Human Rights Law

Monday Night Book Club: Oath Betrayed

By Alexa

--Dr. Steven Miles of Physicians For Human Rights.

There are literally tens of thousands of FOIA requests on the ACLU website, categorized as Government Documents on Torture Freedom of Information Act.

The 25,000 or so pages of documents serve as a sickening, deeply shameful reminder that the traditional roles of soldiers and medical professionals have been distorted in ways most of us would never have thought possible.

"We do not torture."

--President Bush, November 2005. Harper's Magazine.
An editorial published in 2004 in The Lancet was accompanied by an article that cites government documents and news reports that found medical personnel responsible for treating prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq "failed to protect detainees' human rights, sometimes collaborated with interrogators or abusive guards and failed to properly report injuries or deaths caused by beatings."

The Pentagon denied the allegations, saying the article was drawn from "carefully selected media reports" and excerpts of testimony from congressional hearings, "not first-hand investigative work or accounts."

Dr. Steven H. Miles, a professor in the center for bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis, said his review of the documents revealed that medical staff failed to maintain medical records, conduct routine medical examinations or properly care for disabled or injured detainees.

One of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's first instructions for military interrogations outside the Geneva Conventions was that military doctors should be involved in monitoring torture.

It was a fateful decision -- and we learn much more about its consequences in a new book based on 35,000 pages of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The book is called Oath Betrayed,  published on June 27 by medical ethicist Dr. Stephen Miles.  It is a harrowing documentation of how the military medical profession has been corrupted by the Bush-Rumsfeld interrogation rules.

Where were the doctors and nurses at Abu Ghraib, Qaim, Bagram, and the other islands of the United States prison archipelago abroad when prisoners were being beaten, suspended, and degraded? Defense Department policies set the stage for the abuses, but the silence of prison clinicians allowed them to continue. Some medical staffers witnessed the brutality. Others saw the injuries that resulted from the abuse.

One of [Rumsfeld's] rules was that a prisoner's medical information could be provided to interrogators to help guide them to the prisoner's "emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses" (in Rumsfeld's own words) in the torture process.

At an interrogation center called Camp Na'ma, where the unofficial motto was "No blood, no foul," one intelligence officer testified that "every harsh interrogation was approved by the [commander] and the Medical prior to its execution."

Doctors, in other words, essentially signed off on torture in advance. And they often didn't inspect the victims afterward. At Abu Ghraib, according to the Army's surgeon general, only 15% of inmates were examined for injuries after interrogation.

What is the policy of The American Medical Association on health care professionals and torture?

H-65.981 Human Rights and Health Professionals

The AMA opposes torture in any country for any reason; urges appropriate support for victims of torture; condemns the persecution of physicians and other health care personnel who treat torture victims.

(Sub. Res. 615, A-97; Reaffirmed: Sub. Res. 12, A-04; Reaffirmed: Sub. Res. 10, A-05)

Some of the medical involvement in torture defies belief.

In one of the few actual logs we have of a high-level interrogation, that of Mohammed al-Qhatani, doctors were present during the long process of constant sleep deprivation over 55 days, and they induced hypothermia and the use of threatening dogs, among other techniques.

According to Miles, Medics had to administer three bags of medical saline to Qhatani -- while he was strapped to a chair -- and aggressively treat him for hypothermia in the hospital. They then returned him to his interrogators.

Elsewhere in Guantánamo, one prisoner had a gunshot wound that was left to fester during three days of interrogation before treatment, and two others were denied antibiotics for wounds.

In Iraq, according to the Army surgeon general as reported by Miles, "an anesthesiologist repeatedly dropped a 2-lb. bag of intravenous fluid on a patient; a nurse deliberately delayed giving pain medication, and medical staff fed pork to Muslim patients."

Doctors were also tasked at Abu Ghraib with "Dietary Manip (monitored by med)," in other words, using someone's food intake to weaken or manipulate them.

The United States in the past has always denounced torture, recognizing that its indirect costs are enormous in its effect on the national reputation, its alienation of allied and international opinion, and its corruption of the morale and morality of the military and intelligence services.

Sadism functions through institutions as well as through individuals, and the determination of this administration to treat its enemies in this manner represents moral perversion in its use of national power: not only to impose an American policy on its enemies but to degrade and humiliate them.

This clearly is the will of this government with respect to those who stand in its way. Enemies are not simply to be defeated; they are to he annihilated morally as well as physically.

After a while, you get numb reading these stories.

They read like accounts of a South American dictatorship, not an American presidency. But we learn one thing: once you allow the torture of prisoners for any reason, as this President did, the cancer spreads.

In the end it spreads to healers as well, and turns them into accomplices to harm.

Oath Betrayed: Military Medicine and the War on Terror by Steven Miles is now available in bookstores.>

UPDATE:  Please see Unitary Moonbat's History For Kossacks: Guantanano Bay for the best background on Guantanamo that I've ever read.  many thanks to our beloved historiant!

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on October 27, 2008 (boomark / email).