[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.
