Larry C. James is an American psychologist, author and former officer in the United States Army. [1] [2] He served as Joint Task Force Guantanamo's chief psychologist in 2003, and as Abu Ghraib's chief psychologist in 2004.
| Walter Reed | Served as the Chief of the Department of Psychology for five years. | |
| 2001 | The Pentagon | Chief Psychologist for the Mental Health Task Force |
| 2003 | Joint Task Force Guantanamo | Chief Psychologist, Joint Intelligence Group |
| 2004 | Abu Ghraib | Director, Behavioral Science Unit, Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib |
James has also served on the Presidential Task Force on Military Deployment Services for Youth, Families and Service Members. [4]
In 2008, James was hired as the Dean of Wright State University's School of Professional Psychology. [5]
In 2008 he published a memoir, entitled: "Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib". [1] [2] A review in the Brooklyn Rail described the book as James's defense against insinuations he was a "torture shrink", and noted:
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Trudy Bond, another psychologist, requested in 2008 that the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists review the ethics of James' work in Guantanamo. [6] When the board dismissed Bond's complaint she requested the Board's actions be reviewed by the state court. State District Judge Mike Caldwell ruled he did not have jurisdiction over the Board.
In July 2010, Deborah Popowski, Terry Lodge and Tyler Giannini filed a challenge to James's right to practice psychology with the Ohio Board of Psychology. [7] [8] In June 2013, the Ohio state court dismissed the case on procedural grounds and ruled that Ohio's psychology licensing board did not have a legal obligation to conduct an investigation into Dr. James. [9]
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychologists in the United States, and the largest psychological association in the world. It has over 157,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It has 54 divisions, which function as interest groups for different subspecialties of psychology or topical areas. The APA has an annual budget of around $125 million.
During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These abuses included physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture, and rape, as well as the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi and the desecration of his body. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs by CBS News in April 2004, causing shock and outrage and receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.

Geoffrey D. Miller is a retired United States Army major general who commanded the US detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq. Detention facilities in Iraq under his command included Abu Ghraib prison, Camp Cropper, and Camp Bucca. He is noted for having trained soldiers in using torture, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" in US euphemism, and for carrying out the "First Special Interrogation Plan," signed by the Secretary of Defense, against a Guantanamo detainee.
Medical torture describes the involvement of, or sometimes instigation by, medical personnel in acts of torture, either to judge what victims can endure, to apply treatments which will enhance torture, or as torturers in their own right. Medical torture overlaps with medical interrogation if it involves the use of professional medical expertise to facilitate interrogation or corporal punishment, in the conduct of torturous human experimentation or in providing professional medical sanction and approval for the torture of prisoners. Medical torture also covers torturous scientific experimentation upon unwilling human subjects.
Michael Ratner was an American attorney. For much of his career, he was president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit human rights litigation organization based in New York City, and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) based in Berlin.
Camp Delta is a permanent American detainment camp at Guantanamo Bay that replaced the temporary facilities of Camp X-Ray. Its first facilities were built between 27 February and mid-April 2002 by Navy Seabees, Marine Engineers, and workers from Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root. It is composed of detention camps 1 through 6, Camp Platinum, Camp Iguana, the Guantanamo psychiatric ward, Camp Echo and Camp No. The prisoners, referred to as detainees, have uncertain rights due to their location not on American soil. There are allegations of torture and abuse of prisoners.
Colonel Michael Bumgarner has been a career officer in the military police of the United States Army. He is most noted for having been the commander of the Joint Detention Group, the guard force component of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, from April 2005 through June 2006, at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. During this period there was a widespread hunger strike in 2005, which he helped end. On June 10, 2006, three detainees were found dead, in what the United States Department of Defense announced as suicides. Bumgarner had other assignments after Guantanamo and retired from the military in 2010.

Alberto José Mora is a former General Counsel of the Navy. He led an effort within the Defense Department to oppose the legal theories of John Yoo and to try to end the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, also known as GTMO, GITMO, or just Guantanamo Bay, is a United States military prison within Naval Station Guantanamo Bay (NSGB), on the coast of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It was established in January 2002 by U.S. President George W. Bush to hold terrorism suspects and "illegal enemy combatants" during the Global War on Terrorism following the attacks of September 11, 2001. As of December 2024, at least 780 persons from 48 countries have been detained at the camp since its creation, of whom 743 had been transferred elsewhere, 9 died in custody, and 27 remain; only 16 detainees have ever been charged by the U.S. with criminal offenses.
Abd al-Salam al-Hilah is a citizen of Yemen, held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.

Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, also known as Riyadh the Facilitator, is a Yemeni alleged Al-Qaeda associate who is currently being held in the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. He is accused of being a "senior al-Qaida facilitator who swore an oath of allegiance to and personally recruited bodyguards for Osama Bin Laden".
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world—including Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Bucharest, and Guantanamo Bay—authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white room torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
John Francis Leso is an American psychologist and a major in the United States Armed Services, who is reported to have aided interrogators at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Leso co-authored an October 2002 memo which "recommended physically and psychologically harmful and abusive detention and interrogation tactics", which were used on Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker. Information on Al-Qahtani's interrogation became public when a classified interrogation log was leaked to Time. Leso's name was included in the leaked log, which triggered debate in the medical community about the role of psychologists in supporting military interrogations. Debate is ongoing about the effectiveness and ethics of the interrogation techniques used with Al-Qhatani, as many consider them torture. Although some activist psychologists have criticized Leso for "directing" the interrogation of Al-Qhatani, scrutiny of public sources on the matter reveals that Leso's actual role and duties remain unclear.
In United States law, habeas corpus is a recourse challenging the reasons or conditions of a person's detention under color of law. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. A persistent standard of indefinite detention without trial and incidents of torture led the operations of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to be challenged internationally as an affront to international human rights, and challenged domestically as a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution, including the right of petition for habeas corpus. On 19 February 2002, Guantanamo detainees petitioned in federal court for a writ of habeas corpus to review the legality of their detention.
The Behavioral Science Consultation Teams are groups of psychiatrists, other medical doctors and psychologists who study detainees in American extrajudicial detention.
James Elmer Mitchell is an American psychologist and former member of the United States Air Force. From 2002, after his retirement from the military, to 2009, his company Mitchell Jessen and Associates received $81 million on contract from the CIA to carry out the torture of detainees, referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" that resulted in little credible information.
Music was used to torture detainees held by the United States during the war on terror. Usually, interrogates opted to use heavy metal, country, and rap music, although music from children's TV shows was also used. The practice was widespread and officially approved, being used in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, Camp Cropper, and several other American detainee camps.
A number of incidents stemming from the September 11 attacks have raised questions about legality.
Gerald Paul Koocher is an American psychologist and past president of the American Psychological Association (APA). His interests include ethics, clinical child psychology and the study of scientific misconduct. He is Dean Emeritus Simmons University and also holds an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School. Koocher has over 350 publications including 18 books and has edited three scholarly journals including Ethics & Behavior which he founded. The APA's Hoffman Report implicated Koocher for his role in creating memos to justify sexual, physical and emotional abuse of prisoners.
Stephen Houran Behnke is an American psychologist, ethicist, and author. From November 1, 2000 until July 8, 2015 he was the director of the Office of Ethics for the American Psychological Association.
The complaint, which sought to revoke James' license to practice psychology, was filed by human rights activists and psychologists, including Deborah Popowski, a clinical instructor for the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.