Why is the Bush Administration Using Doctors for Torture?

Why is the Bush Administration Using Doctors for Torture?

August 3, 2005

New reports in the New England Journal of Medicine and the New Yorker find startling evidence that U.S. military physicians, psychologists and psychiatrists have been used to capitalize on the medical problems of prisoners in interrogations despite explicit prohibitions against such actions.  This development continues a dark and disturbing trend of Bush administration behavior contributing to direct violations of long standing human rights laws and protocols. 

• Doctors are expressly forbidden from participating in torture or the abuse of medical information for interrogations.  As Dr. M. Gregg Bloche and Center for American Progress visiting fellow Jonathan Marks write in the New England Journal of Medicine: "The laws of war defer to medical ethics. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions provides that medical personnel 'shall not be compelled to perform acts or to carry out work contrary to the rules of medical ethics.' Although the protocol has not been ratified by the United States, this principle has attained the status of customary international law. International human rights law (most important, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) provides additional protection for privacy in general — in wartime and peacetime."
  
  
• Despite these prohibitions, the Bush administration has used doctors to turn the medical problems of detainees into openings for information. The Pentagon has denied that military physicians have used private medical histories to aid interrogations. But Bloche and Marks' inquiry into physician abuses at Guantanamo concludes that this claim "is sharply at odds with orders given to military medical personnel — and with actual practice at Guantanamo. Health information has been routinely available to behavioral science consultants and others who are responsible for crafting and carrying out interrogation strategies. Through early 2003 (and possibly later), interrogators themselves had access to medical records. And since late 2002, psychiatrists and psychologists have been part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with behavior-shaping rewards, to extract actionable intelligence from resistant captives."
  
  
• Any participation of doctors in torture or abuse must be stopped immediately and anyone responsible for these abuses must be held accountable.  The Bush administration and the Pentagon must put an immediate end to any use of medical information for torture or abuse and bring anyone responsible for ordering, allowing, or participating in such actions to justice.  The credibility and authority of the entire United States is on the line and the president must stand strong against this deplorable behavior.