This afternoon, I published a story in In These Times magazine that zeros in on the role of health professionals in the design and implementation of the torture regime of the Bush era:
The Psychologists of Torture: Medical professionals designed and helped to implement Bush administration interrogation practices.
While many of us rightfully focus on the abuses of the rule of law, this dimension of the torture story surfaces how health professionals joined in our national descent into torture. I believe that we will be hearing much more about this issue over the next little while. I hope that this article will provide a useful framework for surfacing this constellation of profound issues that go to the very integrity of the health professions.
One of the key, if underreported, findings in Tuesday’s bombshell Senate report on the Bush-era treatment of U.S. military detainees was the role of civilian and military psychologists in devising, directing and overseeing the torture of prisoners.
While the report highlights the role of senior Bush administration officials in approving "aggressive" interrogation techniques, it also exposes how medical professionals helped to transform the Pentagon’s torture resistance program into tactics used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and CIA "black" sites.
Understanding the role of these professionals should be a "specific focus" of an investigation into the use of these tactics, according to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which has condemned the tactics as illegal and medically unethical.
In a series of reports available on its Web site, PHR details the tactics, which it says include beating, sexual and cultural humiliation, forced nakedness, exposure to extreme temperatures, exploitation of phobias, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based organization, which won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, says psychologists "led the way" in legitimizing the Pentagon’s approval and use of the tactics. It has joined the Senate committee in calling on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate who should be held accountable.
In this section are some effective rebuttals to the claim that the administration did not torture, because there were doctors on hand:
The Senate report confirms the intimate involvement of health professionals in designing, supervising and implementing the Army and the CIA’s "enhanced" interrogation program. (The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel memos, released April 16, revealed that medical professionals had served as "safety officers" during waterboarding and other interrogation sessions.)
"The monitoring of vital signs and giving instructions to interrogators to start and stop are some of the most severe abuses of the Hippocratic Oath and medical ethics imaginable," said Nathanial Raymond of PHR. "Strangely, the memos and the statements of former senior Bush Administration officials use the presence of medical professionals in contravention of their professional ethics as a defense, when it is in fact, itself, a crime."
Tactics used by psychologists and supervised by medical personnel clearly constituted torture and a grave breach of medical and professional ethics, according to both PHR and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
In a February 2007 report made public earlier this year, the ICRC states that health professionals who participated in the interrogation process "constituted a gross breach of medical ethics" at times amounting to "participation in torture."
Steven Reisner, PHR’s advisor on psychological ethics, believes that U.S. psychologists were busy perpetrating torture even before Justice Department lawyers wrote their opinions justifying the interrogation practices.
"These individuals must not only face prosecution for breaking the law," Reisner says, "they must lose their licenses for shaming their profession’s ethics."
When the International Committee of the Red Cross investigated, they compiled a chilling picture of what the torture regime planned by the Bush administration looked like. Here is their report (PDF).
For even more hair raising detail, see the report Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by the U.S. by Physicians for Human Rights.
These will be vital resources in the days to come.