Guantanamo trials to be based upon secret evidence; Are psychologists helping to generate this “evidence”?
December 1st, 2007
Torture was on the front pages of both the New York Times and the Washington Post today. The New York Times reports that Military Commissions trials at Guantanamo can deny defendants the right to know the identities of the witnesses against them:
Defense lawyers preparing for the war crimes trial of a 21-year-old Guantánamo detainee have been ordered by a military judge not to tell their client — or anyone else — the identity of witnesses against him, newly released documents show.
Of course, mounting a real defense will be impossible. But, as the defendants have already been convicted by the Bush administration, the trials are a mere formality:
Mr. Khadr’s military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler of the Navy, said that while he has been given a list of prosecution witnesses, the judge’s decision requires him to keep secrets from his client and that he would ask Colonel Brownback to revoke the order. He said it treated Mr. Khadr as if he had already been convicted and deprived him of a trial at which the public could assess the evidence against him.
“Instead of a presumption of innocence and of a public trial,” Commander Kuebler said, “we start with a presumption of guilt and of a secret trial.”
Every day we get further confirmation, if any more was needed, of the lawless void at the heart of US detention centers. Torture may, according to some reports, no longer be the practice at Guantanamo. But the place is a monument to arbitrary authority stamping on the face of human rights.Unfortunately, the entire world suffers when the strongest nation becomes a lawless bully, accepting no limits on its arbitrary power.
The American Psychological Association pretends to be ignorant of these abuses. They issue occasional bland statements expressing concern about detention without trial and other abuses. Meanwhile, they turn a blind eye to the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that the psychologist-interrogators they claim are keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective” may be helping generate the secret “evidence” to be used in these kangaroo courts. If it wasn’t clear years ago, anyone aiding the Guantanamo system by participating in interrogations there is complicit in the massive human rights abuses at the heart of these facilities. Interrogators have no control over the use of the “information” they generate. Even the most humane “rapport-based” interrogations are generating information that can be abused by those in command. Alas, the APA prefers access to the powerful (“ability to influence policy”) to taking an ethical stance. It is time for rank and file psychologists, APA members or not, to rescue the reputation of our profession, complicit as it is in many of the most heinous human rights abuses of the Bush era.
Entry Filed under: APA, Civil Liberties, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Interrogation, Law, Psychology, Torture, War Crimes