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Homecoming date? Obama intends to close Gitmo within a year, but questions remain about where detainees will land.

US. President Barack Obama’s executive order to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and all the CIA’s prisons was one of the most anticipated moves of few-days-old administration. For months, human rights groups, political advisors, and international editorials urged the move. But few talked about the logistics -- where the prisoners would go, who would look after them, and how they could or would be tried.

No one knows those complications better than Michael Gelles, a clinical psychologist and, for 16 years, part of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. When Guantánamo opened in 2002, it was Gelles’s advice that military investigators sought in training prison interrogators. Several years later, Gelles became one of the first whistle-blowers after learning that torture -- rather than rapport-based tactics -- were being used on prominent detainees such as Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Since then, Gelles has been an unsilenceable advocate for ensuring that psychologists with proper training and background are a part of any future war-on-terror interrogations. He spoke with FP’s Elizabeth Dickinson and Blake Hounshell about what Gitmo was like, and how to close it properly.

Foreign Policy: This week, President Barack Obama issued an executive order to begin closing Guantánamo Bay and to freeze all ongoing military tribunals. Was that the right move?

Michael Gelles: With all that went on at Guantánamo, and all that Guantánamo represents, do you keep it open? What President Obama is trying to do is to be in a position to say, there are certain things that have occurred during the Bush administration that have really put us in quite a negative position in the world. One can say in the midst of having just been attacked there was probably a knee-jerk reaction and we went overboard. We’re going to right ourselves now ... [but] while we have made mistakes, if in fact the end goal was to prevent an attack, one could argue that those mistakes -- as egregious as they may have been perceived by some -- may in fact have worked, but at what cost.

So [as a] way ahead, [we must] take corrective action, get back on a course that is both consistent with our values, our moral compass, but more importantly -- get us back on course to what we believe is the right way to approach the adversary to get accurate and reliable information. And that means a rapport-based approach which would infer, immediately, respecting human rights and being aligned with those issues that have been outlined by the U.N. and others around human rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the like.

FP: You helped develop the “biscuit” teams of behavioral psychologists used for interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, correct?

MG: In February of 2002, [the government?] put together the Criminal Investigation Task Force, [meant to] integrate the Army, Navy, Air Force, FBI, and other law enforcements agencies to conduct investigations on specific terrorists who were detained. Mark Fallon, [the then deputy commander and special agent in charge of the Criminal Investigation Task Force], came to me and said, “Listen, we’ve got quite a task ahead of us in that we have to train quickly hundreds of agents to be able to conduct interviews and interrogations of Middle Easterners and Southwest Asians.” We quickly developed a team that was comprised of psychologists and behavioral experts … to begin to think through how we could do this training.

[Later that spring,] I met Maj. Gen. Michael Dunleavy at Gitmo [and learned that] the military intelligence folks were interested in our approaches because [their staff] were young folks or reservists who were supposed to elicit information for intelligence purposes. They were looking for information; that was their performance measure. General Dunleavy said to me, in a meeting, I need your people, your team in Guantánamo, and I need them here now. Get them down here, and I want them training and consulting on these interrogations.”

The bottom line is that I told Dunleavy: “You can’t have it; my people are deployed all over the world.” Dunleavy said to me, “Well, if you can’t give it to me, I’ll create my own.” He then went to the military, and had clinicians from hospitals assigned to support his effort, psychologists and psychiatrists who did not have forensic background, who did have the training and experience of folks who work directly in support of operations. He also called [the team] a “biscuit.”

FP: How did his “biscuit” teams differ from how you would have imagined them?