[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.
Freedom Archives
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415 863-9977
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