US Military Doctors took part in extensive torture

[Thanas]

Guardian

Doctors and psychologists working for the US military violated the ethical codes of their profession under instruction from the defence department and the CIA to become involved in the torture and degrading treatment of suspected terrorists, an investigation has concluded.

The report of the Taskforce on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centres concludes that after 9/11, health professionals working with the military and intelligence services "designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees".

Medical professionals were in effect told that their ethical mantra "first do no harm" did not apply, because they were not treating people who were ill.

The report lays blame primarily on the defence department (DoD) and the CIA, which required their healthcare staff to put aside any scruples in the interests of intelligence gathering and security practices that caused severe harm to detainees, from waterboarding to sleep deprivation and force-feeding.

The two-year review by the 19-member taskforce, Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, supported by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations, says that the DoD termed those involved in interrogation "safety officers" rather than doctors. Doctors and nurses were required to participate in the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike, against the rules of the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association. Doctors and psychologists working for the DoD were required to breach patient confidentiality and share what they knew of the prisoner's physical and psychological condition with interrogators and were used as interrogators themselves. They also failed to comply with recommendations from the army surgeon general on reporting abuse of detainees.

The CIA's office of medical services played a critical role in advising the justice department that "enhanced interrogation" methods, such as extended sleep deprivation and waterboarding, which are recognised as forms of torture, were medically acceptable. CIA medical personnel were present when waterboarding was taking place, the taskforce says.

Although the DoD has taken steps to address concerns over practices at Guantánamo Bay in recent years, and the CIA has said it no longer has suspects in detention, the taskforce says that these "changed roles for health professionals and anaemic ethical standards" remain.

"The American public has a right to know that the covenant with its physicians to follow professional ethical expectations is firm regardless of where they serve," said Dr Gerald Thomson, professor of medicine emeritus at Columbia University and member of the taskforce.

He added: "It's clear that in the name of national security the military trumped that covenant, and physicians were transformed into agents of the military and performed acts that were contrary to medical ethics and practice. We have a responsibility to make sure this never happens again."The taskforce says that unethical practices by medical personnel, required by the military, continue today. The DoD "continues to follow policies that undermine standards of professional conduct" for interrogation, hunger strikes, and reporting abuse. Protocols have been issued requiring doctors and nurses to participate in the force-feeding of detainees, including forced extensive bodily restraints for up to two hours twice a day.

Doctors are still required to give interrogators access to medical and psychological information about detainees which they can use to exert pressure on them. Detainees are not permitted to receive treatment for the distress caused by their torture.

"Putting on a uniform does not and should not abrogate the fundamental principles of medical professionalism," said IMAP president David Rothman. "'Do no harm' and 'put patient interest first' must apply to all physicians regardless of where they practise."The taskforce wants a full investigation into the involvement of the medical profession in detention centres. It is also calling for publication of the Senate intelligence committee's inquiry into CIA practices and wants rules to ensure doctors and psychiatrists working for the military are allowed to abide by the ethical obligations of their profession; they should be prohibited from taking part in interrogation, sharing information from detainees' medical records with interrogators, or participating in force-feeding, and they should be required to report abuse of detainees.

[Borgholio]

Doctors are still required to give interrogators access to medical and psychological information about detainees which they can use to exert pressure on them. Detainees are not permitted to receive treatment for the distress caused by their torture.

For a moment there I thought you were quoting a historical article about the Nazi regime. Holy fuck, how many skeletons DO we have in our closet?

[PainRack]

Ouch....... Its the part about not receiving treatment for distress caused by torture that really rip my guts..............

[K. A. Pital]

Borgholio, let me explain this in very easy terms:

Detainees are not permitted to receive treatment for the distress caused by their torture.

If you permit them to receive treatment for distress caused by torture, then you admit that you tortured and the whole goal of clean torture is destroyed.

Clean torture was pioneered by democracies to escape the wrath of the public in case they should discover torture (due to the more transparent nature of most democratic countries; a claim that is now severely compromised by new facts that point to the existence of pervasive "state within a state" surveillance empires in almost every major power). Clean torture was supposed to make public scrutiny worthless: you torture people, but your torture techniques do not leave any marks, and then it becomes a matter of "he said, she said" and nothing more.

As soon as you admit that a person can seek help after being tortured by one of these clean methods, you actually highlight any and all torture cases, should the medical records come under scrutiny. It would essentially prove the statements of people tortured at black sites. Every person who seeks treatment would have a confirmation that he was a torture victim.

The proponents of clean torture want to avoid this at all costs. And it is clear that the special services of powerful democratic nations are the first and foremost proponents of the clean torture system: easy deniability, hard to find traces unless documents are unearthed, but it still leaves the special service with a capability to torture, which they do not want to lose simply because the public finds torture distasteful and horrendous.

Part of every system of torture is also medicine; in fact, it is impossible to torture cleanly without involving medical personnel. What if the doctor knows that this person has specific intolerance factors? What if the person is psychologically unstable and may kill himself due to torture being applied? All these factors should be well known to be able to apply clean torture and avoid embarassing fuckups such as death of the victim or leaving traces of torture that will be found by independent review later.

So cooption of the medicine and clean torture are not, in fact, something that is evoking the Nazis. They hardly needed cleanliness; and medicine in Nazi Germany was fully coopted well from the start, participating in some of the most horrendous experiments with extensive records. This is the opposite: the desire to limit medical involvement to a necessary minimum and keep torture efficient (in democracies this means undetected) and clean.

[Serafina]

US-torture always reminds me of the things the Stasi did in the GDR (Eastern Germany). Which got sanitized for a similar reason (arguable more to look good towards other nation than the own citizenry, but still) and involved pretty much the same methods (isolation, sleep deprivation, psychological manipulation).

[Zaune]

Does nobody in the US Army get training on how to recognise and respond to an unlawful order, or did these guys all just decide it's not unconstitutional if you're doing it to foreigners?

[Purple]

Does nobody in the US Army get training on how to recognise and respond to an unlawful order, or did these guys all just decide it's not unconstitutional if you're doing it to foreigners?

You shut up and do what you are told or else you end up having to run away to Russia or worse?

[Simon_Jester]

I am curious as to the timeframe during which the abuses documented here took place. The Guardian article is not specific about whether this is things which happened in the same 2002-03 timeframe as the initial Guantanamo imprisonments and the initial Abu Ghraib abuses, or whether it continued to happen through, say, 2007, or 2009, or continues to happen today by all available evidence.

[Zwinmar]

Fucking christ.

[/quote]Medical professionals were in effect told that their ethical mantra "first do no harm" did not apply, because they were not treating people who were ill.[/quote]

Any 'doctor' taking part in this is no doctor at all and should have all their credentials pulled, lined up against a wall and shot seems like a good method to deal with anyone who used torture. There is no legitimate excuse for torture in my opinion, none.

I still don't understand how military personnel can not understand the difference between a lawful order and something like this, after all the whole Nuremberg trial is (or at least was) something taught in boot camp along with the Geneva Convention.

[Darth Yoshi]

When I was still in the military I was repeatedly told that it was okay to refuse illegal or unethical orders, and that it was in fact my duty to do so. Which just makes what these people did even worse.

[loomer]

We've known this for years. There was actually a really good Coast to Coast Live episode (don't laugh, it was a more serious and less conspiracy focused spin-off at an earlier timeslot) where Ian Punnet looked at this exact issue back in 2006 for a full three hours, with a third or so of that dedicated to the question and problem of doctors and psychologists being in collaboration with the CIA for the torture. It's still distressing, and it's good to have more confirmation, but this really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

As Stas was saying, most regimes that practice clean torture use doctors while they do it, or at least people with some medical training. It helps ensure that no long-term marks are accidentally left and you don't have to explain a spike in deaths in custody from some jackass who can't waterboard right. I strongly recommend everyone read Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali. It may make you find new ways to hate the world, but it's also a deeply illuminating study of how 'civilized' democracies are responsible for the growth and spread of some of the most insidious torture techniques world wide.

[K. A. Pital]

I strongly recommend everyone read Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali. It may make you find new ways to hate the world, but it's also a deeply illuminating study of how 'civilized' democracies are responsible for the growth and spread of some of the most insidious torture techniques world wide.

Oh yes. This book. It was particularly illuminating how torture methods were first applied in the colonies with little consideration (due to the isolation of colonial countries, inability of information to spread) and how they were refined and fine-tuned, if such words are applicable here, after being transported to the metropoles.