First, Do Harm

[struggle4progress]

TAP talks to Oath Betrayed author Steven H. Miles about physicians' complicity in U.S. detainee abuse.

By Aziz Huq
Web Exclusive: 08.11.06

Dr. Steven H. Miles is the author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror (Random House 2006)

... I’ve done a lot of international relief work with international NGOs , where I’ve been up to my eyeballs in human rights abuses. When the pictures from Abu Ghraib came out, it was clear that this was more than a matter of a few bad apples. You don’t have torture of this kind without a command that authorizes it. The question then was why the doctors hadn’t blown the whistle. I wrote an article for the medical journal Lancet in August 2004 based on the Taguba report and on congressional hearings, about how physicians were involved in designing abusive interrogation procedures and in falsifying death certificates to hide abuses. The Department of Defense reacted by criticizing the tone of that article but did not contradict any of the factual claims.

Then, six days before the 2004 election, the government dropped 6,000 documents in response to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request. This was too much to analyze before the election. Another 15,000 pages came in January 2006, and another 15,000 in the next four months. This material gave me my story ...

Physicians failed to record injuries. They failed to get accounts of the origins of injuries. They failed to look for other related injuries. For example, one kid was seen by U.S. medics after his jaw was broken at the prison; the physician diagnosed a broken jaw, but he didn’t make any inquiry as to how it happened and did not even take off the boy’s shirt to look for other signs of trauma. This kind of behavior is a violation of standard medical practices ...

This is exactly what the Geneva Conventions are meant to prevent. The Geneva Conventions apply to those who are no longer fighting, to those who are “hors de combat.” They are not about battlefield ethics. They are about prisoners who have been disarmed. Geneva is a set of standards for preventing armies from making war on captives. In medical terms, this means providing minimal medical care, preventing epidemics in camps, and not torturing ...

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11849

[Mnemosyne]

1. knr, so everyone sees this. n/t

[enough]

2. k&r