Despite the health professions’ universally recognized duty to do no harm, doctors and psychologists have played a key role in the U.S. government’s policy of torture in its overseas prisons. They crafted and justified torture tactics, inflicted pain, oversaw abuse and enabled, covered up and turned a blind eye to cruel treatment. Yet, in the face of clear evidence, government officials, licensing boards and professional associations defend their failure to take action against these health professionals by claiming that they do not have enough information.

The Center for Constitutional Rights disagrees. When Healers Harm presents compelling evidence that supports the need for ethical, and in some cases criminal investigations of health professionals involved in the mistreatment of people detained in the so-called “war on terror” that began on September 11, 2001.

The campaign’s website, WhenHealersHarm.org, will house a growing roster of psychologists and physicians who were complicit in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The site will be updated as new information about the torture program and its players are revealed.

Though the greatest responsibility for the abhorrent torture of so many prisoners lies with those at the top, we will not limit our inquiry to high-level officials.  The U.S. torture program needed many actors to run smoothly, but each set of actors has been quick to assign fault elsewhere.  High level officials blame the “bad apples” on the night shift; the “bad apples” claim they were following orders from above.  The government lawyers point to the health professionals who said the techniques wouldn’t hurt that much; the health professionals blame the government lawyers who said the tactics were legal. Others, including journalists, point fingers at the electorate for supporting torture through the ballot box and ask: if the blood is on all of our hands, how can any one of us judge?

CCR’s campaign challenges this paradigm. When Healers Harm is built instead on the premise that true justice will only be achieved when all levels of participation in systematic abuse are acknowledged and addressed.  History shows that complicity webs are wide and include enablers as well as direct perpetrators of torture.  And ethical and legal codes remind us that widespread blame does not erase individual responsibility.

The information available on this site has been researched and fact-checked rigorously. But we are advocates, not judges. We believe in due process and the rule of law, and ultimately it is the courts and licensing boards that must determine legal culpability. However, until those with institutional power – President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Congress, state licensing boards and the professional associations – take action to hold accountable those who are complicit, as advocates we have an obligation to expose the truth and to fight for justice.

Men, women and children have been tortured in our name, and unless we demand otherwise, America will remain a torturing society.  Join us in making sure that those who choose to cover for the torturers as a matter of political expediency will come to see the pursuit of justice as a political necessity.