By Brandon Cottrell
Impunity Watch Reporter, North America
WASHINGTON, D.C., United States – According to a study released this morning by a nineteen member independent task force of doctors, lawyers, and ethicists, U.S. military doctors designed, enabled, and engaged in the torture of suspected terrorists held at American detention centers in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The torture, which violates globally recognized ethics and medical principles, which bar physicians from inflicting harm, is believed to have occurred for the past decade. The study reports that physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists, who work for U.S. military branches or intelligence agencies, allowed “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of prisoners while acting at the direction of military leaders under both the Bush and Obama administrations.
Some of the torture practices include force-feeding detainees who were hunger striking. Human rights advocates have long protested the way that the detainees are forced feed – a tube is inserted into the nose of a chair-restrained detainee and food is then pushed through that hose and into the body – as being inhumane. Additionally, the use of these “very coercive restrain chairs” violates the ethical standards of the World Medical Association. The Pentagon, however, said the force-feeding is lawful.
Other finds include abusive interrogation techniques including “consulting on conditions of confinement to increase the disorientation and anxiety of detainees.” Other tactics included inducing hopelessness, psychologically dislocating the detainee to maximize vulnerability, and reducing or eliminating his will to resist.
Dr. Gerald Thomson called the report a “big striking horror” and also said that the “covenant between society and medicine has been around for a long, long, time – patient first, community first, society first, not national security.”
Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, however, does not think that these “people go to work every day and say ‘I’m doing something terrible’ . . . [rather they] say ‘I want to fight terrorism.’ They think they’re doing the right thing.”
A spokesman for the Department of Defense, however, called the report “wholly absurd” and stated that it is “worth noting that other than the habeas counsel . . . not one of the task force claimants have had actual access to the detainees, their medical records, or the procedures.” The White House has also discredited the report.
The spokesman also added that, “The health care providers . . . routinely provide not only better medical care than any of these detainees have ever known, but care on par with the very best of the global medical profession, [they] are consummate professionals working under terrifically stressful conditions, far from home and their families, and with patients who have been extraordinarily violent.”
David Rothman, president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession, in a statement said “Putting on a uniform does not and should not abrogate the fundamental principles of medical professionalism . . . “do not harm” and “put patient interest first” must apply to all physicians regardless of where they practice.”
Fore more information, please see:
BBC – Doctors Aided US Torture At Military Prisons, Report Says – 4 November 2013
CNN – Report Raps Doctors Over Roles In Post-9/11 Interrogations – 4 November 2013
The Guardian – CIA Made Doctors Torture Suspected Terrorists After 9/11, Taskforce Finds – 3 November 2013
NBC News – ‘Big, Striking Horror:’ US Military Doctors Allowed Torture Of Detainees, New Study Claims – 4 November 2013
