The Torture Doctors-These physicians have a strange way of preserving the American way of life

[babylonsister]

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0723,hentoff,76862,6.html

The Torture Doctors
These physicians have a strange way of preserving the American way of life
by Nat Hentoff

For all the press coverage of abuses, including torture, of our "detainees," most Americans are unaware of the partnership between military interrogators and military doctors and psychiatrists in "breaking" prisoners who refuse to provide information. A chilling account of this utter betrayal of medical ethics appeared in the July 2005 New England Journal of Medicine ("Doctors and Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay"), hardly a widely circulated publication.

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Are none of the doctors in these prisons troubled by what they see, even if some are not directly involved? "There is evidence," says Physicians for Human Rights, "of failure on the part of health professionals to report abuse as well as evidence of complicity in acts of physical and psychological torture."

There are FBI agents with much higher ethical standards than these health professionals. A number of them, appalled at what they saw during Army interrogations while on assignment at Guantánamo, sent urgent e-mails to FBI Director Robert Mueller reporting these abuses, adding that some of the torturers pretended to be FBI agents. Mueller took no action until persistently prodded by Vermont Democratic Senator Pat Leahy; he then said he'd look into it. But as far as I know, no torturer cited by the FBI agents has been held accountable.

I asked Miles what actions have been taken against these health professionals who have abandoned medical ethics. "Only very minor reprisals," he said. "A medic who watched some abuse. A nurse who witnessed other abuses. But no one higher has been disciplined." A source at Physicians for Human Rights tells me: "It's been a complete whitewash."

Not only Army interrogators and doctors are committing these war crimes under our own War Crimes statute. Two years ago, The Washington Post's Dana Priest reported that in a CIA Rendition Group of kidnappers, "case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists . . . figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside. . . . "

The famed anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that in ancient times, when a physician arrived, a patient was not sure whether the doctor had come to treat him or kill him. So much for advanced civilization. But why, I wonder, are American doctors who are not in our military prisons remaining silent?

[soothsayer]

1. I wrote a paper once on Nazi doctors. They'd advise soldiers as to the best,

most efficient place for a kill shot (German army was low on ammo, so had to stand prisoners one in front of the other to shoot say 3 with a single bullet). You'd think that Hippocratic oath would matter, but I guess not to everyone. More of a hypocritic(al) oath to some.

[madrchsod]

2. russian psychiatric doctors were banned from the international association

from the international association of psychiatry for years because of their complicity in the russian government use of psychiatric hospitalization of political dissidents. now we do the same?