UPDATE: US Health Professionals’ Role in Torture Worse Than Previously Known

(Peter Nicholls/The Times)
Mohammed Jawad says he was arrested in 2002 when only 12. He is now seeking to sue the US for his 7 years of abuse and torture here

MODEL UPDATE for Possible STATES' Campaigns: here
Actions by Issues - See # 13 on health care professionals

See write up on Jawad's torture and medical/psychological abuse here

SHOCKING EXCERPTS from NEW report:

“Medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep observational records about waterboarding, which approaches unethical and unlawful human experimentation,”

“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/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. “Health professionals who aided torture must be held accountable by professional associations, by state licensing boards, and by society..."

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Physicians for Human Rights: Health professionals’ involvement in torture even worse than we knew August 31st, 2009

Physicians for Human Rights has issued a new report — Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report — analyzing the roles of health professionals, psychologists included, in the CIA’s torture program, as revealed in the CIA Inspector General’s report released last Monday. Here is the PHR press release:

PHR Analysis: CIA Health Professionals’ Role in Torture Worse Than Previously Known

Cambridge, MA — 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, according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

A team of PHR doctors authored the new white paper, Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General’s Report. The report details how the CIA relied on medical expertise to rationalize and carry out abusive and unlawful interrogations. It also refers to aggregate collection of data on detainees’ reaction to interrogation methods. PHR is concerned that this data collection and analysis may amount to human experimentation and calls for more investigation on this point. If confirmed, the development of a research protocol to assess and refine the use of the waterboard or other techniques would likely constitute a new, previously unknown category of ethical violations committed by CIA physicians and psychologists.

“Medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep observational records about waterboarding, which approaches unethical and unlawful human experimentation,” says PHR Medical Advisor and lead report author Scott Allen, MD. For example, “Interrogators would place 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. It is profoundly unsettling to learn of the central role of health professionals in laying a foundation for US government lawyers to rationalize the CIA’s illegal torture program.”

The Inspector General’s report documents some practices — previously unknown or unconfirmed — that were used to bring about excruciating pain, terror, humiliation, and shame for months on end. These practices included:

Mock executions;
Brandishing guns and power drills;
Threats to sexually assault family members and murder children;
“Walling” — repeatedly slamming an unresponsive detainee’s head against a cell wall; and
Confinement in a box.
“These unlawful, unethical, and ineffective interrogation tactics cause significant bodily and mental harm,” said co-author and PHR Senior Medical Advisor Vincent Iacopino, MD, PhD. “The CIA Inspector General’s report confirms that torture escalates in severity and torturers frequently go beyond approved techniques.”

“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. 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,” stated co-author Steven Reisner, PhD, PHR’s Psychological Ethics Advisor.

“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/NYU 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.”

PHR has called for full investigation and remedies, including accountability for war crimes, and reparation, such as compensation, medical care and psycho-social services. PHR also calls for health professionals who have violated ethical standards or the law to be held accountable through criminal prosecution, loss of license and loss of professional society membership where appropriate.

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INSERT: MUCH of current torture and malpractice relates to social psychology experiments done decades ago including the following:

This is partly an explanation for how the US public has become immune to ending torture. Unfortunately our leaders know this and have tried to keep the lid on VISUAL images in order to distance citizens from the effect of torture on the victim.
Since many visual evidences of torture via photos and videos have been destroyed - we still have to rely mostly on these written reports. This blogger recommends a balance between over-numbing with photos to make the effect commonplace and the right photos at the right time in the face of all who are complicit - which is all of us unless we speak out. When subjects in this classic experiment actually saw the suffering of another person, only a minority were known to continue to comply with authority figures’ demands for compliance and they refuse to administer the shocks earlier on in the experiment - at lower levels of apparent shock. Apply this pattern to the current circumstance.

PHR Library

Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report
This 6-page white paper, published August 31, 2009, after the new release of the May 2004 CIA Inspector General's report, shows that the extent to which American doctors and psychologists violated human rights and betrayed the ethical standards of their professions by designing, implementing, and legitimizing a worldwide torture program is worse than previously known.

To download and read the 6-page report PHR’s Aiding Torture, visit here

Since 2005, PHR has documented the systematic use of psychological and physical torture by US personnel against detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram airbase, and elsewhere in its groundbreaking reports, Break Them Down, Leave No Marks, and Broken Laws, Broken Lives.