Physicians for Humans Rights just laid the smackdown on a Pentagon spokesman who dissed PHR's new report on medical evidence of U.S. torture and its enduring impact on former detainees, men who were never charged with any crime.
This is juicy. In a moment, the Pentagon talks smack and gets smacked down. First, a bit of background.
In today's Washington Post, a Pentagon spokesman dismissed a new report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), documenting medical evidence that US personnel tortured 11 men who endured months of agony and anguish in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
PHR's report presents the most extensive clinical examinations to date of former detainees in U.S. military jails, and corroborates their claims of physical and psychological abuse and torture.
"The horrific consequences of U.S. detention and interrogation policy are indelibly written on the bodies and minds of the former detainees in scars, debilitating injuries, humiliating memories and haunting nightmares," states Dr. Allen Keller, Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture and a contributor to PHR's report Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by U.S. Personnel and Its Impact. "Physical and psychological evidence clearly supports the detainees' first-hand accounts of cruelty, inhuman treatment, degradation, and torture."
"The poignant case studies focus on the profound and lasting consequences of cruelty at the hands of U.S. personnel," said Farnoosh Hashemian, MPH, PHR Research Associate and lead author of the report. "The detainees suffer permanent hearing loss, persistent and debilitating pain in limbs and joints, major depressive disorder, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety disorders, such as panic attacks."
The Pentagon Diss
Here's the Post's Joby Warrick:
In a statement accompanying the report, retired Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who led the Army's first official investigation on Abu Ghraib, said the new evidence suggested a "systematic regime of torture" inside U.S.-run detention camps.
A Pentagon spokesman yesterday criticized the report, saying its authors had drawn "sweeping conclusions based upon dubious allegations" of former detainees who had been out of U.S. custody for years.
"The quality of medical care we provide detainees is similar to that which our troops serving in the same locations receive," said the spokesman, Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon. "We have robust psychological and mental health care available to detainees."
PHR Smacks Back
Here's PHR's just-posted statement from CEO Frank Donaghue in response to Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon:
"PHR’s research was conducted by some of the world’s leading experts on evaluating and documenting torture claims, according to rigorous and internationally accepted clinical standards," stated Frank Donaghue, CEO of Physicians for Human Rights. "In response to PHR’s medical evidence of torture and war crimes, the Pentagon today strangely responded by defending its current standards of medical care. We’re not aware of any international medical standards that include sleep deprivation and isolation, which the US Army Field Manual still authorizes. The Pentagon has not yet responded to the new medical evidence of past crimes, including periodic beatings, sodomy, and electric shocks."
Disclosure: I'm consulting with PHR on strategic communications initiatives to raise the profile of this report.
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