As Jeffrey Kaye - known to Kossacks as valtin - writes today in a too-little-noticed diary, findings of a newly released investigation indicate that the Cheney-Bush administration conducted illegal experiments on human beings as part of its torture program designed to break captives that it suspected of being terrorists.
While Kaye and others have for years suggested this was going on, the Physicians for Human Rights has now confirmed it in its chilling report, Experiments in Torture. You can read other coverage of the report by digby, emptywheel, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the Washington Post and The American Prospect.
This isn't the first time that PHR has taken notice of such experiments or the torture they were part of. In the face of stonewalling, far too little interest from the media and curtailed budgets, the organization has spent years digging into the collusion of psychologists and other health professionals in greasing the wheels for war crimes committed by the CIA and other agencies. In the latest report:
The human subject research apparently served several purposes. It increased information on the physical and psychological impact of the CIA’s application of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques, which previously had been limited mostly to data from experiments using US military volunteers under very limited, simulated conditions of torture. It served to calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation, ostensibly to keep it from crossing the administration’s legal threshold of what it claimed constituted torture. It also served as an attempt to provide a basis for a legal defense against possible torture charges against those who carried out the interrogations, since medical monitoring would demonstrate, according to the Office of Legal Counsel memos, a lack of intent to cause harm to the subjects of interrogations. ...
In the second and third instances indicating human experimentation presented here, the evidence also suggests that the collection of medical information was acquired and applied to inform subsequent EI practices. In the second instance, health professionals analyzed data based on observations of 25 detainees who were subjected to individual and combined applications of the EITs. They derived generalizable knowledge about whether one type of application over another would increase the subjects’ susceptibility to severe pain.
Such practices, and the others detailed by PHR, violate domestic and international law. This includes the Nuremberg Code, which established ethical principles for human experimentation.
OK, but so what? Every member of the Cheney-Bush torture regime still roams free, having not even been given a wrist-slap for ordering, condoning, participating in or writing twisted legal rationalizations for these violations. Why would the revelations in PHR's new report matter except as confirmation for what we already have long suspected? Because there is a possibility, PHR argues, that unlike the justifications written for enhanced interrogation techniques, the Office of Legal Counsel may not have approved the experiments as being legal. That might make administration officials liable for new charges that might be prosecutable.
Consequently, PHR has asked for an investigation. Its full recommendations can be read in the jump. The record does not provide much hope that these will be taken seriously, but such roadblocks have never stopped the organization from trying to remind us that we're supposed to be on the side of civilization not barbarism.
Recommendations
Based on the findings of this investigation, the United States should take the following actions: President Obama must order the
- attorney general to undertake an immediate criminal investigation of alleged illegal human experimentation and research on detainees conducted by the CIA and other government agencies following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
- The secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services must instruct the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) to begin an investigation of alleged violations of the Common Rule by the CIA and other government agencies as part of the "enhanced" interrogation program.
- Congress must amend the War Crimes Act to eliminate changes made to the Act in 2006 which weaken the prohibition on biological experimentation on detainees, and ensure that the War Crimes Act definition of the grave breach of biological experimentation is consistent with the definition of that crime under the Geneva Conventions.
- Congress should convene a joint select committee comprising members of the House and Senate committees responsible for oversight on intelligence, military, judiciary and health and human services matters to conduct a full investigation of alleged human research and experimentation activities on detainees in US custody.
- President Obama should issue an executive order immediately suspending any federally funded human subject research currently occurring in secret — regardless of whether or not it involves detainees.
- The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility should commence an investigation into alleged professional misconduct by OLC lawyers related to violations of domestic and international law and regulations governing prohibitions on human subject experimentation and research on detainees.
- President Obama should appoint a presidential task force to restore the integrity of the US regime of protections for human research subjects. This task force, comprising current and former officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the human rights community, and leading health professional associations, should review current human subject protections for detainees, and recommend changes to ensure that the human rights of those in US custody are upheld.
- States should adopt policies specifically prohibiting participation in torture and improper treatment of prisoners by health care professionals. Such participation is considered professional misconduct and is grounds for loss of professional licensure. Proposed legislation in New York State provides a model for such policy.
- The United Nations special rapporteur on torture should undertake an investigation of allegations that the United States engaged in gross violations of international human rights law by engaging in human subject research and experimentation on detainees in its custody.