New Report Condemns Role of Doctors, Psychologists and Psychiatrists as Torturers in Bush’s “War on Terror”
Unusually, there has been so much Guantánamo-related news lately that I haven’t had time to write about it all. A case in point is “Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror” (also available here on Scribd), a 156-page report by the Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers, an independent panel of 19 military, ethics, medical, public health, and legal experts, who spent two years working on their report, with the support of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession and the Open Society Foundations.
The report was published on November 5, and, as a press release explained, the task force of experts “charged that US military and intelligence agencies directed doctors and psychologists working in US military detention centers to violate standard ethical principles and medical standards to avoid infliction of harm.”
The task force also concluded that, “since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA improperly demanded that US military and intelligence agency health professionals collaborate in intelligence gathering and security practices in a way that inflicted severe harm on detainees in US custody,” which included “designing, participating in, and enabling torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of prisoners seized in the “war on terror.” Read the rest of this entry »
Who's still at Guantánamo?
