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In reply to the discussion: Pic Of The Moment: Report: Bush's CIA Engaged In Brutal, Illegal Torture For No Reason [View all]Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)November 4, 2013, 5:17 pm
The Torture Doctors
An expert panel concludes that the Pentagon and the CIA ordered physicians to violate the Hippocratic Oath
By Scott Horton
snip*The two-year study, whose findings were issued in a report called Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, was conducted by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University, and was supervised by a board of nineteen preeminent physicians, lawyers, and health-policy experts. After extensively surveying publicly available information, the reports authors concluded that health professionals at Guantánamo had designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees.
The report acknowledges that the Obama Administration has made changes to the Guantánamo system, but expresses serious concerns about systematic and ongoing ethics lapses in the detention centers notorious force-feeding program. The Pentagon, it notes, continues to follow policies that undermine standards of professional conduct with respect to interrogation, hunger strikes, and the reporting of abuse. Doctors and nurses at Gitmo are required to participate in the force-feeding of detainees, who are placed in extensive bodily restraints for up to two hours twice a day, which the reports authors conclude (as the American Medical Association did earlier this year) violates basic ethical rules.
http://harpers.org/blog/2013/11/the-torture-doctors-2/