|
The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
|
May 28th,
2009 - Do CIA Cables Show Doctors Monitoring Torture? |
|
Do CIA Cables Show
Doctors Monitoring Torture? Documents obtained by the ACLU seem to show that medical personnel
monitored the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah. By Sheri Fink Salon Magazine May 28, 2009 Evidence is emerging that
medical personnel monitored the medical effects of the waterboarding of Abu
Zubaydah, the al-Qaida operative who was, according to government reports,
subjected to the near-drowning at least 83 times in August 2002. The new information comes
from descriptions of cables, classified as top secret and relating to the
interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, that were transmitted from a Central
Intelligence Agency field station to the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters
nearly every day between Aug. 1 and Aug. 18 that year. The descriptions of the
cables reveal that a daily "medical update" and "behavioral
comments" along with status and threat updates were sent to CIA
headquarters throughout that period. On five occasions between Aug. 4 and
Aug. 9, an additional cable was sent containing "medical
information" along with such information as the strategies for
interrogation sessions, raw intelligence, the use of interrogation techniques
to elicit information, and the reactions to those techniques. The fact that
medical information was included in these cables hints that Abu Zubaydah was
medically monitored during or after being subjected to those techniques. Both
professional organizations and human rights groups have rejected as unethical
any monitoring role for medical personnel. A summary of the 34 cables
and of a handwritten log book were released to the American Civil Liberties
Union earlier this month on orders of U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein,
who is presiding over a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the
group. The lawsuit was based on a request for records related to detainee
treatment that the ACLU and four other advocacy groups made of the U.S.
Departments of Defense, Justice and State and the CIA in 2003. The new
summary, known as a Vaughn Index, was released in response to a motion that
the ACLU filed in 2007 after then-CIA director Michael Hayden acknowledged
that the agency had destroyed videotapes of detainee interrogations in 2005. The cables themselves have
not been made public, and the agency is contesting their release. In response
to a request for more detail on the medical information included in the
cables and the reasons that information was transmitted from the field site
to CIA headquarters, CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano wrote in an e-mail to
ProPublica: "The materials speak for themselves." The U.S. Department of
Justice gave the ACLU other documents this month that suggest the cables are
among nearly 550 interrogation-related cables sent from field stations to CIA
headquarters between April and December 2002. Among those analyzing the new
documents are National Public Radio's Ari Shapiro, the Washington
Independent's Spencer Ackerman and Firedoglake's Marcy Wheeler. The documents are the latest
installment of an ongoing story about the role of doctors and psychologists
in the government's efforts to pry information from suspected terrorists.
Professional organizations of doctors, nurses, public health practitioners
and psychologists have stated their opposition to health professionals'
involvement in torture. "The AMA has taken the clear stand that the
participation of physicians in torture and interrogation is a violation of
core ethical values," the American Medical Association said in a
statement last Friday. Last month, the AMA sent a letter to President Barack
Obama reiterating, as it did during the Bush administration, that the
association's ethical code prohibits physicians from participating in torture
or coercive interrogation. However, there is evidence
that health personnel, at least some of them physicians, have been involved
in interrogations. For example Col. Thomas M. Pappas, former chief of
military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, who was interviewed as part of the Taguba
investigation, testified that a psychiatrist and another doctor monitored
interrogations at the prison and had the final say in what aspects of the
interrogation plan were implemented. The question raised by the
cables is, How deep was the involvement of physicians or other health
professionals in the actual interrogations at CIA "black sites"
such as the one where Abu Zubaydah was held? Previously released
documents show that Bush officials overseeing the waterboarding of Abu
Zubaydah saw the involvement of medical personnel as crucial because it could
help prevent prosecution of interrogators under U.S. law. As ProPublica
previously reported, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee signed a memo on
August 1, 2o02 spelling out those concerns and the terms under which
interrogators could waterboard and slap Abu Zubaydah, subject him to
"cramped confinement" and stress positions, and shove him into
flexible walls. "The constant presence
of personnel with medical training who have the authority to stop the
interrogation should it appear it is medically necessary indicates that it is
not your intent to cause severe physical pain," the memo said. Abu Zubaydah began
cooperating in late April under questioning by Ali Soufan, a Federal Bureau
of Investigation agent who said he did not use coercive methods. In
congressional testimony this month, Soufan disclosed that there was a
"CIA medical team supporting us" when he and other FBI and CIA
personnel first spoke with Abu Zubaydah. Soufan said the medical team
insisted that Abu Zubaydah, who was injured during capture and in danger of
dying, be taken to a hospital for treatment. It is unclear whether the
same CIA medical team that evaluated Abu Zubaydah's health problems in the
spring was still caring for him in August when he was waterboarded. Nor is it
clear precisely how health personnel might have crossed the line from
providing medical care to participating in or supporting the interrogations,
which Soufan and other sources have described as becoming increasingly
abusive under the instruction of a former military Survival, Evasion,
Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training psychologist contracted by the CIA.
Soufan and others, including another psychologist employed by the CIA,
protested the escalating techniques and left the site. In a cover letter
accompanying the new Vaughn Index, acting U.S. attorney Lev L. Dassin wrote,
"The Government is … acknowledging that August 2002 was the month during
which Abu Zubaydah was subjected to the most intensive interrogations."
An Aug. 4, 2002, cable with the subject "Abu Zubaydah
Interrogation" is a typical entry in the Vaughn Index: “This is a
four-page cable from the Field to CIA Headquarters. The cable includes
information concerning the strategies for interrogation sessions; the use of
interrogation techniques to elicit information on terrorist operations
against the U.S.; reactions to the interrogation techniques; raw
intelligence; a status of threat information, and medical information.” The news that medical
information was being transmitted regularly to CIA headquarters throughout
the time Abu Zubaydah was being repeatedly waterboarded troubled medical
ethics experts interviewed by ProPublica. Normally, health professionals who
work at U.S. prisons share inmates' medical information with authorities only
"if there's a need to know; for example if someone has a seizure
disorder, we put in a medical order for a bottom bunk," Dr. Dean Rieger,
chief medical officer for Correct Care Solutions, a healthcare management
company for correctional facilities, said in an interview with ProPublica.
Rieger, who has been involved in corrections for more than three decades and
who coauthors a column on medical ethics for the Society of Correctional Physicians,
said it would be problematic to continue sharing an inmate's medical
information with authorities overseeing a system "that creates the harm
in the first place." University of Pennsylvania
bioethicist Arthur Caplan agreed. At that point, "you gotta start
protesting and stop transmitting," he said in an interview. "The
issue isn't privacy violations, it's complicity … You're part of the torture
team at that point if you're assessing injuries and saying whether the
person's capable of enduring more." Legal memos written in 2005
suggest the CIA had reached precisely the opposite conclusion - that
waterboarding and other harsh interrogations should involve personnel from
the CIA's Office of Medical Services, including its physicians. A recently declassified
Justice Department memo discussed the involvement the OMS eventually had in
supporting interrogations. That memo, quoting still-classified OMS guidelines
from December 2004, said that the "use of the waterboard requires the
presence of a physician." Another memo said that OMS doctors and
psychologists had been consulted about the effects of using several
techniques together, such as "when an insult slap is simultaneously
combined with water dousing or a kneeling stress position, or when wall standing
is simultaneously combined with an abdominal slap and water dousing" and
concluded they would not cause severe pain. Medical personnel were also
given the responsibility of monitoring the interrogations for safety.
"Should it appear at any time that Abu Zubaydah is experiencing severe
pain or suffering, the medical personnel on hand will stop the use of any
technique," Bybee's 2002 memo said. It is unclear whether the
"medical personnel" designated to monitor Abu Zubaydah's
interrogation included M.D.s. "There is no role for physicians in those
practices," Dr. Otmar Kloiber, secretary-general of the World Medical
Association, told ProPublica. Kloiber said that physician involvement in
interrogations increases the chances that questioning will devolve into abuse
and torture. A physician's reassuring presence can give questioners a green
light to escalate physical and mental pressure. In a confidential
International Committee of the Red Cross report made public by New York
Review of Books contributor Mark Danner last month, Abu Zubaydah described to
ICRC interviewers days of being waterboarded to the point he believed he
would die, slammed into hard and flexible walls, and confined in a small box
where one of his wounds reopened and began to bleed. It was only later, he
said, that "eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of
the doctor." The ICRC report also reveals
that other detainees who spent time in the CIA's black sites perceived that
some staff who treated them or monitored their interrogations were
physicians. The potential presence of
physicians as opposed to other types of personnel raises crucial questions. Numerous officials, both
Republican and Democrat, have characterized waterboarding as torture. There
is widespread agreement among doctors - whether employed by the military, other
government agencies, or not - that ethical standards prohibit physicians from
using medical knowledge or information about patients to support torture. The World Medical
Association, which lists 85 countries including the U.S. as members, was
established in 1947 to uphold independence and ethical behavior among
physicians after the horrors of Nazi medicine were revealed. It is arguably
the world's key arbiter of medical ethics. Earlier this month, the
group's governing council issued a resolution reaffirming the group's
long-standing position that physicians are forbidden from "participating
in, or even being present during, the practice of torture or other forms of
cruel, inhuman, or degrading procedures" and must denounce those acts
whenever they're aware of them. According to officials from
the WMA and the Norwegian Medical Association, which put forward the
resolution, the original draft made specific reference to U.S. detention
facilities. At the WMA council meeting in Jerusalem earlier this month,
intense discussion ensued between normally staid physicians over whether to
remove mention of the U.S. and make the language more generic. WMA officials declined to
say who took up which side. "It got heated enough I
had to call a short recess and have a cooling-off period," WMA chair Dr.
Edward Hill told ProPublica. Hill, a former president of the American Medical
Association, said the U.S. delegation stayed out of the debate. But the American delegation
made its views clear, according to Dr. Trond Markestad, who drafted the
original resolution and who chairs the ethics committee in the Norwegian
Medical Association. "They felt it was a bit unfair, wasn't really
correct, to single out that one [example] since there were so many wars going
on and so many things happening all over the world and since they'd already
addressed this nationally." The final version of the WMA
resolution passed unanimously after language naming the U.S. was removed. The
resolution condemns "reports worldwide" of "deeply unsettling
practices by health professionals, including direct participation in the
infliction of ill-treatment, monitoring specific methods of ill-treatment,
and participation in interrogation processes." The group also resolved to
support physicians who refuse to participate in or condone torture. Kloiber
told ProPublica that WMA members are concerned, for example, that physicians
in areas where sharia law is adopted are being asked to carry out punishments
such as amputations. The WMA resolution calls on
national medical associations, such as the AMA, to investigate breaches of
fundamental medical ethics among physicians. But the AMA has not made public
whether its ethics and judicial body has ever investigated or sanctioned
physicians for participating in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment. Last Friday, the Center for
Constitutional Rights in New York launched an advocacy campaign that aims
"to hold accountable healers that have harmed." The group is
encouraging citizens to file complaints against health professionals
suspected of participating in torture and to support legislation, such as a
proposed bill in New York state, that prohibits health professionals from
participating in torture or the improper treatment of prisoners at home or
abroad. External link: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/05/28/torture/ |