9486 in the collection  

Medically Assisted Torture

We need public acknowledgment
that educators who do test prep and participate
in the administration of high stakes testing
are:


• deeply involved in facilitating child
  abuse


• participating in activities that violate
  professional ethical standards.


We need this acknowledgment from professional
organizations and from the participants
themselves.

EDITORIAL

There was a great deal to be troubled by in a
report by the International Committee of the
Red Cross documenting the kinds of torture and
abuse inflicted on terrorism suspects by the
Central Intelligence Agency. One disturbing
footnote is that medical personnel were deeply
involved in facilitating the abuses, which were
intended to coerce suspects into providing
intelligence.

The report, prepared in 2007 but kept secret
until it was published by The New York
Review of Books, was based on Red Cross
interviews in late 2006 with 14 “high-value
detainees,” who include some of the most
dangerous terrorists in custody. The prisoners’
complaints gain credibility because they
described similar abuses and had been kept in
isolation at different locations, with no
chance to concoct a common story.

Various prisoners said they had been subjected
to waterboarding, forced to stand for days with
their arms shackled overhead, confined in small
boxes, beaten and kicked, slammed repeatedly
into walls, prevented from sleeping, deprived
of solid food, forced to remain naked for weeks
or months at a stretch, often in frigid cells
and immersed in cold water. All were kept in
continuous solitary confinement for their
C.I.A. detention, ranging from 16 months to
more than four years.

Medical personnel seem to have been involved
mostly as facilitators rather than torturers or
interrogators. In one case, they monitored a
detainee’s oxygen saturation with a device
attached to his finger so waterboarding could
be stopped before the prisoner suffocated. In
another case, an amputee forced to stand with
his arms shackled overhead had his intact leg
checked daily for signs of dangerous swelling.
Several detainees said health workers sometimes
instructed interrogators to continue, adjust or
stop particular methods of abuse.

Such activities violate the ethical codes of
major health organizations, both national and
international. The Red Cross called it “a gross
breach of medical ethics” that in some cases
“amounted to participation in torture and/or
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

None of the health personnel wore
identification, but the prisoners inferred that
they were physicians or psychologists. They
also could have been paramedics, physician’s
assistants or other less-trained personnel.

The report underscores the need to have a full-
scale investigation into these abusive
practices and into who precisely participated
in them. Only then will we know whether
indictments or, in the case of physicians, the
loss of medical licenses, are warranted.


— Editorial
New York Times
2009-04-09


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INDEX OF OUTRAGES

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