CCR Launches Website to Expose Health Professionals' Complicity in Torture]

May 22, 2009

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Dear CCR Supporter,

Faced with a steady current of evidence that doctors and psychologists participated in the torture of prisoners detained overseas, federal officials, state licensing boards and professional associations defend their failure to take action against those health professionals by saying that they "do not have enough information."

We disagree. In response, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has launched the website for When Healers Harm, our campaign to hold health professionals accountable for torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In addition to housing resources and tools to take action on accountability, this site will house a growing roster of health professionals who have been complicit in prisoner abuse. It will be updated periodically, as new information about the torture program and its players is revealed with the help of activists, researchers, reporters and you, our supporters. Together, we will show that more than enough evidence exists to launch ethical - and in some cases criminal - investigations of the psychologists and physicians involved in the mistreatment of men, women and children detained in the so-called "war on terror" that began on September 11, 2001.

Visit WhenHealersHarm.org and read about Dr. John Leso, an Army psychologist who participated in the torture of Mohammed al Qahtani at Guantanamo and who helped develop abusive interrogation techniques and detention conditions at the prison. Dr. Leso, a clinical psychologist trained at SUNY-Albany and Bellevue Hospital, is still licensed to practice psychology in New York. Despite being presented with undeniable evidence, the New York body charged with investigating and prosecuting professional misconduct by NY-licensed psychologists has refused to even open an investigation.

It is time to hold accountable the healers who have harmed and to show those who tortured in our name that we refuse to be a torturing society any longer.

Sincerely,Annette DickersonDirector of Education and Outreach

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