Bush Memos Suggest Abuse Isn’t Torture If a Doctor Is There

[babylonsister]

http://www.propublica.org/article/memos-suggest-abuse-isnt-torture-if-a-doctor-is-there-417

Bush Memos Suggest Abuse Isn’t Torture If a Doctor Is There
by Sheri Fink, ProPublica - April 17, 2009 4:38 pm EDT


Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden was fond of saying <1> that when it came to handling high-value terror suspects, he would play in fair territory, but with “chalk dust on my cleats.” Four legal memos <2> released yesterday by the Obama administration make it clear that the referee role in CIA interrogations was played by its medical and psychological personnel.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which authored the memos, legal approval to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other abusive techniques pivoted on the existence of a “system of medical and psychological monitoring” of interrogations. Medical and psychological personnel were assigned to monitor interrogations and intervene to ensure that interrogators didn’t cause “serious or permanent harm” and thus violate the U.S. federal statute against torture <3>.

The reasoning sounds almost circular. As one memo <4>, from May 2005, put it: “The close monitoring of each detainee for any signs that he is at risk of experiencing severe physical pain reinforces the conclusion that the combined use of interrogation techniques is not intended to inflict such pain.”

In other words, as long as medically trained personnel were present and approved of the techniques being used, it was not torture.

snip//

Some medical professionals are calling <13> for their colleagues to be investigated and sanctioned for participating in practices that professional medical and psychological organizations and officials in the Justice Department now call torture. “We stand ready to adjudicate these issues,” said American Psychological Association spokesperson Rhea Farberman.

But finding out which professionals were involved in designing, monitoring and implementing the interrogation techniques may be difficult. The four memos were released almost in their entirety. The few redactions concerned mainly the names of the personnel involved.

[ProSense]

1. "Extent of Health Professionals' Role at CIA Prisons Draws Fresh Outrage From Ethicists'

Extent of Health Professionals' Role at CIA Prisons Draws Fresh Outrage From Ethicists:

"The health professionals involved in the CIA program broke the law and shame the bedrock ethical traditions of medicine and psychology," said Frank Donaghue, chief executive of Physicians for Human Rights, an international advocacy group made up of physicians opposed to torture. "All psychologists and physicians found to be involved in the torture of detainees must lose their license and never be allowed to practice again."

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. "First, do no harm."

Any doctors who participated in these practices should have their licenses permanently revoked.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

3. Has an abortion occurred if a doctor is there?

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

5. :-o

[nickyt]

4. I read a book years back about survivors of the concentration camps. On the

lone page that preceded the text was a quote from a survivor that chilled me to the bone:

"They were ALL doctors".

- Auschwitz survivor

(same shit, different century)

[cagesoulman]

6. There was a Law and Order episode about this a coupla years ago

Some shrink developed torture plans and then came back to the US trying to prove they had therapeutic value because she felt so guilty inside.