Legal Commentary

Ethics Group Claims CIA Doctors Used "Human Experimentation" During Torture Sessions

By Jeralyn

About those doctors who attended the CIA interrogation sessions at which enhanced technigues, aka torture, were used:

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a non-profit group that has investigated the role of medical personnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto understood.

....The most incendiary accusation of PHR's latest report, Aiding Torture, is that doctors actively monitored the CIA's interrogation techniques with a view to determining their effectiveness, using detainees as human subjects without their consent. The report concludes that such data-gathering was "a practice that approaches unlawful experimentation".

The report cites the recently released 2004 CIA Inspector General's report. [More...]

In an appendix to the CIA's IG report, there are medical guidelines for attending physicians.

Medical workers are given the task of "assessing and monitoring the health of all Agency detainees" subjected to enhanced techniques. These techniques include facial slaps, sleep deprivation, walling – where their padded heads are banged against walls – confinement in boxes, and waterboarding or simulated drowning.

On waterboarding:

In a highlighted note at the end of the guideline, medical staff are instructed to keep detailed notes of every time waterboarding is used, "in order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations". Doctors are told to record "how long each application lasted, how much water was used in the process, how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled ... and how the subject looked between each treatment."

What to do about it?

PHR is calling for an official investigation into the role of doctors in the CIA's now widely discredited programme. It wants to know exactly how many doctors participated, what they did, what records they kept and the science that they applied.

The full report is here.(pdf.)

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 02, 2009 (boomark / email).