America’s Torture Doctors

 

JTF Guantanamo photo by U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Michael R. Holzworth

American Conservative

For me one of the most horrifying revelations about the torture carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at its black sites, and the military at its prisons, was that medical doctors not only stood by to monitor the process but were also involved in providing advice to make the torture both mentally and physically more effective. Let’s face it, you can always find a thug who is willing to torture someone, particularly if he is sold a bill of goods that he is doing his patriotic duty and paid handsomely while being assured that he will never be punished. But a physician is supposed to answer to a higher calling. There is something called the Hippocratic Oath, a guideline for ethical behavior by doctors, which includes the mandate “first do no harm.”

The system, described subsequently as having “anemic ethical standards,” worked as follows: a doctor or team of doctors would stand by while someone was being tortured to attempt to prevent the suspect’s actual death, not as a resource to mitigate suffering but rather in recognition of the fact that the prisoner is a source of intelligence that has to preserved until he surrenders all the information that he possesses. The physicians were also there to observe the process for effectiveness. Afterwards, the doctor would write up a report to explore how the experience might be enhanced in terms of the ultimate objective, which was to obtain a complete confession. Both medical doctors and psychologists were part of the process as both pain and fear were to be exploited to obtain the desired results. CIA psychologists also participated in the “Penny Lane” conditioning program at Guantanamo that sought to turn prisoners into double agents.

Did they know they were doing wrong? Absolutely. The Department of Defense even described its attending physicians as “safety workers” in reports because it did not want to reveal that they were actual medical doctors. And if this all sounds like something that might have been contrived by Dr. Josef Mengele and his colleagues at Auschwitz, it should. Even though opponents of torture have demonstrated that prisoners who are subjected to it will say anything to stop the pain, and even though in practical terms permitting the practice invites enemies to do the same when they capture Americans, the belief persists that torture somehow works. Recent CIA efforts to demonstrate that torture produced information vital to the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden have proven to be somewhat fanciful, as an exhaustive 6,300 page investigative report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has demonstrated that that the procedure never produced anything that could not have been obtained by other means.

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