Doctors, nurses aided torture of terror suspects, report states
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Doctors and nurses tasked with monitoring the health of terror suspects were complicit in abuses committed at prisons run by the Pentagon and the CIA, an independent report said yesterday.
The US Defense Department and the CIA demanded the health care personnel “collaborate in intelligence gathering and security practices in a way that inflicted severe harm on detainees in US custody,” according to the two-year study by the Institute of Medicine and the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.
Medical professionals helped design, enable and participated in “torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of detainees, according to the report.
Collaboration at US prisons in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and the Central Intelligence Agency secret detention sites began after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the US.
“It’s clear that in the name of national security, the military trumped (the Hippocratic Oath), and physicians were transformed into agents of the military and performed acts that were contrary to medical ethics and practice,” said study co-author Gerald Thomson, professor of medicine emeritus at Columbia University.
The Hippocratic Oath is a commitment made by medical personnel to practice their profession in an honest and ethical manner.
The report, conducted by two dozen military, ethics, medical, public health and legal experts, calls on the US Senate Intelligence Committee to fully investigate medical practices at the detention sites.
Co-author Leonard Rubenstein of Johns Hopkins University focused on force-feeding of Guantanamo Bay’s hunger strikers, as well as CIA agents’ use of harsh interrogation methods and waterboarding at secret sites.
“Abuse of detainees and health professional participation in this practice is not behind us as a country,” he said.
Both the CIA and the Pentagon rejected the report’s findings.
The report “contains serious inaccuracies and erroneous conclusions,” said CIA public affairs chief Dean Boyd.
“It’s important to underscore that the CIA does not have any detainees in its custody and President (Barack) Obama terminated the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Program by executive order in 2009,” Boyd said.
Obama signed an executive order shortly after taking office in 2009 that banned interrogation techniques used under his predecessor George W. Bush.
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