Mark Benjamin

Levy practices what is called “reparative” or “conversion” therapy, which allegedly helps homosexuals become heterosexuals. The theory that homosexuality is a mental disorder that needs to be cured is the moral underpinning of the Christian right’s crusade against gay marriage, sodomy laws, gay adoption and sex ed curriculums in schools. While all major modern mental health professions say conversion therapy is baseless and potentially dangerous, I wanted to experience for myself what is going on behind counselors’ closed doors.

When I arrived in Levy’s office, I was asked to fill out roughly 15 pages of questions about myself and my family. Mostly the questions centered on how I got along with my folks. In a section about my problems, I wrote “possible homosexuality.” The fact is, I’m straight, I’m married to a woman, and I have a 3-year-old daughter and a son due in October. I wrote on the form that that I was married with a kid. But I lied and said I was also living a secret life, that I harbored homosexual urges.

According to the Bible, Levy says, homosexuality “is not consistent with the manufacturer’s desire. It is not what the body is for. It is not what procreation is for. It is not what life energy is for. I am going to draw you out of that because the people around you are into that.” To receive God in his holiness, Levy tells me, to experience the ultimate happiness for which God created men and women, a person needs to overcome any homosexual feelings.

Homosexuality, Levy asserts, is a mental disorder, a certifiable neurosis. “The psychoanalytic perspective has always considered homosexuality and same-sex attraction to be a neurosis. They still do and they still treat it.” (In fact, mental health associations do not consider homosexuality a neurosis and do not “treat” patients for it. Dr. Douglas Haldeman, president of the Association of Practicing Psychologists, a group affiliated with the American Psychological Association, says it is wrong to identify homosexuality as a neurosis. “There is no scientific evidence of that, and there is no mainstream mental health organization or profession that supports this ancient, discredited theory,” he says.)

Levy informs me that homosexuality is difficult to treat because it is about more than sexuality — it is about a way of life. “I want to make a distinction between same-sex attraction and being gay,” he says. “That is a whole ideology. It is a lifestyle. It becomes the locus, or organizing principle, of the identity of the human personality.” Reparative therapy focuses on getting gays and lesbians to stop talking or walking “gay.” One “ex-gay” program in Memphis, Tenn., Refuge, bars men from wearing jewelry, donning Calvin Klein clothes and listening to secular music.

The causes of homosexuality, Levy explains, are many, but childhood loneliness figures prominently. “When a child is neglected — if not abused, then neglected or isolated — loneliness is often experienced as genital tension,” Levy says. “When kids are understimulated, they play with themselves, and the source of greatest stimulation is obviously your genitals or your mouth.” I tell Levy I did not think I was a lonely kid. “There are more reasons,” he responds. “I got more.”

He suggests that I may lack confidence and am turning my admiration for bold and masculine men into sexual desire for them. “I call it the Wizard of Oz principle,” he says. “The lion wants courage so he can be the most courageous one on the journey. Some people call it the ‘cannibal compulsion.’ Cannibals will eat people, but only the enemies they admire. If their enemies are courageous, cannibals will eat their heart. If they are strong, they’ll eat their muscles. There is a compulsion to take into yourself the qualities you feel you’re lacking and someone else has. Eroticization is one of the ways to do that.”

He turns to a central theory of reparative therapy, which is that a son’s unrequited love for an emotionally unavailable father gets transferred into sexual desire for men. Homosexual feelings can arise, Levy says, “when a boy is not affirmed in his gender by the father, who might be mean, who might be cruel, who might be absent. Often, there is a highly conflicted relationship where the mother disparages the father. She misidentifies with the marriage and might even start to identify with the son.” Under those circumstances, Dr. Joe Nicolosi, president of the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality, later tells me, “temperamentally sensitive” boys become vulnerable to homosexuality.

Levy says reparative therapy is effective, but that a cure for homosexuality takes at least two years of weekly counseling. (My one hour cost Salon $140.) He says that if I stay in therapy, I will either turn straight or get “significant relief.”

The success or failure rate for changing gays is difficult to quantify. One study, often cited by conservative groups like Focus on the Family, shows incremental success from reparative therapy. But critics point out that the study was based solely on interviews with subjects arranged by ex-gay ministries; in fact, many of them worked at the ministries.

Levy tells me that reparative therapy can be a lonely business. “There are not a lot of us who do this work,” he says. “It is politically incorrect. And it is difficult.” He also admits that “not everybody who starts down this road gets cured. This is not a sure-fire cure. I wish I could tell you that it is, but it is not.” But he remains committed.

Homosexuality “is not just another flower in God’s garden,” Levy says. “This is something that happens to people that can be fixed. And if someone comes seeking relief from this suffering, we would be wrong not to offer them relief.”

Army contracting documents show that nobody else was allowed to bid on the resilience-training contract because “there is only one responsible source due to a unique capability provided, and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements.” And yet, Salon was able to identify resilience training experts at other institutions around the country, including the University of Maryland and the Mayo Clinic. In fact, in 2008 the Marine Corps launched a project with UCLA to conduct resilience training for Marines and their families at nine military bases across the United States and in Okinawa, Japan.

Government contracting regulations allow sole-source contracts, but only under very limited conditions, such as when only one company has the ability to do the needed work, according to Trevor Brown, a contracting expert at Ohio State University.

Brown said inappropriately awarding sole-source contracts is an “endemic” problem throughout the Department of Defense.

“I am not an expert on resilience training,” he said, “but I know enough to know they could have put out a tender, and my guess is they would have gotten a number of bids. My first reaction was that there is a market for this stuff.”

Army resilience training is the pet project of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey, previously the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq during the darkest days of the war there, from July 2004 through February 2007. Army sources say the director of the Army’s resilience program, Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum, rammed the training contract through the Army bureaucracy on Casey’s behalf.

Seligman is most famous for his work in the 1960s in which he was able to psychologically destroy caged dogs by subjecting them to repeated electric shocks with no hope of escape. The dogs broke down completely and ultimately would not attempt to escape through an open cage door when given the opportunity to avoid more pain. Seligman called the phenomenon “learned helplessness.”

Government documents say that the goal of Bush-era torture was to drive prisoners into the same psychologically devastated state through abuse. “The express goal of the CIA interrogation program was to induce a state of ‘learned helplessness,’” according to a July 2009 report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

Seligman, described as politically conservative by a psychologist who knows him well, once chastised his fellow academics for “forgetting” 9/11. “It takes a bomb in the office of some academics to make them realize that their most basic values are now threatened, and some of my good friends and colleagues on the Edge seem to have forgotten 9/11,” Seligman once wrote on the Edge Foundation website. In that post, Seligman was arguing that any science advisor to the president “needs to help direct natural science and social science toward winning our war against terrorism.”

Previous reports have explored how Seligman’s fingerprints show up on the CIA and military torture programs — including his interactions at key moments with individuals and institutions that helped set up and carry out government torture. Seligman told Salon he never intended for the government to use his ideas for torture and described the timing of the meetings as coincidental.

Understanding Seligman’s connection to torture requires a bit of background. Bush-era torture was designed by a small group of current and former military psychologists who had been training elite U.S. soldiers to resist torture, an effort that has been in existence in the military for decades in what is called the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program.

In late 2001, both the CIA and the Pentagon first requested interrogation assistance from various SERE psychologists, according to a November 2008 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee and a 2004 CIA inspector general report. A small group of those SERE psychologists agreed to reverse-engineer their torture-resistance training tactics into brutal interrogation methods.

Seligman shows up early on. In December 2001, one of the SERE psychologists who helped establish and run the CIA torture program, James Mitchell, attended a small meeting at Seligman’s house along with Kirk Hubbard, then the CIA’s director of Behavioral Sciences Research. The New York Times has described this meeting as “the start of the program.”

In a lengthy correspondence with Salon over the previous months, Seligman described that meeting at his house as a small gathering of professors and law enforcement personnel as well as at least one “Israeli intelligence person,” to conduct an academic discussion about the so-called war on terror. “It was about isolating Jihad Islam from moderate Islam,” Seligman said of the meeting. “It did not touch on interrogation or torture or captured prisoners or possible coercive techniques — even remotely.”An interview with another attendee as well as an agenda for that meeting, obtained by Salon, support Seligman’s description of that meeting.

Seligman said he interacted with Mitchell at that meeting infrequently, but does recall the SERE psychologist “telling me that he admired my work at a coffee break.”

Another interaction between Seligman and the architects of Bush-era torture came a few months later, in the spring of 2002. Jane Mayer’s 2008 book “The Dark Side” shows that Seligman made a three-hour presentation at the Navy’s SERE school in San Diego in the spring of 2002. Mayer said Hubbard, the CIA official, was involved in arranging Seligman’s presentation. Hubbard confirmed that in an e-mail to Salon.

In e-mails to Salon, Seligman said that Hubbard, the CIA official, also attended the presentation. So did Mitchell and Mitchell’s partner in setting up government torture, another SERE psychologist named Bruce Jessen. Seligman said the audience included 50 to 100 SERE officials. “I was invited to speak about how American troops and American personnel could use what is known about learned helplessness to resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors,” Seligman wrote.

Seligman did allude to discussions at that time with SERE officials about interrogating al Qaida suspects, but said those talks were limited because of security clearance issues. “I was told then that since I was (and am) a civilian with no security clearance that they could not detail American methods of interrogation with me,” he wrote. “I was also told then that their methods did not use ‘violence’ or ‘brutality,’” he wrote.

Seligman’s colleagues estimate that the famous psychologist charges between $20,000 and $30,000 to present a speech. Seligman waived his fee when he presented to the SERE officials.

The Senate report says that at around the same time during that spring of 2002, Mitchell’s partner, Jessen, wrote for the military a “draft exploitation plan” for use on detainees. The Senate report says that at the same time, a number of SERE officials became involved in developing the torture program. “Beginning in the spring of 2002 and extending for the next two years (SERE officials) supported U.S. government efforts to interrogate detainees,” the Senate report says. “During that same period, senior government officials solicited (SERE) knowledge and its direct support for interrogations.”

Another related thing was going on at the same time in the spring of 2002. The CIA had also just recently taken custody of al Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah, the first so-called “high-value” detainee subjected to CIA abuse. Mayer’s book documents how Mitchell, the SERE psychologist, led the team that tortured Zubaydah that spring of 2002. She quotes an unnamed source present at the scene who says Mitchell described his plans for Zubaydah “like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while, he’s so diminished, he can’t resist.”

(Mayer’s book also explores the ironic leitmotif of Bush-era torture: that SERE officials are not trained interrogators and the methods they employed were originally designed by Communists to produce forced confessions, not good intelligence.)

In his correspondence with Salon, Seligman said the CIA and military appear to have hijacked his learned helplessness work without his knowledge or consent. “I am grieved and horrified that good science, which has helped so many people overcome depression, may have been used for such dubious purposes,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Most importantly, I have never and would never provide assistance in torture. I strongly disapprove of it.”

Similarly, Seligman says he doesn’t know anything about how or why the military early this year steered the $31 million resilience-training contract to his psychology center with no other competition allowed. “I just don’t know,” Seligman wrote. “Government contracting is way above my level of knowledge or competence.”

“You will need to ask General Cornum and (Army Chief of Staff.) Gen Casey about their process,” Seligman added.

Gary Tallman, an Army spokesman, said in an e-mail that the Army steered the contract to Seligman for the benefit of soldiers. “The decision not to compete was affected by a compelling reason to execute this contract as quickly as possible, as the impact of current operations (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] incidents) and a suicide rate reported to be sixty percent higher than in 2003 posed significant concern for the well-being of our Soldiers,” Tallman wrote. He said the contract also went to Seligman because the psychologist had “the only program available that demonstrated it could meet stated requirements such as ‘longitudinal efficacy in randomized clinical trials, with improvement well documented in published research.’”

Tallman said Casey and Cornum declined Salon’s interview request.

“Well, it was two guys who did it actually killed the dude (sic) but the whole platoon knew about it,” Winfield wrote to his father. “Theres (sic) no one in this platoon that agrees this is wrong.”

Winfield is one of five soldiers in an Army Stryker Brigade from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, that the Army has accused of being involved in the murders of at least three civilians in Afghanistan between January and May. Details have emerged about rampant drug use in Winfield’s platoon of around 30 soldiers, and of troops posing for photos with corpses. Soldiers in the unit say the alleged ringleader in the murders, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, severed and collected body parts, including teeth and fingers, apparently to make a necklace. Members of the platoon allegedly used drop weapons to cover up their crimes.

It’s too early to blame what occurred in Winfield’s platoon on soldiers’ moral compasses spinning out of control after repeated, violent tours in Iraq and Afghanistan (Gibbs was on his third combat tour). But it is easy to imagine that seemingly endless wars contributed to the moral turpitude Winfield described to his father.

“There are no more good men left here,” Winfield wrote in the Feb. 14 exchange released to Salon by Chris Winfield through his attorney, Neal Puckett. At one point, Winfield seemed to echo Sen. John Kerry’s haunting 1971 testimony about Vietnam when Kerry asked rhetorically, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

“I started to think whether I should quit and just give up because it’s stupid to get smoked in Afghanistan,” Winfield wrote. “The Army really let me down when I thought I would come out here to do good maybe make some change in this country I find out that its all a lie (sic).”

Winfield said he raised concern about the January murder with someone there, but received a blasé response. “Well I talked to someone and they told me this stuff happens all the time and that when we get back there is always someone that spills the beans so it normally works its way out,” he wrote.

Winfield claimed he gave up his position in the platoon as a team leader because of the murder. “I stepped down I cannot be a leader in a platoon that allows this to happen,” he wrote.

In the correspondence from Feb. 14 Adam’s father, Chris, expressed shock at the indifference to the killing. “No one else thought it was wrong?” he asked his son. “No,” Adam wrote back. “Everyone just wants to kill people at any cost they don’t care the Army is full of a bunch of scumbags I realized.”

Adam Winfield also wrote that he feared for his own safety if he reported the murder, harkening back to the fragging incidents in Vietnam. “Pretty much the whole platoon knows about it,” Winfield wrote about the January killing. “It’s okay with all of them pretty much. Except me,” he added. “I want to do something about it the only problem is I don’t feel safe here telling anyone.”

Chris Winfield has said that he made multiple calls to the Army (including at least four to various offices at Fort Lewis) in an effort to report the murder his son described to him. On Friday, the Army announced that it is investigating this claim.

Winfield’s phone records, reviewed by Salon, show phone calls to those numbers taking place between 3:43 p.m. and 4:18 p.m. on Feb. 14. Mostly, Winfield says, he left messages, though he also talked to a sergeant in his son’s unit’s office. “I said my son is in [Stryker Brigade] and he told me there is a rogue sergeant over there committing murders,” Winfield told Salon. “I was pretty upset. I was frantic.”

He said nobody ever got back to him. Members of his son’s platoon allegedly committed at least two more murders in the months that followed. The Army has now implicated Adam Winfield in one of those later killings.

“The Army had the opportunity and they dropped the ball,” Chris Winfield said. “The Army has the blood on their hands on those two [later] murders. They want to sweep it under the carpet and make it disappear,” he claimed. “I’m not going to let them do that.”

The Army is not commenting on the cases.

CRS is a branch of the Library of Congress that conducts research on a confidential basis for members of Congress and committees. Its report was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists and released on September 24, but a CRS spokeswoman would not say who in Congress originally requested it.

Meanwhile, the Muslim Public Affairs Council has crunched FBI data, information in government press releases, and media reports on potential al Qaida-related plots and determined that since 9-11, Muslim Americans have helped thwart 11 al Qaida-related plots, nearly one-third of all such planned attacks that threatened the United States. (A vivid example of an American Muslim warning authorities of a problem: a Muslim was the first to report to law enforcement last May the suspicious vehicle in Times Square which turned out to be a dud car bomb.)

The cooperation from American Muslims is no secret to law enforcement officials, who have established, all the way down to the local level, formal and informal connections to American Muslim communities to cultivate the flow of intelligence — like the Muslim Community Affairs unit of the Los Angeles Sheriff Department, established in August 2007. For their part, Muslim-Americans have established a litany of organizations to better understand and refute extremism, like the Muslim American Society’s “Straight Path Initiative,” which focuses on rooting out potential extremism, particular on Muslims aged 15 to 30. The CRS report on American Jihadist terrorism contains a list of examples of American Muslim organizations established to rebut extremism and an appendix listing federal, state and local authorities’ efforts to work with American Muslim communities.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, agreed that the American Muslim community has played a crucial but often overlooked role in the fight against extremism, actively reporting to law enforcement about potentially dangerous developments. “We can’t expect the intelligence community to spot these aberrations on the fringe,” Hoffman said. “That work comes from communities who are best poised to work with the authorities to prevent problems from even surfacing.”

Ironically, the American Muslim community is simultaneously facing what seems to be a swelling wave of Islamophobia, fueled, in part, by specious rhetoric that fuses terrorism and Islam.

Earlier this month, columnist and birther Frank Gaffney, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, and others held a news conference on Capitol Hill to release a report on Muslim religious law entitled “Shariah: The Threat to America.” That document alleges that Muslim adherents to Shariah law are categorically “making a determined, sustained, and well-financed effort to impose it on all Muslims and non-Muslims, alike.”

“This is laughable. This is pure prejudice and fear mongering,” is how Nihad Awad, executive directory of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reacted to Gaffney’s report. “What they are presentingis contrary to Islamic ethics. They are just trying to scare people. This is the new McCarthyism. They are exploiting fear and public unawareness of Islam in general.”

Some American Muslims are also frustrated by grappling with anti-Muslim sentiments while simultaneously working so hard against extremism and assisting law enforcement to root out terrorists. “Ironic doesn’t even begin to explain this,” said Alejandro Beutel from the Muslim Public Affairs Council. He said Islamophobes are “failing to see who are the potential enemies and who are the potential allies.” Beutel predicted, however, that this new evidence of American Muslims’ role in thwarting attacks wouldn’t change the minds of many Islamophobes, saying, “Nothing we do is going to be good enough for them.”

Earlier this month, the Delaware Republican Party filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that O’Donnell accepted illegal contributions from the Tea Party Express. On Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed complaints with the FEC and the U.S. attorney in Delaware alleging that O’Donnell had violated the law by using campaign contributions for personal use, paying for gas, bowling, even the rent on her house.

“I am confident that we have been ethical,” O’Donnell said this week to a scrum of reporters who had cornered her at a forum held by the First State Patriots. “I personally have not misused the campaign funds.” When a CNN reporter pressed her specifically about using campaign money to pay the rent on her house, however, O’Donnell would not answer. In fact, she ran away.

That’s probably because even under notoriously equivocal campaign finance laws, there is no gray area when it comes to using campaign money to pay the rent on your house. “Well, that is a clear violation,” said Richard Briffault, who teaches election law at Columbia Law School. Indeed, according to FEC rules, “the campaign may not pay for mortgage, rent or utilities for the personal residence of the candidate or the candidate’s family even if part of the residence is being used by the campaign.”

The Wilmington News Journal in March of this year figured out that a sheriff’ sale for O’Donnell’s Wilmington home had been set for Aug. 1, 2008, because O’Donnell was in default on her mortgage. A month before the sale, however, O’Donnell sold the house to Brent Vasher, who was also her campaign attorney and her boyfriend at the time. (O’Donnell ran for the Senate in 2008 against Joe Biden.) She then rented the house from Vasher until sometime last summer.

The FEC files of O’Donnell’s campaign committee, Friends of Christine O’Donnell, document payments of $750 to Vasher during this time period. Also, back in March, O’Donnell admitted she was using campaign money to pay that rent, “because she also uses the town home as her Senate campaign headquarters,” the News Journal reported. “I’m splitting it, legally splitting it and paying part of it,” the paper reported her saying about her rent. “This is our technical headquarters,” she said about her house.

O’Donnell’s campaign expense files do show a number of unusual expenditures, including charges at gas stations and stores like Dollar Tree, Trader Joe’s, Target and Kmart, among others. O’Donnell was also very tardy in reporting those expenses, failing to file at least two required campaign finance reports with the FEC last year that were supposed to disclose contributions and expenses from April through the end of September. Twice the FEC wrote O’Donnell letters warning her that, “failure to file … may result in civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action.”

During the same time period, the FEC also learned that Friends of Christine O’Donnell’s was operating without a treasurer after the departure of Susan M. Dixon sometime after April 2009. “It is required that for any committee to conduct any business, they must have an active treasurer,” the FEC wrote O’Donnell in April and then again in October. “Failure to appoint a treasurer will result in the inability of the committee to accept contributions and make disbursements.” Campaign finance lawyers agree that the rules on this are clear.

An FEC spokeswoman would not comment on O’Donnell’s records, but said that, in general, the commission tries to negotiate with a delinquent candidate like O’Donnell to hire a treasurer and report on time. That may have occurred in this case. In January of this year, O’Donnell sent in a campaign finance report covering the missing months in 2009. In that report, O’Donnell lists herself as the treasurer of her campaign committee.

Campaign finance attorneys say it’s unusual for a candidate to serve as her own treasurer, but may not be illegal. Paul Ryan, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, said that rules clearly require a treasurer, though they don’t seem to rule out a candidate putting herself in that position. “I don’t read the regulation as having anything to say about who should or may serve as the treasurer,” Ryan wrote in an e-mail.

In yet another twist, the Daily Beast reported earlier this month that her campaign committee also cut checks for $3,500 to O’Donnell’s mother, Carole O’Donnell. The first payment, dated Feb. 26, 2010, lists $500 for “bookkeeping and reporting.” A second payment on July 13, 2010, for $3,000 describes Carole O’Donnell as performing “financial consulting services.” Attorneys say those payments are legal if Carole O’Donnell did real work for the money.

Blogger Judson Bennett noticed an “unusual pattern of reimbursements” on O’Donnell’s FEC forms early this year, and when he asked her about it, O’Donnell responded, “I’m not rich, I’m not working. It is perfectly legitimate for me to use campaign funds for my living expenses while campaigning — food, gasoline, etc.”

Yes and no, campaign finance lawyers say. Ryan said O’Donnell could use campaign money only for expenses that are directly related to campaigning, like a fundraising dinner. When asked if she can use campaign money to pay for her regular groceries, for example, Ryan said, “The answer is a clear ‘No.’”

Still, attorneys familiar with campaign law say that based on the FEC’s track record, O’Donnell is unlikely to face much in the way of consequences, even if she did violate the law. “Generally what they try to do is resolve it informally or have her repay her campaign funds with her own funds,” Briffault said. “It is very, very, very rare that there are criminal prosecutions.”