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Mother JonesPhysicians' Group Seeks Criminal Investigation of Torture Docs
— By Michael Mechanic | Mon August 31, 2009 12:52 PM PST
—Photo from Flickr under a Creative Commons license
Doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other health care professionals complicit in the US torture program should be subject to an independent investigation, and those found to have violated professional ethics or the law should be prosecuted and/or lose their license and professional society memberships. That sentiment, from the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), may well mark the first time a doctors' group has demanded true accountability of its professional peers.
Back in 1986, PHR was founded on the idea that health care professionals—given "their specialized skills, ethical commitments, and credible voices, are uniquely positioned to investigate the health consequences of human rights violations and work to stop them." Little did the founders realize they would one day be looking into the activities of their own government and colleagues.
Since 2002, doctors, medics, and mental health professionals in federal employ have brazenly violated longstanding and internationally recognized ethical obligations forbidding participation in torture and abuse of prisoners. As Justine Sharrock reported in our July/August issue ("First, Do Harm"), some military doctors did speak up internally regarding the aberrant policies—which came down directly from Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon by way of the CIA and lawyers in the White House Office of Legal Counsel. But those voices were quickly stifled. Retired Army Brig. General Stephen N. Xenakis told Sharrock that after the dissenters were shut down, they and others feared for their careers and simply shut up.
They weren't the only ones. Physicians for Human Rights, which shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, has been conducting the sorts of analyses that others—including state medical licensing boards and professional groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association—have simply refused to undertake.
Read more:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/08/physicians-seek-criminal-investigation-colleagues-who-tortured
Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 CIA Inspector General’s ReportThis 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.
A team of PHR doctors authored the white paper, which 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. Physicians for Human Rights 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.http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/news-2009-08-31.htmlFULL Report:
http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/documents/reports/aiding-torture.pdf