Monday, June 7, 2010

The Torture Reports: Physicians for Human rights

Just as George W. Bush emerged to re-ignite public debate with his embrace of waterboarding as something we did to "save lives" Physicians for Human Rights concludes, in The Torture Reports:
`Evidence Indicates that the Bush Administration Conducted Experiments and Research on Detainees to Design Torture Techniques and Create Legal Cover'.  
The abstract: "Health professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA monitored the interrogations of detainees, collected and analyzed the results of those interrogations, and sought to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations. Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."


Update: The New York Times editorializes that the participation of health professionals in titrating doses and changing the material (e.g. from water to saline) could well be understood as aiding and abetting torture.

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