Yesterday, New York State Supreme Court Justice Saliann Scarpulla rejected the case against John Francis Leso, a psychologist accused of overseeing "coercive interrogation tactics" at Guantánamo Bay, claiming nothing in state education law guarantees that the office "formally investigate every single complaint of professional misconduct, no matter the contents or applicability of the complaint."
How about even ONE? The judge ruled that claimant Steven Reisner, a psychologist and an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine, "did not suffer an injury as a result of the state's decision not to investigate." WTF? We ALL, rights advocates and citizens of the whole damn world experience moral degradation by allowing legal protection for torture perpetrators.
Despite the failure (as yet) of rights-based litigation to bring transformative results in freeing prisoners and closing Guantanamo, Yale Law School's Muneer I. Ahmad recognizes the potential of resistance to the dehumanization at the core of U.S. torture policy, inspired by hunger strikes engaged in by the Guantanamo prisoners themselves.