Torture Generates Turmoil at the APA
by Meteor Blades
Tue Aug 12, 2008 at 06:42:44 AM PDT
Unlike the people in Stalin’s Soviet Union, no U.S. official risked disappearing into the prison for dissent. Senior State Department and Defense Department official, field commanders, intelligence and FBI officers, and frontline soldiers dissented. They were usually ignored. A few were threatened with administrative sanctions; a few were reassigned; a few requested reassignment. The possibility of dissent makes the silence and complicity of senior and frontline medical personnel in the abuse and neglect of prisoners that much more inexplicable and inexcusable.
– Dr. Steven H. Miles, M.D., Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror
Despite Dr. Miles’s book, despite Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, despite reports such as the Physicians for Human Rights' Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of US Torture and its Impact,
Americans still don't have anywhere near a full picture of what happened after the Cheney-Bush administration decided to spit on the Geneva Conventions, redefine and fine-tune torture and treat human beings like the inferior creatures it thought them to be.What we do know is horrible enough. Most horrible of all is knowing that
medical personnel and psychologists violated the most basic ethics of their professions – Do No Harm – by participating in and helping to design "enhanced" interrogations designed to break prisoners. Some did break. Some were killed. This systematic torture focused on sensory and sleep deprivation, overstimulation, and dependency creation. Massive amounts of pain and fear were also included. For their part,
psychologists "reverse-engineered" the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program – designed to help American soldiers and marines resist torture – as a means to teach interrogators how to employ torture against captives. Let me repeat that. Training established to help American prisoners of war cope with, or at least anticipate, their captors' efforts to break them down was
"reverse-engineered" as a means to break down prisoners at Guantánamo and "black sites" run by the CIA or military intelligence operations in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Talk about becoming the enemy.much more at:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/8/12/4517/58276/901/566587