Abuse revelations demand an inquiry, says PHR

[OneActivist]

By Elizabeth Goitein
The Boston Globe
August 5, 2009


EARLIER this year, there were widespread calls for an independent commission to examine the Bush administration’s counterterrorism abuses. Although Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont courageously took up the cause, President Obama resisted, citing a desire to “look forward, not back,’’ and for a short period it seemed he would get his wish.

But the past refuses to stay buried. What’s more, the present is beginning to carry disturbing echoes of the past, creating a powerful new argument for a commission.

The abuses underlying the original calls for a commission are well-known. The Bush administration instituted interrogation techniques widely seen as torture. It asserted the right to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely without judicial review. It implemented an illegal warrantless surveillance program. And it abused various privileges to conceal its wrongdoing from Congress, the courts, and the public.

President Obama hoped we could put all that behind us - but the revelations keep coming. The release of Bush-era Justice Department memoranda revealed additional “enhanced’’ interrogation techniques. New photos of detainee abuse surfaced. A report by five inspectors general referenced still-secret “intelligence activities’’ that even some Bush officials considered illegal. And Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta revealed that Dick Cheney ordered the CIA not to inform Congress, as required by law, about its secret plans to assassinate Al Qaeda leaders.

With each revelation, it becomes clearer that the previous administration’s abuses were part of an overall breakdown in good government. The institutional safeguards designed to ensure fidelity to the rule of law - indeed, the entire system of checks and balances - failed dramatically. Unless we determine exactly what went wrong and what institutional reforms are necessary to fix the problem, the past could well become prologue.

Indeed, in some areas, that is already the case. Most notably, Obama has continued the Bush administration’s pattern of withholding important information from Congress and the courts. Even as the news broke that Cheney had told the CIA to withhold information from Congress, Obama threatened to veto legislation requiring the CIA to inform the full intelligence committees about covert operations. He issued a signing statement effectively claiming the right to ignore legislation designed to protect government whistleblowers, and his administration continues to misuse the state-secrets privilege to stop lawsuits alleging government misconduct.

As for the treatment of suspected terrorists, Obama has put an end to torture for the time being. But he continues to apply overly broad criteria for who may be detained under the law of war. And he claims that US-held detainees in Afghanistan have no right to judicial review - the same argument President Bush made regarding Guantánamo detainees, only to be rebuffed by the Supreme Court.

These developments underscore the need for a thorough examination of post-9/11 counterterrorism operations. Currently, there is a patchwork of investigations by congressional committees, agency inspectors general, and (perhaps) criminal prosecutors. But this fragmented approach leaves some issues untouched, and may not capture broader systemic problems. Furthermore, each of these investigations is limited. Congress is understandably preoccupied with other matters. Inspectors general lack sufficient subpoena authority. And prosecuting low-level CIA agents who used unauthorized interrogation techniques would miss the bigger issue, which is that the authorized techniques themselves crossed the line.

Any inquiry into abuses initiated under Bush will provoke claims of “partisanship,’’ however unwarranted. Nonetheless, an independent commission would be less vulnerable to such charges than existing inquiries by the Democratically controlled political branches. It could even take some of the pressure off Obama, who currently must expend time and political capital - detracting from healthcare reform and other priorities - responding to each new revelation of misconduct.

Of course, the president may prefer the headache of dealing with Bush-era abuses to an inquiry that might call into question some of his administration’s own actions. But that’s exactly why a commission is necessary. We must acknowledge that some problems don’t solve themselves. The time has come for an independent commission.

Elizabeth Goitein is the director of the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

[LeftDemocrat]

Just like Nazi doctors, physicians and psychologists gleefully used the ethical nadir of America under Bush-Cheney to engage in human experimentation...

Group Charges Complicity by CIA Medics in Torture
by William Fisher, September 02, 2009

Did physicians and psychologists help the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency develop a new research protocol to assess and refine the use of waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques?

This is the question being raised in a new report by a leading human rights organization. The group says that, if confirmed, it would likely constitute a "new, previously unknown category of ethical violations committed by CIA physicians and psychologists."

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) charges that the "extent to which American physicians and psychologists violated human rights and betrayed the ethical standards of their professions by designing, implementing, and legitimizing a worldwide torture program is greater than previously known."

A team of PHR doctors authored the new white paper, "Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General’s Report."

The report details how the CIA relied on medical expertise to rationalize and carry out abusive and unlawful interrogations. It also refers to aggregate collection of data on detainees’ reaction to interrogation methods.

"PHR is concerned that this data collection and analysis may amount to human experimentation," the report says.

"Medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep observational records about waterboarding, which approaches unethical and unlawful human experimentation," says PHR medical adviser and lead report author Scott Allen, MD.

"It is profoundly unsettling to learn of the central role of health professionals in laying a foundation for U.S. government lawyers to rationalize the CIA’s illegal torture program," it says.

Frank Donaghue, PHR’s chief executive officer, told IPS, "Health professionals violated ethical duties by participating in the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. PHR has long demanded a full investigation into the role health professionals played in detainee treatment. PHR again calls upon health professional associations to support a nonpartisan commission of inquiry."

"It is time for the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and others to demand a nonpartisan commission to investigate these crimes," he said. "The associations must sanction any of their membership found to have violated their professional ethics."

These and other professional organizations have condemned participation by their members in detainee interrogations.

"The required presence of health professionals did not make interrogation methods safer, but sanitized their use, escalated abuse, and placed doctors and psychologists in the untenable position of calibrating harm rather than serving as protectors and healers," said co-author Steven Reisner, Ph.D., PHR’s psychological ethics adviser.

"The fact that psychologists went beyond monitoring, and actually designed and implemented these abuses – while simultaneously serving as ’safety monitors’ – reveals the ethical bankruptcy of the entire program," Reisner said.

"That health professionals who swear to oaths of healing so abused the sacred trust society places in us by instigating, legitimizing, and participating in torture, is an abomination," states co-author Allen Keller, MD, director of the Bellevue Medical Center/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture.

"Health professionals who aided torture must be held accountable by professional associations, by state licensing boards, and by society. Accountability is essential to maintain trust in our professions and to end torture, which scars bodies and minds, leaving survivors to endure debilitating injuries, humiliating memories and haunting nightmares," Keller said.

PHR has called for full investigation and remedies, including accountability for war crimes, and reparation, such as compensation, medical care and psycho-social services. PHR also calls for health professionals who have violated ethical standards or the law to be held accountable through criminal prosecution, loss of license and loss of professional society membership where appropriate.

http://original.antiwar.com/fisher/2009/09/01/group-charges-complicity-by-cia-medics-in-torture/

Physicians' Group Seeks Criminal Investigation of Torture Docs
— By Michael Mechanic | Mon August 31, 2009

Doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other health care professionals complicit in the US torture program should be subject to an independent investigation, and those found to have violated professional ethics or the law should be prosecuted and/or lose their license and professional society memberships. That sentiment, from the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), may well mark the first time a doctors' group has demanded true accountability of its professional peers.

Back in 1986, PHR was founded on the idea that health care professionals—given "their specialized skills, ethical commitments, and credible voices, are uniquely positioned to investigate the health consequences of human rights violations and work to stop them." Little did the founders realize they would one day be looking into the activities of their own government and colleagues.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/08/physicians-seek-criminal-investigation-colleagues-who-tortured

[LeftDemocrat]

Collusion of American doctors with torture regime under Bush-Cheney

Hentoff: Tough questions for doctors who aided CIA torture

By Nat Hentoff/Syndicated columnist
Posted Sep 18, 2009

The fearlessly independent Physicians for Human Rights - founded in 1986 and sharer of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 - has once again exposed the shameful role of doctors and psychologists throughout the CIA's torture interrogations, banned by the international Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as well as in the Geneva Conventions and our own statues.

Despite all the attention and furor when the former CIA Inspector General's 2004 report was finally released through an ACLU lawsuit - to the rage of objectors Dick Cheney and CIA Director Leon Panetta - the continuing debate has yet to focus on, and deal with, the Physicians for Human Rights Aug. 31 report:

"Aiding Torture: Health Professionals' Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General's Report" - with additional incriminating details that "CIA Health Professionals' Role in Torture Worse Than Previously Known."

The startling indictment is that "health professionals were involved at every stage in the development, implementation and legitimization of this torture program." They were as disgracefully complicit as John Yoo and the other Justice Department lawyers who provided torturously manipulated "legal" cover to the CIA and its bosses in the Defense department and the Oval Office.

Preceding the waterboarding, the confinement of battered, shackled terrorism suspects in boxes so small they could only crouch, very prolonged sleep deprivation, et al, there was the "intake process closely linked to the process of interrogation."

As Dr. Steven H. Miles painstakingly described in his path-breaking accounts of the self-degradation of these health professions - "Oath Betrayed: America's Torture Doctors" (paperback, University of California Press, 2009) - the psychologists had information about the prisoners to indicate their possible phobias and other vulnerabilities. They informed the interrogators using "enhanced" techniques on how best to "crack" these suspects.

Furthermore, "by requirement," Physicians for Human Rights reports, "all interrogations were monitored in real-time by health professionals." They not only saw it all as it happened but were committed to making the torture as effective as possible.

For instance, "a medical device called a pulse oximeter (a device to measure oxygen saturation in a subject's blood) was placed on the finger of a detainee to monitor the effectiveness of his respiration during waterboarding ... to calibrate physical and mental pain and suffering." Don't let up now!

Since there is clear evidence of deaths during interrogations - from Defense Department autopsy reports obtained by the ACLU and the scrupulous reporting of the New Yorker's Jane Mayer - did any of these on-the-spot doctors and psychologists intervene before it was too late?

byline: Nat Hentoff is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinion/x41299113/Hentoff-Tough-questions-for-doctors-who-aided-CIA-torture

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