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Close Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo and bring the detainees to justice in the US legal system.
Greetings,
As Martin Luther King Jr. declared, "The time is always right to do what is right ." Please take just 30 seconds to act on this important issue. Attorney General Eric Holder decided that the best way to bring detainees to justice is to hold the trials at a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, a place of cruel, inhumane, degrading practise. Tell your representatives to Close Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo instead. Help to stop the torture, rape and sexual abuse of military prisoners and bring the detained to justice in the American legal system. Express your opposition to cruel, inhuman and degrading practices by organizing protests and writing letters to your congressional representatives and your local media. Tell them to Close Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo and bring the detainees to justice in the US legal system. In addition, you can sign this petition.The United States military should be a force in the service of American values and the defense of human rights. Help us now to stop the torture, rape, and sexual abuse of military prisoners and those illegally detained at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo and elsewhere.
We wish to uphold the values of humanity before the entire world.
Specifically, we call upon all doctors and medical professionals to refuse to cooperate in torture. International political organizations have condemned torture categorically and there are specific prohibitions against physician involvement in torture (such as the 1975 Declaration of Tokyo by the World Medical Association). In 1999, the American Medical Association adopted a formal position on physician involvement in torture, stating that physicians must oppose and must not participate in torture for any reason. Participation in torture includes, but is not limited to, providing or withholding any service, substances, or knowledge to facilitate the practice of torture. Physicians must not be present when torture is used or threatened%u201D (American Medical Association. Opinion 2.067 Torture. Code of Medical Ethics and Current Opinions).
It is not acceptance of torture butresistance to torture that is the hallmark of medical ethics. And yet, the mistreatment of prisoners at the Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, called the moral commitments of US military medicine into question. It is important that the military work with medicine to define procedures that will keep physicians from complicity in the evils of torture. But we also call on physicians within and outside the military, especially those called on to care for prisoners, to avoid any and all complicity in acts of torture.
