Press

America’s professional association of psychologists has quietly declined to rebuke one of its members, a retired US army reserve officer, for his role in one of the most brutal interrogations known to have to taken place at Guantánamo Bay, the Guardian has learned.

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.

New York State cannot be forced to investigate a psychologist accused by a human rights organization of overseeing coercive interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a judge in Manhattan ruled on Thursday.

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.

Radio WBAI Interview with CJA Legal Director Kathy Roberts

July 2010

Interview with Kathy Roberts.