Doctors accused of helping refine US torture methods

A major American medical human rights organisation has charged medical professionals of colluding and experimenting in US hard interrogation techniques, in other words torture, in the George W Bush ‘war against terror’.

The Physicians for Human Rights organisation – which shared the Nobel Prize in 1997 – accuses CIA doctors and psychologists of "neglect of medical ethics" in witnessing aggressive interrogation of detainees, including the near-drowning technique of water-boarding.

The report, working from published sources, says that doctors and health professionals witnessed water-boarding, carried out analysis of sleep deprivation and other 'stress' techniques of interrogation, and analysed data of the CIA's use of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' on some 25 detainees. It did all this, the report claims, under the guise of trying to protect the detainees' health.

The report claims to blow apart attempts by the Bush administration to give legal cover to its regime of detention and harsh interrogations - torture, according to critics - following the incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.
 
The CIA has responded robustly by stating "the report is just wrong... The CIA did not as part of its detention programme conduct human subject research on any detainee or group of detainees."

Nathaniel Raymond, lead author of the report, told reporters yesterday: "The crime of illegal experimentation is equal to the crime of torture."

The accusation that doctors and health professionals have been too close to the interrogation, detention and illegal transport from country to country of detainees in the Bush war against terror, is nothing new. In fact the report comes up with little original prime evidence off its own bat.

Coincidentally, however, it appeared on the day that the former head of the British Army, General Sir Mike Jackson gave dramatic testimony in the inquiry into the torture and killing of Basra hotel manager Baha Mousa in British military custody in September 2003.

Jackson said the killing was "a stain on the character of the British Army" and the blame lay with the commanding officer of the unit involved, Lt Col Jorge Mendonca of the Queen's Lancashire  Regiment. "It is absolute bedrock to the British Army's philosophy that a commanding officer is responsible for what goes on within his command," said Jackson.

At least the general has been forthright. So far at least, no doctor has been accused of hideous experiments with the living and dead on the scale of Dr Josef Mengele in the Nazi extermination camps of the Second World War. But there are huge questions of tacit collusion with those who carried out the 'advanced interrogation techniques' - postmodern torture - in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

This collusion often happens when those involved do not have any firm belief in the cause, so believe usual ethical standards can be dropped, according to Philip Zimbardo, author of 'The Lucifer Effect' - a book pored over by US and UK military psychologists and loathed by their commanders. Zimbardo was involved in the notorious Stanford Experiment in the 1970s when students were confined to role-play as prisoners and their captors - with disastrous results.

Zimbardo spoke up for the accused in the first round of the Abu Ghraib abuse hearings, as he claimed they were almost as much victims of the system as the detained, deprived and tortured.

And here is the wider point about the accusations of the latest accusations about the detention and graduated torture techniques in the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. Most of the abuses arose from troops and groups of professionals unconvinced of the ethics either of the cause itself or the methods used in the campaigns.

The problem was, and is, that most of the media were prepared to accept the official narrative on such matters, rather than question it and then speak truth to power. They let Blair and Bush and their cohorts get away with it in their deluded sense of mission. ·