Free Fixing Hell by Larry C. James, Gregory A. Freeman Page A

you want to be treated’ is what Reverend Johnson would say.”
    “Sir, who in the hell is Reverend Johnson?”
    “Luther, he was my Baptist minister many years ago,” I said. “I learned a lot from him.”
    The technique I taught Luther was just one way we got prisoners to talk without anything remotely abusive. Much of the culture at Gitmo in 2002 and 2003, perhaps due to the anger over 9/11, involved projecting one’s rage onto the detainees. My role was to teach rapport and relationship-building approaches between the detainee and the interrogators without the abuse. Simple things like kindness, sweets, pizza, cigarettes, movies, tea, and magazines went a long way in fostering these relationships. If a fish sandwich and a girlie magazine didn’t work, then there were other plans we could implement. For instance, if the prisoner was an older male it would sometimes be effective to have a young, petite female interrogator work with him in a very calm and reassuring manner, rather than a more aggressive male interrogator.
    I had a hundred scenarios we could try. No matter which strategy we employed, the goal was always the same: get the prisoner to say something in response. Anything. Once the prisoner said, “Okay,” or “Thank you,” or “Praise Allah,” I knew we had him. From there it was only a matter of time before he told us something useful.
    There would be many more challenges to come at Gitmo, and I had no idea at the time that how we handled those challenges would shape the future role for military psychologists in this global war on terrorism. For example, one afternoon I was having lunch in the chow hall and a female nurse who was a Navy lieutenant commander came to see me in a fit of anger. Her name was Lieutenant Commander Pearl Henderson from northern California. “Commander, I have been hearing about you and I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” I said with a smile. “Pour yourself a cup of coffee and let’s see if we can work this thing out.”
    She began talking really fast and I regretted offering her coffee. This was an intense woman. I captured enough of what she was saying to understand that she was upset with how interrogators were coming over to the medical clinic and demanding unhindered access to detainees’ medical records. This was a surprise to me, and a disturbing concept to a psychologist. I had to ask her to slow down and give me a better understanding of what was going on.
    “I’m not tracking with you at all,” I said. “They’re doing what with the medical records?”
    She explained to me that there was a federal regulation that made it perfectly legal for any interrogator, regardless of rank, educational background, or age, to have legal open access to any detainee’s medical record. What I discovered was that on any given day, FBI, CIA, Army, Navy, and contract interrogators would go to the hospital and demand to see detainees’ records immediately. If any of the doctors or nurses hesitated—and they naturally would as medical professionals—these interrogators, some of them only eighteen or twenty years old, would simply walk into the medical records room and help themselves. It was allowed by federal law but it ran counter to everything the doctors and nurses held sacred about the privacy of medical records.
    I told the lieutenant commander that in spite of what the regulation or law said, from a practical standpoint this system just didn’t seem to be working. Not only was I sympathetic to the staff’s desire to protect those records, but I also could see that the animosity generated by interrogators snatching records from the clinic was counterproductive to our overall mission. So Lieutenant Commander Henderson and I devised a plan that would keep the interrogators from having any physical access to the records. We painted an invisible red line around the entire medical hospital by declaring that the hospital and all doctors and nurses were