Press

In the history of state-sponsored torture, a rarely acknowledged truth is that accountability only takes place in countries where the torturing government has fallen from power. Victors tend neither to acknowledge nor to hold themselves accountable for torture.

The Obama administration has announced that key suspects in the 9/11 attacks will be tried by military commissions at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay—not in U.S. civilian court. There will, however, be one Guantánamo case tried in New York. Today the New York State Supreme Court will hear the case against Dr. John Leso, a psychologist accused of participating in torture during interrogation of detainees in Guantánamo. The case was brought on behalf of Dr. Steven Reisner, who is at the center of a growing group of medical professionals campaigning against the participation of psychologists in the U.S. government’s interrogation programs.

On the same day President Barack Obama formally launched his re-election campaign, his attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that key suspects in the 9/11 attacks would be tried not in federal court, but through controversial military commissions at Guantánamo. Holder blamed members of Congress, who, he said, "have intervened and imposed restrictions blocking the administration from bringing any Guantánamo detainees to trial in the United States." Nevertheless, one Guantánamo case will be tried in New York.

MANHATTAN (CN) - New York State Supreme Court Justice Saliann Scarpulla said that she sympathized with, but is unlikely to grant, a licensed psychologist's petition to compel an investigation into another psychologist's alleged human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay.

NEW YORK — A push to shed light on psychologists' role in terror suspect interrogations got a rare court airing Wednesday, as a judge told human rights advocates she shared their "sensibility" but wasn't sure they had legal grounds to force a state investigation.

NEW YORK--The practices of a New York-licensed psychologist will be reviewed by a state Supreme Court judge today, after he was accused of creating U.S. interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay that some decry as torture.

NEW YORK — A court was asked Wednesday to force an investigation into whether an Army psychologist developed abusive interrogation techniques for detainees at Guantanamo Bay and should be stripped of his license.

A human rights group and two law school clinics are going after the licenses of psychologists involved in the interrogations and torture of detainees by the U.S. military and intelligence personnel.

COLUMBUS, OHIO -- The American Psychological Association is taking the unprecedented step of supporting an attempt to strip the license of a psychologist accused of overseeing the interrogation of a CIA detainee.

If their aim was to break him, his interrogators apparently succeeded. By late November 2002, Mohammed al-Qahtani—a suspected Al Qaeda operative sometimes described as the 20th hijacker—was hearing voices, talking to imaginary people, and spending hours on end cowering in a corner of his Guantanamo cell with a sheet draped over him.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Two Army psychologists helped perpetrate abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay including sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation, according to complaints filed Wednesday by human rights groups trying to have the psychologists' state licenses revoked.