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Michael Otterman is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, as well as an award-winning journalist and filmmaker.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
New work details the complicity of the medical profession in abusive interrogation
As the issue of “aggressive” interrogation has become increasingly prevalent on the public radar since the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004, the argument that torture reflects a problem with the barrel rather than merely a few bad apples (in reference to officially sanctioned U.S. interrogation policy), is obvious.
Reports abound about the methods used against suspected enemy combatants by military and CIA interrogators at notorious facilities such as Bagram Air Force Base and so-called “black sites” across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. But now a new book entitled "Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror" by Dr. Steven H. Miles, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, takes a look specifically at the complicity of the medical profession in abusive interrogation.
Miles concludes that “In U.S. prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, medical personnel helped determine the nature and severity of torture. They ignored abuse. And they covered up the most heinous cases.” This is not new information but is nevertheless startling.
He sums up by qualifying a key point that "we need to go back to the framework of international law that we would be proud to uphold."
Reports abound about the methods used against suspected enemy combatants by military and CIA interrogators at notorious facilities such as Bagram Air Force Base and so-called “black sites” across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. But now a new book entitled "Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror" by Dr. Steven H. Miles, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, takes a look specifically at the complicity of the medical profession in abusive interrogation.
Miles concludes that “In U.S. prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, medical personnel helped determine the nature and severity of torture. They ignored abuse. And they covered up the most heinous cases.” This is not new information but is nevertheless startling.
He sums up by qualifying a key point that "we need to go back to the framework of international law that we would be proud to uphold."