To arrange an interview with PHR spokespeople, contact Jonathan Hutson: jhutson [at] phrusa [dot] org, +1-857-919-5130 (English)

Nathaniel Raymond

Director, Campaign Against Torture

Nathaniel Raymond is the Director of the Campaign Against Torture at Physicians for Human Rights. He currently leads PHR’s inquiry into the alleged 2001 Dasht-e-Leili massacre in northern Afghanistan and worked with the PHR team that discovered the mass grave site in 2002. Raymond has coordinated PHR’s work with investigative reporters probing the Dasht-e-Leili case and led the analysis of once-secret documents that PHR’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit forced the government to divulge. He has interviewed former senior Bush administration officials about the Dasht-e-Leili case and has coordinated the collection of data and analysis from experts on international law, satellite imagery, and military affairs.

Raymond helped write the 2008 report, Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact. This report contains the first comprehensive, independent medical evaluations of former detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. The preface to the report was written by Major General Antonio Taguba (US Army—Retired).

Since 2006, Raymond has been PHR’s lead investigator of the role of health professionals—particularly psychologists—in the design, supervision and implementation of the Bush Administration’s regime of physical and psychological torture of detainees in US custody.

Raymond has served overseas with Oxfam America in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Ethiopia and Sri Lanka. In 2005, he was one of the coordinators of the Oxfam International response to the tsunami in South Asia and also worked on the ground in Mississippi as part of Oxfam’s response to Katrina. He has published several articles on international law and mass atrocities, and contributed to the NPR programs The Connection, The Story, and This American Life.

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Susannah Sirkin

Deputy Director, Physicians for Human Rights

Susannah Sirkin is the Deputy Director of Physicians for Human Rights, a position she has held since 1987. She also directs PHR’s program on human rights violations in armed conflicts. Since 1998, Sirkin has overseen PHR’s research and advocacy on human rights violations in Afghanistan, including the investigations and advocacy regarding the Dasht-e-Leili massacre in northern Afghanistan since the discovery of the mass grave site by Physicians for Human Rights in 2001. Over the years, she has briefed senior officials at the UN, US Special Forces and the Afghan Government, as well as leading academics and NGOs on the Dasht-e-Leili grave.

In her time at PHR, Sirkin has organized health and human rights investigations to dozens of countries, including recent documentation of genocide and systematic rape in Sudan, PHR’s exhumations of mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunals, and investigations into the consequences of human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kosovo, Kuwait, Somalia, Turkey, Zimbabwe and the US.

Sirkin is the author and editor of numerous articles and reports on the medical consequences of human rights violations, physical evidence of human rights abuses, and physician complicity in violations. A leader in the US human rights movement for three decades, Sirkin has been quoted in articles and columns in recent months in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Associated Press and Boston Globe and has been interviewed live during the past month on ABC Radio News, Voice of America, New England Cable News, and Radio Australia.

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