At a meeting in Chicago on Monday, the AMA's House of Delegates adopted guidelines that make it unethical for physicians -- AMA members or not -- to use their medical knowledge to interrogate prisoners, deeming all such operations inherently coercive and adversarial.

Of the 136 documented deaths of prisoners in detention, Miles found, medical death certificates were often not issued until months or even years after the actual deaths. One prisoner's corpse at Camp Cropper was kept for two weeks before his family or criminal investigators were notified. The body was then left at a local hospital with a certificate attributing death to "sudden brainstem compression." The hospital's own autopsy found that the man had died of a massive blow to the head. Another certificate claimed a 63-year-old prisoner had died of "cardiovascular disease and a buildup of fluid around his heart." According to Miles, no mention was made that the old man had been stripped naked, doused in cold water and kept outside in 40° cold for three days before cardiac arrest.

Complaints about American prisons and torture after the days of Saddam, Uday and Qasay and their prisons remind me of the person who is so busy seeing the speck in my eye that he cannot see the log in his own eye.