CIA doctors, psychologists participated in torture of prisoners

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Physicians for Human Rights report
CIA doctors, psychologists participated in torture of prisoners
By Tom Eley
4 September 2009

A new report by the medical ethics group Physicians for Human Rights
(PHR) charges that medical professionals attached to the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) assisted in the torture of terror detainees.

CIA doctors also provided a pseudo-medical rationale for torture and
used prisoners as human research subjects to determine the effects and
efficacy of various methods of torture, the report states. These acts
constitute war crimes according to the Geneva Conventions and are
clear violations of medical ethics.

PHR called for an independent investigation of medical personnel in
the CIA interrogation program. It is seeking to determine how many
doctors participated in torture, and on what scientific and medical
basis they conducted their work.

The study, “Aiding Torture,” analyzes the role of doctors,
psychologists, and nurses in known instances of torture at prisons
where terror suspects were held, including Abu Ghraib in Iraq,
Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, and Bagram in Afghanistan. It is based on the
2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on torture, which the Obama
administration released two weeks ago, in heavily redacted form and in
compliance with a court order.

In a press release accompanying the report, PHR asserted that “the
extent to which American physicians and psychologists violated human
rights and betrayed the ethical standards of their professions by
designing, implementing, and legitimizing a worldwide torture program
is greater than previously known.”

“The CIA relied on medical expertise to rationalize and carry out
abusive and unlawful interrogations,” the group said. Furthermore,
medical personnel experimented on inmates through the “aggregate
collection of data on detainees’ reaction to interrogation methods.”

“They were experimenting and keeping records of the results,” said
Steven Reisner, co-author of the report. “That in itself is a war
crime under the Geneva Conventions. Doctors are certainly guilty of
war crimes for permitting torture to go forward and overseeing it
while they had the authority to stop it.”

“The required presence of health professionals did not make
interrogation methods safer, but sanitized their use, escalated abuse,
and placed doctors and psychologists in the untenable position of
calibrating harm rather than serving as protectors and healers,”
Reisner added. “The fact that psychologists went beyond monitoring,
and actually designed and implemented these abuses—while
simultaneously serving as ‘safety monitors’—reveals the ethical
bankruptcy of the entire program.”

It is all but certain that sections of the CIA Inspector General’s
report—completely redacted by the Obama administration—deal with
instances in which detainees were killed as a result of abuse they
suffered in their interrogations. This raises the possibility that
medical personnel not only collaborated in CIA torture, but in murder.

The new report substantiates a lengthy section of an International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report, leaked earlier this year, on
the role of medical personnel in torture. The ICRC concluded that
doctors were present during waterboarding sessions to observe the
results of the near-drowning technique on the oxygen levels in
prisoners’ blood.

Likewise, the PHR report asserts that “medical professionals were
directed to meticulously monitor the waterboarding of detainees to try
to improve the technique’s effectiveness, essentially using the
detainees as human subjects, a practice that approaches unlawful
experimentation.”

PHR singles out the role of psychologists in waterboarding, who
reportedly gathered data on the amount of water used and the length of
time prisoners were exposed. “That is experimentation and as such is a
war crime,” Reisner said.

“Medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep
observational records about waterboarding,” said PHR Medical Advisor
and lead report author Scott Allen, MD. Citing one example, Allen
pointed to instances of interrogators placing “a cloth over a
detainee’s face to block breathing and induce feelings of fear,
helplessness, and a loss of control. A doctor would stand by to
monitor and calibrate this physically and psychologically harmful act,
which amounts to torture.”

Allen’s reference to doctors observing the fear and helplessness in
tortured prisoners is significant. “Learned helplessness” was a
central aim of the CIA torture methods.

Medical personnel were involved in the interrogation process from the
moment detainees arrived in the prison. The report notes “the role of
health professionals in participating in initial psychological and
physical assessments of detainees in an intake process closely linked
to the process of interrogation [whereby] all interrogations were
monitored in real-time by health professionals.”

Medical or scientific experimentation on prisoners of war violates the
laws of war and and basic precepts of human rights. It is also a major
breach of long-established medical ethics, including the Hippocratic
oath, which stipulate that medical personnel must provide care to the
sick and wounded and do no harm.

“That health professionals who swear to oaths of healing so abused the
sacred trust society places in us by instigating, legitimizing and
participating in torture, is an abomination,” states co-author Allen
Keller, MD, director of the Bellevue/New York University Program for
Survivors of Torture. “Health professionals who aided torture must be
held accountable by professional associations, by state licensing
boards, and by society. Accountability is essential to maintain trust
in our professions and to end torture, which scars bodies and minds,
leaving survivors to endure debilitating injuries, humiliating
memories and haunting nightmares.”

The experimentation and study of the physical and psychological
effects of torture on inmates simultaneously at a number of different
CIA prisons could only have occurred if it were organized and ordered
by high-ranking Bush administration officials. Taken together with
other evidence of torture during the Bush administration, the PHR
report leaves no doubt that this was the case.

Bush administration Office of the Legal Counsel (OLC) memos released
through court order earlier this year connect the dots. These memos
provide detailed descriptions of the physical and psychological impact
of various forms of torture on inmates, including waterboarding,
exposure to cold water, beatings, extreme isolation, and forced nudity.

The memos noted CIA guidelines that require the presence of doctors
and psychologists for some of these methods. But it is clear that the
central role of medical personnel at the interrogations was to analyze
the “success” of various forms of torture in breaking the resistance
of prisoners to interrogators.

“Not only were health professionals involved in designing and
monitoring the CIA interrogation program, they also played an indirect
but essential role in the legal justifications for the program
prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC),” the report notes. “The
OLC was asked by the CIA whether certain techniques constituted
torture under [US law] by causing ‘severe physical or mental pain or
suffering.’ Since the OLC lawyers had no direct experience of the
techniques, they necessarily relied instead on the judgment of health
professionals. Yet, in a striking example of bootstrapping, they
turned for advice about the pain caused by the techniques to the very
health professionals who were implementing them.”

It continues, “In essence, the lawyers were asked if the techniques
constituted torture and they replied to the CIA that they only did so
if the CIA Office of Medical Services (OMS) informed them that the
techniques reached the defined standard of pain. The OMS health
professionals obligingly passed on through CIA channels their opinion
that the pain was not in fact severe.”

The report notes one OLC memo which concluded that waterboarding is
not torture because “however frightening the experience may be, OMS
personnel have informed us that the waterboard technique is not
physically painful.”

The role of US medical personnel in torturing prisoners and
experimenting on their bodies recalls the infamous practices of Nazi
doctors on concentration camp inmates in WWII. A number of these
doctors were tried and convicted at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in
the war’s aftermath.

The Nuremberg Code emerged from the trial of Nazi doctors, who claimed
that their experiments were not fundamentally different than those
carried out before the war. The first of the 10 principles in the code
states that in cases of experimentation on human subjects, the consent
of the individual is absolutely necessary. The Nuremberg Code of
ethics provided the basis for the US Code of Federal Regulations,
Title 45 Volume 46, which regulates all federally funded experiments

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/phys-s04.shtml

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