[News] The Strange, Post-Gitmo Career of Col. Larry James

Anti-Imperialist News news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Aug 7 11:21:27 EDT 2008


http://www.counterpunch.org/

August 7, 2008


The Strange, Post-Gitmo Career of Col. Larry James


Fixing Hell and Curing Obesity

By Dr. TRUDY BOND

Colonel (Retired) Larry James, Chief Psychologist at Guatanamo Bay in 
2003 and 2007, as well as Abu Ghraib in 2004, has a new vocation: 
Dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State 
University, Dayton, Ohio. Seems that James perhaps realized that some 
academicians might find it difficult to understand how his 
experiences at these illegal detention facilities qualified him for 
an academic deanship: he did not include his time at Guantanamo or 
Abu Ghraib on the CV he presented to Wright State.

More true to fact is the bio that he presented in 2005 when James 
stated that he was assigned to Guantanamo Bay as Chief Psychologist 
for the Joint Intelligence Group in 2003 and Director, Behavioral 
Science Unit, Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib 
in 2004. We're talking Intelligence and Interrogation at two of the 
most notorious sites of abuse and torture that this country has 
perpetrated in this century.

Though he camouflaged his deployments at these sites on his most 
recent resume, conversely James has written an entire book about his 
time at 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446509280/counterpunchmaga>Abu 
Ghraib: Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib. 
Wright State beware: James' grandiose claims border on the absurd.

According to the publisher's promotion of Fixing Hell:

" . . . the U.S. Army dispatched Colonel Larry James to Abu Ghraib 
with an overwhelming assignment: to dissect this catastrophe, fix it, 
and prevent it from being repeated . . . Colonel James's expertise 
made him the ONE INDIVIDUAL CAPABLE of taking on this enormous task . 
. . readers will see the tightrope military personnel must walk while 
fighting in the still new battlefield of the war on terror, the 
challenge of serving
as both a doctor/healer AND combatant soldier, and what can and 
must-be done to ensure that interrogations are safe, moral, and 
effective." (emphasis added)

Never mind that Rumsfeld and the Pentagon wasn't calling Abu Ghraib a 
"catastrophe" at the time James was dispatched (at least not 
publicly). To remind some readers, this is the same Colonel Larry 
James who was Chief Psychologist of the Guantanamo Joint Intelligence 
Group [JIG] at the time that the Camp Delta Standard Operating 
Procedures (SOP) manual was put into place. This secretly-released 
SOP at Guantanamo was written specifically for the Joint Intelligence 
Group of which James was Chief Psychologist. The SOP makes it clear 
that the Joint Intelligence Group was specifically the military unit 
that decided how long isolation was used on each detainee to "enhance 
and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly 
arrived detainee in the interrogation process," along with other 
means of torture, abuse and violation of international law, such as 
hiding detainees from the International Red Cross.

This is the same Colonel Larry James who had command responsibility 
for BSCT psychologists who were involved in SERE-based interrogation 
methods at Guantanamo during the period documented in a report from 
the Pentagon's Office of Inspector General.

Superhero that he claims to be in Fixing Hell, James couldn't write 
the book alone, even though his coauthor, Gregory A. Freeman, also 
seems to lack the credentials required of an academic researcher or 
historian (are you listening Wright State?), unless we're talking 
historical fiction and homophobia.

Freeman's most notorious writing was in 2003 when he wrote a piece 
for Rolling Stone with the indelible title of "Bug Chasers: the men 
who long to be HIV+." Freeman was writing about gay men who found sex 
with HIV+ partners erotic, suggesting that the numbers of such men 
were about 10,000 per year. Freeman's two experts immediately 
denounced the quotes Freeman attributed to them, and Freeman's shoddy 
misinterpretation of the statistics from the Center for Disease 
Control (he had assumed that all HIV+ cases were the result of men 
having sex with men) resulted in a sensationalized scenario that Sean 
Hannity and others were only too happy to pass along as truth in the 
midst of trashing gays.

Andrew Sullivan said it best: "The entire lead of the piece is 
written in a prose style that reads like Jerry Falwell channeling 
Hunter S. Thompson . . .That's why this piece isn't journalism. it's 
hysteria, wrapped in a homophobic and HIV-phobic wrapper."

James' co-author has also made a couple of attempts at 
military-related books, neither of which would lend credibility to 
James' story of Abu-Ghraib. Freeman's book, 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060936908/counterpunchmaga>Sailors 
to the End: The deadly fire on the USS Forrestal and the Heroes Who 
Fought It, was reviewed in the Naval History Magazine from Annapolis 
in August, 2003:

The heroic survivors and lost souls deserve to have their story told 
in a detailed and accurate manner. Unfortunately, this account is a 
disjointed description of facts and interviews, insufficiently and 
incoherently tied together . . . The description of several actions 
frequently are either awkwardly stated or simply incorrect. It was 
equally disturbing to find a lack of editing for technical accuracy. 
This resulted in numerous errors throughout the book. . . . These and 
other gaffes show an obvious lack of familiarity with military 
terminology, equipment and procedures and calls into question the 
author's credibility and ability to tell this epic story with 
historical accuracy. . . it would more accurately be characterized as 
'historical fiction' rather than as an accurate documentation of the 
Forrestal fire.

And Freeman's more recent attempt in 2007, 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0015VT2I4/counterpunchmaga>The 
Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All For The 
Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II. (The grandiose title of 
Freeman's books begins to take on a familiar pattern: Sailors to the 
End . . . The Greatest Rescue Mission . . . Fixing hell.) Apart from 
minor details such as referring to the Yugoslav Air Force in WWI, 
when Yugoslavia didn't even exist at that time (remniscent of 
McCain's difficulties with Chekoslovakia), Freeman utterly 
misrepresents the roles of Tito's Partisans and Mihailovic's Chetniks 
in his depiction of that piece of history.

Why did Colonel Larry James choose Freeman as his coauthor to write 
about his time at Abu Ghraib? And why did Dr. Phillip Zimbardo of the 
Stanford Prison Experiment write the foreward to a book with Freeman 
as a coauthor?

But the presses are hot. Dr. Larry James has another book coming out 
the same month. (Could Wright State be any happier?) This book has 
nothing to do with Abu Ghraib. It's about . . . obesity. How did 
James research and edit a book on obesity intervention while being 
the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? You decide.

For this book, which James co-edits with John Linton, James' bio 
states that he is Chair of the Department of Psychology at Tripler 
Army Medical Center, Honolulu, while simultaneiously holding adjunct 
appointments at the (1) Uniformed Services University of the Health 
Sciences School of Medicine, Bethesda, MD (2) Howard University 
Hospital, Washington, DC (3) University of West Florida, Pensacola, 
FA (4) American School of Professional Psychology, Hawaii (5) 
University of Hawaii, AND (6) Hawaii Pacific University. Busy man, 
this Dean of Psychology at Wright State University, wright next door 
to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Once more, no mention of 
his time at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib in this bio, even if he was fixing 
hell in addition to all his faculty appointments.

There is one final tale of tragic irony. Colonel Larry James has been 
chosen by the American Psychological Association to receive the Booz 
Black Award to honor outstanding research and practice in Counseling 
Health Psychology at their annual convention next week, the same 
convention that was the stage in 2007 for Colonel James, straight 
from Guantanamo, to urge his fellow psychologists to continue to 
professionally support those locations where men, women and children 
are held illegally for years, kept in solitary confinement, lives 
ruined, tortured and killed. Perhaps APA is confused, thinking it's 
giving James the Black Boots Award rather than the Booz Black.

Dr. Trudy Bond has been a licensed psychologist for 28 years. She can 
be reached at <mailto:ar_mordilo at yahoo.com>ar_mordilo at yahoo.com.




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