The Biscuit Breaker

The line, he says, must be drawn at the point where a psychologist's direct actions harm individuals—including suspected terrorists. And since coercive measures have been standard at Guantánamo, he says, psychologists should not be working there at all. Current APA president Alan Kazdin said in response: "APA's position has been clear and loudly articulated; in all instances it is unethical for a psychologist to participate in or assist with any interrogations that involved torture or abuse or place the detainee at risk of injury—physical or psychological."

James, the retired colonel and former Guantánamo psychologist, says Reisner fails to recognize that procedures have evolved at detention centers where terrorist suspects are held. "What bothers me is that these people who criticize the biscuit program have never been there," James said by phone from Ohio, where he is now dean of the school of professional psychology at Wright State University. "Their assumption is that if you work at Guantánamo, you're automatically torturing people."

James arrived at Guantánamo in January 2003. In a book he published this year about his experiences there and at Abu Ghraib, James says he witnessed abuses early on. Peering one night into an interrogation room at Guantánamo through a one-way mirror, James saw an interrogator and three MPs wrestling with a detainee on the floor. "It was an awful sight," James writes in the book. "The detainee was naked except for the pink panties I had seen hanging on the door earlier. He also had lipstick and a wig on. The four men were holding the prisoner down and trying to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown, but he was fighting hard."

James says he put a stop to the abuse and began working with interrogators on getting detainees to talk through more positive inducements.

He claims that no incidents of abuse by either an interrogator or a psychologist have been reported since he arrived at Guantánamo. Asked about the Jawad case specifically, James said in an e-mail: "The psychologist at Gitmo right now told me a few weeks ago that there is a whole lot more information than what was presented in those [court] documents … Me attempting to answer this would not be appropriate because I don't have all the information."

If Reisner loses the APA election (results will be announced in early December) he says he will turn to lobbying Congress and the Pentagon directly. Already his campaign has earned him enemies. Regularly, he says, other psychologists post listserv comments asking him why he cares more about terrorists than American citizens. Occasionally, he encounters biscuit psychologists face to face, as in August 2006, when he sat near James at an APA meeting on torture. Reisner says James was introduced to him as "the man who was sent to clean up Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib." For Reisner and his supporters, those prisons are not clean enough.

With Daniel Stone in Washington

© 2008