Time: How Doctors Got Into the Torture Business

[Starfury]

From Andrew Sullivan (!) writing for Time Magazine reviewing a book on the role doctors and nurses play at Abu Ghraib, etc. I thought about highlighting the key phrases like usual, but what's the point? It's all critical. Read it all (it's a short read).

(...)

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 (first reported in TIME), 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.

Of the 136 documented deaths of prisoners in detention, Miles found, medical death certificates were often not issued until months or even years after the actual deaths. One prisoner's corpse at Camp Cropper was kept for two weeks before his family or criminal investigators were notified. The body was then left at a local hospital with a certificate attributing death to "sudden brainstem compression." The hospital's own autopsy found that the man had died of a massive blow to the head. Another certificate claimed a 63-year-old prisoner had died of "cardiovascular disease and a buildup of fluid around his heart." According to Miles, no mention was made that the old man had been stripped naked, doused in cold water and kept outside in 40° cold for three days before cardiac arrest.

Other doctors just looked the other way, their military duty overruling the Hippocratic Oath. One at Abu Ghraib intervened to ask guards to stop beating one prisoner's wounded leg and quit hanging him from an injured shoulder. He saw it happen three times. He never reported it. In Mosul, according to Miles, one medic witnessed guards beating a prisoner and burning him by dragging him over hot stones. The prisoner was taken to the hospital, treated and then returned by doctors to his torturers. An investigation into the incidentwas closed because the medic didn't sign the medical record and so he couldn't be identified.

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.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1207633,00.html

:mad: :mad: :mad:

Little smilies don't even begin to describe how I feel about this - this is absolutely sickening!

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Paging Dr. Mengele, paging Dr. Mengele ...

I don't know about anybody else, but I'm ashamed to have these goons pretending they're "fighting for my freedoms".

What's wrong with these physicians, anyway?

--p!

[no_hypocrisy]

2. My exact words upon first impression!

If this isn't Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, then nothing is. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/heart/summary.html

The horror, the horror.

[Julius Civitatus]

7. My exact thoughts -- Mengele would be proud of these bastards

By the way, isn't it illegal for doctors to do this?
Can't they lose their licenses?

[DELUSIONAL]

3. Their medical licenses should be stripped from them

This is so sick --

what the hell happened -- it didn't take bush and his criminal gang to bring out the dark side is so many.

If this mess isn't cleaned up . . . . .

and this means a re-organization of the whole military from the top to the bottom . . . .

then the US military will be beyond hope forever.

These medics are/were cowards -- they should have walked away, just refused to do the bidding of the evil ones . . . they stayed and did their "jobs" and became forever tainted by the stench of the head of the rotting fish.

[Canuckistanian]

4. Any doubts as to Rumsfeld's complicity in torture, now?

The book is called Oath Betrayed (to be published June 27) by medical ethicist Dr. Stephen Miles, and it is a harrowing documentation of how the military medical profession has been corrupted by the Bush-Rumsfeld interrogation rules.

One of those 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.

To hell with the Hague. There should be a people's tribunal for this.

[Briar]

5. Everything these criminals in the Bush administration

touch, they corrupt. And justice cannot touch them. It takes defeat to give one any hope of bringing a Mengele to face trial - should fate permit.

Not that doctors are necessarily men and women of integrity - plenty have sold their souls to insurance and drug companies.

[ArmchairMeme]

6. My Opinion - they can no longer be called doctors

They have failed to uphold the hippocrates oath that they took which I believe contains - first do no harm.

They have left their own personal self-respect behind as seems to be a requirement of anyone participating in this administration.

The thought that they might be able to re-enter mainstream practice after their "duty" would be even more difficult to comprehend.

[Julius Civitatus]

8. Can these doctors get sued? Can they lose their licenses?

I believe all these harrowing cases may be cause for doctors to lose their licenses.
Could this happen? Could anyone with legal/medical background expand on this?

[Fiendish Thingy]

9. Torture is THE most evil use of our tax dollars...

and one my top reasons for contemplating leaving this country, and taking my labor, contributions to my community, the economy, and my tax dollars with me.

[Julius Civitatus]

10. Well said

Every April 15 has been a day of reckoning for the last 5 years. You know where your hard-earned dollars are going. It's painful...

[Judi Lynn]

11. More on this book from Amazon.com's review page:

Oath Betrayed : Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (Hardcover)
by Steven Miles

List Price: $23.95
Price: $15.57 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.

Availability: This title will be released on June 27, 2006.

~snip~
Miles has based this book on meticulous research and a wealth of resources, including unprecedented eyewitness accounts from actual victims of prison abuse, and more than thirty-five thousand pages of documentation acquired through provisions of the Freedom of Information Act: army criminal investigations, FBI notes on debriefings of prisoners, autopsy reports, and prisoners’ medical records. These documents tell a story markedly different from the official version of the truth, revealing involvement at every level of government, from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the Pentagon’s senior health officials to prison health-care personnel.

Oath Betrayed is not a denunciation of American military policy or of war in general, but of a profound betrayal of traditions that have shaped the medical corps of the United States armed forces and of America’s abdication of its leadership role in international human rights. This book is a vital document that will both open minds and reinvigorate Americans’ understanding of why human rights matter, so that we can reaffirm and fortify the rules for international civil society.

“This, quite simply, is the most devastating and detailed investigation into a question that has remained a no-no in the current debate on American torture in George Bush’s war on terror: the role of military physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel. Dr. Miles writes in a white rage, with great justification–but he lets the facts tell the story.”
–Seymour M. Hersh, author of Chain of Command

“Steven Miles has written exactly the book we require on medical complicity in torture. His admirable combination of scholarship and moral passion does great service to the medical profession and to our country.”
–Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, and co-editor of Crimes of War: Iraq
(snip)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So glad this book is coming out. I hope millions and millions of people read it.

Thanks, Starfury, for the post.

[Starfury]

12. All Too Quiet: Where were the doctors and nurses at Abu Ghraib and Bagram?

I wasn't sure if I should post this in a seperate thread, if it doesn't generate a response, I'll probably do that. This Salon.com article gives more details on the Abu Ghraib and related abuses, including the abuse and resulting coverup of an American soldier who suffered brain damage as a result of the abuse.

The article also includes a link to the ACLU website describing and listing ~10,000 pages of related documents obtained via FOIA. Among those documents is a .pdf where the FBI complain how "torture techniques" are being used by interrogators pretending to be FBI, so that the FBI would be left holding the bag if there were a resulting lawsuit. I've included those links below.

(...)

A physician at an undisclosed Iraq prison told investigators that a prisoner had complained of being beaten. But the doctor said that he did not see bruising. The medical record could not be found. In 2005, Army investigators thought believable the complaint of a Tikrit inmate that he had been chilled with an air conditioner, beaten, kicked, and dragged. But they closed the investigation because no medical records could be found and the detaining soldiers could not be identified. Another Tikrit inmate described three days of beatings after which his urine became bloody. Again, Army investigators could not find a medical record. In another 2004 case in Iraq, a medic recorded, in a medical note, abrasions, bruises, a broken nose, and a fractured leg. The attending physician signed the note without examining or interviewing the battered prisoner. When the prisoner brought formal charges of abuse through the prison's complaint system, the lack of a doctor's note harmed his credibility. The prisoner decided to drop his complaint and signed a formal statement, "I swear under oath that I do not want to file a complaint against the American Forces so I can get released."

The misplacement of medical records also was used to discredit an American soldier. In January 2003, Spc. Sean Baker put on a Guantanamo prisoner's uniform to allow soldiers to practice extracting a prisoner from a cell. The extraction team did not know that Baker was an American. He recalls, "They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and … got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down." Guard Scott Sinclair "began to choke me and press my head against the floor." He twice "slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me." Baker was hospitalized for brain trauma, given a medical discharge, and continues to suffer from regular seizures. The videotape of the training exercise was lost.

An Army Physical Evaluation Board concluded that Baker's injuries and disabilities were due to the beating and gave its report to Baker. Yet 18 months later, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Laurie Arellano told reporters that Baker's medical discharge was not related to his duties in the military. When Baker released the Army Board's statement, Arellano conceded that the beatings were a factor in Baker's discharge, stating that she had new information.

In the course of the investigation by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Army Major Anthony Cavallaro testified, "What bothered me most about what happened at Abu Ghraib was that no soldier came forward and said this is wrong." The same can be said of the doctors, nurses, and medics.

http://www.slate.com/id/2144590/
And the beat(ing) goes on...

Main ACLU website:
http://www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/gen/13794res20050429.html

FBI complaint:
http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/FBI_3977.pdf