Tuesday, March 27, 2007

How Doctors Got Into the Torture Business

How Doctors Got Into the Torture Business, via Andrew Sullivan.

I'm more concerned with the fact that we're torturing than with the idea that doctors are involved, but the article provides some disturbing details about what the government is doing in our names. If you have no sympathy for al-Qhatani, as I don't, remember what Mencken wrote:
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.


Excerpt:
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...

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-degree 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 incident was 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.

4 comments:

CyberKitten said...

Doctors are often used in torture situations - so that the person being tortured doesn't die (too quickly).

Makes rather a mockery of the Hippocratic Oath though don't you think?

It is rather ironic (to say the least) that a country "defending" Freedom and Democracy in the world has to stoop to the methods of the people it is supposedly fighting. Whatever happened to holding the moral high ground?

Can you bomb people to the ballot box? Can you create freedom at the point of a gun or with the application of electric cables?

Somehow I think not......

Anonymous said...

Cyberkitten, while your ideas would be relevant to a situation of civil disobedience they are irrelevant in a situation of war because there are no moral wars. Wars are by definition immoral even though we do try to keep to some relative standards. The object of war is most often survival and that often superceeds all issues of morality. It is impossible to stop wars as they (and the narcissism that causes them) are part of human nature and history. So the point is moot.

beepbeepitsme said...

Miles was interviewed on australian televison here. It was a fantastic interview and very "illuminating."

Anonymous said...

I truly, with all possible skepticism of the government, never thought that our government would openly condone torture, and that the public would go along with it. But then, I'm not out demonstrating against it, etc... myself. It must be how all big bad government-instigated actions take place. Nobody is willing to stick their neck out to say no.