Ethics Process Fails at APA, Psychologists Demand Review

Two psychologists with the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology have written an open letter to current American Psychological Association (APA) President Suzanne Bennett Johnson. The letter excoriates the APA Ethics Office for refusing to censure blatant cases of psychologist involvement in torture or other related crimes.

Doctors Steven Reisner and Trudy Bond review three cases that were brought to APA on charges of ethics violations -- Michael Gelles, John Leso, and Larry James. The letter is reprinted below, reproduced from its online posting here.

I was pleased to see that some of my own investigations into psychologist involvement in torture were referenced by Reisner and Bond, in particular my work on the Daniel King-Michael Gelles case.

APA Confirms It Exonerated Gelles

On August 8, 2010 I received an email from APA Communications Director Rhea Farberman. I had written to her after I'd seen a copy of an unpublished letter she had written to USA Today. According to Farberman, she had written to the paper because they were going to publish an op-ed by attorney Jonathan Turley on Gelles and the Daniel King case. She "wanted to let the USA Today editorial page staff know that at least one of Mr. Turley’s assertions was incorrect." The op-ed was subsequently cancelled.

While Reisner and Bond state in their Open Letter (italics in original): "The Ethics Committee apparently found that Dr. Gelles’ behavior did not violate APA ethics," Farberman confirmed she had written the letter to USA Today, and told me in the August 8 email (bold emphasis in original): "APA did investigate the allegations against Dr. Gelles and found no violations of the APA ethics code."

In the unpublished letter by Farberman to USA Today, written after the 2009 summer APA convention, where former King attorney Jonathan Turley had spoken about the King case and Gelles, the APA Communications Director wrote:

• Mr. Turley asserts that APA ignored his complaint. That is totally untrue. In April of 2001 a complaint was filed against an APA member, Dr. Michael Gelles. As a result of this complaint, filed by Mr. Turley, an ethics investigation was initiated and a formal ethics case was opened.

• Material relevant to the investigation was provided to APA by Mr. Turley who as the complainant’s representative received correspondence from the Ethics Office regarding this case.

• The complainant was provided multiple opportunities to submit information. Materials submitted by Mr. Turley included a videotape which was part of the record and thoroughly reviewed. According to APA’s procedures, the record also included Dr. Gelles’ responses to the charges against him.

• The full APA Ethics Committee reviewed the case and, on the basis of all the facts in the record, including materials provided by Mr. Turley and Dr. Gelles’ responses, determined that there had been no violation of the APA Ethics Code. On September 26, 2002, the APA Ethics Office informed the complainant through Mr. Turley of the final outcome of this matter.

I tried on multiple occasions to get comment from Turley, but he never responded to requests. Nevertheless, another of King's attorney's did speak to me, and revealed that not long after the Gelles interview, Daniel King made a suicide attempt or gesture. I wrote up this interview with former JAG Robert A. Bailey in a follow-up article to my first King-Gelles story, Broken Faith: How a Navy Psychologist Drove A U.S. Prisoner to Attempt Suicide.

I followed up the Aug. 8 email and asked Farberman if APA could "verify if the ethics investigation also contacted Daniel King's military JAG attorneys, Lieutenant Robert Bailey or Lieutenant Matthew Freedus, or reviewed their testimony to the Senate Intelligence committee as part of the ethics investigation?" I also asked if APA would share the video of the King interrogation, if they had a copy.

Farberman refused to make further comment. "We will not be releasing any further materials related to the investigation and review of Mr. Turley’s allegations against Dr. Gelles beyond what I have already told you," she said in her email response.

Actually, what Farberman confirms is far worse than what Turley originally claimed. He said that APA ignored the ethics charge. Farberman insists the charges were investigated but APA found Gelles did nothing wrong. What that means is that from APA's standpoint, misrepresentation of roles, lying, and participation in an abusive interrogation, using sleep deprivation on a prisoner, is totally fine with APA, and such behavior doesn't even merit the most minor of rebukes. (For more details on the King case, see the link above.)

I'd add that I also wrote on the role Col. Larry James played in supervising the rendition of child prisoners from Afghanistan to Guantanamo. See Guantanamo Psychologist Led Rendition and Imprisonment of Afghan Boys, Complaint Charges. As one example of James' crime we have the testimony of Mohammed Ismail Agha, age 13, who told the Washington Post, he was "put on a plane with other prisoners, chained by the wrists and ankles, with a hood placed over his head." None of the parents of these children were informed what had happened to their sons.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to psychologists Steven Reisner and Trudy Bond, and other psychologists and medical professionals who have tried to stand up and get their professional associations, and the members of same, to be accountable. It is surely a dark, dark stain on the history of the helping professions to see them twisted into their exact opposites, agencies of cruelty and despair.

What follows is the text of the Open Letter. All italics were in the original.

Open Letter to

President Suzanne Bennett Johnson

American Psychological Association

A.P.A. has taken a very strong stance against the use of torture, inhumane, and degrading treatment, and if anyone is able to identify A.P.A. members who have been involved in such activities, we will take disciplinary action.
-- Gerald Koocher, former APA President, speaking on Democracy Now! (June 16, 2006)

September 18, 2012

Dear Dr. Johnson:

We are two psychologists committed to making certain that psychologists implicated in torture and prisoner abuse are held accountable by oversight bodies for their egregious ethical violations. We believe the public trust and the reputation of our profession depend upon such accountability.

We are writing at this time regarding ethics complaints filed with the APA Ethics Office against three psychologists who remain APA members in good standing: Dr. Michael Gelles, Dr. Larry James and Dr. John Francis Leso. Based on undisputed facts, these cases cry out for investigation and appropriate censure. We would like to briefly review some of the evidence for these complaints and express our concern with regard to the status of each complaint.

Attorney Jonathan Turley filed a complaint with the APA Ethics Office in 2001 against Dr. Michael Gelles for alleged complicity in the harsh treatment of US Naval Officer Daniel King, who had been accused of espionage.[i] [ii] King was held for 520 days without charge by the Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and interrogated for 29 days in 15-20 hour sessions. During this period, Navy investigators gave King multiple polygraph tests and lied to him about the results. By the end of the month, King had signed a confession despite having no recollection of the actions to which he admitted. Prior to his military hearing, King had become suicidal and felt he was losing his grip on reality, since he could not remember the event. He requested a consultation with a psychologist to help him remember, via hypnosis or truth serum, and King was sent to Dr. Gelles for a psychological consultation.[iii] [iv] [v] According to testimony of King’s defense attorney before the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Gelles virtually ignored the statement of King that he had suicidal thoughts…two days before the interview.”[vi] He focused instead on pressuring King to give the agents “corroborating” evidence, offering to hypnotize King if he did so. These allegations are supported by the videotape of Dr. Gelles’ session with King (made by NCIS without consent) which was provided by Turley to the Ethics Committee. (Ultimately, all charges against King were dismissed when a military judge concluded there was insufficient evidence even to sustain a determination of probable cause.[vii])

The Ethics Committee apparently found that Dr. Gelles’ behavior did not violate APA ethics; in fact, subsequent to this case, Dr. Gelles was chosen by the Director of the Ethics Office to sit on the PENS Task Force and help develop ethical guidelines for national security interrogations.

On December 5, 2007, Dr. Trudy Bond filed a complaint with the APA Ethics Office against Dr. Larry James for his alleged involvement in the harsh treatment of detainees. Among numerous ethical violations, Dr. James oversaw the transport of three child prisoners – one 12 years old and two 13 years old[viii] – from Bagram, Afghanistan to Guantánamo, where Dr. James was the Chief Behavioral Science Consultation Team member (“BSCT #1”).[ix] [x] According to the New York Times, during transport the boys were “put on a plane with other prisoners, chained by the wrists and ankles, with a hood” placed over their heads. At Guantánamo, Dr. James oversaw the daily interrogations of these boys. For ten months the boys’ families were not told what had happened to their children, who had been “disappeared” by American authorities. The United Nations Committee Against Torture has held that such “disappearance” is torture – not only for the subject, but also for the family of the child taken without public acknowledgement. In addition, there is no dispute that such treatment of children is a violation of international law.

The ethics complaint against Col. James was dismissed by the APA Ethics Office without investigation.

In 2006, Dr. Alice Shaw filed a complaint against Dr. John Leso with the APA Ethics Office, which was never officially acknowledged. On April 15, 2007, Dr. Trudy Bond filed a similar complaint against Dr. Leso, which also was not acknowledged. Dr. Bond refiled the complaint on September 4, 2007. That complaint was formally acknowledged by APA on February 27, 2008. Declassified U.S. government documents indicate that while serving at the U.S. Station at Guantánamo Bay Dr. Leso, in his position as BSCT #1 (he preceded Dr. James in this position), co-authored a document recommending that a series of escalating physically and psychologically abusive interrogation tactics be used on detainees there. Many of these techniques were applied to Guantánamo detainee “063,” Mohammed al-Qahtani, under Dr. Leso’s direct supervision.[xi] [xii] Susan Crawford, the Convening Authority for the Guantánamo Military Commissions appointed by George W. Bush, dismissed the case against al-Qahtani precisely because “his treatment met the legal definition of torture.” Many of the techniques and conditions that appeared in Dr. Leso’s written interrogation document were subsequently applied to other men and boys held at Guantánamo and eventually to detainees held in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, more than five years after filing, the ethics complaint against Dr. Leso still remains unadjudicated by the APA Ethics Office (apparently the longest unadjudicated case in APA history).

The results of the case against Dr. Leso in New York clearly establish why the APA must take the lead in such cases. Unlike the NYOPD, the APA’s standards for psychologists do not permit the sidestepping of ethical issues through legal gymnastics. As the APA Ethics Code states:

This Ethics Code applies only to psychologists' activities that are part of their scientific, educational, or professional roles as psychologists. Areas covered include but are not limited to the clinical, counseling, and school practice of psychology; research; teaching; supervision of trainees; public service; policy development; social intervention; development of assessment instruments; conducting assessments; educational counseling; organizational consulting; forensic activities; program design and evaluation; and administration.

Most states follow the lead of the APA Ethics Office in determining ethical standards and in adjudicating cases.

Because of the Ethics Committee’s delay in adjudicating the Leso case, Dr. Steven Reisner initiated an ethics complaint against Dr. Leso with the New York Office of Professional Discipline (NYOPD), which grants his license to practice.[xiii] The NYOPD and the New York Attorney General acknowledged the fact that, “Dr. Leso, apparently, was asked to use his skills as a weapon; not to help the mental health of the detainees.” But the NYOPD used these very facts to determine that – since the aim of Dr. Leso’s activity at Guantánamo was explicitly to cause harm, and since there was no “therapist-patient relationship between Dr. Leso and any of the Guantánamo detainees” – Dr. Leso’s professional behavior could not be considered the “practice of psychology” under the New York Education Law and therefore the ethics code did not apply. The case was dismissed without investigation.

Dr. Reisner pursued the case against Leso in New York State Supreme Court. The Court refused to overrule NYOPD, not on the merits of the case, but based on a technicality: that harm to the profession at large notwithstanding, Dr. Reisner could not show that he had been personally harmed by Dr. Leso’s activities. But harm to the profession of psychology is precisely a central issue for the American Psychological Association. The ability of our association to establish and uphold ethical principles is the very basis upon which we garner and maintain public trust. And that trust has been sorely challenged by the failure of the APA Ethics Office to determine when a psychologist’s behavior in national security interrogations has violated our basic, time-honored ethical principles.

In light of the circumstances we have described here, we are requesting that you, as President of the APA:

1. Open a full review of the practices of the APA Ethics Office with regard to the investigation and adjudication of cases alleging torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in general, and the cases of Drs. Leso, James, and Gelles in particular.

2. Ensure that the case against Dr. Leso now receives a prompt adjudication, five years after it was filed.

3. Move to rescind the current statute of limitations on cases of torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment so that there can be accountability for psychologists who participate in classified abuses whenever the evidence of such abuses becomes available.

Sincerely,

Trudy Bond
Steven Reisner

Endnotes

[i] Kaye, J. (2009, July 24). Former Top Navy Psychologist Involved in Pre-9/11 Prisoner Abuse Case. Retrieved September 7, 2012, from Invictus: http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/former-top-navy-psychologist-involved_24.html
[ii] Turley, J. (2007, August 20). Testimony in Senate Intelligence Committee on Abuses By Naval Intelligence and the Daniel King Case Published 1, Aug. Retrieved September 7, 2012, from http://jonathanturley.org/2007/08/20/testimony-in-senate-intelligence-committee-on-abuses-by-naval-intelligence-and-the-daniel-king-case/
[iii] (Turley, 2007)
[iv] (Kaye, 2009)
[v] Soldz, S. (2009, December 7). The "Ethical Interrogation": The Myth of Michael Gelles and the al-Qahtani Interrogation. Retrieved September 7, 2012, from The PsySR Blog: http://www.psysr.org/blog/2009/12/07/michael-gelles-and-the-al-qahtani-interrogation/
[vi] (Turley, 2007)
[vii] (Kaye, 2009)
[viii] James, L. (2008). Fixing Hell. Grand Central Pub. p. 43.
[ix] International Human Rights Clinic. Public Accountability for U.S. Doctors and Psychologists Involved in Torture. Retrieved September 7, 2012, from Human Rights Program Harvard Law School: http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/hrp/clinic/current%20projects/current_americas_projects.html
[x] Center for Constitutional Rights. Evidence: Larry James. Retrieved September 7, 2012, from When Healers Harm: http://whenhealersharm.org/sources-call-for-an-investigation-on-larry-james/
[xi] Center For Constitutional Rights. John Leso. Retrieved September 7, 2012, from When Healers Harm: http://whenhealersharm.org/john-leso/
[xii] UC Berkeley School of Law. Do No Harm? Intelligence Ethics, Health Professionals and the Torture Debate. Retrieved September 7, 2012, from BerkeleyLaw - University of California: http://www.law.berkeley.edu/8307.htm
[xiii] The Center for Justice & Accountability. Reisner v. Leso: Accountability for One of the Psychologists Behind the Guantánamo Abuses . Retrieved September 7, 2012, from The Center for Justice & Accountability: http://cja.org/article.php?list=type&type=412

Broken Faith: How a Navy Psychologist Drove A U.S. Prisoner to Attempt Suicide

Cross-posted from The Public Record

Los Angeles attorney Robert A. Bailey, formerly a military JAG officer, and one of the lawyers in the Daniel King case, spoke to me a few weeks ago in some detail about the controversial King interrogation. Bailey, now on the Board of the Program for Torture Victims, described to me how the abusive interrogation King endured, and the betrayal of the military psychologist he thought would help him, led King to a suicidal breakdown.

In articles last month, both at FireDogLake and at The Public Record, I reported on the role of Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) Chief Forensic Psychologist Michael Gelles in the abusive treatment of Chief Petty Officer King, who was forced into giving a false confession of espionage. The story made waves in psychology circles, and was picked up by Truthout and Naomi Wolf, among others.

The story had resonance for anti-torture activists, as Dr. Gelles is a primary spokesperson for the presumed ethical use of psychologists in national security interrogations, and was a prominent member of a 2005 American Psychological Association (APA) task force on the issue. That task force was widely seen as rubber-stamping the military’s position, and backing the use of psychologists in interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere, interrogations later labeled as torture.

King was a cryptanalyst and chief petty officer with twenty years in the Navy when he was held on suspicion of espionage after producing an inconclusive, or “no opinion” polygraph result in September 1999. He was held without charges and interrogated for 29 straight days. He produced a “confession” after seven days of 12 to 19 hour interrogation, sleep deprivation, threats, and 24-hour a day constant surveillance. He quickly recanted this confession, and the interrogation continued, ending after 29 days. King was moved to the brig at Quantico Marine Corps base in Virginia, where he remained in a six by nine foot cell for another 500 days.

Until now, it wasn’t clear why NCIS finally abandoned the interrogation. The interview with Robert Bailey clears up what happened, and the revelation is shocking.

The Gelles Interview and Its Aftermath

During the 29 days of interrogation, NCIS agents had ignored King’s pleas for an attorney. When he broke down crying, and voiced suicidal thoughts, complaining that he was losing contact with reality, agents apparently relented when King asked to see a mental health therapist. It was about three weeks into the interrogation, and King was taken to see Dr. Gelles.

As previously reported, the interview with Gelles was videotaped without the approval of King. Two NCIS agents sat in the room. One was a woman agent who Bailey believed had often been utilized to play “good cop” and provide feminine attention to the divorced and lonely Daniel King. The sleep-deprived King told Gelles he couldn’t tell what was real anymore. Agents had told King he had been found lying on his polygraph tests, which itself was a lie that Gelles did nothing to dispel. King asked Gelles to hypnotize him or give him truth serum, so he could figure out what was real.

According to Bailey, Gelles told King that he would feel better if he confessed. King’s civilian attorney, Jonathan Turley, told a congressional committee how Gelles represented himself as “the doc,” ignored King’s suicidal statements, and “told King to give corroborating evidence as a precondition for the hypnosis that King sought to clear his doubts as to any espionage.”

(In full agreement with King’s JAG attorneys, Turley later filed an ethics complaint against Gelles with the APA, which declined to accept it. At the APA convention in Toronto last week, Turley told an audience that Gelles’s behavior was the most egregious case of medical ethics violation he had ever experienced.)

Bailey first met Dan King in the brig at Quantico, only a few weeks after the Gelles interview. Bailey described how King told him that after the Gelles meeting he became more despondent. King had gone to Gelles for help and therapy, and was only met with another demand to confess. He subsequently became “less certain what was real.” His mental condition deteriorated. He had lost faith in people.

Chief Petty Officer King was a man in his 40s, a career Navy man, falsely accused of espionage, the penalty for which could be death, kept from sleeping more than an hour or two at a time for days on end, holed up in various hotel rooms for weeks, and subjected to near constant interrogation. According to Bailey, King could not stand the pressure anymore.

Approximately a week after his attempt to get psychological help, and — as Bailey explained King told him — “distraught” with the duplicity of “doc” Gelles, King grabbed a knife found in the residence hotel where they were holding him and tried to stab himself in the stomach. Agents quickly grabbed him and prevented King from harming himself. But the NCIS agents worried they could no longer monitor their prisoner under the current circumstances, and he was removed from their custody and placed in the brig.

Once King was put in the brig, he was finally allowed to see a lawyer. When Robert A. Bailey, a young JAG attorney with only six months experience, was the first person assigned to King’s defense, he found his client to be “a wreck, just incomprehensible.” The defense team spent weeks just trying to piece together the story of what had happened to him.

The young military attorneys struggled to defend their client against an overbearing and obstructionist prosecution and Navy bureaucracy. The fears the attorneys had for themselves and their careers were aired in May 2000 court hearing at the time before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and can still be viewed via C-SPAN video (warning: the Flash video has garbled sound for the first 14 minutes). Coincidentally, the Chief Judge on the Appeals panel was Susan Crawford, who later was appointed Convening Authority for the military commissions at Guantanamo.

According to Bailey, the two military attorneys in the case realized early on that they would have to decide if they “were going to stick around for a career in the Navy,” or work diligently for their client. Luckily for Daniel King, they made the right choice.

Today, King works at an agency helping veterans access their benefits. He stays in contact with his former attorneys, and reminds them each year how grateful he was that they stood up for him and restored his faith in people. Meanwhile, the APA Ethics Director at the time of the referral of charges against Gelles, Dr. Stephen Behnke, whose office refused to investigate the serious charges noted above, retains his position.

United States v. Daniel King (video)

Some of you may have followed my coverage of the Daniel King case, wherein Navy Chief Forensic Psychologist Michael Gelles reportedly participated in an abusive interrogation regime along with agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). In early 2001, the investigating judge in the case dismissed charges against King, in part because the prosecution had forced a false confession from the 20-year Navy petty officer, who was incarcerated over 500 days without charges ever being brought.


Those interested in the King/Gelles story may now watch on-line a May 20, 2000 video of a hearing on the case, which aired on C-Span at the time. The sound for the first 14 minutes of the video is garbled, but is fine thereafter.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces heard oral arguments in the case of the United States vs. Daniel King. Mr. King was charged with passing National Security Agency secrets to the Russians while working in the United States Navy. The bulk of these arguments centered around the legality of having an armed guard present during all of counsel's meetings with the accused.

Interestingly, the Chief Judge on the Appeals panel was Susan Crawford, who later was appointed Convening Authority for the military commissions at Guantanamo. Judge Crawford famously told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post in January 2009 that U.S. interrogators had "tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani".... His treatment met the legal definition of torture." Judge Crawford subsequently declined to refer al-Qahtani for prosecution.

Attorney Jonathan Turley speaks on behalf of his client, Mr. King. The video itself (click here to play) is 1 hour, 36 minutes long.

Former Top Navy Psychologist Involved in Pre-9/11 Prisoner Abuse Case

Crossposted from The Public Record

By Jeffrey Kaye

A well-known spokesman for ethical interrogations by psychologists in national security settings was himself accused in 2001 of unethical behavior for his part in the interrogation of a suspect in an espionage case. Dr. Michael Gelles was at the time the Chief Forensic Psychologist for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). His work on the investigation of Petty Officer Daniel King was referred for ethical violations by King’s civilian attorney, Jonathan Turley, to the Ethics Office of the American Psychological Association, who declined to follow up the charges.

Lieutenant Robert A. Bailey of the Judge Advocate’s Corps, and one of two military attorneys for Mr. King, described the interrogation techniques used on his client as “abusive” and “unconstitutional.” The conditions of King’s custody were “intrusive, threatening, and illegal… coercive and inescapable.”

Daniel King was a Petty Officer and Navy cryptanalyst who was arrested for espionage in October 1999. The cause was an inconclusive, or “no opinion” polygraph examination made after he finished his assignment in Guam and was returning to the United States. The administration of such polygraphs is routine when exiting a high-security clearance assignment. King was subsequently incarcerated for 520 days without formal charges.

According to a CBS 60 Minutes story in March 2001, King recalled what happened after his arrest:

“That’s when I started getting interrogated for 17 to 19 hour [sic] at a time,” he says. “When we’d get done, I’d go back to the safe house and go into a room. I’d have to leave the door open, the lights would be on, they’d blare the TV, the phone would keep ringing all the time. Even when I went to the bathroom, I had to leave the door open.”

After 29 days of long interrogations (some sources say it was 26 days), in which every waking hour was spent with NCIS agents, and with periods of sleep deprivation imposed upon him, King made a false confession, which he later recanted. His requests for an attorney were ignored. NCIS tried to get family members to incriminate him.

When on October 6, 1999 he made his “confession” — admitting he had turned a computer disk over to the Russian Embassy — Petty Officer King had been interrogated for 30 out of the previous 39 hours. The confession was quickly retracted at his next interrogation session, and, according to Lt. Bailey, at almost all subsequent sessions King “denied the veracity of the October 6 statement.”

For many months after his return to the United States, King was held incommunicado in a six by nine foot cell for 19-20 hours per day. The lights were kept on at all times. He was subjected to multiple polygraphs, none of which obtained more than inconclusive results. These polygraphs were administered despite the fact Mr. King was not of sound mind, having trouble distinguishing fact from reality, and having suicidal thoughts. Sometimes they were administered after hours of onerous interrogation, breaking Department of Defense guidelines on the administration of polygraphs. Additionally, interrogators lied to King about the results of his polygraph examinations, which were never anything but inconclusive.

According to Jonathan Turley’s account, Mr. King was encouraged to write down his dreams and prior fantasies about espionage and then sign them as statements. Audio tapes made by the government “show King weeping and sobbing” during interrogation.

At times, King is shouting “I don’t know what I’m supposed to give you” over and over at the agents as they press him for a signed confession.

In the end, Petty Officer King was released from custody without charges on March 9, 2001. The Investigating Officer in the case, Commander James P. Winthrop, wrote in dismissing the charges (emphasis added):

Although the espionage charge is a very serious one, the government’s evidence does not appear to be significantly stronger. It is based exclusively on a confession that the accused subsequently contradicted on several occasions. Additionally, the defense clearly intends to attack the voluntariness of that confession and it appears that such a claim is colorable. The defense contention is bolstered by considerations of the accused’s mental state both before and during the weeks-long period where conditions were placed on his liberty. Furthermore, and most importantly, the confession lacks strong corroborating evidence.

By the end of his incarceration, according to Turley, Daniel King had exhausted his finances. His mother had died and he had missed the funeral. The Navy released him with a statement that he was a “traitor.” The case made headlines in early 2001, including reports by CNN, the Washington Post, and NPR (with audio, and includes an interview with Daniel King and a clip from the Gelles interrogation).

Michael Gelles’s Role

According to a prepared statement for a Senate Intelligence Subcommittee hearing by Lieutenant Matthew Freedus, the second of two defense counsels for Daniel King from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, Mr. King continued to be interrogated by NCIS agents after his “confession,” and after repeated requests for access to counsel.

On October 19, 1999, three weeks into the interrogation, King was taken by his own request to see psychologist Michael Gelles. While this indicates probable earlier contact with Dr. Gelles, nothing is currently known about any earlier contact. Gelles met with King for 45 minutes. The session was videotaped, although this was done without the legal requirement to read King his rights, or inform him the tape could be used against him in court. Two other NCIS agents were also present during the meeting, which took place after days of prolonged interrogation, sleep deprivation, and ever-present monitoring.

Lieutenant Freedus stated that King made “highly exculpatory statements” during this meeting, as indeed he did in all other taped sessions with him.

The actions of Dr. Gelles were documented by a videotape, which with other audio tapes, were discovered by accident by the defense, as they had illegally been withheld from discovery. The videotape reportedly shows Dr. Gelles referring to himself as “the doc” and “not an agent.” King told Gelles he had “no memory” of any of the espionage activities to which he’d confessed. He was concerned he had “repressed memories, or something like that,” because he was falsely told the polygraphs had come out positive, and he wondered if perhaps hypnotism or “truth serum” could jog his memory.

According to Turley’s statement to the Senate Intelligence subcommittee (emphasis added):

[King] told Gelles that he had no memory of the espionage facts but says that the polygraph examinations prove that he must have done something – a clear misconception that neither Gelles nor the agents correct. King asked for hypnosis and truth serum to determine if this is merely a dream. Gelles told him that he might give King hypnosis if King goes back and gives the agents “corroborating” evidence. Gelles told King that he could trust the agents and says that the agents are clearly his friends, he had a “special relationship” with the agents and the agents “will be with you forever.” Gelles virtually ignored the statement of King that he had suicidal thoughts when he left Guam – two days before the interview. Instead, Gelles told King to give corroborating evidence as a precondition for the hypnosis that King sought to clear his doubts as to any espionage.

After King was released, Turley made known his intent to file ethics charges against Michael Gelles with the American Psychological Association (APA). According to Mr. Turley, Dr. Gelles “refused to give licensing information to the defense or to respond to allegations of violation of basic canons of professional conduct as a licensed psychologist.” In a private communication, Mr. Turley subsequently indicated the ethics charges were filed, and dismissed without any investigation by APA.

From Guantanamo to the APA PENS Task Force

After 9/11, Dr. Gelles was appointed in early 2002 to the government’s newly formed Criminal Investigations Task Force (CITF). He retained, as well, his position as Chief Psychologist with NCIS. At first, he appears to have gone to Afghanistan to help train interrogators there. Later he was sent to Guantanamo.

As documented by the 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report on prisoner abuse, Dr. Gelles, along with a number of other CITF and NCIS professionals, protested the use of coercive interrogation techniques on prisoners. These techniques derived from the reverse-engineering of torture training protocols by the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) school. CITF and FBI interrogators had developed an alternative interrogation plan based on facilitating “long-term rapport” with the prisoner. In the end, along with his superior officer, Dr. Gelles took his complaints about the SERE-influenced techniques to the Navy General Counsel, Alberto Mora.

In a review of the draft interrogation plan for Guantanamo “Detainee 063,” Mohammad Al-Qahtani, Dr. Gelles observed of these abusive techniques:

Strategies articulated in the later phases reflect techniques used to train US forces in resisting interrogation by foreign enemies… [These techniques] would prove not only to be ineffective but also border on techniques and strategies deemed unacceptable by law enforcement professionals.

Nevertheless, Dr. Gelles and his colleagues were overruled and the torture plan for Al-Qahtani proceeded. So far as is known, Dr. Gelles continued to work at Guantanamo, and subsequently in Iraq. At no time has Dr. Gelles criticized the cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo that stemmed from a Standard Operating Procedure that emphasized isolation of prisoners, behavioral control over prisoners lives, or the “frequent flyer” sleep deprivation program run at the prison. In fact, in an interview for the recent documentary Torturing Democracy, when asked Gelles minimized the psychological damage done to prisoners there:

Well, I think that whether you’re detained at Guantanamo Bay or you’re detained in any type of prison facility, one could experience psychological disturbance….

I mean, right now, I have a — though I haven’t been there in close to two years, though I do have some connections to those folks who are involved. It’s very much like a US prison in many cases. But that doesn’t change one’s own psychological expectation of what a potential outcome could be. Any degree of detention is going to have a psychological impact on someone.

With increased controversy over revelations about the use of psychologists in torture at U.S. prison facilities, especially following the Abu Ghraib scandal, the American Psychological Association bowed to pressure from the membership. In Spring 2005, they constituted a Psychological Ethics and National Security Task Force (PENS) to address the role of professional ethics and national-security related activity.

Altogether, six of the nine formal participants were military-related. One of these six was Michael Gelles.

While later held up by APA as a model of integrity for his protest against SERE techniques at Guantanamo, APA officials never alluded to the fact that ethics charges had been filed against Gelles in the King case. Nor was any of his behavior in that case ever brought to light. This could not be for lack of knowledge. In fact, Gelles alluded to his participation in the case in private emails exchanged with other PENS participants prior to the Task Force’s official meetings (and later published publicly at the ProPublica and Salon websites) (emphasis added):

As Chuck Ewing has said on many an occasion… the Agency is entitled to consultation just as an individual…. In the Squillicoate [sic] case referenced in the article, and to some extent my experience with the King case, a new demand to re-think how the profession was going to hold psychologists in practice accountable in contexts outside of the clinical and academic arena’s was becoming more evident.

There is no further mention of the King case in the PENS email listserv collection.

On 2005, the PENS Task Force issued their report. While formally condemning torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, the Task Force endorsed the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations, stating “The Task Force believes that a central role for psychologists working in the area of national security-related investigations is to assist in ensuring that processes are safe, legal, and ethical for all participants.”

Subsequent Developments

As Dr. Gelles’s role in protesting abusive interrogations at Guantanamo became public, he became an exemplar for APA in polemics with opponents on their interrogation policy from both within and outside the organization. Dr. Gelles has had letters to APA prominently posted on APA’s ethics website. In an article in the September 1, 2008 issue of Psychiatric Times, Dr. Stephen Behnke, who is APA Ethics Director, and who authored the PENS report, wrote “of psychologists who have used their professional positions to fight abuse”:

One stellar example is found in The Dark Side, in which author Jane Mayer reports that psychologist Michael Gelles, an American Psychological Association member, took heroic steps to fight abuse at Guantánamo.

Other professionals in the interrogation field have also been highly laudatory of Dr. Gelles. A recent example of this occurred in a public email exchange between Colonel Steven Kleinman, an intelligence officer and director for Air Force Special Operations Command, and anti-torture activist and psychologist Martha Davis, a visiting scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Mr. Kleinman told Dr. Davis that he had “extensive professional and personal knowledge” about Dr. Gelles, and some of Gelles’s PENS colleagues. “As a result,” he told Dr. Davis, “I am in a position to serve as a witness to their principled conduct and willingness to speak truth to power in defense of the law and the moral high ground.”

Despite the seriousness of the Daniel King case, no statement regarding Dr. Gelles’s participation in the King interrogation by APA or any of Dr. Gelles’s peers can be found. It is difficult to know exactly how much APA officials knew about his previous activities prior to assigning him to the PENS Task Force. Yet, at a minimum, one would think the Ethics Director would have been aware of the King case, after all, an ethics complaint was filed with his department, and Gelles brought up the subject during the PENS discussion.

A number of disputes are likely to be aired over interrogations and related issues at the APA Council of Representatives meeting at the psychologists’ yearly convention this August 6-9 in Toronto. One such dispute concerns a controversy over APA Ethics Code 1.02, which allows psychologists with ethical conflicts with organizational authorities to defer to government orders. Another controversy concerns the implementation of a member-passed referendum last summer that calls for prohibiting psychologist participation in settings where human rights violations take place.

It is incumbent upon APA members, as they consider the arguments for and against these issues, to consider the deeds as well as the words of the advocates for status quo at APA. Dr. Gelles is on the record as supporting the inclusion of psychologists in national security interrogations. Yet his words ring hollow when one considers his actual history:

Having worked with law enforcement, the intelligence community and correctional officers, I am very familiar with the structure and function of detention facilities. I am too aware of how easily aggression can get out of hand, and how the well intentioned can become carried away with emotion and perverse purpose and drift across boundaries, all of which may result in aggressive, violent and humiliating acts to detainees…. Removing trained professional psychologists from these settings will impact the degree of oversight and inevitably increase the likelihood of abuse, thus having precisely the opposite effect of what occurred as a result of my involvement at Guantanamo Bay.

Despite the opinions of Dr. Gelles, and a number of others who hold the same position, the Daniel King story stands as an indictment of professionals working for a government that all-too-often abuses individuals with no regard to human rights. Whatever Dr. Gelles did or did not do after 9/11, it was wrong to hide the story of his involvement in the King case from his peers, and wrong of APA not to investigate. It calls into question the sincerity of Dr. Gelles, NCIS, APA, and other actors involved in the case. It also challenges the legitimacy of the PENS Task Force, as well as the position of Gelles and the APA bureaucracy on the ethics of psychologists in interrogations.

On a larger scale, the Daniel King case, and the actions of NCIS agents and the “Chief Psychologist” involved, should raise red flags for Congress and other groups considering the proposed new “special unit of professional interrogators,” which the Obama administration is said to be “considering creating… to handle key terror suspects, focusing on intelligence-gathering rather than building criminal cases for prosecution.” Typically, “intelligence-gathering” interrogations have less safeguards regarding suspect rights than those used to build probable criminal prosecutions, i.e., less safeguards than even those that supposedly were involved in the King case.

For the record, back in 2001, the Navy denied using “coercion” on Daniel King. Today, Dr. Gelles is no long working for the Navy, but works as a consultant and writer. He was interviewed in January 2009 by Foreign Policy about interrogation issues and his experience at Guantanamo. Both Dr. Gelles and Dr. Behnke were contacted by email and offered an opportunity to comment for this article. Neither replied.

Correction, 7/26/09: The article incorrectly states that Petty Officer King's false confession was rendered after 29 days of interrogation. As the article elsewhere points out, the "confession" occurred on October 6, seven days after interrogation began. King subsequently recanted this confession and the interrogation continued, ending 29 days after it initially began.