On the eve of World Health Day, April 7, the New York Review of Books published a long-secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which concludes that health professionals who participated in interrogations in CIA secret detention centers committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases participated in torture.
The ICRC's confidential report lays bare an ethical crisis in the healing professions. It provides additional confirmation of what Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has been charging for years: that health professionals violated ethical duties by participating in the torture and abuse of detainees in US custody.
In the wake of the full disclosures of this report, PHR renews its call to health professional associations to support a non-partisan commission of inquiry.
"It is time for the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and others to demand a nonpartisan commission to investigate these crimes," said Frank Donaghue, Chief Executive Officer of PHR. "The associations must sanction any of their membership found to have violated their professional ethics."
PHR helped create the ethical prohibitions against health professional participation in national security interrogations. Consistent with previous PHR findings, the ICRC report concludes that "the interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation of health personnel in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics." The ICRC report also finds that "their primary purpose appears to have been to serve the interrogation process, and not the patient. In so doing the health personnel have condoned, and participated in ill-treatment."
Glenn Greenwald writes on Salon.com:
I could literally spend all day highlighting passages from the ICRC Report that will turn the stomach of any minimally decent human being. Those morally depraved individuals who continue to mock and dismiss the notion that the U.S. Government, at the highest level, ordered the most brutal and inhumane torture should be compelled to read the Report in its entirety (and the Report is confined to 14 individual "black site" prisoners; it says nothing about what was done to the tens of thousands of other detainees at Guantanamo, Bagram, in Iraq and elsewhere -- many of whom died in our custody).
In a report released in June 2008, Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact, former detainees medically evaluated by PHR reported medical complicity in torture.
For example, Hafez, an Iraqi detainee who was held at Abu Ghraib, told PHR that his arm was dislocated during an abusive interrogation. He states that an individual, whom he believed was a doctor, put his arm back in place and told the interrogators to "continue."
President Obama reaffirmed America's commitment to uphold the human rights of detainees at a town hall meeting in Strasbourg, France last week. He stated that the United States "will not torture." Now it is time to follow up on that commitment by establishing a full record of the torture and abuse of detainees in US custody, and by holding health professionals and others who participated in illegal, degrading, and inhuman treatment to account.
"The Bush Administration weaponized medicine by using health professionals to break the bodies and minds of detainees," stated John Bradshaw, PHR's Washington Director. "Congress must act to restore medical ethics by finally authorizing a non-partisan commission to probe these crimes."
Disclosure: I am PHR's Chief Communications Officer.