Despite CIA director Michael Hayden's claims that certain techniques used by the CIA on its detainees were simply "medical procedures" done out of a regard for "detainee health," doctors flatly disagree:
Two of the most brutal CIA interrogation tactics revealed in the Senate’s report on torture are little-known techniques called “rectal feeding” and “rectal hydration.”....
Doctors and psychiatrists, however, said they have zero medical application and are nothing more than full-bore torture methods that no medical professional should ever be a party to. More than that, they are well-documented forms of painful, humiliating torture that have been used since the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, doctors said.
“This is a variation on a medieval form of torture in which the intestines were swollen up with fluid in order to cause pain," said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and board member of the Center for Victims of Torture, both of which are in Minneapolis. "You can’t feed somebody this way. And so, for the U.S. government to claim that this is some sort of feeding technique, that’s just totally bizarre,” he said. “Because there is no physiological way for any nutrients to be absorbed in the colon, any medical participation in this rectal feeding procedure is medical participation in torture.”....
Hayden blandly defended the actions that were taken against helpless prisoners by suggesting that they were purely medical in nature, although he added, "I’m not a doctor" and that "what I am told" is that it was simply a means of feeding and hydration. A little plausible deniability is always handy I guess when the people under your direction have done monstrous things, in fact committed war crimes.
During their interrogation, at least five detainees, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, were subjected to forced feeding and hydrating through a tube or enema inserted into their rectums, the report revealed. One prisoner was even force-fed a pureed mix of hummus, nuts and pasta through his rectum, according to the report....
Doctors and psychiatrists say Hayden is incorrect in the assertion that there is any medical application for rectal hydration or rectal feeding.
“He may have been told that by one of his underlings or something, but that’s totally false,” said Dr. J. Wesley Boyd, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and faculty member at the school’s Center for Bioethics. “We hydrate people normally by handing them water, handing them a glass or bottle of water and you drink it. If you’re unconscious and unable to drink fluid, in those instances we would place an IV in your arm and run fluids into you that way. That is a legitimate medical procedure. ... Rectal feeding is full-on 100 percent torture, period. It’s about humiliation, it’s about degradation and exerting control and obviously about inflicting pain.”
Beyond that, the procedures -- variations of which Miles says have been employed in modern times by interrogators and torturers from Palestinian territories to Algiers -- are unethical for any medical professional to take part in, both Miles and Boyd said. They added that any doctor who participated in their application should not be allowed to practice medicine.
Will any interrogators, medical personnel who participated, or the people who directed these torture techniques be held accountable?
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