The ancient oath of Hippocrates, which underpins medical ethics, has a long reach. In the wake of the debate about torture that grew out of the Bush administration’s management of Guantanamo and the war in Iraq, the spirit of that oath is stirring up controversy in the health professions about the morality of assisting government interrogation programs.
The American Psychological Association last week warned its members that they could be expelled from the Association for participating in the torture of people detained by the U.S. government (the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association already had such a prohibition). The APA is going farther than that in the case of former Air Force psychologist James Mitchell, who allegedly developed torture programs involving waterboarding and other extreme stress techniques to be used in CIA interrogations. Mitchell is not a member of the APA, but the APA has joined an effort to get his license revoked.
And in Cambridge, Mass. in June, Physicians for Human Rights issued a report, based on government documents, that details and condemns the part played by health professionals in coercive interrogations. “Medical personnel,” the report says, “were required to monitor all waterboarding practices and collect detailed medical information that was used to design, develop, and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures&” Health professionals also collecting evidence that stress on prisoners increased when measures such as slapping, dousing with water and confinement in painful positions were used simultaneously instead of serially. That evidence was used to develop more intensive coercion techniques.
It was also used, PHR concludes, to try to justify torture by creating new, previously illegal programs that would shield government agencies like the CIA from legal conflict. PHR researchers say that implicates those agencies in “another alleged war crime—illegal experimentation on prisoners.” And in both torture and experimentation the health professionals, regardless of their intentions, were complicit, the report concludes.
“Medical personnel,” the researchers contend, “were ostensibly responsible for ensuring that the legal threshold for ‘severe physical and mental pain’ was not crossed by interrogators, but their presence and complicity in intentionally harmful interrogation practices were not only apparently intended to enable the routine practice of torture, but also to serve as a potential legal defense against criminal liability for torture.”
