British resident Shaker Aamer has been freed from Guantánamo after more than 13 years behind bars. Aamer had been cleared for release since 2007, but the Pentagon kept him locked up without charge. During his time in captivity, Aamer claims he was subjected to abuses including torture, beatings and sleep deprivation. At one point, he lost half his body weight while on a hunger strike. Aamer is en route to London where he’ll rejoin his wife and four children. “If you think about how much our world has changed, it’s like they’re dropping them into a completely different place with very little support, and there’s no right to a remedy for the allegations of torture—which are absolutely credible—for the prolonged arbitrary detention and for any of the other violations that happened,” says our guest Widney Brown, director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights.
Widney Brown talking:
Shaker Aamer’s experiences just are an endless story of human rights violations, from his detention, arbitrary detention, prolonged detention, no due process for trial protections. He’s cleared for release in 2007 and held for an additional eight years. And the key issue was that, unlike the other British detainees who were released, he was a British resident, not a British citizen. And the U.S. used that as the pretext for refusing to release him even though he was cleared.
There’s also the issue of any of these men who are now being released. It’s like time travel. They have been held for, many of them, over a decade, with no access to the outside world. If you think about how much our world has changed, it’s like they’re dropping them in there with—into a completely different place with very little support, and there’s no right to a remedy for the allegations of torture—which are absolutely credible—for the prolonged arbitrary detention and for any of the other violations that happened. And one of the things that helps victims of torture heal is to be able to claim an effective remedy against the state that tortured you.
the CIA turned to the American Psychological Association to get a psychologist to basically endorse what was euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques”—two psychologists we know of, Mitchell and Jessen, who the ACLU actually has now filed a civil suit against. The APA then had a panel that altered its ethics structure such that psychologists could participate in these interrogations—basically, colluding in torture. The American Medical Association prohibits that. The American Psychiatric Association prohibits that. But the American Psychological Association actually reduced its ethical standards. So this vote restoring the standards is critically important, and the withdrawing of psychologists from any interrogation of national security detainees or any interrogation of anyone being held in unlawful detention circumstances is a very important step forward.
the American Psychological Association has its own ethical board, so if a psychologist did go forward with that, they could be challenged, including possibly losing their license. Our concern has more been, if you think back to the Navy nurse who refused to participate in force-feeding in Guantánamo Bay, he was threatened with a court-martial. We can’t have the military going after health professionals, who have ethical codes, when they stand by those ethical codes of conduct and refuse to engage in what is patently unlawful behavior.
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Widney Brown
director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights
— source democracynow.org