Last week the Red Cross revealed that doctors were present at
CIA interrogations involving torture.LISA MILLAR: The Red Cross has slammed medical personnel who allegedly supervised interrogations and the torture of terror suspects by the CIA. Based on interviews with 14 terror suspects, the Red Cross has found medics monitored prisoners' vital signs to make sure they didn't drown during waterboarding. And it says that may amount to direct participation in torture.
EMILY BOURKE: The individual testimonies of 14 so-called 'high value' terror suspects detail a litany of torture techniques used during interrogations at secret locations and at Guantanamo Bay. They describe confinement in a box, exposure to extreme cold, sleep deprivation and waterboarding. But the Red Cross also found health professionals gave instructions to CIA interrogators to continue, adjust, or to stop particular methods.
We already knew this. It had been discussed all along since we invaded and occupied Iraq. In 2004 the New England Journal of Medicine
published a report about it.There is increasing evidence that U.S. doctors, nurses, and medics have been complicit in torture and other illegal procedures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. Such medical complicity suggests still another disturbing dimension of this broadening scandal.
We know that medical personnel have failed to report to higher authorities wounds that were clearly caused by torture and that they have neglected to take steps to interrupt this torture. In addition, they have turned over prisoners' medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the prisoners' weaknesses or vulnerabilities. We have not yet learned the extent of medical involvement in delaying and possibly falsifying the death certificates of prisoners who have been killed by torturers.
So we knew. We have known. I had forgotten this article in Time Magazine by Andrew Sullivan in 2006. He assigns blame for this policy to Donald Rumsfeld.
How Doctors Got Into the Torture BusinessSoldiers are trained to kill and doctors to heal. At least that's how we usually understand those two professions. But wars can often distort reality, and the war on terrorism has turned into a test case. An inspiring example is that of Colonel Kelly Faucette, M.D. He recently wrote about caring for a new patient at the intensive-care unit of the 47th Combat Support Hospital in Mosul, Iraq. The patient was a terrorist insurgent, a man who planted hidden roadside bombs to murder civilians and Faucette's fellow soldiers. Faucette wrote in his local paper: "Something inside me wants to walk up to this guy ... and just clobber him." But Faucette didn't. Instead he healed him before sending him to a jail, and by that act of healing he helped heal Iraq.
That's the America I know and love. But it is not, alas, the only face of America in this war. One of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's first instructions for military interrogations outside the Geneva Conventions was that military doctors should be involved in monitoring torture. It was a fateful decision — and we learn much more about its consequences in a new book based on 35,000 pages of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The book is called Oath Betrayed (to be published June 27) by medical ethicist Dr. Stephen Miles, and it is a harrowing documentation of how the military medical profession has been corrupted by the Bush-Rumsfeld interrogation rules.
So we knew. We have known. Looks like Rumsfeld will not be forced to accept the consequences of such instructions.
Actually we knew things were wrong in 2003, but it took a Norwegian paper to clue us in about it. When we called our congressional leaders, they were in denial. But they knew.
We saw pictures from Iraq from a paper in Norway in 2003One of the pictures is at the link.
Amnesty International expressed concern today at the disturbing article and images portrayed in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet which show American soldiers escorting naked Iraqi men through a park in Baghdad. The pictures reveal that someone has written the words ‘Ali Baba - Haram(i)’ (which means Ali Baba - thief) in Arabic on the prisoners’ chests.
The article quotes a US military officer as saying that this treatment is an effective method of deterring thieves from entering the park and is a method which will be used again; another US military officer is quoted as saying that US soldiers are not allowed to treat prisoners inhumanely.
..."“Whatever the reason for their detention, these men must at all times be treated humanely. The US authorities must investigate this incident and publicly release their findings.”
It does not in this case mention doctors, but we knew we were humiliating the people whose country we invaded and occupied.
Things like using the infliction of pain to instill fear and to punish, carry right on down the line in our culture. There was a nurse just standing by as 8 very big guards were using pain compliance techniques on a 14 year old boy, including beating him. The nurse just stood there. They were all found innocent of any charges.
A travesty of justice in Bay County, Florida.PANAMA CITY | A juvenile boot camp nurse charged with killing a 14-year-old boy testified Tuesday that her job did not routinely require her to interfere with the actions of the guards.
Kristin Schmidt said she was only to interfere with the guards, "If I saw something that would cause an injury."
Lady, he died. You should have interfered.
When people who torture do so with impunity, a whole country pays the price with a collective loss of conscience. It was done in our name, and we should demand that in our name they pay the price for doing it.
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