Text 1562, 113 rader
Skriven 2006-06-28 20:49:00 av BOB KLAHN (1:123/140)
Ärende: Torture... the real thing
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Friday, Jun. 23, 2006

 How Doctors Got Into the Torture Business Andrew Sullivan on the
 harrowing new book "Oath Betrayed", in which a medical ethicist
 documents how members of his profession got caught up in the
 abuse of prisoners

 By ANDREW SULLIVAN

 Soldiers are trained to kill and doctors to heal. At least
 that's how we usually understand those two professions. But wars
 can often distort reality, and the war on terrorism has turned
 into a test case. An inspiring example is that of Colonel Kelly
 Faucette, M.D. He recently wrote about caring for a new patient
 at the intensive-care unit of the 47th Combat Support Hospital
 in Mosul, Iraq. The patient was a terrorist insurgent, a man who
 planted hidden roadside bombs to murder civilians and Faucette's
 fellow soldiers. Faucette wrote in his local paper: "Something
 inside me wants to walk up to this guy ... and just clobber
 him." But Faucette didn't. Instead he healed him before sending
 him to a jail, and by that act of healing he helped heal Iraq.

 That's the America I know and love. But it is not, alas, the
 only face of America in this war. One of Defense Secretary
 Donald Rumsfeld's first instructions for military interrogations
 outside the Geneva Conventions was that military doctors should
 be involved in monitoring torture. It was a fateful decision ?
 and we learn much more about its consequences in a new book
 based on 35,000 pages of government documents obtained under the
 Freedom of Information Act. The book is called Oath Betrayed (to
 be published June 27) by medical ethicist Dr. Stephen Miles,
 and it is a harrowing documentation of how the military medical
 profession has been corrupted by the Bush-Rumsfeld interrogation
 rules.

 One of those rules was that a prisoner's medical information
 could be provided to interrogators to help guide them to the
 prisoner's "emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses" (in
 Rumsfeld's own words) in the torture process. At an
 interrogation center called Camp Na'ma, where the unofficial
 motto was "No blood, no foul," one intelligence officer
 testified that "every harsh interrogation was approved by the
 [commander] and the Medical prior to its execution." Doctors, in
 other words, essentially signed off on torture in advance. And
 they often didn't inspect the victims afterward. At Abu Ghraib,
 according to the Army's surgeon general, only 15% of inmates
 were examined for injuries after interrogation.

 Some of the medical involvement in torture defies belief. In
 one of the few actual logs we have of a high-level
 interrogation, that of Mohammed al-Qhatani (first reported in
 TIME), doctors were present during the long process of constant
 sleep deprivation over 55 days, and they induced hypothermia and
 the use of threatening dogs, among other techniques. According
 to Miles, Medics had to administer three bags of medical saline
 to Qhatani ? while he was strapped to a chair ? and aggressively
 treat him for hypothermia in the hospital. They then returned
 him to his interrogators. Elsewhere in Guantánamo, one prisoner
 had a gunshot wound that was left to fester during three days of
 interrogation before treatment, and two others were denied
 antibiotics for wounds. In Iraq, according to the Army surgeon
 general as reported by Miles, "an anesthesiologist repeatedly
 dropped a 2-lb. bag of intravenous fluid on a patient; a nurse
 deliberately delayed giving pain medication, and medical staff
 fed pork to Muslim patients." Doctors were also tasked at Abu
 Ghraib with "Dietary Manip (monitored by med)," in other words,
 using someone's food intake to weaken or manipulate them.

 Of the 136 documented deaths of prisoners in detention, Miles
 found, medical death certificates were often not issued until
 months or even years after the actual deaths. One prisoner's
 corpse at Camp Cropper was kept for two weeks before his family
 or criminal investigators were notified. The body was then left
 at a local hospital with a certificate attributing death to
 "sudden brainstem compression." The hospital's own autopsy found
 that the man had died of a massive blow to the head. Another
 certificate claimed a 63-year-old prisoner had died of
 "cardiovascular disease and a buildup of fluid around his
 heart." According to Miles, no mention was made that the old man
 had been stripped naked, doused in cold water and kept outside
 in 40° cold for three days before cardiac arrest.

 Other doctors just looked the other way, their military duty
 overruling the Hippocratic Oath. One at Abu Ghraib intervened
 to ask guards to stop beating one prisoner's wounded leg and
 quit hanging him from an injured shoulder. He saw it happen
 three times. He never reported it. In Mosul, according to Miles,
 one medic witnessed guards beating a prisoner and burning him by
 dragging him over hot stones. The prisoner was taken to the
 hospital, treated and then returned by doctors to his
 torturers. An investigation into the incidentwas closed because
 the medic didn't sign the medical record and so he couldn't be
 identified.

 After a while, you get numb reading these stories. They read
 like accounts of a South American dictatorship, not an American
 presidency. But we learn one thing: once you allow the torture
 of prisoners for any reason, as this President did, the cancer
 spreads. In the end it spreads to healers as well, and turns
 them into accomplices to harm.


 Copyright © 2006 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
 whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy
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BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

... George W. Bush... first of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.
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