Posts Tagged ‘interrogations’

Psychologist/Former U.S. Army colonel charged with influencing beatings, rape threats and other torture at GITMO

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Center for Constitutional Rights
CommonDreams.org
October 15, 2009

BATON ROUGE, La. and NEW YORK – October 15 – Today, attorneys filed an appeal before the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal, in the case Dr. Trudy Bond v. Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists. Toledo-based psychologist Dr. Trudy Bond is calling on the Louisiana State Board of Examiners to investigate Louisiana psychologist and retired U.S. Army colonel Dr. Larry C. James, a former high-ranking advisor on interrogations for the U.S. military in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

According to his own statements, Dr. James played an influential role in both the policy and day-to-day operations of interrogations and detention at the prison camps.  Publicly-available information shows that while Dr. James was at Guantanamo, abuse in interrogations was widespread, and cruel and inhuman treatment was official policy.

Allegations of abuse during Dr. James’s January to May 2003 deployment include beatings, religious and sexual humiliation, rape threats and painful body positions. Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who is still imprisoned in Guantanamo, is one of the prisoners who has alleged brutal treatment in the spring of 2003, when he was only 16 years old. James was also stationed in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 and returned to Guantanamo in 2007. In 2008, he was named Dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

Read entire article: http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/10/15-19

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The Huffington Post “How It Is: Psychiatrists, Physicians, and Torture”

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Dan Agin
Huffington Post
April 22, 2009

Our current troubles with torture by agencies of our government, and the shock of many that medical doctors stood by or even assisted in such torture, will be with us for a while. There is never too much of knowledge, and usually too little of knowledge of the past, and our present time is apparently an illustration of our public failings.

To be clear about my own views, the publicized recent physical and psychological stresses used in the interrogation of prisoners in American hands, from the perspective of medicine, neuroscience, and psychiatry, were indeed torture. Various legal minds apparently twisted the meanings of words and phrases into knots in their attempts to provide cover for the use of terror in interrogations, but my guess is they and everyone around them knew the truth. And now various media hacks sound the same corrupted chant, more out of foolishness than any reasoned argument. It’s an ugly dance, a jig that reminds one of a crazy gavotte in Bedlam.

Maybe the saddest cut of all is that we’ve been here before. Too many people are bemused by the illusion that physicians are incapable of standing by or assisting in the mechanics of torture. Maybe most are, but to say that all are is a public lie — and how many psychiatrists and internist physicians do you need to help turn the rack or rip at the mind with terror? Not many. For the few hundred prisoners at a place like Guantanamo, a handful of assisting psychiatrists and internists would be sufficient, both psychiatrists and internists already on the agency payroll and committed to agency operations.

Physicians of various kinds have always been involved in government interrogations. and it’s a bit silly to pretend otherwise.

Read entire article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-agin/how-it-is-psychiatrists-p_b_189271.html

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