Medical Torture - Asserted Medical or Professional Complicity

Asserted Medical or Professional Complicity

According to the Center for Constitutional Rights' When Healers Harm campaign, health professionals were complicit in the torture and abuse of detainees during the so-called “war on terror” of U.S. President George W. Bush. Health professionals are those who are trained or licensed in a healing profession, including: medical doctors, psychiatrists, medical examiners, psychologists, and nurses. All of these professions have been implicated in the torture and abuse of prisoners in CIA secret prisons and in military detention centers, such as those in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Among other things, health professionals:

• crafted abusive tactics and falsely legitimized their use;
• advised interrogators on methods of abuse that would exploit prisoners’ vulnerabilities;
• used medical procedures to harm prisoners;
• gauged pain and monitored interrogations that risked leaving prisoners in need of treatment;
• checked prisoners to certify that they were capable of surviving additional abuse;
• conditioned medical or mental health treatment on cooperation with interrogation;
• shared confidential patient information that was used to harm patients;
• covered up evidence of torture and abuse; and
• turned a blind eye to cruel treatment.

State licensing boards and the professional associations have the responsibility to uphold medical ethics and to hold medical professionals accountable for their participation in abuse. To date, none of these bodies has investigated – nor, in some cases, even acknowledged – abusive conduct by individual members of their professions. In 2009, after years of denial, the American Psychological Association finally recognized that psychologists had engaged in torture. However, the American Psychological Association has yet to acknowledge that psychologists were in fact integral to the Bush Administration’s torture policy. Some criticize the APA for failing to respond to allegations of “collusion between APA officials and the national security apparatus in providing ethical cover for psychologists’ participation in detainee abuse."

Although the American Medical Association has made clear that physicians should not be involved in interrogations of any kind, it continues to insist that it has “no specific knowledge of doctors being involved in abuse or torture,” despite widely known evidence to the contrary, including government documents and Office of Legal Counsel memos, a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross and multiple accounts by survivors.

Some other accounts of medical or professional complicity in torture include:

• The SERE ("Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape") program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy although he has emphatically denied that he had advocated the use of SERE counter-resistance techniques to break down detainees. The New Yorker notes that in November, 2001 Banks was detailed to Afghanistan, where he spent four months at Bagram Air Base, "supporting combat operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters".
• A 2005 report by Human Rights Watch suggested that torture was routine under the appointed Iraqi government. Human Rights Watch Report
• Dr. J.C. Carothers, British colonial Kenyan psychiatrist, has been implicated by some recent academic historians in designing interrogation of Mau Mau prisoners. His advice was published by the Kenya Government as The Psychology of Mau Mau, in 1954.
• Similarly, it has been implied that Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Dr. Ayad Allawi violated his obligation to medical ethics whilst serving as Western European chief of secret police for the Baathist government of Saddam Hussein. However, the same sources allege that Allawi had abandoned his medical education at that point and his medical degree "was conferred upon him by the Baath party." .