Dr. Michael Gelles

Chief Psychologist

Naval Criminal Investigative Service
(1991-2006)

Dr. Michael Gelles served as chief psychologist for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) for over sixteen years, and was assigned in 2001 to aid the Pentagon's special Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF). In that role, Dr. Gelles consulted on the interrogations of terror suspects in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq. In 2002, alarmed at the increasingly coercive tactics being employed at Guantanamo, he and the CITF's top agent there took their concerns to the director of the NCIS in Washington - and ultimately to the general counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora.

Dr. Michael Gelles on...

Interview: September 21, 2007
Edited Transcript

If we go back to 2002, unlike thinking about it from today, 9/11 is still very fresh. Things are going on in Afghanistan. There is still the simmering of Iraq, and the alleged weapons of mass destruction. So, you know, the tenor of the time, if you will, is tense. We are in a position where we have captured and continue to capture many, many people in Afghanistan and around the world, some very high value targets, who, by definition of who they were and what we knew about them, even prior to 9/11, were clearly those who held hostile intent, who were being held by the -- outside of Guantanamo by other government agencies. But most importantly, we were still quite concerned about when we were going to be attacked again. And I think that still is a question today, when are we going to be attacked again? Are we going to be attacked again? And I think probably the best answer is yes, we are. And it's just a matter of time.

But back then it was, we need to -- we have these people who we have captured, again, very high level. Not a whole lot of discernment. What do you mean by these people? These could have been people that were sold to US troops by the Taliban -- we learned that -- folks who were just swept up in a net in the mountains who were moving, and people who, in fact, had hostile intent. So clearly, one wants to elicit information from this group with very little, you know, concern about who's who, just information. And that's where, I think, it becomes -- that becomes a very critical point, that information. The goal is information. The performance measure is information. Information will lead us to understand and interrupt forward motion of the next attack.

Of course, from our perspective, the question is, information, or accurate and reliable information, which is what I think is most critical. And, of course, at that point in time, I think people were more concerned about pushing forward, getting the information, and stopping the next attack. And that, then, became the pressure. You know, there was still lots of communications, lots of cells that were active, but we had what we thought were pretty significant people. Therefore, we would be able to elicit information from them, and we would be able to stop the next attack.

Did you see, potential problems coming early, even interrogations going on in Afghanistan?

That's actually a big first step for us. The first problem is that you had people being captured in a battlefield, being interviewed by military interrogators whose focus is really to elicit information on the battlefield for the purpose of understanding where the enemy is, and how to strategically interrupt them, tactically avoid them. And that's really the thrust of the training that military interrogators had, the six weeks at that point in time that they spent at Fort Huachuca. This was a very different environment.

The other thing that we had confronted was the fact that we had federal agents now who spent their entire careers, with more than six weeks of training, primarily months of training and many years of experience, with interviewing and interrogating westerners. So you had the military interrogators who, in fact, had very little experience and were working outside of their context now, when people are captured and move to Guantanamo, where they're interrogating them for intelligence, and federal agents who had never worked with Easterners; who had strategies that would be more rapport-based as they would be acceptable in US courts, but perhaps not specific to understanding the adversary and executing what they did efficiently. And lastly, the majority of many of these military interrogators were very young. They were 18, 19, 20, kids who were kids, who essentially were serving their country, devoted to serving the country, and now confronted with a challenge where they had not even the life experience, let alone the education and training, to be able to manage such a complicated challenge.

As a result, from our side, that's where we began to, very quickly, think about how do we understand the adversary? How can we begin, by understanding the Middle Eastern mindset, culture, the psychology, the training that al Qaeda, at that point in time, and the Taliban went through? Could we develop quick and efficient training methods for our agents, the Criminal Investigations Task Force, our NCIS agents? The FBI was doing the same thing. How could we train our agents in such a way that they could, then, discipline themselves to interview and interrogate folks for the purposes of eliciting accurate and reliable information, in a way that they could utilize, in understanding the adversary, and operate differently than with a western suspect.

We went to Afghanistan to do some training, and to get a sense of what the operations were there. And I was with a couple of agents. And so we had done some training, pretty much all day, with a lot of the military interrogators at this facility. And as a result, you know, we got to know them a little bit. And again, remember, people are rotating in, people are rotating out. So if you trained a set of people, that didn't mean that they were going to be there for any more than a couple, three, six months. And the same thing with leadership. So that's the other issue about oversight. You know, oversight of these young folks would change. That probably would be another problem.

So there was this person that was brought in, and one of the fellows we had done the training with said, "Hey, would you like to observe?" I'm a psychologist, don't do interrogations, observe, understand the process. But I was with an agent who was a very good interrogator. And they were doing some of their techniques and at that point in time --

For example?

I think this fellow was in a -- was standing, and he was uncomfortable, and, you know, they were doing the pride up, fear down -- they were using a translator. He didn't speak any English. And you could see he was visibly upset. And they were continuing to try and question him. And again, performance measure, goal, get information. Not necessarily be attuned to the process, not be attuned to the mindset, not be attuned to the culture. Here is the set of methodologies, get information. Respectfully. This is 2002.

It's going nowhere, you know. And finally, the young guy says, "This is getting -- this the terrible." So the fellow I was with, Rob, says, "Do you mind if I take a shot at it?" So I talked to Rob, we spoke a little bit about what we understood about this fellow and stuff. So puts him down in a chair, takes the flexi cuffs or whatever off him, gives him a cup of tea, talks to him about his family, talks to him about some of the circumstances. In about two hours, of just relaxed rapport-based approach, he had pretty much told us the whole story, how the Taliban was involved, how -- in fact -- where these rockets were coming from. And then he had a little rest and we talked with him again. He provided additional information as to who was organizing and forcing a lot of people to be compliant.

That's one example. It's kind of, you know, I only want to tell you my success stories and not about the failures, because there are many stories where there are folks who have been interrogated with the best of the best interrogators, the best of the best techniques around rapport, and understanding mindset and culture, and they don't tell you anything, because people are not going to talk if they don't want to talk. And I would say that's fair in a number of these cases. People are just not going to talk. And that happens all the time. People don't talk.

But it's also the case that sometimes people don't know anything.

Thank you. People don't know anything. Right. And now this becomes the big challenge. And that's why using techniques, using a strategy where you would understand the mindset, you would understand the culture, and you would understand behavior, different from the way you understood it with westerners, and you would engage in a rapport-based approach that was most sensitive to an individual from a collective society, sensitive to humiliation, who was an associative thinker, who was an emotional processor, meaning associative thinkers don't think in a linear and logical way, so they jump around a little bit, which in western interview and interrogation, would suggest someone is deceptive, someone is avoiding. If you didn't ask the right question, you weren't going to get the answer. So it's not just what they didn't know, to what they weren't going to say, to how they said it, and more importantly, how did you ask the question? So the onus was really very much on us.

When you say you started hearing about things going on at Guantanamo that started to trouble you. What kinds of things did you start hearing?

It's important to emphasize here, the one person that's sort of never really interviewed because he's still active with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Mark Fallon. And Mark was the deputy commander of the Criminal Investigation Task Force. Britt Mallow was the commander.

As things unfolded, again, I want to stick to sort of a principle here. Information is a critical goal, and again, because of the idea that in 2002, there was believed to be viable intelligence within this group, vice, for example, two years later, I mean where everything erodes, let alone five or six years later. But we were still looking for information, and the information was not coming quickly enough. Despite the fact that if you understand the culture and the mindset, it's going to take much longer than it might take in a western situation, it wasn't coming. People were getting frustrated. Here we had all these alleged terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, and we weren't getting the intelligence that leadership thought we should be getting. So it was time now to begin to think about, how were we going to expedite this process, ticking time bomb -- all of this shapes the context.

What we struggled with initially was, because you had the military side of the house or the Intel folks looking for information, and the Criminal Investigation Task Force agents who were looking to make cases to prosecute, working much like they would work as federal agents, and anything they would do that would be acceptable in a US court, utilizing and implementing rapport-based approaches, knowing that coercive tactics, let alone tactics that ever approached sort of torture would yield information, but that information - it could never be ensured that it was accurate and reliable, because we know that people who are tortured provide information. We just don't believe that in most cases that information is accurate and reliable.

Because?

Because people will provide information to stop the discomfort.

We began to have some conflict with the agents and the military folks who were working together in Tiger teams. It just wasn't working. Their techniques and strategies were contradicting ours. They were feeling more pressure to get information. So the Tiger teams were split up at this point in time. And so they would do their interrogations, and then the agents, the CITF folks would do separate interrogations. So talk about a quagmire. Now you're making it even worse, because you've got people who had multiple interrogations before they arrived, now having multiple interrogations while they're there, until we eventually were able to separate out cases.

There were concerns that things were taking too long and people were exploring other strategies and techniques.
There were other techniques and strategies being utilized and being implemented elsewhere, as ways of eliciting information that were beginning to funnel down from other agencies into DOD and into the law enforcement community. Techniques that we were hearing about -- not witnessing, not seeing, but hearing about as being proposed, which were quite contradictory, if you had any true understanding or insight into this adversary. And that would be SERE -- reverse engineering of the SERE tactics.
SERE is training for individuals to be prepared for, should they be captured. This is all done within a school context with the purposes of helping people develop some expectation of what could occur. Now, because they had used that, and had watched the stress, as you would imagine, associated with that in schools, reengineer that to use in interrogations. Absolutely ridiculous.

Why?

It's just completely out of context. Those types of tactics were used to prepare people to resist and evade. Now we were going to use them to elicit information? It also was contradictory to all the concepts that helped us understand who the adversary was, and how we could elicit accurate, reliable information.

The question is, what type of information will that give you? And are you willing to take the risk of using these types of techniques, which are coercive and abusive, that move towards eliciting information, that we will then act upon, which can have a huge impact on how resources, throughout law enforcement in the intelligence community, are deployed. And that was always another one of my issues. You're eliciting information. That information is then analyzed and causes action. Okay? The idea was, let's not encourage the dog to chase its tail. And if that's the case, let's be more discerning.

So at that time we're hearing about it, and there is some concern. There is a lot of discussion like, "What's this about?" And actually, I remember talking with people about it and calling down to Fort Bragg and saying, "What do you think about this?" And they're like, "That's kind of ridiculous." That's what they told me at that time. So we -- we put our foot down and said, "We're not going to be involved in any of this." At this point in time, Mark Fallon and I are talking with Dave Brant. And we're talking with Dave about this, who is quite concerned. You know, it doesn't make any sense to him.

Dave Brant is a very bright, very insightful fellow, who is a true strategic visionary, who at the same time can be one of the most practical and pragmatic people I've ever met. And for him, this just made absolutely no sense. At this point in he's Director of NCIS, but he's been a federal agent and a police officer probably at that point in time for 25 years. Made absolutely no sense to him. And it began, you could see, to sort of bother him a bit. And I know he was talking with the other directors of some of the agencies about it.

A lot of people objecting, and objecting, on the basis of it just doesn't work?

I'll tell you. This is something that probably, you know -- it's one of those things my mother should never hear. There is the notion of some of these techniques -- and I do believe this -- just first of all, being immoral. There is a moral check on this. The other is that you don't want to engage in techniques and tactics like this, with an adversary, that might then in result cause those who capture our service people and our folks -- for it to be, then, condoned and used on them. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we didn't believe it worked.

So if you really get down to the brass tacks, if these are strategies that we feel are not effective in eliciting accurate and reliable information, why would you risk all the other potential consequences, to include, justifiably, the moral argument? It's just not what we do as a country, and a nation.

What SERE was designed to do was to provide training and opportunities for these folks and again, I'm not a SERE psychologist; I never served with SERE -- but to expose them to a variety of different environments and situations that would build their resiliency should they be captured. And it's done in a very controlled setting by highly trained professionals, and it is a I think been proven to be a critical asset in anyone's training who deploys into hostile territory.

The idea of using those techniques, then, in the interrogation setting, where you're in an uncontrolled setting, where the goal is not to build resiliency but to elicit information, because during a controlled setting with students those techniques were found in a mock exercise to elicit information. Again, without getting into detail, you can understand there's a very different context here. "I know I'm a student, I know that this is controlled, I know they're not going to hurt me, I know they're not going to kill me, I know that I've got to get through this exercise and how much of this am I going to really, you know, how much of this is really real?" Vice, when I take those techniques that I was using in a controlled setting with a detainee, you know, who has -- the purpose is to use them to elicit information. And the techniques themselves, which I think what we began to see in terms of some of the techniques, you know, where people were humiliated -- those aren't SERE techniques for all intents and purposes.

It led to this, what we call, "drift", and that was something also that we've spoken quite a bit about, I have, and Dave has, and I know Alberto Mora has, in regards to, when you begin to give some permission for the use and in this case, in my opinion, the inappropriate use of -- inappropriate application of techniques in a context they were never designed for. Things are going to begin to get out of hand. You don't have the same controls in place that you have in a SERE school setting, so where is it going to go?

And that was the whole argument about the coercive tactics, is they began to come into place, especially with the insight and experience, probably not the experience and exposure I had, to seeing these young folks -- 18, 19, 20 -- who were up against considerable challenges, to do interrogations of, in some cases, difficult people who either didn't know anything, who didn't want to talk, and who you were talking with through an interpreter. It could be a pretty volatile situation. How do you then really institute the controls over these types of tactics? How do you demonstrate how long someone stands in a stress position? How long is sensory deprivation or isolation going to lead to some of psychological sequelae. You don't know, and we don't know.

But we knew that the idea was to elicit accurate and reliable information. And we didn't really think that these techniques were going to achieve the goal that we wanted, which was accurate and reliable information that could be presented in a court of law, whether that would be a tribunal or that would be a hearing of some or sort or in US court.

A SERE student, even totally stressed, knows that he's not going to be killed. Could the detainees understandably fear that they were going to be harmed, if not killed?

I would imagine that they would have been quite frightened about what the potential outcome was. I don't know that I could ever surmise -- I guess some of them may have feared that they might have died; there was clearly probably a lot of stress. But, remember now, there were there were different levels of the SERE techniques.

But they led, I think, to the thinking that we could begin to develop and utilize more coercive tactics to more expediently elicit information. And in all fairness to the people who were doing that thinking, despite the fact that I didn't necessarily agree with them, in fairness, their goal was to protect America. Their goal was to stop a terrorist attack. We don't want to see thousands of Americans again die in a US city, and if this is what it was going to take, this is what we were going to do. Now, I wouldn't argue with the fact that all of us never wanted to see any American die again in a US city, let alone the fact that we pain whenever there's an American killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. However, we didn't believe that this was the appropriate approach. That's really what it comes down to.

Who introduced SERE tactics at Guantanamo?

I don't think you're talking about one person. I think that there were many people, you know, who began to see this as a possible solution, and an approach that was obviously vetted and validated by senior leadership. So it's not really one person. Was there I don't think there was probably one person who sat down one night, having a cup of coffee, and said, "Let's do it this way." I think that this is something that clearly, like any phenomenon, goes from idea to action, that it evolved over time, that people had discussions, and people thought about things.

You, as I understand it, had access to some of the interrogation logs at Guantanamo.

The interrogation logs were made accessible to people working there. Sure, I had access to them, but the story about Mr. Qahtani is really not about Mr. Qahtani. Mr. Qahtani just happens to symbolically represent this process.

All of what was going on was well before they ever even engaged Mr. Qahtani with the types of tactics that you have seen documented in the logs. And, so for timeline purposes in many respects back to the August time frame when we're beginning to see that there is this urgency to get more expedient information, that there is the exploration wherever it is coming from as I have said to you. Was it the SERE techniques? Was it what other countries had found successful? Was it what we knew in history in terms of what we had done previously since, you know, the Civil War in terms of eliciting information? So there was discussion about increased coercion in techniques. They were going to take the techniques and turn it up.

Can you give me examples of the techniques?

Everything from sleep deprivation and isolation, sensory deprivation, heat and cold a lot of these things that were probably used in smaller amounts earlier on but then really began to escalate.

There was even some discussion about certain levels of slapping. I think if you remember that, measured slaps I always found that interesting. But, more importantly, these were becoming more coercive and abusive techniques that moved further away from the concept of a more rapport based approach. A rapport based approach attempts to establish a relationship where one can be confrontational, one can be direct, one can demand clarification. It's not a matter of, if you will, making love to the subject, and making him happy and sweet so he will tell you things.

So, around now -- the summer and into the early fall -- there is an increased discussion, there is planning, this is something that they feel may be effective, some of the interrogations that are moving forward, even interrogations that were moving forward with others and Mr. Qahtani that were actually making progress. I was aware of an interrogation that was going on, a number of them being done by a couple of FBI agents and NCIS agents who were with CITF -- that were excellent, moving forward, but just not moving forward fast enough for the leadership. And, again, want to protect the homeland, holding out, we need the information, we've got to thwart the next attack always important to insert in your thinking. We became concerned.

The November time frame, when I was in Guantanamo, around this time frame they're going to try and use these tactics on a number detainees to expeditiously elicit information. And we become concerned. And I remember seeing an interrogation plan while I was there, as they were sharing it with us, with an FBI agent who I worked closely with, who we both looked at each other and said, "This is ridiculous." And we quickly, instead of just saying, "It's ridiculous," wrote an alternative approach. "Might you consider this?" And then, of course, our alternative was dismissed and they were moving forward.

At that point in time, Mark Fallon and I do go to Dave Brant, and we talk to Brant. Now we're into that November time frame, right around Thanksgiving, and we tell him about this. Things are moving forward. Brant pretty much says, "I'm going to get all my agents out of there if that's the case. I don't want them near this. I don't want them there."

At the same time, I go back to Dave Brant I know he was my boss and director of NCIS, but he very readily, when Mark Fallon and I came to him, could have dismissed us, okay? Could have clearly dismissed us, but Brant is a visionary. He is somebody who is incredibly practical and tactical in the moment, but he can see where things were going, and he didn't dismiss us. And it would've been okay if he did. "Go back, do your jobs, this is not our issue, keep our agents away from it, we're not taking it any further, let me know if our agents are involved, I'll keep them out of it." But he didn't do that. He kept the agents away. And that's where Brant goes to see Alberto Mora. And not just goes by himself, he says, "The two of you are coming with me." And so, basically, we go to meet with Alberto Mora.

And what did you expect when you were going to meet Alberto Mora?

I had met with Mr. Mora before. Mr. Mora has a reputation of being one of the most thoughtful, insightful leaders that we had ever worked with. My expectation was that Mr. Mora was going to listen. He was going to listen.

And, we felt confident that he would hear us, and he would listen to us. I guess what I had underestimated was that I didn't expect how horrified he would be when he heard it. He was just taken aback by this. This was something that penetrated his core. It appeared as if he almost had a visceral reaction. It was everything that he didn't believe in, that was being presented to him in his conference room. And he sat there, still, listening, didn't ask a question for minutes. We all finished, and that's, then, when I remember him saying, "This is not right."

And then, of course, Alberto Mora, in true form, begins to think out loud, analytically, with us about this problem. And that was the nice thing about always working and I worked with Mr. Mora in a number of different areas is you never, ever had to guess where Alberto Mora was going, you're never going to be surprised about Alberto Mora making a particular decision, because he was a collaborative professional. He was the General Counsel of the Navy. You could have been an E5 sitting with him, and I'm sure it had happened, and he's sharing his thinking with you, and actually asking you about the process, totally engaging this as a leader. And, of course, what Alberto Mora said to me was and to Mark Fallon was I need the two of you now to develop for me the alternative approach.

Over the course of several weeks, as things were being monitored, we wrote, I think -- with I must emphasize the collaboration of other psychologists, special agents, other experts in the field -- what was tantamount to about a 60, 70 page document.

During this period of time as well, after you've presented what's going on to Mr. Mora, he asks you to go back down to Guantanamo to meet with the commanding general.

And we did. We went down and presented it to General Miller. Now, General Miller hadn't been there that long; he had just come in after General Dunlavey's departure. And again, he's working with his staff, who are providing him insights and information and keeping him briefed.

And we're coming with a whole alternative approach. At that point in time and I say at that point in time I don't believe General Miller was all that interested in what we had to offer. I think later on, to his credit, he began to see that the position we had taken was a more effective and efficient way to elicit information.

I remember him listening respectfully, I taking the brief, but I think, you know, he may have already made up his mind about what he wanted to do. Well, obviously, because if you go forward, then there is an interrogation of Qahtani. He wanted -- I think he said something to the effect that, if you wanted to be on the team you needed to wear the same jersey, or the same color jersey. And that was a little disappointing because we kind of felt that we were on the team. And I hope on most teams, people offer different approaches and strategies and that there isn't just one authoritarian approach. But, I guess I would say to General Miller, "No, we weren't wearing the same jersey and we never did."

You showed the al-Qahtani logs to Mr. Mora? What was his reaction when he was reading those logs?

What would you expect? He was shocked. You're not seeing waterboarding; you're not seeing these types of SERE techniques. You're seeing some things that are absolutely incredible, with the underwear, and things that are I think that reflect clearly some of the more coercive tactics around. The point is what you see is these tactics that are humiliating. And, again, you see these tactics that are humiliating for the first time here.

And he's outraged by that; he is really disturbed by it. He's disappointed, he's upset, he's disturbed. He just can't believe this. And I think that this further motivates him to become more aggressive within his own ranks, to attempt to save us from making further mistakes. And, interestingly, what you saw in those logs aren't all that different, to some extent, to what you later see in pictures in Abu Ghraib.
This is what I was saying before; when you start to introduce these types of techniques and tactics, right, with an adversary that is ambiguous, difficult to understand, and who you see as a threat, your fear drives your inability to keep perspective and boundaries around what you're doing and, you get drift. And you slowly just get further drift, and things get well out of scope, in the service of what people truly believe they're doing is right in protecting us.

Mr. Mora has told his initial reaction, besides being shocked, at what was reported to him

He was angry.

But he also thought it was a mistake.

Well, we all thought it was a mistake. Putting it in the appropriate context for you, he believes it is a mistake because he has tremendous insight from what we've been talking about with him since November. These logs are coming out later, after we've already had a number of discussions and we are in the midst of preparing alternative documents and approaches to be provided to very senior leadership.

He is convinced that if he points out the mistake, that it will be corrected?

Remember, at this point in time he has already been engaged in discussions with folks about the inappropriateness of these tactics, and how these tactics are a mistake. He has already provided some leadership and guidance to us, to develop an alternative approach that will also meet the same goal, protecting America. He sees the logs, it validates everything he's been thinking and processing, and it becomes probably a very poignant moment for him, where, in fact, he sees that everything that we have been talking about in terms of the inappropriateness of these types of techniques, the potential for drift, the loss of perspective, the self-induced the self-induced pressure to be fighting the war right here in this cell, with this man, has come to fruition.

What I struggled with was the fact that I felt that there were people who were making I wondered how informed those who were making these decisions truly were. I always wondered about a lot of the agendas that were being worked how political was this? Because if you really got anyone in the room and talked to them thoughtfully about understanding what we were trying to accomplish, how we try to optimize what we were doing, both from an operational perspective as well as from a strategic perspective -- tactical and strategic -- it didn't make any sense to move forward with this type of an approach with this type of adversary.

Do you consider the tactics that were approved in combination, if not singly -- do you consider some of them cruel and inhuman?

Oh I think most definitely they were cruel. I felt -- inhuman, I mean that's kind of subjective. They were just -- yeah, they were cruel. I do believe that this violated the way we should view and the way we should manage human rights. I was most concerned that this would lead to lots of problems for our folks when they were captured.

Mr. Mora calls it a policy of cruelty.

A policy of cruelty. And I would say, from my background, there was a sadistic trend to this. This was sadistic, and the sadism that was being thought about, developed, and implemented, I think was a function of fear, that we had been -- we had been terrorized, and we were fearful, and we were going to ensure, like in anybody's wish, that we would not be frightened, because we would eliminate and control that which made us frightened. That's a little psychological; you can edit that however you want. But that's what I think. I would say a policy of cruelty and there was clearly a sadistic element to it, and if you begin to think about the origins of, you know, of sadism -- and there was a sense of fear around being -- fear, a sense of fear.

A number of the attorneys for the detainees -- for some of the detainees that are still down there, essentially have said that their clients have suffered profound psychological damage. Without getting into specific cases, is that possible from your perspective? Would that be an outcome?

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 think probably the challenges, for someone at Guantanamo Bay, are that there is no end in sight for them, and that it's a prolonged detention without any mechanism to even measure some particular outcome. So I would imagine -- yeah, it's hard to think that it wouldn't have an impact psychologically. I think other aspects of impact psychologically is that the longer people have stayed there -- maybe even those folks who were inadvertently detained -- clearly could be radicalized, and that the radicalization process that goes on within the facility.

The facility itself, you know -- again, it depends on how informed you are. Many people still, at times, can think of Guantanamo Bay as a set of kennel cages where we put detainees, because that's what's in the media. 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. I think the fact that in Guantanamo Bay, that there is no real endgame, there is no outcome expected, there are the hearings around combatants and noncombatants, but there's no -- no process in place that anyone knows of that will lead to some resolution, short of occasionally what you hear in the media, that they're going to close Guantanamo Bay.