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Report: Doctors Complicit in Torture

Sickening. From the New England Journal of Medicine (by Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.):

There is increasing evidence that U.S. doctors, nurses, and medics have been complicit in torture and other illegal procedures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. Such medical complicity suggests still another disturbing dimension of this broadening scandal.

We know that medical personnel have failed to report to higher authorities wounds that were clearly caused by torture and that they have neglected to take steps to interrupt this torture. In addition, they have turned over prisoners' medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the prisoners' weaknesses or vulnerabilities. We have not yet learned the extent of medical involvement in delaying and possibly falsifying the death certificates of prisoners who have been killed by torturers.

Here's more:

Various medical protocols — notably, the World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo in 1975 — prohibit all three of these forms of medical complicity in torture. Moreover, the Hippocratic Oath declares, "I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing."

....American doctors at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere have undoubtedly been
aware of their medical responsibility to document injuries and raise
questions about their possible source in abuse. But those doctors and
other medical personnel were part of a command structure that
permitted, encouraged, and sometimes orchestrated torture to a degree
that it became the norm — with which they were expected to comply — in
the immediate prison environment.

....To understand the full scope of American torture and abuse at Abu
Ghraib and other prisons, we need to look more closely at the behavior
of doctors and other medical personnel, as well as at the pressures
created by the war in Iraq that produced this behavior. It is possible
that some doctors, nurses, or medics took steps, of which we are not
yet aware, to oppose the torture. It is certain that many more did not.
But all those involved could nonetheless reveal, in valuable medical
detail, much of what actually took place. By speaking out, they would
take an important step toward reclaiming their role as healers.

Read the whole thing. [hat tip to Carl at The Nation.]

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