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Doctors complicit in torture at CIA, military prisons: report

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Doctors and nurses tasked with monitoring the health of terror suspects were complicit in abuses committed at prisons run by the Pentagon and the CIA, an independent report said Monday.

The Defense Department and the CIA demanded that the health care personnel "collaborate in intelligence gathering and security practices in a way that inflicted severe harm on detainees in U.S. custody," according to the two-year study by the Institute of Medicine and the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.

Medical professionals helped design, enable and participated in "torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment" of detainees, according to the report.

Collaboration at U.S. prisons in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and the Central Intelligence Agency secret detention sites began after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

"It's clear that in the name of national security, the military trumped (the Hippocratic Oath), and physicians were transformed into agents of the military and performed acts that were contrary to medical ethics and practice," said study co-author Gerald Thomson, professor of medicine emeritus at Columbia University.

The Hippocratic Oath is a commitment made by medical personnel to practice their profession in an honest and ethical manner.

The report, conducted by two dozen military, ethics, medical, public health and legal experts, calls on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee to fully investigate medical practices at the detention sites.

Co-author Leonard Rubenstein of Johns Hopkins University focused on force-feeding on Guantanamo Bay's hunger strikers, as well as CIA agents' use of harsh interrogation methods and simulated drowning known as waterboarding at secret sites.

"Abuse of detainees and health professional participation in this practice is not behind us as a country," he told AFP.

The authors also urged the Pentagon and CIA to follow standards of conduct that would let medical personnel adhere to their ethical principles so they could later heal detainees they encounter.

Both the CIA and the Pentagon rejected the report's findings.

The report "contains serious inaccuracies and erroneous conclusions," said CIA public affairs chief Dean Boyd.

"It's important to underscore that the CIA does not have any detainees in its custody and President (Barack) Obama terminated the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Program by executive order in 2009," Boyd said.

Obama signed an executive order shortly after taking office in 2009 that banned interrogation techniques used under his predecessor George W Bush and that critics say amount to torture.

Although the president has not banned extraordinary rendition, new rules prevent suspects from being tortured before they are transferred to a different country for interrogation, trial or continued detention.

Obama also established a task force to review interrogation and transfer policies and issue recommendations, but the group's 2009 report remains classified.

At the Pentagon, spokesman Todd Breasseale said that none of the critics of prisoner care "have had actual access to the detainees, their medical records," or the procedures at the Guantanamo detention camp.

According to Breasseale, Guantanamo's doctors and nurses are "consummate professionals working under terrifically stressful conditions, far from home and their families, and with patients who have been extraordinarily violent."

The doctors and nurses "routinely provide not only better medical care than any of these detainees have ever known, but care on par with the very best of the global medical profession," he said.

Allegations of medical personnel complicit in abuses are not new: in 2009, the group Physicians for Human Rights said that doctors were directed to monitor the CIA's interrogation techniques in an effort to improve their effectiveness.

The group said the practice amounted to "unlawful experimentation" on detainees treated as human subjects.

© (c) 2013 AFP

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

10 Comments
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The American brain-washing machine is working really, really well. I should think it may only be one or two generations away from producing a whole slew of Shiro Ishiis and Josef Mengeles.

-2 ( +2 / -4 )

Why is none of this even the least bit surprising?

2 ( +4 / -2 )

Hypocritic Oath

0 ( +2 / -2 )

CIA agents’ use of harsh interrogation methods

Absolutely must refrain from doing this and now must use sponge baths, massages, and hand feed peeled grapes to the detainees to get them to open up and divulge valuable information that could save 1,000s of lives.

These libtards are way out of line and way off track. Trying to defeat an enemy you need to not treat them with gentleness and loving care for crying out loud.

I am sure the two world wars would not have been won if harsh methods were not used.

0 ( +3 / -3 )

Well StormR, I am sure that if you were plucked from your country and taken to Iran because someone suspected you of something, you would be more than a little upset if they waterboarded you for weeks in between throwing you in a barren, cold cage.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

Controlfreak they don't just select random people of the street for this, there has to have been some reason why you would have been targeted, probably found in a Taliban hideout or similar, get real .

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StormRNov. 05, 2013 - 09:23AM JST Controlfreak they don't just select random people of the street for this, there has to have been some reason why you would have been targeted, probably found in a Taliban hideout or similar, get real .

Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr - Kidnapped from Italy in 2003 by the CIA while he was walking to Mosque, tortured at a facility in Egypt for a year before they figured out he knew nothing, but he was rearrested again afterwards and it took 4 years for him to get home.

Khalid El-Masri - A German citizen with absolutely no connection to terrorism was abducted by the CIA, flown to a black site in Afghanistan where he was anally raped, tortured and beaten. He was eventually freed, but when he tried to sue the U.S. government for compensation they declared it a state secret so he couldn't get a cent. The European Court of human rights heard the case and found the U.S. guilty of human rights abuses.

Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah - A citizen of Yemen who was kidnapped by the CIA, tortured for a year at a U.S. air force base, then when they found out he had NO connection to terrorism he was STILL kept for another year. Oh, and the reason they kidnapped him? He had visited Afghanistan for business.

There are more than a hundred more cases like these that we know about, and not a single reported death. Given the type of torture used and the average age of kidnap victims it is a statistical certainty that there are deaths that have not been reported. How many? We don't know.... why? Because of the continue abuse of the "national security" excuse.

As for these doctors, I say they should all be prevented from practicing medicine ever again, not to mention jailed for assault.

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Professional terrorists are basically worse than sub human animals, they need to be tortured etc...never shown any mercy. Why?? Ask Israel, ask the family victims of 9/11 etc...

-3 ( +1 / -4 )

Frungy you obviously have an interest in this, we wouldn't know about these 3 examples or the hundreds you claim.

Terroists are scum and should be treated as such, they show no mercy and should be shown none.

-2 ( +0 / -2 )

StormRNov. 06, 2013 - 06:26PM JST Frungy you obviously have an interest in this, we wouldn't know about these 3 examples or the hundreds you claim. Terroists are scum and should be treated as such, they show no mercy and should be shown none.

Indeed, I agree. Terrorists deserve the death penalty. However the U.S. government has a less than 20% accuracy rate in identifying terrorists, and the vast majority of people kidnapped and tortured have been completely innocent.

Kidnapping, torturing and killing innocent civilians is wrong. That some people cannot grasp this simple idea is amazing.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

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