Category: Torture & interrogation

Health professionals’ pledge rejects any form of participation in or condoning torture

Sean Murphy*

Physicians for Human Rights is sponsoring a Health Professionals’ Pledge Against Torture that includes statements that signatories will never “participate or condone” torture and support colleagues who “resist orders to torture or inflict harm.”  It also commits signatories to insist that their professional associations support those facing pressure “to participate or condone torture and ill-treatment.”

What is noteworthy is that the pledge is not limited to simply refusing to torture someone, but is a pledge against participation (which would include forms of facilitation like referral) and against condoning the practice.

Replace “torture” with commonly morally contested procedures and it becomes obvious that the ethical position taken by Physicians for Human Rights vis-à-vis torture is identical to the position of many health care professionals who object to practices like euthanasia or abortion for reasons of conscience.

Doctors launch online pledge against torture

BioEdge

Michael Cook*

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has launched an online pledge for health professionals across the United States to reject torture as an absolute wrong which can never be sanctioned.

“At a time when human rights are increasingly under threat, we’ve launched this pledge to marshal the powerful voices of health professionals across the United States and reaffirm their ethical duties to honour human dignity,” said PHR’s executive director, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)Donna McKay. . . .[Full text]

A war interrogator racked by conscience

 Kael Weston

Eric Fair was a civilian interrogator for the U.S. military for several months in Iraq in 2004 and ever since has felt haunted by his inexcusable behavior.

In his important memoir, “Consequence,” Fair confronts his demons. He recognizes the “things that can’t be undone” and writes about them with painful clarity: “This is the first detainee I lay hands on. I grab him by his clothing and drag him out of his chair . . . I shove him into the wall . . . it feels good.” He describes a joint interrogation of an Iraqi boy. The goal: to wrest a confession out of him. “I scare him. I shout,” he writes. “I throw a chair. It ricochets off the wall. I call the MP [military policeman] inside and he handcuffs the boy to the iron loop in the floor. . . . He suffers. He cries.” . .  . [Full text]

The nuts and bolts of CIA torture

BioEdge

Michael Cook

Can doctors participate in torture if there is a reasonable expectation of mitigating the harm done? It could be a seductive hope for a military doctor who is under pressure to cooperate.

However, in a book review in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Henry Shue, of Oxford University, explains that the latest CIA techniques of torture make even minimal participation ethically impossible, no matter how low the bar is set.

Contemporary torture is not so much physical as mental. Its goal is to make the person “psychological putty” in the hands of his interrogators.

The goal of the CIA paradigm as used in Guantanamo is to produce at least temporary regression to an infantile state in which the torture victim will become completely compliant (and therefore supposedly tell the torturers what they want to know). Infantile regression is produced by unhinging the structure of the self of the torture victim and alienating him from his own values through methods like sexual humiliation, religious contempt, sleep deprivation and temperature extremes.

An essential element in this is ensuring that no stable human relationship of any kind should develop between the victim and his captors.

… such total control is maintained over the victim that it is difficult for me to imagine how even if a well disposed doctor could manage to have meaningful conferences with a victim, or by some other method somehow discern what she took his genuine interests to be (as a physician attending an unconscious patient might), that the authorities at a torture site like Guantanamo would ever permit a doctor to take action that served the interests of the victim in a manner that was contrary to the demands of its relentless regression regimen.

A doctor needs to establish some bond with a patient and to understand his history in order to help him. But in this regimen, it would be impossible to know anything meaningful about the victim’s real state of mind. So it is quite unlikely that a doctor’s complicity with the torturers will ever succeed in lessening the pain of the victim.

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Torture: sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, say bioethicists

Michael Cook*

Torture is an issue on which the public might expect bioethicists to be moral absolutists. Never again! Never ever! It was somewhat surprising, then, to read in the New York Times that one of the world’s leading animal rights theorists, Oxford’s Jeff McMahan, support torture. . . .   Full Text