the soldiers, and improving the quality of life for the detainees. Abu Ghraib had three colonels, Colonel Thomas, the new hospital commander, and the new intel center director, who were dedicated to humanity and always doing the right moral things at all times. This is a secret that America never knew. The mass media frenzy forced us all to be mentally stuck on those horrible pictures, the abuses, the torture. Mention “Abu Ghraib” and those images immediately come to my mind. Most people assume that little has been done to improve the situation in Abu Ghraib, that perhaps the outright abuse has been stopped but probably little else has changed. Those people are seriously mistaken. Somehow, the nation was never told that the United States spent over $300 million to do the right moral thing at Abu Ghraib after the abuses were uncovered.
What must we do to prevent abuses in the future? First and foremost, we need well-trained interrogators and military police who have responsibility for the humane care and custody of the detainees. When I arrived at Guantanamo in 2003 the interrogation regulations were so broad they allowed almost anything to happen, except the death of a detainee—that would have been considered bad. Now the regulations that govern interrogations and the rulebook for the military police have outlawed abusive tactics for interrogations and for the military police.
Second, unlike at the beginning of the war, we have a training course for psychologists who work in the detention arena. They are incredibly well trained. Unlike Major John Leso, these young officers have a detailed set of guidelines that lay out what a BSCT psychologist can and cannot do. Leso was flying blind, doing his best to figure out the rules on his own. We know now that well-trained psychologists should remain a major part of the detention and interrogation team. Why? Because they can provide oversight on when behaviors are starting to drift and identify the early signs of abuse. These are the critical things the Department of Defense can do to prevent the occurrence of abuses or torture in prisons, whether in a U.S. prison or a POW facility.
Lieutenant Colonel Frantz once told me, “Sir, I have no problem with torturing these guys to get information if it will save American lives. Heck, Colonel, I don’t see what the big deal is about using information out of a detainee’s medical record. If that’s going to help us save a soldier’s life, well, what’s the problem with it?” I suspect many civilians would take the same position, but my experience in working at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib reaffirmed the position I previously held on these issues. I now know, more surely than ever before, that I am against torture.
When Lieutenant Colonel Frantz brought the issue up, I explained my position by saying, “Frantz, is America going to be a moral leader in the world? When you torture a prisoner, the information you get is not reliable. We cannot allow our anger and need for revenge to serve as a compass in the global war on terrorism. It’s really about morality, and Frantz, we must treat every human being with decency and respect. I was taught as a child to always take the high road, and as an officer, I was taught to never violate the Geneva Conventions. It will only fuel the enemy.”
As an American soldier who believes wholeheartedly that we must fight the Muslim extremists who want to see us all dead, and fight them aggressively, I support the American military’s effort to extract valuable intel from detainees. But I do not support torture, because it is simply wrong from a moral perspective, it violates my duties as a psychologist, and—this is an important point that can negate the need to debate the first two—it is not as effective as the other methods of interrogation that I put in place at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.
Much has been written about Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, the commander at Abu Ghraib and earlier at Guantanamo Bay. He never ordered me to teach torture. It was the direct opposite: he told me to teach the interrogators how to work with detainees without any abuse whatsoever. His gruff appearance and style got in his way at times. In terms of how he was presented in the media, he sometimes did himself no favors with the way he interacted with people. But it was General Miller’s desire to do the right thing that led to the humane treatment of the juveniles at Guantanamo and the large field hospital being built at Abu Ghraib. Likewise, I have no data to show that Major Leso ever tortured anyone. Leso’s efforts to change the way prisoners were interrogated at Gitmo was like watching an aircraft carrier do a 360-degree turn in a harbor. It was going to change course and head in a new direction, but everybody watching knew that it was going to take some time. Major Leso got that carrier started in the turn, and eventually it did head in a new direction.