College-Type Hazing Interrogations Get Rougher, As Medical Doctors Join Interrogators.
Were Some Doctors Bad Apples Too, or Just Caught-up In Systemic Abuses
Last summer, an article in the Lancet charged that doctors at Abu Ghraib
knew about the abuse that was going on, and aided the process by not
providing adequate care, and by helping to design physically and
psychologically coercive interrogations. They also helped cover it up
by falsifying medical records and death certificates.That aspect of the
scandal is rarely mentioned, because it doesn't fit in the bad apple
container.
At about the same time, the Washington Post
reported that doctors at Guantanamo were sharing prisoners' medical
records with interrogators. The Red Cross had complained that the
information was used to develop interrogation plans. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey
Miller, who commanded the prison at the time of the complaints, denied
the allegations.
Next month, an article will be published in the New England Journal of Medicine charging that doctors and mental health professionals didn't just hand over the records, they used the information to help interrogators develop methods of interrogation:
All of the evidence is fitting together into a pattern:
in a systemic fashion, health information and clinical judgment played
a role in developing interrogation strategies that included some pretty
harsh abuses," Mr. Bloche said.
According to the NEJM, there is a standing order,
dated August, 2002, and signed by Richard A. Huck, at that time Chief
of Staff of the U.S. Southern Command, which says that there is no medical confidentiality for
prisoners. The DOD memo requires medical personnel not only to hand
over prisoners' medical information on request, but to volunteer any
information that they think might be useful. The NEJM piece discusses
how this policy differs from that in American prisons, and how it
contradicts the laws of war:
Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions provides
that medical personnel âshall not be compelled to perform acts or to
carry out work contrary to the rules of medical ethics.â
Although the protocol has not been ratified by the United States,
this principle has attained the status of customary international law.
International human rights law (most important, the 1966
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) provides
additional protection for privacy in general â in wartime and
peacetime. Although this protection isnât absolute, exceptions
must be justified by pressing public need, and they must represent
the least restrictive way to meet this need. Wholesale abandonment of
medical confidentiality hardly qualifies, especially when the âneedâ
invoked is the crafting of counter-resistance measures that are
prohibited by international law.
In addition, the New York Times
has interviewed former interrogators who backed up the journal's
charges about the illegal blurring of the lines separating
interrogators from doctors:
The former interrogators said the military doctors'
role was to advise them and their fellow interrogators on ways of
increasing psychological duress on detainees, sometimes by exploiting
their fears, in the hopes of making them more cooperative and willing
to provide information. In one example, interrogators were told that a
detainee's medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and
suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to
cooperate.
But there's a huge difference in emphasis between the NEJM piece and
the NYT report. The Times focuses on how psychologists and
psychiatrists are working with interrogators, but they fail to even
mention the 2002 memo requiring medical professionals to cooperate.
They only cite a more recent and vague "policy statement" that
"officials said was supposed to ensure that doctors did not participate
in unethical behavior." This is very odd because the NEJM emphasizes
the memo.
The NYT also discusses the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (or
BSCT, pronounced "biscuit" teams), which advise interrogators on
techniques, or, in the cruder terms of an interrogator interviewed by
the Times, "help us break them." But the Times leaves out an important
bit of information: The teams were created in 2002, and approved by
Major General Geoffrey Miller, who took command of Guantanamo at about
that time, specifically because of the "growing frustration with the
slow pace of intelligence production at Guantanamo."
Overall, the NEJM piece reads as a denunciation of a policy
of making caregivers accessories to intelligence gathering, putting
prisoners at greater risk for abuse. The NYT piece, in contrast, by
focusing on more amorphous ethical debates, and failing to discuss the
role of military officials in crafting this policy, leaves the
impression that the problem is a few caregivers put into a sadly
difficult ethical situation.
Conduct contrary to the laws of war is a bit more serious than a
vague ethical dilemma, but this is so typical of the corporate press,
which, even when it reports on abuses, manages to dance around the
direct responsibility of high level officials for that abuse.
