You Will Anyway: Military doctors aiding and abetting torture

Friday, June 24, 2005

Military doctors aiding and abetting torture

The story hits the mainstream - again. Will it make any impact this time?

Military interrogators at the Guantanamo prison camp may have breached medical privacy and encouraged doctors to violate professional and legal standards, two medical ethics experts said in an influential U.S. medical journal on Thursday.
Reuters article

Military doctors at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have aided interrogators in conducting and refining coercive interrogations of detainees, including providing advice on how to increase stress levels and exploit fears, according to new, detailed accounts given by former interrogators.
NY Times article

Not that this is actually new news. Perhaps the British Lancet report wasn't prestigious enough to cause any concern in the U.S. Will the New England Journal of Medicine report fare any differently?

Doctors and Torture - July 2004 (Veterans for Common Sense)

Study outlines doctors', medics' role in Iraq prison abuses - August 2004 (Newsday)

Military doctors allegedly collaborated in prison torture - August 2004 (MSNBC)

Doctors implicated in abuse of Iraqi prisoners - August 2004 (New Scientist)

Doctor's orders -- spill your guts - January 2005 (LA Times)

Military doctors assailed for role in detainee abuse - January 2005 (Baltimore Sun)

ABUSE CRISIS: Allegations: US Army Doctors Participated in Torture - January 2005 (ATSSN)

Of course, just ahead of the report, the military got new guidelines.

Hey, they're not physicians - they're soldiers.

So much for medical ethics, eh?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated. There may be some delay before your comment is published. It all depends on how much time M has in the day. But please comment!

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Daily Twain:

And other words of wisdom...

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others. -- John Andrew Holmes

There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack. -- Molly Ivins

[War] is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious [racket]. ... It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives ... It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. -- Major General Smedley Butler

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe. -- Albert Einstein

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." -- James Thurber

One of the fun aspects of Empire is how many ironies it creates. -- Glenn Greenwald

I had a slightly insane discussion the other day with a winger who wanted urgently for me to understand that the Haditha massacre is the kind of thing that happens in war. Whereas I was trying to point out to him that the Haditha massacre is the kind of thing that happens in war. -- Molly Ivins

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. --George Orwell

I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare. –- Howard Zinn

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. --Upton Sinclair

If we're the greatest country in the world, then maybe we could have the greatest government. -- Lewis Black

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. -- Aristotle

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair. -- H.L. Mencken

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -- James Madison, 4th President of the United States

No nation builds a wall out of strength. They build it out of fear. -- Michael Flynn

They call it The American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. -- George Carlin

Texas justice is Texas justice. -- Victoria Nuland, US State Department spokeswoman

When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, “Except in wartime.” -- George McGovern

Sometimes I go about with pity for myself, and all the while Great Winds are carrying me across the sky. ~Ojibway saying